Page 28 of Black Hand
The feeling was slowly returning to my numbed limbs, but I still couldn’t open my eyes to see what was going on. My mouth didn’t want to move either. Otherwise, I could at least ask what in all the worlds Alice was doing, because that hard thing was poking at my lips again. A jolt of panic zapped through me when I thought she might be trying to pry my mouth open to get a look at my fangs. I wouldn’t have put that past her, not since the reason we’d become friends was because of her curiosity. She was worse than a cat, so maybe that was why her and Dominic butted heads all the time. The thought nearly made me smile.
All thought evaporated from my mind when my lips were parted, whatever hard thing Alice was sticking in my mouth slipping in. Warm liquid filled my mouth next, and I wanted to gag and choke so I could spit it out, but some of it went down my throat and that was all it took. I gulped it greedily, going as far as sucking on what had to be a straw to get more of it. With each swallow I felt more alive, the tingling feeling intensifying through my body. After a few moments of drinking, I managed to unglue one eyelid and squint at the room I was in.
Alice’s face popped above me, and seeing her huge eyes through the glasses she wore had me choking.
“See? It worked.” Smirking like she just discovered the Americas, she looked up at, I guessed, Dominic over my head. “Now what are you going to say?”
Unwilling to release the blood, I kept sucking on the straw as if my life depended on it, moving my head slightly up to look at now-grumbling shifter. His face came into view upside down, but seeing the worry etched on his face tightened my throat. Deep lines slashed his forehead and dark circles made smudges under his green eyes. I was about to pull the straw out when Alice stabbed a finger at his face, shouting “A ha! I was right.” A red rope dangled from her arm, and for some reason I reached for it. She saw me move and slapped my hand away with a scowl.
“Don’t touch that. It took me forever to find a vein.” This time I did choke, and I sputtered all the blood in my mouth over my chin and face. “Hey, that’s not nice to spit out what was given as a gift.”
Yanking the straw—which wasn’t a straw at all—out of my mouth, I coughed up a lung before I traced the tube from her inner elbow to the end I was holding in my hand. “What the hell are you doing, Alice?” I rasped, my throat raw and burning from each word as if I’d been screaming for days.
“She’s feeding you,” Dominic deadpanned, folding his arms across his chest. “I told her to wait until you awaken, but your human is more stubborn than you.”
“She’s not my human.”
“I’m not an object.”
We both spoke over each other, and the biggest shock of my life happened when Dominic threw his head back and released a deep belly laugh. His face was turned up, and his chest shook from the guffawing. Tears gathered at the corners of his closed eyes. Alice and I naturally gawked like brainless idiots.
“Well it worked, thank you very much.” Alice recovered first, clearing her throat and pushing her glasses up her nose. “Did you see how she was sucking on that tube like a baby goat on a tit? Not a vampire, my ass.”
“You were right, human.” Small chuckles and snickering still escaped his full lips, but he thumped his chest a couple of times and fought to control the expression on his face. “I concur.”
“Did you get Johnathan?” The memory of the fight pushed any humor away, so I threw my legs to the side of the couch and sat up. Bile burned the back of my throat when his words floated through my mind.
“That was your friend?” When I just glared at Dominic for daring to use the word friend in the same context as that asshole, he lifted both his palms up in surrender. “I just wanted to know if it’s the same male, that’s all. And no, he was long gone when I went looking for him.”
“You shouldn’t have let him escape.” Panting through the panic that Johnathan was now in front of the Council spilling his guts and gloating that he could still snitch on me, I gripped the edge of the couch hard enough I heard the fabric rip under my fingers. Another thought hit me, and my gaze shot to Dominic’s. “The dagger. I think I dropped it at the front of the house.”
“In the kitchen.” His chin pointed at the closed door leading to the kitchen that Alice was opening,, the tube still attached to her elbow and the other end held up with her finger pressed over the opening.
“I cleaned it too, Brooklyn. My dad used to collect them, so I learned how to do that when I was younger.” Her voice came muffled through the walls, but I was focused on the wolf curled up in a ball in front of the fireplace, his front leg and tail wrapped in gauze. And of course he was glaring at me.
“What happened to him?” Dominic glanced at the wolf, and when he met my gaze again, mirth danced in his eyes.
“He got scratched playing with the big boys in the forest, but the human acted like his intestines were spilling out.” Chuckling under his breath, he kept his voice low so Alice didn’t hear him. “She fussed over him as much as she did over you. Consider yourself lucky there was only enough of that fabric for him or you would’ve woken up as a mummy.”
I tried.
I really didn’t want to laugh, but it bubbled out of me in waves until a stitch in my side where I was stabbed took my breath away. I couldn’t have been asleep for long if it was still healing. Dominic was next to me in the blink of an eye, lifting my chin with a crooked finger under it.
“What’s wrong?” He searched my face, but I was stunned mute and couldn’t answer him. “What do you feel?”
“It’s nothing.” I had to clear my throat twice so I could speak. “Just a reminder that if you let a sharp blade near you, it’ll hurt. That’s all.”
“They didn’t carry just blades.” He still held my face up to his, a line forming between his brows. “Those were spelled to make you bleed out.”
Pulling out of his grip, I leaned back on the couch and yanked my shirt up to see the stab wound. My skin was red where the sword glided in, but there was nothing else wrong with it. I wasn’t still bleeding, which is what I would expect if what Dominic said was true. When my eyes found his in question, a blush crept across his stubbled cheeks. My jaw dropped at that. Clearing his own throat, he moved away, shuffling his feet uncomfortably and looking at everything but me.
“When the human couldn’t stop the bleeding I … I gave you some of my blood.” I could barely breathe, so I just stared at him. “I didn’t know if it would help, but I had to try. You were going to die if I didn’t.” We both knew that was a lie, but we both ignored it.
I wouldn’t have woken up, and I’d be in an internal sleep if I bled out, but the moment blood reached me I’d be up like I’d had a good night’s sleep. Something else was nagging at me more than that, though, so I blurted it out without thinking.
“She didn’t know if the tube would work. That’s why she tried it on herself.”
My gaze dropped to his left wrist, which he was pressing on the side of his leg, as I asked. He wasn’t fast enough to hide one of the red dots—a mark from my fangs. A shifter would never willingly offer blood to one of my kind. They’d rather die than let us have a drop of it. I was lucky that I was sitting, because surely I was about to faint. The rushing of blood was like a train in my ears.
