Page 10 of Avenged

“She’s going to be mad I called you…but she’s never been this bad.” Violet’s voice shook with the fear she wasn’t voicing.

“Never been this bad how?” The phone was in the crook of my neck and my shoulder as I buttoned the jeans and went to my dresser, grabbing the first T-shirt I touched and not caring what it was.

“She’s bleeding so much.”

Shit.

“Okay. I’ll be there in five.”

“Thank you…”

I hit the “off” button so she couldn’t change her mind, shot a text off to Dawson so he wouldn’t worry when he got home and found me gone, and then pushed my feet into the nearest pair of shoes I could find.

The muggy air hit me as soon as I opened the door. I was used to it in some ways from Hawaii, but the East Coast had its own brand of muggy. It felt more oppressive because you didn’t expect it. Because the quaint town looked like it would never experience a bad climate day, like it was movie-set perfect. I used the thoughts of movies filmed in East Coast seaside towns as a way of distracting me from worrying about two blonde-haired women on their own in Leena’s Victorian. One bleeding. The other scared.

When I got there, I let myself in with the key I’d never returned. The lights were off downstairs. I flicked the lamp on in the entryway and then took the stairs two at a time. I turned down the hall toward the two rooms I’d known were Jersey’s and Violet‘s but had never entered during my time in the house.

Violet was standing outside one. The door was shut, and she was wringing her hands.

“Talk to me, Violet. What’s going on?” I asked quietly.

“She won’t let me in because she thinks she’s got the stomach flu on top of her normal period, but I could still hear her throwing up and moaning. She’s had to wash her sheets twice because she keeps bleeding through everything. She wouldn’t let me do it. She won’t risk me getting sick, but she barely made it up and down the stairs to the laundry room.” Violet’s voice was almost a whisper, more like the way Jersey usually spoke and less like the energetic trill that was her norm.

I didn’t know what to think. I mean, I had a mom and had had girlfriends. I knew the basics of what happened. I knew sometimes things went astray and there was blood, but never the kind of blood Violet was talking about.

“Okay. Let me go in and see what’s going on.”

She nodded. I knocked on the door and then opened it.

The room had a strong odor. Blood and musk and sick. I’d been around worse but not by much. Jersey was faced away from me, curled up in the fetal position in leggings and a long T-shirt, with what looked like sketches all around her on the bed.

“Get out, Violet,” she groaned, waving a hand toward the door.

I sank down on the edge of the mattress, pushing some of the black-and-white comic-book drawings out of my way, and putting a hand on her hip. She flipped over, and her face was even paler than normal. Corpse-like. Scary. She really could be a ghost. A beautifully haunting ghost, but a ghost.

“Wh-what are you doing here?” she asked.

“Vi was a little worried,” I told her.

She flushed, the coloring sneaking over the pale-white skin. “It’s nothing. Just something I ate or the flu.”

Her body stiffened, and she pulled her legs back up to her chest again.

“Jesus Christ. Let’s go. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

She shook her head. “No. Don’t be ridiculous.”

But it was said in between big breaths as if she was trying to hold in the pain.

I wasn’t going to argue over this. I swept my hands under her and stood with her in my arms. Even sick, bleeding, and smelling funny, she was still gorgeous.

She pushed against me weakly. “Put me down, Travis.”

“You’re going to the hospital.”

I pulled open the door, and she struggled against me more.

“Stop.”

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