Lucia wipes up the existing blood with one hand, holds the other hand over the knife wound, hisses out a quick incantation to slow bleeding, then pulls the knife out, puts the fresh side of the bandage on the wound, pulls a small jar of goop out of her pocket and dumps like half of it over the whole thing. 

El is not conscious to critique any aspect of this performance at the moment.

Okay. 

Cool. 

In retrospect, asking a bunch of questions about maleficers, and paying extra attention to Jack after she saw him sitting with El the evening after the soul-eater incident, may have had consequences. 

...

This is the first time she's killed a human being. 

She thought it would be harder than killing a mal, thought she would hesitate at the last second, would at least try to physically remove Jack from his victim without killing him. 

She is not going to cry about this while El is still maybe not stable. She is going to...use some of the mana she got from killing Jack (she is trying so hard not to think about the fact that she got mana from killing Jack) to fix the door. 

It is, uh, more broken than it was last time. She's not going to be able to get it really usable without, like, raw materials, which she doesn't have. 

She could run to the shop to get them but something would probably eat El while she was gone. She could send someone else to shop except nobody else would be guaranteed to come back alive; she could ask someone else to watch El while she went to shop except that people don't like El so she couldn't trust that El would still be alive when she came back. 

Plus curfew is pretty soon and nobody in their right mind would agree to be in someone else's room at curfew even with Santa Lucia asking. 

And even if she did, somehow, get raw materials Right Now, she probably wouldn't be able to fix the door before curfew. And even if she did, El might still be in too poor condition to leave alone. 

El comes to after a few minutes. She gropes vaguely for her bed.

"Should you be moving?" Lucia asks, mildly alarmed. 

"Oh, good point, I should most likely lie on the floor so I'm easier for the little mals to reach."

"I will kill anything that gets near you."

"Curfew is in, what, ten minutes?" She manages with some effort to grab her mana crystal and put it back around her neck.

"I sneak down to lab after curfew all the time. I've never tried being in someone else's room overnight and I bet it's exhausting but we'll both live through the night."

"You - are you serious, you're a lunatic -"

"It's been said." 

"I'm already on a platter with an apple in my mouth so I suppose if you care to adjust my nutrition facts I have no reason to object."

"Yes, you'll be the most delicious bait. Do you want anything before I get so busy killing things I can't grab your blanket off the bed, I still think you shouldn't move."

"I should very much like to pass out again on a marginally softer surface than the floor and I think between the patch and the goop I ought to be able to make it to bed if you would help me instead of behaving like I've managed to break my neck instead of being simply stabbed."

"--Yeah, sorry." 

She helps El up. 

"In my defense stomach wounds are bad business, I'd be much less of a drama queen if you had been stabbed in the chest and didn't immediately die." 

El flops gingerly into bed. "I'm not going to get infected with the patch on. Unless you let one of those rot-rats that've been at the apple pie in, then who knows."

"If I let one of those in you wouldn't be in much less trouble with a papercut."

I'm sorry I didn't kill Jack sooner." 

"Well, the best time to kill Jack Westing is sometime before you ask a lot of questions about maleficers and put him on the defensive, and the second best time is today, I guess."

"Yep. I hope I haven't put any other maleficers on the defensive, he was the only one I specifically suspected of killing someone, if I've missed anyone..."

"He's the one who did for Luisa if that's what you mean."

"I wasn't sure. But a maleficer was my best guess for what got her and he was the only one I knew of that had looped around to charming again. ...Maybe I should have been sure and the only reason I wasn't was because I didn't want to kill a human being."

"Your moral dilemmas are fascinating beyond words," croaks El, and she closes her eyes.

"Sorry." 

The curfew bell rings. She gets up off the bed and starts killing things. 

She is frighteningly good at it. 

It makes it kind of hard to sleep. Not impossible, though! El catches as catch can in between commentary on how if she'd killed that thing this other way it would have been convenient.

Making it harder to sleep is when Lucia starts glowing. 

"'Scuse me," she mutters, and darts over to the bed, leans into El's personal space to grab her crystal, and dumps a shitton of mana into it. Then it's back to murdering things.