Page 30 of Kingdom of Chaos (Creatures of Chaos #2)

“Talon. I said pull over,” I say, trying to take a tone that leaves no room for argument.

By now, we’re on the expressway heading north.

Talon flicks one of his incisors with his tongue, the gesture sharp with irritation, before letting out a sigh and taking the next exit.

He pulls over about half a mile off the expressway, the truck rolling to a stop on the shoulder of a quiet rural road. There isn’t another vehicle in sight.

Opening his door, Talon gets out and heads around back toward the bed, where all our bags are.

Everyone else stays put as I scramble out and meet up with him.

I find him digging through his backpack.

The bag is ripped from the monster attack in the swamp, but amazingly the zipper still works and a lot of the items inside are still intact.

The sun is fully up now, and my stomach clenches when I see how much of his T-shirt is soaked through. After grabbing a few supplies from his pack, he reaches down and pulls the shirt over his head with a pained grunt.

I gasp when I see his injury. There’s a hole leaking blood on the left side of his torso right above his hip.

It’s on the opposite side of his body as the slashed bitemarks he got from the Komodo dragon shifter the night before—or was that two nights ago?

It feels like both an eternity and the blink of an eye since we landed in the human world.

The gashes from the Komodo dragon still haven’t fully healed. The skin around them is red and inflamed, raw and tender-looking. A knot tightens in my chest. Wounds like that should be healing faster.

I try to tamp down my concern, reminding myself that Talon said the poison in the bite was slowing his ability to recover. Even so, it’s the gunshot wound that draws my focus. Blood still leaks steadily from it. It’s clearly far worse.

Talon twists, craning his neck to see behind him, and I realize there’s a matching wound on the other side of him. I look up at him sharply, alarm shooting through me.

“It must have gone through me. What did she call it? A bullet,” he says calmly.

“Talon, you have a hole in your abdomen. We have to get you help. Do you think they have hospitals here?”

“It’s my lower abdomen at least. That’s good.”

“How is that good?” My voice comes out high and tight with panic. Even as I watch, blood leaks in a steady flow from the twin wounds.

He shrugs. “Less important stuff down there. There’s a better chance an organ didn’t get hit.”

I drag my gaze from his wounds back to his face, certain the panic on mine is impossible to miss.

“Do you think it hit an organ? Could you be bleeding internally?”

I take him in from head-to-toe and back up again. Is he paler than he was a few minutes ago?

Another shrug. “Maybe.”

Pulling a water bottle out of his bag, he splashes water on the wound and then tries to mop up the blood the best he can with a piece of cloth. Then he reaches over, grabs a roll of heavy-duty silver tape, pulls out a strip, and tears it off with his teeth.

“How are you not freaking out right now?” I ask, as he pinches the torn skin together and presses a strip of duct tape over it like it’s no big deal. “You could be slowly dying !”

Talon chuckles and shakes his head like I said something funny. This is not funny. He has holes in him, and all he has to help fix them is a roll of tape and a piece of cloth.

This is serious.

He twists to the side, trying to reach the exit wound, but he’s clearly struggling to get the right angle. I reach forward, snatch the rag from his hand, and step behind him.

The hole on his back is a little larger than the one in front. I’m relieved he can’t see how badly my hands are shaking as I do my best to clean away the blood so the tape will stick.

Still, he doesn’t need to see my face to know what I’m feeling. He reads the silence like I’ve spoken my fears out loud.

“It’s okay, Freckles,” he says, and despite the gruesome sight in front of me, a trickle of warmth runs down my spine at the use of my nickname. “I’m pretty hard to kill.”

I want to believe him, but there’s a lot of blood.

“Just ask Imogen,” he says with a chuckle. “She tried to take me out at least twice when we were growing up.”

Even though his tone is light, I can’t tell if he’s actually joking. The thought of that infuriating vampire hurting him makes my fists clench with anger. I force myself to breathe, to focus, and finish cleaning the wound as best I can.

I hold out my hand, waiting for Talon to pass me the silver tape.

“If it was really bad, I’d already be dead,” he says quietly, all traces of humor gone.

I sigh. “You could be half dead and still tell me you’re all right.”

It was the truth, and that scared me to my core. Talon was reckless at the best of times, and never admitted when he needed help. I didn’t know if that was pride, or something else.

