Hide & Seek: Games and Fangs (Ravana Moon #2), page 7
“Fuck.”
There was no time to assess the damage, I lifted my body from the ground and pulled my sword from the scabbard on my waist. The thing turned and was already aiming its open maw in my direction. I moved around it with all the speed I could, but the damn thing seemed to match me. Its teeth elongated, and that was when I realized why the hellhounds were going after human families.
A whistle from the direction the hound had come from drew its attention for a moment long enough for me to drive my blade through the beast’s skull. It slumped to the ground as another came at me from the other end of the alley. A third bound down the opposite direction and its skull connected with my back. My blade fell to the ground, and I spun on top of the hound’s head. A low hanging ladder against the building presented itself, and I grabbed on with my right arm.
Looking down I could see the two animals circling underneath me. They looked up when a noise erupted through the alley. It was metal, and it was the release latch on the fire escape. The ladder fell toward the ground and me with it. When it stopped abruptly, it knocked me loose of the rung, and I fell on my back on top of one of the hounds. The other came after me with its teeth as the one I was on began to buck beneath my body.
I had to put the pain of my shoulder out of my mind and take control, or I wasn’t going to live long enough to find out who was responsible for these animals.
Rolling to the ground away from both of my attackers I grabbed a loose brick from the buildings and shoved the thing in the eye socket of one of the hellhounds. It whimpered, but didn’t relent. It stalked forward. Slowly, as I backed away. The other behind it. A white arrow dived into the skull of the injured animal and the second one attacked, jumping over its companion to gain access to me.
“I can’t get a shot from here. Move!”
I listened to Emerick’s words, not used to him speaking to me from the shadows as his arrows flew to the rescue. My back hit a chain link fence, and I clawed at the rings, trying to pull my weight up the fence, but the hound dived its head into my torso. Its mouth open and moving against me. I felt nothing. The air around me went cold, and I slipped the small dagger on my hand into the neck of the monster as it went to town pulling at my flesh and bone. A rib cracked, and my fist moved further into the animal’s throat, then my hand went across the front of its neck.
The animal's jaw relaxed, and the weight of the body fell on my legs. Even as I changed from human to vampire, I hadn’t experienced so much damage without any pain. I could feel the bone snap in the animal’s jaw. I felt flesh, muscle and bones torn from my midsection, and yet no pain.
“Fuck. Are you ok? Hang on, Ravana. I’ll get you outta here.”
I could hear Emerick shouting. I could see his form, it was blurry, but it was there in front of me. I smelt his aftershave. The distinct smell of musk and maple. It was tantalizing, and yet I tried hard to hate it. His hands were coarse. Calluses formed over his hands and fingertips where he handled his bow. His face brushed the side of mine, and I could feel the stubble on his chin. My only thought was that I didn’t realize he had facial hair.
The lights of the city flew by, and I knew he was running at vampire speed. Before I knew it, I was laying in my bed with fresh clothes on. My hair was cold and wet. The heat of my skin had cooled, and I felt weak. I felt the familiar pinch of a needle inserted into the vein of my arm, while someone tightened a bandage around my midsection and laid me down atop of a large pile of pillows keeping me sitting upright in case I needed to feed.
“Why isn’t she healing? She should be healing by now.” Delia sounded far away, but I could feel her warm hands on my arm.
“I don’t know. I think we need to figure out more about these hellhounds. I had one brought to the lab downstairs.”
“You did what? She will be furious.”
“Easy, Keeper. It’s dead.”
A rustling noise came from the other room, and I heard somebody clear their throat. The bed shifted where Emerick was sitting, and he left the room.
“Ravana, if you can hear me, they are looking for Massimo. You were injured really bad, and you’re not healing. We are giving you blood, but you may need to feed. So, wake up just a little. I’ll even offer myself for the cause. You just need to heal.”
She couldn’t do that. I would never feed on her. She would not look at me the same ever again. No, they had to make sure the blood bags worked. While I contemplated this, she got up and left the room.
~Delia
Emerick brought Ravana into the apartment so fast I almost didn’t recognize the shift of air in the room. I was sitting in my usual place on the floor. My laptop and books scattered around and was just about to turn the page when it flipped itself.
The first thing I saw when I entered her bathroom was the blood. It was everywhere. I jumped back and ran to the lab, grabbing a wastebasket and shoved all the blood bags in the small fridge into it. By the time I got back to the bedroom, Emerick had her bathed, dressed and laying on her bed. Bandaging her wounds didn’t use to be an issue. I hoped it was just because of how extensive the damage had been, but there was no way of knowing.
The first two bags of blood did little for her healing, but the color seemed to be coming back in her cheeks. Emerick left her alone with me to scour the streets looking for Massimo. Why he needed to be the one she fed off was a question only Emerick could answer, but he barely said two words when he’d come to a conclusion, himself.
I sat on the edge of the bed holding her hand. Her fingers were cold, but that could mean anything. It could very well be her usual temperature for all I knew. I’d never held onto her like that before. “You’ve never gotten this badly injured before. At least not to the point that you didn’t heal. Ravana, you need to wake up and tell me what to do. That’s how this arrangement works.”
