The Viper, page 7
“I want to see them,” he demanded. “My friends. They need to go back and—”
“What if you could take care of that female yourself.”
Even though Kane heard the words, he could not comprehend the statement: “That is so absurd as to be cruel.”
“No, it is not.” The voice seemed closer now. “Your heart is going to stop in approximately eight minutes. You must decide what you want to do. Live or die.”
“I am past resuscitation, there is no breath you or anybody else can give me.”
“There is something else.”
“Like what?”
Abruptly, a surge of strength entered him, the source of which was unclear—unless it was true that there was a kindling before death, a final flare of coordination and impulse: He sat up. On his own.
And as his face caught the draping, he pulled its fragile weave off of—
A coffin. A pine coffin.
How fitting, and he told himself that his eight-minutes-left needed to be spent ordering the others back to the prison camp. Nadya had done nothing more than treat him, but what if the guards thought she’d been in on the breakout?
The veil was pulled free of him, and what he saw was a source of great comfort: an older female, who was not a vampire, was sitting cross-legged next to his final resting place, her hair in great platinum waves spilling over her shoulders, her dress deep red and beaded with a pattern that was somehow both symmetrical and free-form.
“Welcome to the mountain,” she said as she balled up the shroud that had covered him.
“Where are my friends?”
“You have six minutes and change. Tell me what you want to do. I am offering you life—or you can die and go unto the Fade to see your shellan.”
“I have no choice—look at me,” he snapped. “So I need my friends to—”
“I shall tell them, of course. Whatever you wish.”
As she fell silent, her eyes stared back at him, challenging his decision.
“I don’t know what you’re offering,” he countered.
“I offer you life. All you have to do is host some energy.”
“Energy?”
“It’s what you’re losing because your vessel is so compromised. The energy I’m referring to needs a place and it will heal you if you allow it to stay.”
“Like I’m an electrical cord,” he muttered.
“No, like you’re a lamp.”
“That makes no sense.”
When she just stared at him, he dropped his eyes and looked down at himself. The burns on his chest were open, weeping, bloody in some places, debrided in others. And in the midst of the raw damage there were flashes of white, his rib bones, his sternum. Down below, his lower body was utterly shriveled, with no muscle left.
Flaring his hands, he held them up. He was missing some of his fingers on one side, and when he turned over what would have been his dagger hand, he had to swallow a surge of bile. The flesh of his palm had disappeared, the inner workings of things completely exposed.
“Are you sure you want to go unto the Fade?” the female asked. “When you are so worried about another who needs you.”
“My shellan waits for me on the Other Side.”
It was more a defiant protest than any statement of fact. But who was he arguing with? This ancient female… or himself?
As if she were prepared to settle the debate they weren’t putting to words, she rose to her feet with the grace of a younger female. Padding across to a steamer trunk, she opened the lid and rifled through some contents. The mirror she brought back seemed like something that had been passed down, its glass wavy, its frame pitted. And yet given the reverence with which it was held, it was clearly cherished.
Kane reached forward with his ruined hands. When she just shook her head, he thought, but of course she was right. He wouldn’t be able to hold it up in all likelihood, and moreover, why would she want his bloody stumps on her prized possession.
“Take a deep breath,” she murmured.
“How do you know I haven’t already seen my reflection since the explosion?”
He wasn’t surprised that she didn’t answer him. But given that he hadn’t actually gotten a gander at himself, he did inhale as she suggested, even though he doubted it was necessary—
Kane’s heart stopped and his lungs turned to stone. Strips of flesh hung off his chin, and one eye had no lid to speak of—which made him wonder numbly how he managed to turn off his sight. He had no mouth, just the whites of his teeth spearing into his gums, and his nose was nothing but two holes into his skull, what had once been shaped by cartilage and bone burned off.
He had almost no hair.
For some reason, of all the damage, the scruffy baldness, the patches of exposed skull, were the hardest to see—or perhaps his mind simply refused to grapple with what people had been looking at when they had sat next to his bed.
“Where have I gone,” he said hoarsely. “Why…”
Well, he knew why, at least when it came to the explosion. He had taken his restraint collar off, breaking the seal and igniting the charge so that two deserving souls who were in love could have a future.
A lifetime with the one who mattered most.
As he shifted his eyes to the old female, the expression on her face seemed odd to him. Then again, she was a stranger.
And he was in proper shock.
And… he was dying.
“Is that what you really want?” She kept the mirror in place. “To go unto the Fade.”
“It is all I have wanted for the last three hundred—two hundred years, I mean.”
How could he have lost track of time like that. He’d been so sure he’d had his calendar correct, the years, months, and nights catalogued to the point of obsession. Then again, intensity of thought did not equate with accuracy, and he’d started with the vampire calendar, not the human one, and had never bothered to reconcile the two.
“All I have wanted is to join my shellan,” he said dully.
