Page 84 of Even Vampires Bleed
If I’m not careful, I could break a tooth, too. Or at least severely damage a few of them by clenching my jaw.
It feels like an eternity before Léandre comes back.
What can I say? Time seems to stretch from pain.
Léandre doesn’t ask me what I want. Instead, he folds himself between the tree and me, raising my bag like an offering.
He opened it before doing so; all I need to do is shuffle things around and get my tweezers out of the pocket with all my beauty products.
I hand them to him when he drops my bag to the ground next to me and, yeah; I get a peek at his naked ass.
I don’t even have time to stare, though, because he’s already behind me again and touching my wing.
He takes a deep breath.
I know why.
There must be a lot of blood.
I can’t see it, but I can feel it dripping from my wound.
I also can feel it in the way the edges of my sight are becoming dark and everything else blurry.
I’m scared that if Léandre doesn’t get whatever splinters are inside my wound quickly, I might pass out.
That might be why my jaw and most of my muscles are so contracted. It’s like my mind is rebelling against the idea I could pass out.
Or… because it’s bloody painful.
I don’t scream this time when Léandre touches my wound, but there is a lot of huffing and hissing.
The tweezers feel like an electric shock against my skin and the worst is that I can feel every single little movement inside my wound. I can also hear it when Léandre scrapes my wing bone, and it sounds like someone is scratching a chalkboard.
And then I feel light.
I think I can shift now.
“You’re all good now,” Léandre says. “You can shift.”
I hear him as if he’s meters away when I know he’s right behind me, one of his hands still holding my upper wing bone.
Or maybe like I’m hearing through cotton.
That’s not good, right?
It’ll be okay if I can shift.
So, I do that.
I shift into my bat form momentarily, then back to my human form—with my wings still out.
“The bleeding stopped,” Léandre says, and I know I’ll be okay, so I shift my wings back in and fall to the ground.
The edges of my sight are black, and I can barely see what’s in front of me.
“What is happening to me?”
I think I said it in my mind, but the words leave my lips with a very dry and raspy tone.
