Page 124 of Wicked Hungry

“Pull it out?” I ask. Meredith lies sleeping on the stone by my feet and I’m having trouble focusing on anything else. Karen is bleeding a little, but she’s tied her black long-sleeved shirt over the wound to slow the flow. Vampires must heal fast like us werewolves, or they would be a lot easier to kill. Besides, who are we talking about here? Karen is tough. She’s unbreakable.

Meredith, though, I worry about. At least I can hear her breathing down on the floor. Because she’s snoring.

“Stanley? Can you pull it out?”

I look at Nye’s shoulder, where the tail end of a crossbow dart protrudes, surrounded by blackening blood.

“Is it silver?” I ask, afraid to touch it.

“No, far worse for me,” Nye says. “I’m afraid it’s iron. It burns my blood.”

Nye lays the sleeping Seelie queen down carefully at his feet. Then he takes a step away and holds himself steady.

“I’m ready, Stanley.”

“All right, as long as it isn’t silver,” I say, letting Max carefully down to the floor. He stands, ready, next to my feet. My hands grab the dart. It’s slippery. Slippery with Nye’s blood. To his credit, he doesn’t even flinch. “One, two, three, go,” I say. Then I pull with all my might. There’s resistance, but Nye doesn’t twist away. How can he stand as still as a statue? At last it gives, and the dart comes out with a popping noise.

“Aargh,” Nye says quietly.

The blood flows freely now from his shoulder, black and thick.

Nye spits into his palm, then presses his hand against his shoulder. He closes his eyes for a moment and is still. The bleeding slows, and he opens his eyes again. “That will give me a few more minutes,” he says.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“A trick of the folk,” he says. “I don’t think it works for humans...or for vampires, either.”

“Can we get going?” Karen asks. “If my mother wakes up and sees me out of bed she’s going to kill me.”

Nye looks at her with a raised eyebrow. “Your kind is hard to kill,” he says.

“It’s a figure of speech, okay?” she says, rolling her eyes. She picks up Carolina from the floor with a grunt. “But can we go, already?”

Nye nods. “It would be better for me, too, to make haste. I fear the dart was poisoned.”

“Yeah,” Karen says. “I don’t think that knife that cut me was covered with Neosporin, either.”

Nye looks confused. “With what?”

“Forget it,” she says. “Like you said, my kind is tough to kill.”

When everyone has picked up their sleeping burdens and Max has perched himself again in the crook of my arm, we climb. It’s harder going upstairs carrying a girl who weighs almost as much as I do, but I’ve certainly gained a lot of strength in the last few months. It seems that with every change I become stronger. But I’m afraid that my strength isn’t the only thing growing inside me. The beast is stronger, too.

Meredith groans, lying prone, her stomach against my left shoulder. Is she dreaming? Of me? Of the ceremony that awaited them? Of whatever happened when I should have been with her? I’m filled with guilt, and I just want to keep her safe now. Not let her out of my sight until she’s out of harm’s way and awake.

We climb up to a landing. The door is large, yet modern. It looks like a front door of a big office building. But there’s no keyhole, just writing in the middle of the steel.

“Morgaine’s room, house of Whelan.”

I open the door and bright light blinds me for a moment. Obviously someone here has not gone to sleep. Blinking, I pass through the portal and hear a gasp. In a moment Morgaine is in front of me, looking shocked and fearful.

She lets out a short scream, then recognizes me.

“We tried to reach you, Stanley, and your mother was sure she had connected, but...the others?”

Before I can answer, Karen appears behind me carrying Carolina.

“We need help, Morgaine,” I say. “They’re bewitched by the Seelie prince.”