Pox You: A Croft and Tabby Short (Croft & Tabby Book 1) by Brad Magnarella

Author:Brad Magnarella [Magnarella, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-27T22:00:00+00:00

One frigid shower later, and I was upstairs in my library/lab, feeling even colder than when I’d returned home. I’d examined my wounds in the bathroom mirror. Though no longer bleeding, the gashes on my chest and back were puckered with deep bruising on both sides. Much of that was from the astral damage.

“Dude had some serious personal-space issues,” I muttered.

Pulling ingredients from shelves, I arranged them across my lab table and went to work. I began by grinding limestone and turmeric in a stone mortar, squeezing in the occasional droplet of myrrh oil. When the salve was the right consistency, I scraped everything into a pot on my portable burner and set it to medium. The heat, combined with a series of incantations, activated the advanced healing magic.

I loosened the belt around my cotton robe, exposing my chest to the frigid air. Taking a quantity of salve onto the edge of a tongue depressor, I applied it to the wound. The salve magically embedded itself in the exposed tissue, its warmth heavenly. A prickling sensation followed, telling me the salve was working.

“Now for slash number two.”

But when I crooked my arm over a shoulder, I couldn’t reach the wound on my back. I tried coming up from the waist but still couldn’t touch it. One of my ex-girlfriends had tried to talk me into yoga. Maybe I should have listened. I searched the lab for a longer applicator before sighing through my nose.

“Tabitha?” I called over the railing.

“What,” she murmured irritably.

“I need a favor.”

Silence.

“There’s an extra cut of steak in it for you at dinner.”

A full minute of grumbling was followed by the sound of her large body thudding to the floor. Moments later, she appeared at the top of the ladder to my library/lab and transferred gracelessly to my table. As she sauntered toward me, she paused long enough to bat the vial of myrrh oil to the floor.

“Hey! Why’d you do that?”

“Cat reflexes,” she said. “What do you want?”

I returned the vial to its shelf and pulled my desk chair over. “Do you think you can apply that salve to my back wound?”

“I don’t have opposable thumbs.”

“No, but you have a paw. A sheathed one, preferably. All you have to do is pat the salve in place. The magic will do the rest.”

“How big a cut are we talking?”

“I don’t know. Four, five inches?”

“I was referring to the steak.”

“They’re twelve ounce strips,” I said thinly.

She sniffed the salve and wrinkled her nose. “That’s fucking dreadful. Twelve ounces seems low.”

I needed Tabitha’s help too badly to scold her about her language. “Low? That’s almost an extra pound of meat, but if you’d rather pass…”

“Sit down.”

I straddled the chair backwards, shivering as the robe fell to my waist.

“God, that’s unsightly,” Tabitha said.

“The gash?”

“The hair on your shoulders.”

“Can we focus on the wound?”

With a sigh, she slapped a paw into the salve and then slapped my back.

“Ow! Gently, please. And make sure you’re only covering the opening. I want to save the leftover salve.

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