Page 27 of Absolution
It was that bad? Just moving hurt. Hell, just breathing hurt. So I stopped. Not like I needed to anyway. I lay down and Max handed me a fresh towel that smelled laundered and slightly damp. It felt good against the heat of my skin. Heat. Wait. How was that possible? Crap was I on fire or what? My body just about burned.
“Why am I so hot?”
“Lycan blood,” Max answered as if that was all I really needed to know. “You should know pain meds don’t work on us, but you need about three dozen stitches down your back,” Max told me.
“Fuck.”
“Agreed. He’s fast though.” He nodded to the medic who began stitching me up. After the eighth or ninth prick and tug I tuned it out and focused instead on calming my head. The anger wasn’t there anymore, which was a good thing, but I felt kind of weird and spacey. “You drank a lot of lycan blood. It has a bit of a kick. More than human. Probably more than Luca. Though they don’t taste as good as most witches or mostcibos.”
Was that what the nasty taste in my mouth was?
Riley appeared with a stack of cash in hand. Max took it, counted out a huge wad of Benjamins and put them in a plastic bag and handed them to me.
“Did I win?”
“You did. But you had to use a redout to do it. We’ll have to work on that if you’re going to continue fighting.” Hell yeah, I was going to continue. I hurt like a son of a bitch but it was an amazing high. I’d beat that scary ass MF. “Have you been having a lot of redouts?”
“Not sure what you mean exactly by that. A lot how?” Luca had just told me what they were yesterday. Was I supposed to be timing them or something?
“Blackouts. Though your vision goes red first. It’s the blood filling your eyes, and then the blood lust takes over. You almost killed him. I’m surprised you stopped. It’s very hard to stop a redout short of a kill, or even a dozen kills.”
“I had one yesterday with Luca and he’s just fine. I didn’t kill anyone then either. But I’ve sort of had the weird vision for ages now. Some red, but not loss of consciousness like this time or yesterday. That’s new.”
“Have you told Gabe?” The fact that Max didn’t seem to care that I could have killed his kid really irritated me. Maybe I still needed to get Luca’s answer. Or even to talk to him about why I’d been so upset at his outburst. I was just so unprepared for all this. Was anyone prepared to be undead? And yet it made me angry at Gabe too. He was supposed to be helping me, but instead complete strangers were telling me things I probably should have known months ago. The doctor finished and mumbled something about the stitches disintegrating on their own within forty-eight hours.
“Why does it matter if Gabe knows? It’s a vampire thing, right? I just have to deal with it like all the other shit.”
“If the redout was once a year maybe, or even once a month. But two in twenty-four hours means you need to go to ground. Death sleep in real dirt. Even having acibowon’t stop the blood lust for you this time. Eventually you’ll just come undone and murder everyone within reach.”
The thought chilled me to the bone. They were going to bury me? But I wasn’t dead. Not technically. Seiran had just told me I wasn’t dead. And Gabe would insist, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t want me to endanger Sei, Kelly, Con and Jamie. Oh God. They were going to bury me alive.
I got up on autopilot, retrieved my clothes and began stripping off the gear they’d given me.
“You should shower. You’re covered in blood,” Max pointed out. “Anyone on the street will assume you just came from slaughtering a couple of families. The stitches won’t come out. It’s a blood laced thread that will fall apart after your body absorbs all the blood in it.”
Whose blood, I wondered. And gross. I looked down to find my arms red, stains running over every inch of me and blood dripped forming puddles around me. The heaviness of my shorts and tank meant blood, not sweat. I sucked in a deep breath and made my way to the shower, dropping the soiled clothing as I went.
My heart beat furiously, maybe because I’d had so much blood from the lycan, but I stayed under the spray longer that I probably needed to. When I returned to the bench in just a towel it was to find it had been wiped clean of all traces of blood and Riley waited there with my phone in hand. “Your master wants to speak to you.”
I raised the phone to my ear expecting a lecture. “Hello?”
“Are you okay?” Gabe sounded worried, but I had no idea what he’d been told.
“I’m fine.” Shaky, tired, and aching slightly with a gash down my back, but mostly unhurt.
“I’m on my way to get you.”
“I can find my way home on my own. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Sam,” the quiet tone that said he was unhappy undid me, and suddenly I was sobbing again as I pulled on my clothes. What the hell was wrong with me? Did I have a time of the month now or something? Crap.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
“You’ve had two redouts with full loss of consciousness. Any others you haven’t told me about? Hart’s assistant called with an update.”
“I don’t want to go to ground. Max told me and I don’t want to be buried.”
“Sam, you have to be afraid of the redout. You can really hurt people. You might think you can handle it, but waking up with the scattered remains of people you love around because you killed them in a fit of blood rage, will really fuck you up. Some never even come fully back from them. Nowadays vampires are often killed before the redout is finished to stop the bloodshed.”