The hot bath had a lock. Felicity appreciated the copper tub, the clean towels and the little bundle of herbs someone had tied under the tap, but it was the bolt on the yard gate that made her want to kiss somebody. She slid it home herself, and Victor dropped his jacket over the gap between the gate and the post.
"If you keep this up," she told him, "I'm going to develop very dirty feelings about a man who knows how to hang a towel."
"Keep those for when we're alone. I've got a wolf on the other side of this gate with a very good memory." He let her steal a kiss before he took his place outside. At the far entrance, Voss faced the alley with his back to the bath. She liked the view from her side considerably better than the one he'd arranged for himself.
Rose was already in the water, working a thumbnail under a streak of dried blood. The tub was an old brewing kettle, wide enough for two women as long as both their tails cooperated. Felicity sank to her shoulders, washed her hair twice, and discovered the sandy bits behind her ears were actual sand. For two days she'd thought her new head came like that.
Rose handed over the soap. "Finch and I cleaned the kettle. Voss found the stopper, and Victor heated the water. If anybody asks, it took four reasonably intelligent adults half an hour to work out which hole the plug went in."
Felicity snorted hard enough to get soap up her nose. Rose laughed with her, and for a little while they could almost have been at a friend's house after a bad week. The line about breakfast still hurt. She wanted to bring it up when she could give Rose her full attention and put her pants on afterward with a little dignity.
A boot scraped outside. The voice that followed belonged to a man trying quite desperately to convince someone that the blood coming through his shirt had been there yesterday. Felicity grabbed a towel and asked Victor to let him through the side entrance once she was dressed.
The jaguar waiting there introduced himself as Ash. He had a torn shoulder and black hair stuck to his face, and he was doing a lousy job of unbuttoning his shirt with the wrong hand. A piece of bent metal had come down while he'd been fixing a wire along the delivery gate. He'd caught it before it hit the man holding the ladder. That man sat on a crate with one arm across his ribs.
"I was hoping the bath would set a trend," Ash said as Victor peeled the cloth away from the cut. "A second hot meal, perhaps. Didn't expect to be stripped in a beer garden before lunch."
"That's a different kind of establishment. You'd be getting better tips." Felicity looked at the wound while Victor rinsed it. The cut had clean edges, much like the one she'd closed under his wing. She asked Ash if he'd mind letting her try, and got a very sincere yes to the trying.
She put her fingertips at the lower end of the cut and worked an inch at a time. Gold light passed under her hand. Where the edges met, they held. Halfway up she stopped long enough to see if the bleeding started again. It didn't. Ash lifted his arm of his own accord when she finished, caught a towel sliding off the crate and stared at it in his hand.
"I couldn't even button the damn shirt," he said. He gave the towel to the fellow with the sore ribs and started doing up his own buttons. He missed the first one. Felicity liked that about as much as she liked the clean skin underneath it. He'd been frightened enough to shake, and excited enough to try anyway.
She asked the man with the sore ribs where it hurt to breathe. Victor checked him first, then kept a hand against his back while Felicity fed a little warmth into the bruising. When the man could draw a comfortable breath, she took her hands away. He stayed on the crate because she told him ribs still needed rest. Having somebody actually listen made her feel almost embarrassingly good.
Word carried past the gate. By the time she went to wash her hands, half of Snow Team was there. The little basin got passed to her before she could lift it. A clean towel followed. Ash, his shirt still buttoned wrong, pressed two knuckles to the ground and said, "Protect the fox," with enough feeling that a second man did it too. Felicity looked to Victor for help. He was watching Ash roll his shoulder all the way back for the first time.
"Give it a week," she whispered to her husband, "and they'll be asking whether their lady of the laundry can get blood out of whites."
"He gets to sleep tonight without having to sit upright against a wall. That's a big thing, Fel." Victor gave her the last clean cloth and took the dirty ones himself. He sounded proud of her in a way she wanted to remember when the next thing with teeth came running.
Voss waited until the yard cleared before he asked if using the light hurt her. She told him it felt like missing a meal, provided she had the sense to stop while she could still stand. He reached into his pocket and gave her half an apple wrapped in a clean scrap of cloth. He'd saved it from breakfast. She ate all the way down to the core.
"May I?" he asked, his fingers poised above one damp ear. A loose thread from the towel had caught in the fur. She let him tease it out and kept her head under his hand for the extra second it took him to notice. "Good fox," he said, low enough for her ears. The answering heat in her face had absolutely nothing to do with healing.
At dusk, Ash came back to test the wire he'd been fixing. The delivery gate dragged against the ground as he closed it. He stopped, lifted the latch clear of the post and fitted it again. Felicity could fit two fingers into the new crack in the brick. On the other side of the wall, something underneath the street was still growing.