Page 111 of Blade's Battle
Pryce was pressing along her abdomen. “She’s been back almost a week. If she had internal injuries, I would have seen the signs before now.”
“Then what? Exhaustion?”
Tess put a hand on Blade’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get a cup of coffee and give Pryce space to work.”
Blade shook his head. He wasn’t going anywhere. He kissed the back of Anna’s hand, but she was lying there, so still, her color pale as could be. Even with his shifter hearing, he could barely tell she was breathing.
“I’m going to turn her on her side. Hold her for me,” Pryce said as he turned her. She was facing Blade now, as Pryce examined her back. His brows pinched together as he examined the back of her legs.
“Tess, hold her,” Blade said as he moved to the other side to see what had caught Pryce’s interest.
Pryce was moving a finger over the bumps on the side of her thigh.
“Bug bites,” Blade said, answering the unasked question. Yet even as he said it aloud, he knew he was wrong.
Pryce shook his head. “Needle marks.”
“Drugs?” Blade’s stomach knotted. If there were a medical condition requiring injections she would have told him, wouldn’t she? Recreational use? No, she was a hard worker, too dedicated to willingly cloud her mind. But she had been driving herself too hard in the lab. This is what she’d been hiding.
Where would she have gotten the drugs? Her lab. She had minored in chemistry. All those hours down there, alone. She could have created anything, and he hadn’t known what she was doing.
“I wouldn’t blame her if she was on drugs after what that bastard Drake put her through,” Tess said.
“She was pushing herself too hard,” Blade said, still in shock that he’d assumed the marks were simple bug bites despite all the signs that something more was going on with her. “She must have been giving herself something to keep going. And I failed to notice. Ifailedher.”
“Not drugs,” Pryce said as he counted the scars.
Tess peered over. “But those are the same size scars as the one left by the injections she gave me. Until my wolf healed them.”
“That’s the problem. Larger needles are more painful. No one uses them unless they have to. Drug addicts get by just fine with thin needles.”
All the comments she’d made, all the extra time in the lab, suddenly came together. Blade dragged his hand through his hair as he stepped away from everyone.
“Blade?” Pryce asked, noticing his odd behavior.
“She said she’d found a way of protecting my bridge during the blood-bond. That’s why she’s been so confident about blood-bonding me. She said I’d be protected.”
Pryce exhaled a deep breath as he rolled Anna onto her back and fixed the blankets. “That’s a novel approach.”
“What do you mean?” Tess asked.
“I think Anna sought a way to protect Blade by treating her genes, not his. As if she were the problem. We always talk about how a human weakens a shifter. From the number of tracks here, it appears she’s been experimenting on herself for some time.”
Blade’s wolf scratched and clawed furiously, feeding off his anger. He shoved him down with such force, his wolf yelped. Blade would not give in to the anger, to the fear of what she’d done to herself. Not when she needed him.
How many times had he heard Anna say about Tess—toTess,in front ofBlade—that her gene therapy wasexperimentaland subsequently carried a lot of risk? That without the proper testing on lab rats, the risks increased? Anything could happen. Tess coulddie. Anna had spelled out the risks to him, to Tess and Damien, telling them all, without once saying she was talking about herself and not just Tess. He, Tess, and Damien at least had shifter healing to help them, but Anna was human and more vulnerable because of it.
“Help her,” he begged, knowing deep down this was beyond Pryce’s expertise.
“I’m not sure what’s wrong with her. If she regains consciousness, I’ll be able to ask her what she did, and maybe then I can figure out what to do.”
“If?”
“Her skin is clammy, she has a fever, and. . .” Pryce felt her pulse again, but he didn’t say anything as he slowly drew his hand away.
“Help her!”
“I’m not a doctor, Blade, and even if I were, it could take extensive testing to know exactly what she did. I have no way of knowing if she’ll ever wake. All signs point toward a virus. I guess I could put her on antivirals, but I’m not sure it will help.”
