“You’ve got a status report for me?”

“The attack involved five creatures,” Barabas said. “It started here. They busted through the door. One smashed Doolittle’s equipment and attacked Eduardo and Keira. They crippled her and then the doctor latched onto her throat. That’s her.” Barabas pointed at the woman’s corpse outside the window, on top of a short tower.

“He never let go,” George said quietly. “When I got here, she’d smashed everything, rolled, flailed, rammed the walls with him. Eduardo got knocked out, and Keira would jump out of the way, but Doolittle never let go. I had to rip him away, and then she tried to fly away.”

“She was dying,” Keira said. “Doolittle had clamped onto her neck and severed the jugular. His teeth kept her wounds open and bled her dry. Thirty seconds more and she wouldn’t have been able to fly.” She put her hands over her face. “We should’ve fought harder.”

“We’re all still here,” Mahon told her from the door. “You did your job.”

“While Doolittle was fighting, the second and third attackers blocked access to this room,” Barabas said. “Aunt B and Mahon took down one in the hallway, and Curran met the third in the hallway and fought it into Desandra’s room. The fourth busted in through the balcony into Desandra’s room after the fight began. The fifth, we are not sure.”

“Injuries?” I asked.

“Doolittle is the worst of it,” Barabas said. “Derek has a broken arm. There are some cuts and wounds, but everyone is still alive and moving around.”

They hit here first. “Doolittle was the primary target.”

“It appears that way.”

Curran had said Doolittle wanted to talk to us. He must’ve found something, something that made him a target.

Barabas sat on the floor next to me, his face serious.

“Whenever you have that face, it means something nasty is coming.”

“Do you remember that you asked me to set up meetings with you and the three packs tomorrow morning? Do you want to cancel?”

“Hell no. I want to go and look them in the eye when they tell me they didn’t attack our medmage in the middle of the night.” Anger flared inside me. I would find the assholes responsible and they would pay. Nobody hurt Doolittle and lived. “He was a noncombatant. We will find whoever went after him and I will personally make them regret the day they were born.”

“What she said,” Keira said. “Nobody touches the medic and lives.”

George swung into my view. She held a bottle of brown liquid in her hand.

“What is that?”

“Whiskey.” She handed me a wadded-up rag. “Here, I need you to bite down on this.”

What the hell? “Why?”

“I’m going to clean your wounds.”