I don’t know if it was my imagination, but her hair started to look like it was losing its luster. A dull strawberry blonde, almost mousy brown showing through. She always said she didn’t color it, but until that moment I wouldn’t have believed her. The fluttering of her eyes made me gasp in a breath, but she didn’t wake.
“This is crazy. I should be doing something to help you.” Remembering the massive tomes, I found information on Emerick in, I stood and jogged through the apartment to the library. They were where I left them. Arranged on a shelf in a new section started for the subject himself. In hindsight, it was probably a good thing I didn’t label it with his name. His insistence that Massimo was the only one to help her made me trust him less than I had just the day before. How could he have supported us for so many weeks, yet still be so closed off?
Maybe stopping my investigation of the male was premature. Just because we’d found him, and he’d made himself useful, didn’t necessarily mean we knew all we needed to about Emerick. Being centuries old surly meant there was much more to him. The fact that Ravana wasn’t healing could have something to do with the extent of her injury, or it could have something to do with his blood and the experiment used in his test cases.
I took the two most substantial books off the shelf and walked back to Ravana’s room. She was still asleep. Her bandages looked darker as if the bleeding hadn’t yet stopped. The blood bags hanging from the IV stand were just about empty. It was almost as if the blood was going from the bag right to the wound and into the bandages.
After two hours of coming up empty, I started looking into the alchemist books on blood disorders. “Maybe if we coagulate your blood, it’ll slow the bleeding, so you can heal.” I was tossing at straws. At that point, with no word from the others, I was getting nervous.
The only information I found on blood disorders were for those who were still human. Very few vampires could be considered to have a disease of the blood, because their own blood coagulated, hence the reason for fresh blood to survive. Ravana, Emerick and now Massimo and Torrid were very much the opposite. Their blood did not clot as other vampires, well not as quickly. That was why their bodies remained in such a way that they could live as if they were still human. So, clotting her blood wouldn’t do much. Though, she would surely need more blood to counteract the coagulation. So, I thought about other options. Maybe an anti-coagulant, or a prohibitor complex. Either might make her bleed even more with such a large open wound. She could very well bleed to death. Then I remembered one clarifying fact. She was Ravana. She couldn’t die by ordinary means, but did blood difference count? Could we just let her bleed out, and still be able to revive her?
“Now, I’m just confused. What do I normally do in these situations when we didn’t have a Massimo to wait for?”
The phone rang almost the moment I picked it up. I was going to call the Order, then remembered Ravana was the head of the company now. She was asleep, and I had no other numbers for resources within the organization.
“Hello?”
“Delia? Why are you answering Red’s phone?” Massimo started to sound panic-stricken. Served him right for disappearing on us.
“She’s been attacked. Emerick is out looking for you. He said only you can heal her. She’s not getting better on her own.”
He didn’t answer. The line went dead, and I got the distinct impression he was on his way. Depending on how far from the city he’d been, he could arrive within a few minutes time. I only hoped that meant she was really going to be ok.
Chapter Ten
Massimo
She looked dead. Her hand lay limply in mine, and I silently wished for Emerick’s death. He’d been gone for two days. Two days and Ravana wasn’t getting any better. Where the fuck did he go to?
“Are you sure you don’t know?”
“Delia, don’t you think if I knew how I could help her, that I would? I have no idea why Em thought only I could save her. He was obviously making shit up. Just another one of his lies to get him to look like a hero.”
“He had to have known you’d come back eventually.”
“Who knows. Maybe he thought he’d be back sooner. All I know is we have to figure out a way to get her healing again.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t give her an anticoagulant.” Delia chewed on the end of her pencil and tucked another in her hair to keep it up. She’d spent the last two days in the same outfit, her hair was a complete disaster, and she never left Ravana’s room. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen her without a neat pony-tail or bun, and pressed clothes.
“Why?” I asked a half a beat later when she didn’t elaborate.
She gnawed for a few more seconds then seemed to remember we were in the middle of a conversation. She looked up from her book and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as if it would make a difference in her unruly appearance.
“Oh, I figured out the newest advancement in vampire hunting.” She quickly moved from her position on the floor to stand so she could pace while she spoke. Taking that as a cue that she was going to be a while I got comfortable in the chair next to Red’s bed. “I took a sample of Ravana’s blood and mixed it with two agents. I wanted to be sure the chemicals used in the drugs wouldn’t have an adverse reaction to her blood. Recalling the coagulant would slow down the bleeding in a human, and allow the healing process to begin, that was my first idea.
However, as I thought shortly afterward, the blood just dried up. It was so weird.”
“What do you mean, dried up?”
“Her blood and true vampire blood are so different. I didn’t want to overestimate the abilities she has to sustain against death blows. So, where a normal vampire requires regular amounts of blood, and she doesn’t, I needed to know what the difference was. I think I can replicate Emerick’s formula.” She tapped the eraser of her pencil to her lip as she glared out the window.
“Hello, Goldilocks? Continue with the dried up, bit.”
