“Walker told you about having a brain injury? He told you about his doctor appointments?” I asked. Nothing about this made any sense.
Bex snorted. “Ian doesn’t tell me anything. But he doesn’t need to. I know when he wakes in the morning and eats his oatmeal. I know when he leaves at night to hunt and which weapons he carries. I know when he fucking sneezes, so I damn well know when he has a seizure.” Bex sighed. “I’ve just never actually seen him have one. Not that it matters, since I can’t heal it.”
“There is the little problem of getting past his skull,” I said testily.
Bex shrugged. “With or without the skull, it makes no difference. I’ve witnessed injures in which the brain was exposed, and I attempted to heal the night blood. Both blood and saliva failed.”
I imagined Bex healing a brain the way Dominic often licked my wounds to heal them. I gaped, horrified.
“The brain doesn’t respond to vampire blood like other human muscles and organs,” she explained, oblivious to my expression as she watched Walker. “I pieced the brain together and healed the skull around it, but the person was still severely mentally impaired afterward.”
I just stared. Between listening to Bex talk about exposed brains and holding Walker as he seized, I didn’t know what to say.
“Getting past the skull, as you stated, would be difficult without incurring serious, permanent deficits, worse than the injury he already has,” Bex said, “so I left it alone.”
Her tone and her expression as she watched Walker seize sounded as if she regretted that decision. The mental image of her cracking open Walker’s skull to lick his brain was more than I could bear.
“He’d be left a vegetable!” I screamed.
“I know.” Bex blinked at me, annoyed. “That’s why I left it alone.”
“You’re fucked up.” I snapped. “We need to get him to a hospital! Now!”
“No hospital,” Walker whispered.
He’d stopped seizing. His eyes fluttered open and closed, but other than that, he hadn’t moved.
“Walker? Can you hear me?” I whispered. My hands holding his head were shaking.
“Yeah. How many times did I seize?”
“Just once. Less than a minute,” Bex said wearily, as if she’d answered that question before. “Do you feel another coming on?”
“No. Can you help me sit up?”
I stared at the lines of his face, his eyes, his mouth, the wrinkle between his brows, and a million questions ripped through my mind. How long have you been having seizures? How often? How many? What else did the doctors say? Is that why you’ve been having headaches? Should you be driving? Are you taking medication?
But one question, more insignificant than the rest but by far more insistent, nagged at me.
Why didn’t you tell me?
I couldn’t voice any of those questions now, so instead, I did the one thing I could do. I helped him sit up.
Walker made a noise in the back of his throat. I tensed for a second, thinking he was about to seize again, but I realized he’d noticed the vomit. He shook his head.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said. Even through the thready weakness in his voice, I could hear the bite of his anger.
“I’m not sorry. I’m thankful I was here. What if you’d been alone? Or worse, what if you’d been—” here with only Bex, I thought. I stopped myself short, realizing that she was still beside me. “—in danger. I’m your backup. This is what I’m here for.”
Walker shook his head. “I’m your backup.”
“It goes both ways, darlin’.” I turned to face Bex. “It’s been a lovely dinner, but we’re leaving. Now.”
Bex didn’t take her eyes off Walker. “You can’t just—”
“Let me fly you to the nearest hospital,” Rene interrupted. He stepped forward, his expression pleading. “You need me to fly you from the coven anyway, and it’s no problem to land at the hospital. He can’t possibly climb back up the cavern in his condition.”
Bex’s mouth tightened infinitesimally at Rene’s interruption, but she nodded.
I sighed. The last thing I wanted was more “help” from Rene, but he was unfortunately right. “Thank you,” I gritted from between my clenched teeth. “I’d appreciate that.”
“That’s not necessary,” Walker said, “We’ll see ourselves out.”
“Of course you will.” The disgust in Bex’s voice was palpable, and I realized that she’d anticipated his response.
