Page 9 of Blood Loss (The Obscura Saga #2)

LATH A N

The next day, Lathan helps Kylo draft a text message to Kianna and Lucas to break the news. It takes longer than it should to get the language just right, and they laugh nervously with each other about the logistics of essentially telling one’s siblings ‘hey, I fucked him as a monster.’

Later in the afternoon, Maria tasks David with some grocery shopping. Kylo is asked to go with, and Lathan stays back to help Maria in the kitchen. He wants to do what he can to make up for his stay, so he also slips Kylo his credit card before the guys leave and tells him to use it, to buy whatever—the expensive options, even—without David or Maria noticing.

Lathan has tried three times already to get Maria’s information in order to pay her back for his plane ticket. She keeps refusing, and even has David and Kylo in on it. It isn’t the fact she’s being proud about taking the repayment that weighs on him, but the why . While he has money thanks to his parents, he was always taught manners and courtesies, and he can only imagine his mother smacking him upside the head and spitting straight fire at him for not paying for his own plane ticket. So he’s going to keep trying to wear Maria down—or pay the Garcias back in any way he can, like groceries.

It’s about twenty minutes after they leave, when the midafternoon sun is at its peak for the day, that the doorbell chimes. Maria looks up, and then grumbles down at her hands, covered in oil and spices.

“I’ll grab it,” Lathan says, a hand on her shoulder, and she thanks him in Spanish as he walks out of the kitchen and around to the front door. When he unlocks and opens it, though, his neutral expression hardens.

He locks eyes with those of his own mother’s on the other side of the screened partition.

They stare at each other silently for a moment before Lathan pushes himself outside, closing the door behind him, which forces her to take a couple steps backward. “What are you doing here?”

The woman’s eyes narrow, and she looks over her son briefly. “You need a haircut.”

Lathan cocks an eyebrow, crossing his arms. “Your roots are showing.”

“Flying to another country to find my son is stressful.”

His jaw tenses. “Why are you here?” he hisses, and he almost asks, too, how she found him—found the Garcias’ address. But he knows her talents and tools as an investigative lawyer—though it pisses him off that she’d bother using them for this.

“I’m taking you home,” she says flatly, holding her small black purse against her stomach. The gesture makes her look polite and small, but he knows she’s anything but.

Lathan snorts. “Home? Like Vancouver? That hasn’t been home for me in years, and you know it.”

“You cannot stay here— with werewolves ,” she sneers, like the species as a whole is corrupted. “It looks terrible on us, especially after what happened at Obscura.”

He rolls in his lips, nodding, looking beyond her. “Right. Appearances. Not actual concern. No ‘are you okay?’ or ‘how’s your boyfriend doing?’”

His mother flinches, clearly uncomfortable to hear that her son is still with the wolf that she insists caused trouble for Lathan—and her and her husband, by extension—last term.

“Just go, Mom. I’m fine here.”

“Have you no common sense? They were targeted, and as long as you’re connected to them, you will be targeted too.”

He scowls at her implication. “They didn’t do this. It’s something that happened to them. They aren’t just mindless monsters.”

“But that means it could happen again. And you choose to stay near them? Why would you be so stupid?”

His heart thuds in his chest with anger—betrayal. “Because they’re more family to me than you’ve ever been.”

The rage that strikes her face is instantaneous, and Lathan recognizes it right away. She drops her purse to dangle at her hip and raises a hand, but he catches her thin wrist before she can strike. Something close to shock grips her expression as she’s restrained and forced to listen to her son.

“I am not a child anymore. You cannot punish me like I’ve done something wrong. I am choosing my life now, and it includes the Garcias.”

“You would be Mrs. Park, I take it?”

Lathan doesn’t move when Maria’s voice suddenly comes from behind him. There are two mothers at this doorstep, and only one he considers his own.

She isn’t the one he’s staring at.

“I don’t know how you found my family’s private residence,” Maria continues, her voice as stern as a drill sergeant, yet buttered and sweet somehow, “but I think it’s best you go.”

With her words, Lathan drops his mother’s arm, boring into her with his eyes, like he’s echoing Maria’s sentiment with his stare alone. But his mother collects herself quickly and makes a face at Maria.

“Respectfully, Mrs. Garcia, Lathan is my son, and I will do what is in his best interest.” She moves her annoyance onto Lathan. “Get your things. We’re leaving.”

“Absolutely not.” Maria steps down to Lathan’s side, jutting her arm out and low in front of him, as if to block him from leaving. “ Respectfully , he is perfectly fine here. And frankly, I’m not too keen on a mother who treats her son like her possession.”

Lathan’s heart swells at Maria’s protective stance, her words. His mother gawks at the mother wolf, and then at Lathan behind her arm. “Fine,” she huffs, “leave your things here. I’ll buy you new clothes and textbooks. But you’re coming home.”

She snags her son’s hand and—fast like a lightning strike, with the impact to prove it—wraps her lips around the veined flesh of his wrist.