The female tilted her head, as a dog would if they had found something of interest. “Look in your heart. What do you see?”
“Will you please lower that mirror. I cannot bear it.”
As his image disappeared, he wished he could die in the same way, just one moment here, the next gone. And then… the Fade.
“I see my shellan,” he said roughly. “In my heart.”
“Do you.”
“Of course!” With the exclaimed words, he started coughing, the effort to clear his throat, or maybe it was lungs, such that the world swam around and he gripped the sides of the coffin to stay upright. “I want to be with her.”
“Very well then.”
That the female seemed saddened was just another part of so much that made no sense. What business was it of hers? He didn’t even know who or what she was—and he suspected it might well be a case of “what.”
Plus she most certainly was keeping things from him.
“Lie back,” she said. “It will be over soon.”
Another round of coughing fisted his ribs and revved his internal body temperature such that a roaring fire lit within him. Releasing his hold on the pine box, he put his destroyed hand over his chest, as if that would help. It didn’t. When he was finally able to catch a breath, the rattle in his lungs was such that he was reminded of the game he had played as a young, marbles in a leather bag, crackling aggies—
For no reason at all, his eyes went to where his hand had been on the side wall. His blood had seeped into the fresh, untreated pine, the print strawberry red and smudged.
He thought of when he had first woken up from the explosion. His mind had been fuzzy, but he had been able to remember being in the Hive, that communal cave, up on the platform where the prisoners were disciplined. With stinging clarity, he had recalled pulling his collar off, his body shaking from what he was doing, his hands nearly fumbling the thing as the little red light on the back clasp had started blinking. He had relived the way he’d looked at the Jackal and Nyx, both chained to the thick trunks, about to be tortured. Then he’d felt once again the brilliant blast and the furnace of heat.
He’d had no idea how he had survived, or who had gotten him out of the Hive—and in confusion, he had turned his head… and seen a fully robed figure whose face was obscured by a hood.
“Nadya,” he whispered as he came back to the present.
“You are a male who takes his duties very seriously.” The old female moved closer to him. “I have heard of the Fade, you know. We wolven have our own tradition for the afterlife, yet I have always believed it is congruent with what vampires believe. All of us go to the same place—and all of us take our burdens with us.”
As Kane felt another wave of coughing come on, he tried to sift through her words for the true meaning, for what she was hiding from him—and then it didn’t matter. The memory of Nadya sitting beside his bed, and singing softly to him, and then getting up to bring him food, bandage changes, water, whatever he needed, took over his consciousness such that it was all he could see.
Though he had tried not to stare at her infirmity, he had often speculated about the cause of her difficulties. She had never spoken about them, however, and he had never asked. Instead, their discourse had focused on what she could do to bring him comfort, and what his mumbled responses were.
He had never seen her face. But he knew her scent and her voice as if they had been familiars for centuries.
She was still back in that prison.
“My shellan,” he said. As if to remind himself where his priorities were and had to be.
With that, Kane lay back down. If there was any purpose to him, it had to be the reunion with his mate. He was a gentlemale who had been raised properly, after all. But more than that, if there was wrong to redress, it had to be his failure to protect Cordelhia.
“Our conscience is part of our eternity,” the old female said. “And burdens that cannot be shifted grow heavier. By the moment. By the hour. By the year, the decade… the century.”
“As if I do not know that,” he snapped back. “I have been under a pall since I found my mate bled-out on her bed. Do not speak to me of burdens—”
“Then why would you add to your suffering voluntarily.” The old female lifted her lined palms. “It is true there is much you have not chosen. But this weight is one you may choose.”
He closed his eyes. Eye. Whatever.
“How many minutes left,” he asked roughly.
“Two, now.”
“Will you tell Lucan that he must go back for the nurse.”
“If that is what you wish, to put in harm’s way a couple whose future together—”
“Will you please stop talking,” Kane groaned. “And what the hell can I do in this condition.”
Closing his eyes—eye—again, he told himself that as grateful as he was to Nadya, he was not responsible for her, not in the way he was to a mate. Cordelhia had to be first.
He had not been there when she had most needed the protection of her male.
He would not forsake her again.
“Let me go,” he said, unsure of who he was talking to.
Resolved to his fate, he exhaled what little breath there was in his lungs… and prepared to fade unto the Fade. In the quiet, his wheezing grew louder and louder, and yet there was something else inside the hut. Something…
It was the burbling brook. Behind the ragged sounds of his respiration, the rushing water continued to flow, but it was growing in volume. Once soft, the river became all that he could hear, as if the water was closer by. And getting closer.
As if it had legs and was walking to him.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t water, but the coming of the Grim Reaper to claim what was left of Kane’s body.
How could Nadya have poured any effort at all into such a hopeless case as himself, he wondered. She had never faltered in her faith in his survival, however. Not once.
And she had never left him.
CHAPTER NINE
It all came.