After pouring water on the wound and cleaning the blood away, I do my best to pinch the skin together before taping over the hole, but it’s immediately clear the wound is too big for that.

“Do you have anything I can pack this with before I tape it?”

He rummages in his pack again, pulls out some sterile gauze and hands it to me. I gesture for him to turn back around, but he lifts a hand toward my face, and for a second I think he’s going to cup my cheek. Then he realizes his hands are covered with blood and drops it again.

“Are you okay? You look a little pale,” he asks, his brow pinched with concern.

“I’m fine,” I mumble, not sure if I actually am. “Turn around.”

This time he obeys, and after packing some of the sterile gauze in the wound, I put several long strips of tape over it, praying that it will be good enough until his natural healing kicks in.

We clean our hands as best we can with the remaining water, then Talon throws on a clean T-shirt. Both this one and the old one are dark enough to hide bloodstains.

When we go back to the truck I offer to drive, because Talon is definitely paler now. He doesn’t put up a fight.

Inside the cab, Ensley is seemingly sleeping peacefully against Titus.

Imogen stares at her cousin with a scrunched nose. “I need to stop for food soon, because even you are starting to smell tasty right now.”

Ew .

“You’ll live,” Talon shoots back at her.

“If you don’t, do I have permission to drain your corpse?” she asks with a grin.

Double ew .

Talon rolls his eyes. “Sure. I wouldn’t want to go to waste.”

I give them both a look like they are crazy, and Imogen purses her lips at me.

“Oh, get over yourself,” she snaps.

“Imogen,” Talon warns.

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “I don’t know what you even see in her,” she says, gesturing to me. “She’s so uptight.”

Talon opens his mouth to respond, but I beat him to it.

“It’s not uptight to think it’s gross that you want to eat one of your relatives.”

Imogen leans forward, baring her teeth, even the pointy ones. “It’s a joke. Have you ever heard of one before?”

I really don’t like her, but I tell myself she’s not worth the energy and crank the truck. My eyes connect with Titus’ in the rearview mirror just before I pull back onto the road.

“She’s going to be okay. She just needs to sleep it off,” he says, easily reading the question in my eyes.

I nod even though I know the worry gnawing at my gut won’t disappear until I see it for myself.

“It’s going to take an entire day to get up to New York,” Talon says.

He has the map that Violet gave him out on his lap and he’s tracing the path between Florida and New York. I’m hit with another wave of how strange it is that our worlds are so similar. The coastline looks so similar to ours, maybe even identical.

“My best guess is about eighteen or nineteen hours,” Talon says, lifting his head. “Maybe more, depending on what traffic is like here, but at least it’s a pretty straight shot up the coast. If we drive straight through, we can make it there in the early morning hours.”

“Is that wise?” I ask, thinking of how pale he looks, and Ensley passed out in the back seat. Even Imogen looks worn out.

I want to get there quickly, but after what we’ve all been through, I worry about everyone. Myself included.

“There are enough of us to trade out driving, but if it feels like we’re pushing it, we can stop and rest. Let’s just see how it goes,” Talon suggests.

I nod, and ease the truck back onto the road. I’m nervous to drive but I try not to show it. If Ensley were awake, she’d probably be nervous too. She’s been in a car when I was driving before.

At least most of the way is on the expressway. I just need to get us back to the main road and focus on keeping the truck in the lane.

Easy-peasy , I tell myself to settle my nerves.

I maneuver us back in the right direction, but I only drive for about thirty minutes before Imogen orders me to pull over so she can take the wheel, grumbling about my turtle pace as we switch seats.

I’d be offended, but that half hour was so stressful I’m just relieved to be done.

My fingers ache from how hard I was gripping the steering wheel.

When I slide into the back to take her place, I immediately check on Ensley, still curled up against Titus. Her color looks good, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she was just napping.

The wave of relief that washes over me is immediate and powerful. For the first time since Talon and I found the members of the Silent Order standing over our sleeping friends, I finally start to relax.

The adrenaline crash hits minutes later, heavy and sudden. My eyelids grow impossibly heavy, and I drift off to sleep to the rhythm of the truck’s gentle swaying as we speed down the expressway, racing toward Becks.