Lathan manages to wretch his hand away from her before she can run her tongue along the punctures her swift fangs have made, which would seal in the venom and make the effects last longer. Even without the sealant, though, her venom fights with his blood, and pain radiates from the wound within seconds. Blood trickles from the holes, and Lathan squeezes his wrist as tightly as he can against the intensifying burn.

She reaches out again—her fangs already retracted, like nothing just occurred in the last split second—to grab his shoulder. He knows what she’s thinking: now that he’s wounded, weakened, she should be able to force him into the rental car parked in front of the house. But he rips away from her, eyes wild with disbelief.

“G-go,” he forces through gritted teeth, and shoves his way back into the house as blood escapes down his arm, his hand.

As much as he doesn’t want to leave Maria alone with his mother, his body is moving for him. Like when he was a little kid. His mind separates, and he’s a young boy again. Terrified. Mind paralyzed with pain. Rushing to the bathroom to hide. He locks the door, his arm shaking as the venom courses in his flesh, discolouring under his skin. He lays his wrist over the bowl of the sink and squeezes, presses, tries to coax out as much venom as he can to ease the effects. Colourless, it’s impossible to tell if he’s successful, but more blood pushes out of his wounds, dripping against the white porcelain. He can feel it working through his veins and it makes his head spin. He collapses to the floor, clutching his bloodied arm to his chest, and groaning with the pain.

He can hear Maria shouting at his mother, threatening her, but a lot of it isn’t English—or she’s just too far away for his addled hearing to identify what she’s saying.

Sat on the bathroom floor, Lathan’s teeth chatter. The sensations of his body as the venom runs its course are distantly familiar, and unlocks memories he had buried away in the folds and contours of his brain. A childhood ridden with bites, with venom-forced submission and punishment, of missing school because of the careless bruising that would warrant a visit from a social worker. It would silence him. It would slow his heart, his breathing, his movements, and make him malleable to his mother’s tyranny.

His father never tried to stop it. And he knew. He knew she was using the one thing a vampire has against another.

It’s an evolutionary trait for survival that never changed in the composition of their biology. Venom subdues—creating a euphoric experience for prey, and a disabling one for rivals.

“Lathan, honey, are you okay?” Maria calls from behind the door, her voice cautious, but made loud enough for him to hear.

He kicks his feet out, trying to distract from the hot pull spreading up his arm. Maria’s voice barely breaks through his shrouded memories, but he doesn’t want her to panic—she doesn’t know vampires, and she doesn’t know what’s happening.

“Mhm,” he croaks, voice breaking. “Fine.”

“Sh-should I get the first aid kit?”

He shakes his head, though she can’t see—the aggressive movement feels better than sitting and submitting to the pain. “No,” he says, and then can’t contain a pained whimper as the burn deepens. Fuck . He grips his arm tighter, bubbling more blood to the surface, but the pressure helps some, or at least disperses it, interrupting the fire.

“Mijo, can you please open the door? I’m just here to help.”

When he pictures himself as a child, scared and confused— why does Mommy hurt me? —his eyes brim with tears. I don’t know , he thinks, as if to answer his younger self. With his jaw flexed, in this state, it’s hard to speak—every time he opens his mouth, he risks yelling out in agony.

He takes in jagged breaths, trying to keep the limited grip he still has on himself in check. After a while, he drags himself to his feet, legs shaky with the sedative effects of his mother’s venom. He grunts gently at the fire licking his veins, and—against everything he’s been taught, everything his memory has prepared him for—he cracks the door open for Maria, propping himself against the sink countertop.

His arm has stiffened, fingers clawlike and strained. There’s an intricate indigo cobweb of affected nerves underneath the bloody fang punctures in his wrist. His body trembles, and he’s pale, whiter than normal.

He’s trying to push through it, but it hurts just as much as he remembers. And he didn’t know he had anything to remember until now, which makes the pain that much worse.

“I-I’m ok—kay.”

Maria’s hand shoots to cover her mouth, brown eyes bulging as she sways away from the gory scene. “Dioses mío, Lathan,” she gasps, and then reaches to slip herself under Lathan’s shoulder so she can wrap an arm around his waist. “I’ve got you.”

She assists him out of the bathroom, down the hall, toward the kitchen, mumbling delicate words of encouragement to get him there. He doesn’t lean on her—he’s too heavy for that—and that only makes it more difficult to shamble his way into the dining room. He reaches aimlessly for a chair and falls into the closest one.

Once seated, he crumples over himself, wounded arm tucked against his abdomen, as if he can cocoon his body, make himself smaller, constrict so much that maybe he can put the fire out. His eyes squeeze shut, and he breathes through bared teeth.

Maria disappears, her scampering slippers clucking as she gathers supplies, some from the kitchen, some from down the hall where he can’t quite hear her anymore.

When she runs back to him, she slams an old, probably untouched first aid kit onto the table and twists the cap off a small white bottle. “Here, take these, it’ll help the pain.”

