Page 4 of Blood Loss (The Obscura Saga #2)

LAT H AN

A ravenous anxiety, oddly painful, fills his chest in Kylo’s absence. The silent shuddering of their door vibrates through him like a phantom sound. His eyes don’t leave the doorknob, willing it to open again, for the time to fast-forward and Kylo to reemerge into their safe space.

It doesn’t move. Neither the time nor the handle. So Lathan does.

What if others aren’t as understanding, and take blame with the wolves? What if after all the carnage, Kylo’s still in danger?

He whips it open, leaving it wide behind him, prepared on the balls of his feet to race down the hall after his mate. But he slams into him instead, still perched right outside the door frame. He nearly trips them both; Kylo grabs hold of Lathan’s shirt tightly instead, holding them up, holding them as one.

As Kylo showers, Lathan leans stiffly against the wall of the bathroom stall, attentively watching guard. There’s an unease in his stomach about the whole event—he’s worried someone will jump Kylo if Lathan’s not with him. Even though none of the wolves could have done this on purpose .

Lathan feels vulnerable with his lost hearing. He startles easily without sound cues around him. Even soft movements make him jerk, pulling up his guard, his paranoia. His ears don’t hurt—which he finds odd—but the hollowness that hums around him is still disorienting. It’s loud in its own right, and he isn’t able to sleep because of it, the continuous static. Kylo is exhausted, though, and Lathan’s grateful he’s able to drift to sleep quickly after what the day brought.

When the sun rises, Lathan is restless, and shoves himself out of bed to get an early breakfast, bring something back for Kylo, too, so he doesn’t have to go out on his own later.

When he reaches the main floor of the dormitory, the front doors are sealed in a way he’s never seen. From the outside. Several pink notices are plastered on the glass at different heights, declaring a campus-wide lockdown.

Food will be delivered to your rooms at 10am Lathan can only imagine the profanities he’s grumbling as he finds the email.

9:50am

I’ll sit in and tell you what’s going on. I need to know

wtf happened and what we’re supposed to do now.

Lathan nods at his phone, then glances over his shoulder at Ky. “How do you feel? Sore?”

Kylo looks down at this lap and shrugs halfheartedly. Lathan knows he’s hiding whatever brutish trauma his body’s gone through, but so is he, he supposes.

“I’ve been looking up if this is a documented reaction to high frequencies. There are some science journal publications, but they don’t say a whole lot. It’s like Obscura scrubbed their network of keywords so people couldn’t, well, do exactly this.”

Kylo tilts his head toward the door, as though he isn’t listening to Lathan. He flings himself out of the covers and into the nearest pair of pants—a black pair of Lathan’s jeans that are several sizes too large for him—and hurries to the door.

A woman Lathan recognizes from the main cafeteria stands with two prepackaged brown bags of food. When she sees Kylo, she makes herself small, keeping distance by offering the bags with outstretched arms and averting her eyes.

She’s afraid.

Lathan watches Kylo mime a thank you as he carefully takes the food. The woman doesn’t say anything in return, her lips a tense, flattened line, and she ducks her head to roll her cart to the next room.

Lathan walks up behind Kylo as he closes the door with his bare foot. He looks up at Lathan with saddened eyes, offering him one of the bags. He accepts it but doesn’t look at or in it. He saw the way the woman cowered. How her lips never broke to speak to Kylo. How she feared him, judged him, and yet…he can’t bring himself to blame her. The wolves aren’t to blame, but they are. It wasn’t Kylo’s fault, but this happened to him, and so it happened to everyone around him.

He cocks his head at Kylo, attempting to lighten the tension. “What’s wrong? Is it celery?”

The corner of Kylo’s mouth tugs up into a small smile, but he shakes his head as his gaze becomes sheepish. Lathan motions his head away from the door. “Come on. Eat. You must be starving.”

But the wolf ignores him and saunters to their minifridge to shove the bag inside.

Lathan studies him with concern. But he gets it. He’s been through a lot… His appetite will come back when we know what’s going on. He sits at his desk again and pulls out a deli pack of sliced vegetables to nibble on.

He keeps his phone in his hand, swiping from Kylo’s texts to a new conversation. Eunice.

10:07am

Are you safe? Are you still off campus?

Kylo toes over to Lathan. Resting his butt on the edge of the desk, Lathan sees him glance at the open messages in his hand. His chestnut eyes are round as he obviously exclaims, “Ellie!”

“She’s safe,” Lathan assures. “She’s in the hospital right now. I’m guessing Eunice is there with her. I hope she didn’t come back to campus after her shift.”

As his eyebrows knit tighter, his lips read, “What happened?”

