Embers

"Ummm... no?" I said and the short blonde smiled apologetically.

"Rhetorical question, sweetheart." She told me before proceeding to totally kick our butts.

Whoever this girl was, she was a machine. We never stood a chance. She had two long daggers tight in her tiny fists and boy did she know how to use them. She jerked her knee up and smashed Damion in the soft part. He crumpled to the ground, out for the count. She immediately turned her eyes on Allen and he didn't have time to react before she'd flipped towards him and used her momentum to send him flying into a brick wall. He crumpled to the ground in a heap. Her gleaming blue eyes sparkled with something more than a little scary as she padded noiselessly in the direction of Jack and I.

"I'm so sorry." She said cheerfully before charging me and smashing me to the ground, a blade at my throat.

"Hey!" Jack yelled, trying to pull her off me. She didn't even glance in his direction as she sent a blade flying at him. I heard a cry of pain and knew that she'd hit her target.

"Jack?" I asked and there was no answer.

Instincts and rage took over and I rolled the girl off me like my mother had taught me all those years ago. Unfortunately she'd forgotten to mention what to do when the attacker is holding a sharp object to your neck. McKenna slashed at me and I felt the dagger bite a gash along my collarbone. I made a weird noise of frustration and kicked her off me, scrambling back in the street to try and get away from her without success.

"Hey!" Damion yelled, coming to to see the girl standing with a single bloody knife.

She smiled and shrugged before taking off down the street. Damion took off after him with Allen in his wake. I couldn't even look at him without feeling his hand on the back of my neck. Creep.

I couldn't deny that I was tempted to follow them but when I turned and saw Jack sprawled in the dirt in a pool of his own blood, I knelt by his side instead.

The girl's dagger had gone into his thigh, right by the bone and it was still sticking out, blood gushing like a lava flow down the sides of his leg. I winced and scrambled through my jacket pockets for the tiny flask of nectar I carried for emergencies at my mothers insistence.

"This is going to hurt." I told Jack and he nodded, gritting his teeth before I began to drip nectar into the wound. He groaned and flinched. When I was done I looked up to see him unconscious. I sighed and searched my surroundings for something to use as a bandage. All I found was a dirty flag that probably had more bacteria on it than a petri dosh would've after you'd smeared the United States across it. Groaning, I ripped the edge of my T-shirt into a strip of material and wound it around his leg, securing it in place with a tight knot.

Then I just sat back and attended to my own wound with the nectar, wincing and hoping that Damion and Jack were having more fun chasing the girl than I was playing nurse to myself and my cousin.

Notes