I leaned into Walker, not that Bex or Rene couldn’t hear me—they could probably hear me whisper from miles away—but the instinct to whisper made me lean into his ear anyway. “You just had a seizure. You need—”
“I’ll tell you what I need. I need to be alert and focused. I need my freedom to work and track the animal responsible for those murders. The hospital is going to take away my license, put me on drugs, and prescribe ongoing treatments that I don’t have the time to—”
“You make the time!” I burst. “Maybe you need those drugs! Maybe you shouldn’t be driving!”
“I don’t feel like me on medication. I can’t—”
“So you try different medication until you find one that works!”
Walker shook his head. He used one of the dining room chairs to leverage himself to his feet. “It was only one seizure. I’m fine.”
I blinked as I watched him struggle to stand. The picture I was slowly piecing together was one I didn’t recognize or understand. “You’ve had more than one seizure before,” I said.
He knew it wasn’t a question, and he knew better than to deny it. Instead he said, “And I know that since I only had one, I’m fine.”
He let go of the chair and took a step. His legs visibly trembled from the strain of holding his own weight, but he didn’t fall. I shook my head, torn between helping him and letting him struggle.
“I know the feeling well,” Bex said beneath her breath.
I looked at her sharply, wondering if she could read my mind as easily as I’d been able to read hers.
She turned to Rene and cocked her head toward the entrance. She didn’t need to ask twice. Rene was just a blur and in the next instant, Walker was just a cursing blur with him.
“He’s not taking him to the hospital,” I stated, my voice deadpan. “Is he?”
“That’s Ian’s decision, and he’s chosen to be stubborn, bless his heart. Maybe in the future he’ll choose differently—” Bex’s voice was strained, and I knew that choosing to go to the hospital wasn’t the only choice she was waiting on. “—but in the meantime, he’ll be waiting for you outside the coven.”
I nodded. “Bless his heart,” I muttered. I thought of all the questions I couldn’t ask Walker, of all the uncertainty between us compounded by everything he hadn’t confided in me—the night bloods living with him, Ronnie living with him, and now, his health—and I felt anger, like a deep, vibrating tectonic plate, shift over my heart.
Rene was suddenly, unaccountably in front of me.
I sneered at him.
Rene’s smile widened. “Your turn.”
I tipped sideways in his arms, his grip tight around my body, and we were gone. Out of the dining room, through the flickering dim of the mining shaft, and rocketing up the cavern, passed stalagmites and rock structures, away from the world Bex had created with her kerosene lamps and tapestries and timeless beauty, and toward the steep pitch of the present, we soared.
* * * *
Rene dropped both of us unceremoniously outside the coven. I decided to rise above my anger and the million festering questions inside of me and offer Walker a hand to help him stand. There wasn’t one question I could ask here that I couldn’t ask from the safety and comfort of his living room.
“Let’s get the hell out of the woods and go home,” I said.
He ignored my hand and met my gaze. “What the hell was that back there?”
I blinked. “Exc
use me?”
“That loyal night blood bullshit. You’re not Dominic’s little day servant. You don’t answer to him and his coven. You don’t answer to anyone!”
I let my hand drop to my side. “Things changed while you were gone. I’ve learned to survive on my own, to co-exist with Dominic in peace.”
“There is no peace between wolves and lambs.” Walker spat. “Only slaughter.”
I shot him a quelling look. “Am I the lamb in this analogy? Really?”
“When we were in the city together, you—” Walker shook his head at me. “—but you obviously aren’t the same person I met back then.”
“Not everything has to be war,” I hissed. “Sometimes, in order to survive, you need to compromise.”
“Maybe you should have told me about your compromise with Dominic before you came to visit,” he snapped.
“Maybe you should have told me about having seizures before I came to visit,” I snapped back. “Maybe you should have told me that you lived with Ronnie and an entire houseful of night bloods! You haven’t been exactly forthcoming either.”
“You let me go into that dinner thinking we were on the same side,” Walker said in a low voice.
I rolled my eyes. “We are on the same side!”
