Felicity shoved the bloody cloth through the railing before the first of the creatures rounded the ramp. It caught on the bushes below, bright against the leaves. Two of them went straight over the rail after it. The third followed the sound of their landing, and Felicity got Rose and Finch up the service steps before any of them figured out what they were eating.
"What made you think of that?" Finch asked when they squeezed between two wrecked cars. His white bear ears barely cleared a broken mirror.
"Nothing clever. It was dripping on my shoe, and I was really hoping they liked how Rose smelled better than they liked me." Felicity had to hold the car to keep walking. The cut on Rose's arm was gone, but the effort of closing it had left Felicity feeling as if she'd given blood and then tried to run home.
Finch steered them toward a pharmacy with a delivery door opening onto the alley. He wanted gauze, painkillers and something with sugar in it. Rose wanted a working phone. She had tried her sister sixteen times since the first emergency alert, and as soon as they got inside she reached over the register and picked up the handset. Felicity could hear the dead line from the next aisle.
She wished there was someone she'd have tried sixteen times. On an ordinary day she liked coming home to a quiet apartment. Standing in that wrecked pharmacy, she could have cried over the fact that nobody would be getting impatient to hear from her.
A woman in a pharmacy apron pushed herself up behind the counter. Her skin was bright red, with dark lines around her mouth. Felicity saw the neat little badge with her name on it just before Rose knocked her sideways and the woman put her teeth through the phone cord. Three people in the prescription line turned at the noise. Finch dragged a fallen shelf across the aisle. He had the strength to move it, but every time he got one end into place, the hands reaching over it pulled the other end back.
The same heat that had closed Rose's cuts gathered under Felicity's ribs. She could have stayed by the door and waited for the others to get her out. Instead, she planted one palm low on Finch's back and reached for Rose with the other. Finch ducked under a grasping hand just as her palm lit up, and both her hand and the light ended up a good deal lower than she'd aimed. "When I say push, give it everything you've got."
Finch pushed. The shelf slid six feet and pinned all three attackers against the counter. The woman in the apron came at Felicity from the side. Rose moved so fast she hooked her claws through the apron and yanked the woman into the shelving before those teeth got near Felicity. Felicity got them into the alley, felt Rose take hold of her shirt, and realized she had forgotten to tell them when to push. Apparently a glowing hand on your ass got the point across just fine.
"You got my back," Finch said, looking down at her. "Any lower and I'd have had to buy you dinner."
"Considering what you made me spend on that shelf, I'll take a sports drink and a chair." Her joke came out shaky. He put the drink in her hand, and this time she let him carry the supplies.
They followed the service road until it crossed a stream away from the worst of the smoke. Finch stopped where he could see both banks. He'd been out looking for a shipment of illegal guns with the rest of his team when the city went to hell. They'd agreed on a meeting place beforehand, he told her. So far, that was the first plan Felicity had heard that lasted longer than a block.
Rose stood on a flat rock with her phone held high enough to get one last bar. Nothing came through. "She lives east of here," she said when Felicity joined her. "I'd like to tell you we're close enough that I know whether she was home this morning. We aren't. I don't even know if she still has the same job."
Felicity sat down beside her and offered her the last of the drink. They shared it without discussing which of them needed it more. It was easier than saying she'd have taken the call.
She heard a heavy footfall across the stream, then something like a sail snapping open. Finch recognized the sound and called out a name. Felicity turned to see who had come for them. For a second the whole stream went white, and the last thing she felt was the rock slipping away from under her.
Victor caught her before her head hit the bank. He had tracked Finch clear across three hours of wrecked streets by the prints of his boots, only to come over the water and find a woman falling into it. He got one hand behind her neck, the other under her knees, and let his wings carry them both up the bank. She weighed hardly anything. Her ears had gone limp against his wrist, and he hated the sight of it with a force that scared him.
"Her name's Felicity," Rose told him. "She healed my arm, then did something in the pharmacy that let us walk out alive. If she wakes up asking whether it worked, tell her it did."
Victor had treated enough people in the field to check her breathing before he did anything stupid. Then Finch reached to take her and a growl came out of Victor's mouth. Finch stopped with his hands in the air. "Been a long time since you bit a medic for offering to help, boss."
"Give me the blanket and check the bank behind us." Victor's hands stayed steady while he tucked it around her. They had never shaken on a patient before, and they weren't about to start now. He'd deal with the rest when those great soft ears lifted and she could tell him to get his hands off her herself.
Her fingers closed in his shirt. "Did it work?" she whispered, so faintly he had to bend his head to hear.
"They both walked out, Felicity. I've got you." One ear turned at his voice, and the pressure around his ribs eased until she looked straight at the blood down the front of his shirt. He'd been so taken with catching her that he hadn't checked whose it was. Neither of them could see a cut on her, and where the blood had soaked his sleeve, it was still spreading.