Lathan scrubs a hand up and down his face; he needs to shave, the prickles of budding hairs scratching his palm. “She was attacked. Her leg… I don’t know if they can save it, Ky. It was bad.”

“Oh, my gods.” Kylo’s face pales, fingertips covering his mouth in horror. He begins to say something else Lathan can’t hear or decipher before biting his lip and snatching up his phone.

10:12am

You found her, didn’t you?

10:13am

Is she going to live?

Lathan keeps his head down, speaking at his phone screen. “I don’t know.” His voice is quieter, distant. “She was unconscious when the medics found us.”

Kylo curses over and over again, eyes darting with nowhere to land. His hands begin to shake as he clutches his phone tightly, chin dimpling. He shuts his eyes tightly then drops to the ground, the device tumbling to the floor next to him as he catches his face with both hands.

“Kylo? Hey, listen to me.” Lathan slinks off his chair and onto the floor in front of him. He collects his phone from a few feet away and places it gently before him, glass up. “I know you’re blaming yourself right now,” he starts, searching for his scared, scared eyes. “You didn’t do this. None of you did. This was done to you . I don’t think it was a glitch or fluke. I think something this big was planned. You were attacked. You were targeted.”

Kylo peers up at him with glassy eyes. “But we hurt people, Lathan,” is what Lathan translates from his trembling lips. “Ellie… I hurt someone like Ellie.” His speech starts fast, but he quickly slows down each word, emphasizing it so Lathan can hopefully read it. But he doesn’t need to.

Lathan’s jogged back to Trevor, to how he felt after he attacked him. To his blood on his tongue. His screams in the air. And the murder charge his parents somehow swept away. He feels cold thinking about it, about how it made him feel—how it still makes him feel—and he knows there’s only so much comfort he can give Kylo.

He takes in and releases a loud breath through his nose. He doesn’t know what else to say. And not because he couldn’t hear Kylo—he can gather what he was getting at—but because he’s right. The wolves hurt people. The wolves hurt Ellie, hurt himself.

Kylo clearly hurt someone.

He reaches a wobbly set of fingers to where Lathan placed his phone in front of him and types a message in his notes for Lathan to read before turning the screen to face him.

‘Can we visit her in the hospital?’

“I just asked Eunice for an update.” Lathan reaches for his phone, and when he crouches back down, he deflates, relaxing onto his butt. He motions with the device. “She says she’s okay.” He pauses. “Ellie’s in surgery.” His screen blackens as he clicks it off and looks at Kylo. “That means she’s alive, though.”

And it means I was right. They couldn’t save her leg.

The same sorrow pulses between them in this moment, of the sweet elf, born without an arm, losing a leg and being left with only two limbs. The recovery time. The trauma. The permanence.

The two of them sit on the floor, leaning into one another, mutually grieving in the silence over the events and how both of them—and so many others—have been altered. Then they try to fill their time with studies, as if preoccupying themselves will help numb the pain.

Before long, it’s time for the town hall, and Kylo has his laptop set up on his desk for Obscura’s virtual meeting, pen and paper in hand to make notes.

Lathan hovers over Kylo, a hand on the back of his desk chair, the other on the desk itself. His brows are furrowed as he stares at the screen—an empty podium with Obscura’s crest hung behind it. Though he can’t hear, he wants to watch, wants to take in what the school’s president has to say as it’s said, reading over Kylo’s notes as they’re written.

After a few minutes of nothingness, movement graces the screen as Nicolina Lockhardt, in a white suit, steps in front of the camera and behind the podium. A stone-looking woman in her fifties, at least—nephilim, as made obvious by the soft, intricate markings adorning her face and hands, the natural white streak in the front of her auburn hair. She clears her throat, and generated captions appear at the bottom of the screen in yellow text, enabling Lathan and the other hearing-affected vampires to read along.

“A tragedy has struck Obscura Academy,” she begins, “and for that, I am sorry. The nature of the event that occurred yesterday evening is under investigation, and we have thus far determined it to be manmade. Due to this, the Academy is in lockdown, and I again apologize for the inconvenience of such a decision. If you haven’t read the notices on the dormitory entrances, students are not permitted to leave their living quarters as of yet, and will have meals supplied to their rooms.” She looks down at some papers, swallowing delicately. “I want to give my condolences to everyone affected by this tragedy. Every injury, loss, and trauma. To prevent any more from occurring, Obscura’s campus will be shuttering its doors for the remainder of the term—and possibly through the summer—as we fortify our security and safety precautions, to keep our staff and students safe. We are allotting seventy-two hours for everyone to find accommodations and vacate the premises. Classes are suspended while we switch to an online format. You will receive details via your school emails. This is a troublesome time for everyone, and I acknowledge this change is short-notice, but it is the most efficient option in moving forward.”