Walker jabbed his finger toward the cave opening. “From what I just heard down there, you’re on their side! Compromising with a vampire,” Walker shook his head. “It’s bullshit, is what it is.”
“What does my compromise with Dominic have to do with anything?” I asked. “I’m surviving the best way I know how. If I’m alive and healthy, what does it matter?”
“It matters. When push comes to shove and Dominic tries to turn you, will you agree to that, too?”
Hell no, I thought, but I couldn’t answer truthfully because Bex might overhear. I settled on a different truth instead. “When we were in the city, you told me that it’s my decision to make, not yours and certainly not Dominic’s. Was that a lie, too?”
Walker shook his head and looked away.
“When were you planning to tell me about the seizures?”
“I’ve only been having them for a few weeks. The doctors aren’t even sure if—”
“You never would have told me,” I said quietly, in shock. “If you hadn’t seized right in front of me, you never would have told me. Does Ronnie know? Does anyone know?”
Walker closed his mouth and didn’t say a word.
“We’re going to the hospital,” I insisted.
“No, we’re not. When we first met and I rescued you from Dominic’s coven, did we go to the hospital like I suggested?”
I shook my head. “That’s not the same thing and you know it.”
“You told me you were fine, and even though I knew you weren’t, I brought you home anyway because I respected your decision.”
“I also remember a different time, when I begged you to take me to the hospital, and you didn’t. Nothing was more important than your vengeance to kill vampires.”
“Not much is,” Walker admitted. He struggled to his feet on his own. I caught his arm to steady him, and his fingers brushed against my bruised neck as he groped for balance. I winced back with a hiss.
“Careful,” I muttered. “We should take it slow. We still have a long hike back to the Harley.”
“Your neck has third degree burns. They could easily become infected out here in the woods,” He said, and when he held his fingers up, they were glossed with my blood.
“Let’s get the hell out of the woods then,” I snapped.
He took hold of my chin and tipped my head for a better look at the burns. “We need to get you to a doctor.”
I shook off his grip. “We don’t have time for a doctor. The murderer is still out there, and we—” I stopped short, catching the glint of Walker’s teeth in the moonlight as he grinned at me. “You’re such a brat.”
He wiped my blood off on some dry leaves outside the coven and took my hand. “You’re right about one thing, darlin’. We need to get the hell out of here.”
An hour later, we finally entered his house. Ronnie was shelving newly washed dishes. Logan and his oldest son, Keagan, were continuing their conversation on the couch. Jeremy was eavesdropping on their conversation from a nearby chair and still scowling. My whole world had shifted tonight in the span of three hours, but everything here in this house, everyone we’d left behind, had remained the same.
Maybe we should live more like Ronnie and never leave the damn house.
Walker shut the door quietly behind us, and I wondered at the likelihood of being able to sneak upstairs to my room without anyone noticing our presence. Evidently, Walker didn’t want to face anyone, either. He didn’t greet Ronnie. He didn’t even take off his shoes. I followed suit, and we swallowed our grunts of pain, limping silently across the kitchen, passed Ronnie and Logan and the kids, toward the stairs.
We were almost home free. I’d reached the end of the hall just outside the bathroom, Walker three steps behind, when Ronnie shrieked. “Ian! Oh God!”
The horror, I thought, and I looked back.
Ronnie gaped in dismay. Her hands shot up to cup her cheeks. At her shriek, Logan, Keagan, and Jeremy looked up, too, so every eye was trained on us. I sighed. The glow of the kitchen’s overhead light wasn’t flattering. A few leaves were stuck in Walker’s hair. Blood was crusted on his left cheek, neck, the back of his head, and his wrist from Rene’s attack. His expression looked ragged and pinched with pain, and I doubted I looked much better.
Ronnie dropped the bowl she was drying back in the sink and darted around the island. “Are you OK? What happened? Jesus, Ian, your wrist!”
