Page 72 of Sinner's Secret

She bucked and tried to kick him, throwing her heels back in an attempt to connect with his knee or any other vulnerable part of his body.

“Let me go,” she yelled.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, keeping his tone gentle. “I swear, I will never hurt you.”

She screeched and kept wiggling to get away, but he had her securely. He kept repeating that he wasn’t going to hurt her, that she was safe, that he’d keep her safe no matter what.

She ran out of gas after thirty or forty seconds, breathing heavy, her muscles quivering with fatigue. Then she began to cry, and instead of trying to get away, she sagged against him and choked out, “Baz?”

He never wanted to hear his name spoken in that desperate, despair-filled tone again.

“I’m here,” he said and let her turn around so she could bury her face in his shoulder and sob. It took a while before she had all the stress out of her system.

He picked her up and carried her to the bunk where she’d slept and set her down next to him.

She rubbed her face, clearing the tears away, then met his gaze and said, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin to do.”

That made him chuckle, but not for long. “It’s a very long story.”

“I think I’m owed the entire thing.”

He sighed and nodded. “Okay, I guess I’ll start at the beginning. As near as I can figure it, I was born in 1326 in a region near what is now Slovenia.”

She blinked and opened her mouth but stopped short of saying anything.

He smiled grimly. “I know, most of my life sounds absolutely crazy. Let me tell the whole thing, then you can ask questions, okay?”

She nodded.

“When I was twenty-two, the Sweating Sickness swept through the area. A lot of people died, but several members of my family, including me, didn’t. The virus that caused the disease did something different to us. Something permanent. Something that has made me wish many, many times we’d just died like all the rest.”

He paused to collect his thoughts.

“We’ve only come to understand in the last twenty years what happened to those of us who were changed. You’ve heard of rheumatoid arthritis?”

She nodded again, but he continued. “It’s an auto-immune disease where the body attacks a specific part of itself it sees as foreign. Sometimes, our immune system overreacts to viruses or bacteria, making us sicker than the pathogen did all by itself. Well, our bodies overreacted to the virus that caused the Sweating Sickness in a way that was completely unique.” He paused for a moment. “You also need to know that this reaction only occurred in a few people from a few families. People with a very specific genetic mutation. Everyone else either got sick then recovered normally or got sick then died.”

“Okay,” she said after he waited for her to respond, then tilted her head in a listening pose.

“Our immune systems did something different. They went into overdrive, not making things worse, but repairing...everything.”

“Repairing?”

He shrugged. “It’s been nearly 800 years since I was born, but I look the same today as I did the day I was exposed to the Sweating Sickness. I don’t age. If I’m wounded, I heal, fast. I’m a bit stronger and my senses are a bit sharper than a regular human’s. The one huge drawback is how I get my nutrition.”

“Blood?”

“Yeah, blood. Our bodies stopped being able to process food into fuel. Now, we have to get it directly from someone else’s blood.”

“Does that mean the blood has to be fresh, taken directly from a living person?”

“Yes. Donated blood, like a unit for transfusion, loses all of its nutritional value for us after about twelve hours.”

“And you can’t sleep.”

“Correct. We’re too hypervigilant. Like I said earlier, I can get into a sort of Zen state that allows my body and brain to rest without actually becoming unconscious. I’m still aware of my surroundings, still able to react.”

She looked down for a second. “When that drive-by shooting happened, you were wearing a vest, but were you still wounded by some of the bullets, and you just healed really fast?”

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