No, it won’t , he thinks, but realizes he doesn’t actually know. He was never given pain relief as a child to test the theory. He reaches for the medication with his other hand which is also shaking now, and then stares at the tablets for a moment. Daddy could have given me something for the pain? his inner child asks sadly. Why didn’t he ever help?

Lathan answers by tossing the painkillers into his mouth and chasing them down with a water bottle Maria’s cracked open for him.

“Don’t cover it,” he manages to say, his words gravelly and forced through breaths. It’ll prolong the effects. His free hand drops back to his paralyzed arm, trying to knead out the venom again without being aware he’s doing it. By this point all he’s doing is making himself bleed more.

“Oh, honey, no.” She reaches out and touches the affected arm, urging him to stop, his blood dripping down and soaking into his clothes. “I’m gonna wash it off and treat it with some antiseptic, okay?”

His eyes are round and childlike—and sad. He nods silently, and exhales against the cool touch of the damp cloth she presses to his skin, starkly contrasting the burn he feels beneath the surface. His knee opposite of Maria bounces incessantly, uncontrollably, like it’s keeping time with the waves of embers crashing under his skin. He tries to bite his lip and look away to keep from complaining about the war in his body, to avoid looking ‘weak,’ as his mother would say .

Then his head whips in the direction of the front door. “I-is she gone?” he stutters, and he doesn’t know if it’s him or the abused little boy he used to be asking the question.

“Oh, don’t worry, love, she’s gone.” Maria dries off the wound, wiping any remnants of red away, before she tugs out the antiseptic spray from the first aid kit. “And she won’t be coming back, unless she wants to feel the wrath of our pack on the next full moon.”

He’s quiet again as she works, simmering in the wake of her protective words. Quiet, save for a few sharper breaths here and there, and a grunt of pain. Though his eyes are squinted and his body is cowered, shaken, he watches her gentle aid wordlessly with appreciation. And he feels the remains of his childhood’s eye thanking her too.

“Okay, I’m done.” She smiles at him as she tucks away her supplies. “How are you feeling?”

“It’s not the wound that hurts,” he says hoarsely, as though the venom has wrapped its tendrils around his vocal cords.

“I wasn’t talking about the wound.”

He lifts his pained gaze to find Maria’s worrisome. She doesn’t know about a vampire’s venom and its varying effects, and he isn’t in the right shape to give a lecture on it yet, so it takes him a moment to register what— who —she’s referring to. Last night, he offered more details about his family to her and David than they’d gotten before. But he left out a lot—the gaps of his childhood were filled in for both of them today, on her doorstep.

He doesn’t answer her, just shakes his head and drops his gaze into the bite festering in his skin.

Maria nods in understanding. After a few moments of silence pass between them, she stands, tipping her head at the staircase. “Come. Let’s get you comfortable.”

His fingers quake as he reaches for her bent arm, the muscles in his legs shivering as he lifts from the chair. Part of him accepts her help out of necessity, as he’s still trying to be the best version of himself for his new family, and feels obligated. But another part of him accepts her help because he wants it. Because little Lathan never had a mom like this. He grew up scared of his mother, and now he’s finding he might have a second chance at a motherly figure in his life.

“That’s it.” Wrapping an arm around him again, easing his steps, she slowly walks him down the hall and up the stairs to Kylo’s old bedroom. After guiding him to the bed, she pulls the drapes closed to sift out the sunlight.

“Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.”

The exhaustion is beginning to spike. Not only from battling the pain, but the main feature of the venom: sedation. This effect is not moot when a vampire is bitten, so Lathan’s lids are heavy, and he lets his head hit the pillow despite the burn still singeing away at his innards.

Maria clutches two handles on either end of a tray upon her return, carrying a teapot, an upside down mug, and a small plate with some fruit and crackers. As she draws nearer, he sees one more painkiller rolling around loose on the tray.

“I’ve got chamomile tea with honey steeping here for you, and some snacks to settle your stomach. There’s also another pain killer, if it still hurts in an hour. Different than the others, so it’s okay to take another.”

Lathan’s eyes follow the tray as Maria rests it on the nightstand, and then fill with tears again. This time, though, he’s silent and his breathing stays the same, even as a droplet breaks from his lashes and falls down his face.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and though they’re only two measly words, they hold everything between them. For helping me. For caring. For letting me stay in your home. For welcoming me into your family, regardless of my recklessness.

“Of course, mijo! It’s the least I can do.” She touches a pair of warm fingers to his shoulder, still stiff with venom paralysis. “I’ll let Kylo know what’s happened when he returns, but for now, just try to rest, okay?”

He wipes away the fallen tear and nods, wincing as he rolls onto his back and cradles his wrist against himself. When she leaves, closing the door—but leaving it inches open in case he calls down for anything—he tries to relax like she said. It takes a while, but the heat eventually calms into something tolerable, though the holes in his wrist throb now with the dilution of the venom. He sips at his tea and nibbles a little bit from the tray, and then, even to his own surprise, dozes off for a short nap, his body begging for recovery.