Page 56 of Booked for Murder

Fourteen

Do the bonus points earn me anything special?

With some help from Bradley, my mother made roast and fed me enough I barely made it to bed despite still having company over. I managed to take the medications prescribed by Bradley’s doctor, and the combination did me in. I only survived through sleeping in thanks to somebody making use of my spare key and feeding my cat. Ajani’s purrs could wake the dead, which meant someone brushed the fluffy demoness in my living room. I burrowed under my pillow and mumbled curses.

“I can hear you,” Bradley said. “I have blood in a cooler out here for you. You need to get up and practice with it. I’ve been told you should move it between cups for a minimum of twenty minutes while keeping it from coagulating. After you do that, you’re to practice shaping it and controlling the rate of coagulation. If you last through an hour of that, your abilities likely haven’t been impaired through disuse. You get bonus points if you can keep the blood from coagulating for an hour.”

“Do the bonus points earn me anything special?”

“A trip to the bookstore.”

“I see you have learned one of my secrets.”

“I’ve been informed you are motivated by new books, and that you might be a practitioner of tsundoku.”

“I might be a what?”

“Someone who collects books and allows them to pile up without actually reading them. It’s a Japanese word. I just happened to hear it from Beatrice, as she sees you with books all of the time but isn’t sure you actually read them.”

“I read them. I don’t have any books I haven’t read yet,” I confessed.

“That’s a problem. Obviously, I must bring over more books for you until you have more books than you can read. It’s one book per visitation day, right?”

“For my cat.”

“I find I enjoy visiting your cat, but I’m concerned with her obsession with the brush.”

I rolled out of bed, disgusted I’d gone to sleep in my clothes without changing. I dug through my dresser for something clean and hobbled to my bathroom. “I need a bath or I’ll be stinking you out of here.”

Bradley sat on my couch with Ren and my cat. “You don’t have any bandages or anything with your foot, do you? I was told the blood should be good for two hours before it coagulates in the bag. That gives you an hour with which to bathe. You don’t need anything, do you?”

“No. I’ve already healed from the last round of surgery. I can bathe without assistance, I assure you. And I’m sure I can correct the blood if it coagulates on me. If I can’t, I certainly won’t be able to move it between cups.” Restoring blood from a coagulated state would be a solid test of my skills. If I could restore it to its fully liquid state, everything else was a matter of practicing. I shut the door, regretted its lack of a lock, and went through my morning routine. In some ways, I missed being able to take a shower. Without my boot on, I couldn’t handle standing for more than a few minutes at a time before the pain became intolerable.

One day.

Yesterday and the day before sent me a bill, added interest, and left me with the problem of a swollen foot I couldn’t cram back into the damned medical boot. Having Bradley in my living room would be the nail in the coffin on my physical state. For any hope of getting my foot back into a usable state would require me getting out the ice packs, elevating it, and waiting for the swelling to go down. Only then could I get my boot back on and resume life as normal.

With my luck, I’d need my crutches, which lurked beneath my bed.

Someone had foreseen the trouble, leaving my cane in the bathroom, making my task of getting to the kitchen possible.

I owed someone thanks for that. After some experimentation, I figured out I had an easier time getting dressed while seated on the tub’s ledge, as I could prop my foot on the toilet and wiggle into my clothes while using the towel rack to help balance. It took time, but I squirmed into my jeans and tossed on a shirt before hopping on one foot to my cane.

The medical boot would just have to stay in the bathroom for a while.

With the help of the cane, I made the journey to my freezer, dug out my freezer packs, and flung them in the direction of my couch. They thumped to the cushion closer to Bradley than I’d meant, and my cat hissed at them, although she stayed on his lap.

Bradley kept brushing my fluffy goddess while raising a brow. “Did you miss?”

“Not this time. You’re holding my cat, and I’d never intentionally smack her with an ice pack.”

“Having a problem with your foot this morning? Your boot is off, and I can’t help but notice your foot and ankle look rather unpleasant.”

I regarded my swollen mess of a foot with a sigh. “Welcome to my life. I get to elevate it for a while and hope I can cram it back into my boot. Sometimes it’s all right. Others? This is life. I guess my foot doesn’t like the medications.”

“I’ll call the doctor about it. Can I take a photo of your foot?”

What was one more doctor scolding me about my foot? “Sure. I’ll even give you my doctor’s contact information so your doctor can argue with mine about it.”