“Oh, yes. Well, since she…I mean, since the two of you are able to go a while without blood and require food, I tested two theories. One was to see if the coagulant would stop her bleeding. So, I mixed it with her blood. During the first two hours, the cells seemed to still. But by the fourth hour, the sample was nothing more than ash on the slide. The anti-coagulant was much different. The minute it hit her blood it exploded.”
“Exploded?”
“Yes, it was a small combustion, nothing harmful. If I had injected it into Ravana’s bloodstream, it probably would have killed her. If I had the blood from an actual vampire, it would have been much worse.”
“How much worse.” I could feel the tension in my neck as I strained to keep calm in front of the Keeper. It had taken months to get her to let down her guard with me around, and I didn’t want to risk the progress.
“Nuclear.”
“Really?” I looked back at Ravana, silently thanking Delia for her obsession with facts and experimentation.
“Yes. So, my advancement idea. I have a small amount of EDTA in our storage. We confiscated it from a horde of vampires looking to complete a bloodletting ritual to raise an Elder demon. If we give it to the Order’s armorer and ask that it be put into a test case, we could become the best-armed hunters this side of the Pacific Ocean.”
“That sounds doable. What type of weapon?”
“Like all the greats in television land. Hollow-tipped bullets. The glass breaks on impact, the EDTA mixes with the vampire blood…bye-bye vamps.” She did a little spin and dusted her hands off of each other as if to show the vampires were magically removed as obstacles in this fight.
“That sounds great. Once Ravana is awake we can roll it by her and get it into motion.”
“I don’t think you see where I’m going with this.”
A gasp and moan from the bed made us both stop and look at Red. Her brows moved, and the lines in her face tightened as if she were trying to force herself to wake. I could see the bandages begin to pull and red soak through the fresh white cotton Delia had covered the injury with.
“Ravana, please don’t try to move. You are not healing,” Delia said rushing to her side. Her pencil falling from her blonde hair, letting it sweep down past her collarbone.
Before I could go to her, a strange noise erupted from the front hall of the apartment. I looked around, and Delia pointed to where the front door would be, had we been standing in the living room.
“She asked me to revoke access. You wanted the lock on the door. That’s as good as it gets.” She moved her hands expertly to fix the loosened bandages.
“Fine, I’ll go see to our guest then.”
The elevator was beeping, a high-pitched tone that could probably be heard throughout the entire building. I pushed a button next to the door. Something new. “Hello?”
“Hey, brother. It’s me. Let me up.” Emerick’s voice filled my ears, and I ground my teeth together. He wasn’t talking his way out of things this time.
“I’m not your brother.” My thumbprint was required on a panel to allow the elevator to ascend to the penthouse floor. When the door opened, I made sure to give him a feral look before heading back to the bedroom. “Finally decided to come back?”
“I had a few things to check on.”
“What about Ravana? Didn’t feel the need to check on her?”
“I saw you walk through the front door when I was heading back. There was no need for both of us to hold her hand. One of us had to figure out why she isn’t healing.”
“Oh, and what makes you the best detective here?”
“The fact that I mixed the components to give her life!” His usually calm demeanor broke, and he raised his voice for the first time in my life-time.
“I assume you found something, or are you here to say a final farewell?”
“This is not her deathbed.” He took to the side of the bed that Delia was propped on and with a mixture of emotion in his eyes asked her politely to move to the foot of the bed. It was so faint a request I barely heard it. “There was something different about the hellhounds.”
“What do you mean?”
Red coughed, and I rushed to her side. My anger at our Sire forgotten as the sound of liquid mixing with air as she tried to speak. “They weren’t just hounds.”
“Shhh, lay back. You need to be still, Red.”
“I will, but you have to know something.”
Emerick’s hand landed on her shoulder. The only place on her left side that wasn’t bandaged. “It’s ok. Rest. I know what they are.” He looked at me with real worry. Concern I hadn’t seen mar his face in more years than I could count.
“What is it?” Delia broke the silence in the room. I had a sneaking suspicion that whatever Emerick was about to tell us wouldn’t be good. Nor would it be easy to figure out how to use the information to help Red. Besides, if Emerick was concerned, then I should be as well.
It felt like hours before Emerick, and I left Red to rest. Delia stayed close by, giving her a donation of blood from Emerick. Something he assured me would work in helping her healing process.
We only went as far as the lab in the penthouse. It was almost bare. The table we laid on to infuse ourselves was still there, as were the IV poles and the small refrigerator. A few tables were in the back room behind the secret door, which always remained open these days. What the room would be used for once the new lab was up and running, I had no clue.
I allowed Emerick his moments of silence to wrap his mind around the origin of the beasts. His pacing began to make me dizzy, and I stuck a foot out to trip him up more than once. He didn’t seem to care. He merely corrected his balance and resumed the trench digging.
“Are you going to share with the class here, or do I have to buy a vowel?”
“Don’t be a child.”
“Don’t be a prick.”
I wanted to storm out of the room, but that would get me nowhere. I’d dealt with Em long enough to know his way of doing things was a bit extra. If he weren’t ready to talk, then I would have to coax it out of him or wait.