Everything Nadya had asked for, each drug, all the supplies, even food and water, and more blankets and proper cots, arrived in a steady stream. The guards were good packhorses, coming in laden with duffels and baskets or rolling in carts. They also continued to take direction very well. She created an inventory system quickly, ordered the males around, and got the new provisions to her clinic sorted. Then she asked them to remove the body of the dead guard and dismissed them to get to work.
“One more suture and we’re done,” she murmured to her patient.
When there was no response, she glanced up. The guard whose thigh wound she was stitching closed had his eyes shut and his hands resting on his bare stomach. She had had to cut his clothes away because there had been blood all over him, but his nakedness was just a necessary part of taking the inventory of his condition. He had no injuries to his privacy, and no doubt, assuming he survived, that would be something to rejoice over. The laceration on his head had been severe, however, and she had worried whether he would pull through. So far, so good, though.
Down on his leg, her last stitch was at the base of a ragged wound, and as she tied a knot and clipped the string, she graded her handiwork. The injury had been a tearing of some sort, as if the leg had gotten caught, and in the pulling free, the skin had given way. The bruising was extensive, the swelling getting ever worse, the redness under the skin already going to purple.
“But you’re going to live,” she murmured as she wiped everything down with peroxide. “We have to be positive.”
After she had triaged all the guards—with him being least acute, which was why she was treating him last—she had parceled out pain relief in pill or shot form, and settled in to deal with what she could. She had worked as fast as her hands would allow, and as her back began to ache and her limp grew more painful, she ignored her own discomfort.
The fact that it had taken a full squad of guards being injured to get the kinds of prescriptions and bandages she needed made her angry. Back when they had been at the subterranean location, she had once gone to the Command and begged for things to cure, to ease, to help. She had never asked again. Some lines walked were too dangerous, and how could she do any good at all if she herself was dead?
Ever since they had been relocated to this abandoned hospital, she had had a lull in her patient volume because so many had died during the evacuation as a result of the stress and the travel. But she knew there would be more who’d come to her, there were always more, and so she had claimed this storage room as her own clinic. After the Executioner, who had been the prison camp’s second-in-command, had assumed the leadership role, he’d been far more pragmatic than his predecessor. He’d recognized the financial interest he had in ensuring his workforce could do what he required of them. He had known that unless more inmates came in—which, for whatever reason, they were not—he needed to take better care of those he had.
So he’d allowed her to maintain the clinic.
Which was now full of guards.
After bandaging her set of stitches, she got up off the hard floor and disposed of the detritus of wrappings. Then she limped over to a cart full of fresh bread loaves, knots of cheese, and plastic bottles of water. In quick succession, she fed herself, hydrated, and felt little improvement in terms of energy. What kept her going? Her promise to herself, forged long ago.
She would let no one die or suffer if she could alleviate what ailed them.
As she brought the water bottle back to her lips, she emptied most of what was in there, the chemical tint from the purification system stinging the sides of her tongue. For a moment, she longed for a taste of purity, of something that quenched the thirst not just by adding H2O to her system, but by—
Pivoting around, she looked down the row of beds. Then regarded the guards that had been moved out of the stretchers suspended between the shelves and onto the cots.
Her patients were lying like logs, none of them moving except for breathing. There was only one who was facedown, due to lacerations on the backs of his legs and his buttocks, but the rest she could check their faces to see if they were awake.
One was staring over at her from the far end.
His lids were cracked just a bit, so it was hard to tell if he was feigning sleep or that was as far as he could open things. But his eyes were definitely on her, and as she pivoted to set the water bottle off to the side and then turned back, his focus remained.
Hobbling over to him, she leaned down. “Do you require aught?”
The male had some deep lacerations across his upper body, throat, and face, the kind that were characteristic of a knife fight. She had stitched them up, but the one down his jaw was probably preventing him from speaking.
“Your pain medicine should be working now.”
His eyes shifted over her shoulder.
Nadya stiffened as the presence who had arrived registered. “Greetings.”
She turned around. The head of the guards was standing in the open doorway, looking down the rows of her wounded subordinates. When she got to the final bed, the one that was empty except for a bloody pillow and some smudged sheets, she cocked a brow.
“Yes,” Nadya said. “There was a loss. But he was dying as he came in, and the supplies I required had not been brought to me.”
The female came forward. “Indeed.”
Nadya remained where she was, and when the head of the guards was before her, she tilted back because there was such a height difference between the two of them.
“I want to see your face,” the female said.
“Why.”
There was no reply. But a long arm reached forward—
Nadya slapped a hold on the wrist. “No.”
“What are you hiding under all that fabric.”
“Nothing that will affect my ability to take care of your males. And that is all you need to care about.”
There was a tense silence, and it went without saying that the female could do what she wanted physically. She was ten times stronger.
“Thank you for the supplies,” Nadya said stiffly. “They are very much appreciated. But they confer no rights on your behalf.”