His wrist, I thought, shaking my head. If she only knew. I met Walker’s gaze before he turned around, and he must have read the intention in my eyes. He shook his head, but I couldn’t stand next to him, knowing what I knew while Ronnie stared at us with her battered heart in her eyes. Walker had a serious health condition, and after a lifetime of living together, she deserved the truth. Walker obviously disagreed.
He turned to face Ronnie, and I did both of us a favor and ducked into the bathroom.
I shut and locked the door behind me, flicked the light on, and gaped. I’d been gaping a lot lately, but sometimes, there’s nothing to say or do when reality stares back at you and it’s not anything you ever thought could possibly exist.
The reflection staring back at me from the bathroom vanity was a stranger. My hair was a mess of tangles and leaves. My eyeliner had smudged in dark, dripping circles, and blood was crusted over my lips and between my teeth. The thought of swallowing Bex’s blood made my stomach simultaneously queasy and ravenous. Jillian didn’t voice her thoughts this time, but I could feel her stretch inside of me, luxuriating in the lethargic glow of a full stomach. She was satisfied. For now.
Bex’s blood mixed with my own injuries. I touched a solidified glob of her blood on my cheek, and when I pulled away, her blood stretched in a thick rope between my cheek and finger. I gagged and tried scrubbing her blood off my face. A scrape on my cheek burned as I scrubbed. I scrubbed harder, desperate to clean my face and stop the burning, but just as suddenly as the burning had started, it stopped.
The scrape was healed.
I stared at the blood and my healed cheek for a long moment, trying to come to terms with my life, with the many disturbing realities that still seemed like nightmares, but there wasn’t enough time in a lifetime to find a resolution. The best I could do, the best I’d been able to do for three long weeks now, was damage control.
I twisted the faucet and cleaned my face.
Fifteen minutes later, I’d plucked the leaves from my hair, used the globs of Bex’s blood to heal the burns at my throat, and washed the remainder of the blood, dirt, and grime from my face. I nearly looked like myself again, except for the deep purple bruises around my neck.
I still looked like hell, but at least
I was clean. As far as damage control, that was the best I could do.
Thinking of hell reminded me of my own personal devil. I’d blown Dominic off at sunset, leaving him that God-awful, rambling voicemail, and he’d taken it in stride. Maybe he deserved the courtesy of another phone call.
I rolled my eyes, thinking of being courteous to Dominic, the man with fangs and talons and unfathomable strength. The man who had a silver cage and handcuffs in his bedchambers to keep me “safe” from his coven.
The man who, when presented with the opportunity to get exactly what he wanted from me, to turn me into a vampire, had chosen to save me as a human.
Reluctantly, I punched in Dominic’s number. The phone only rang once before he answered.
“How was dinner with Bex?”
“Hello to you, too,” I said teasingly. “We really need to work on your phone etiquette.”
“Hello,” Dominic said, and I could hear the patience waning in the snap of his tone. “How was dinner?”
“If you’re asking if Bex believes that I’m your loyal night blood, forging alliances on your behalf and anticipating my transformation into a vampire, then dinner went swimmingly. She’s jealous of us and is doubly determined to have Walker. Bless her heart,” I added, Bex’s phrase growing on me.
“I’m sure our Ian Walker is loving the spotlight. Bless his heart.” Dominic said, and it sounded as if he relished the thought. “Bex is something, isn’t she? She’d originally Southern, from Georgia I believe.”
I snorted. “She’s something, all right.”
“If Bex handles this right, she’ll strengthen her standing in the coven. Walker has run amuck for far too long, killing vampires and refusing her rule, without being curbed.”
I snorted. “I got the impression that her coven wants her to choose a different night blood. They’re impatient with Walker.”
“I’m sure they are. He’s killed many of their family and friends. Even if Bex eventually won him over and he agreed to the transformation, he wouldn’t have many allies in his new home.”
I hesitated, Dominic’s logic startling since I’d never thought of the coven’s perspective. I doubt I’d made many allies in Dominic’s coven, but since I was never agreeing to the transformation, I suppose the point was moot.
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