Easy for him to say. I bit my lip as he continued. He was using antiseptic to clean the places Nanette had cut me. Necessary, as he’d said, but God, did it hurt.

“Talk to her,” Hugh said to no one in particular. “Distract her.”

“What happened?” asked Peter. “Who did this to you?”

“Nice distraction,” said Hugh.

“Nanette,” I said. Saying her name made my stomach turn, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to go back on what I’d said to Hugh about throwing up. “She was . . . mad.”

“I guess,” said Peter.

“Mad I told Cedric about her . . .”

“Doesn’t this kind of confirm your suspicions, then?” asked Cody.

Yeah, if beating up the person who’d ratted out your secret plans didn’t sound suspicious, I didn’t know what did. But if Nanette really was behind Jerome’s summoning, why not just kill me outright and leave no witnesses?

Explaining that would take too many words and too much effort, so I just said, “I don’t know.”

“There,” said Hugh, straightening. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

I tried to glare, but I don’t think he noticed. He rummaged in his kit once more and then leaned back over to start bandaging up the wounds. With as much as he was piling on me, I had the feeling I was going to look like a mummy.

“Why didn’t Dante stick around?” asked Cody.

“Huh? Dante?” The bandage pressure wasn’t as bad as the cleaning, but it was still uncomfortable. I wondered when those goddamned drugs were going to kick in.

“He was here,” said Cody. “He called Hugh and told him to come over.”

Some of the exact details of what had happened with Nanette were foggy, but I felt pretty confident, head trauma or no, that I would have remembered Dante being around.

“Dante wasn’t here,” I said.

Hugh paused and looked me in the eye. “Then who called me? It was a guy, from your cell phone. Said to get over here and bring medical supplies—that you’d been hurt.”

I frowned, and it came back to me, a shadow in the pain-filled haze of my memory. The strong arms and gentle voice.

“There was someone here . . .” I began slowly. “Not Dante. Someone else. He put me to bed.”

Silence fell. A slight fuzziness was starting to tingle the edges of my senses, which I took as a good sign. It was more of a pleasant, dreamlike fuzziness—not the I-can’t-handle-this-painanymore kind. There was still a fair amount of that, though.

The guys exchanged puzzled looks. “Are you sure it wasn’t him?” asked Cody.

“Why would Dante leave her, though?” asked Peter.

Hugh snorted. “No telling with him.”

“Stop,” I mumbled. “It wasn’t him.”

“You can’t remember a face or anything?” Peter asked. “Was it even someone you knew?”