Page 63 of The Turning of the Tables

I still couldn’t breathe.

Things were getting dim, the world tilting, colors not quite right. I tried to suck in a breath, to make the darkness at the edges of my vision recede. I tried to reach my pocket again, my scrambled brain convinced that somehow a clean mask would help me get more oxygen, but my arms didn’t work, and I passed out before I managed to get at the damn thing.

I wokeup as they loaded the gurney I was strapped to into an ambulance, the metal under the lumpy mattress pad rattling as the legs folded up beneath the bed. The medic walking next to me glanced down. “Welcome back,” she said, her voice muffled by her full medical-grade N95 mask. Her voice had the soft, familiar vowels of rural Virginia, and I wondered where she was from. If it was anywhere near where I’d grown up.

I tried to say something and discovered that there was a plastic breather over my nose and mouth. An attempt to move one arm brought a sharp pain near my elbow.

“No, don’t move, sugar,” the EMT told me, one warm gloved hand coming to rest on my arm. “We have you hooked up to an IV.”

I gurgled slightly, panic hitting. I didn’t know what they were giving me, and that was dangerous.

“It’s okay,” she soothed, the dark skin on her forehead slightly furrowed. “It’s just saline. We saw your med ID.”

I’m not big into jewelry, but Noahinsistedthat I wear a medical ID bracelet. My name, his name, his cell number, and the wordsALPHA-GAL SYNDROMEin large, all-caps letters.

This was why.

Well, notthis,specifically, since I’m pretty sure that Noah couldn’t possibly have anticipatedthis. But some kind of medical emergency—a car accident, heat stroke, something normal that might require me to go to a hospital.

It’s unbelievable the shit I’m allergic to—anything with gelatin, glycerin, lactose, magnesium stearate, and even some forms of lactic acid. This takes out most major over-the-counter and a lot of prescription medications. No gel-caps or gel-tabs or caplets that aren’t explicitly vegan. No morphine, no oxy, none of the -pentins or -gabins, and half the manufactured brands of shit like acetaminophen.

So anybody giving me medication—or injections—needed to know that, or I’d end up in anaphylaxis, and nobody—especially me—wanted that. In the barely-aware state I was in, I probably couldn’t have remembered even half the shit I wasn’t supposed to take. I just knew that medicine that hadn’t been properly checked against a laundry list of things was potentially fatal.

But I guess my guardian angel-EMT was not only observant, but knew enough to only give me plain old salt and water.

Of course, the fact that they were giving me saline probably meant that I’d lost blood, and that also wasn’t great. Because sometimes—I don’t know if I was included in this or not, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way—people with alpha-gal can have anaphylactic reactions to blood transfusions.

But they knew I had alpha-gal, so, hopefully, that wasn’t going to be me. At least not today.

The gurney gave a final lurch as they pushed it in, my angel-EMT climbing in alongside me.

I turned my head, wanting to ask about Tierney. AboutMaza. About Aimes. The oxygen mask over my face turned it into a mumble. Or maybe I still couldn’t manage words.

My head was still throbbing. Breathing was still hard, although not as bad as before I’d passed out, probably because of the oxygen. My ribs hurt. My elbow hurt. My arm felt oddly numb.

The EMT patted my arm—the one that didn’t feel numb—again. “It’s okay, sugar. We’ll get you to the hospital and they’ll be able to give you something for the pain.”

She thought that’s why I was restless. I didn’t want drugs, though. Pain was an everyday fact. Not this much pain, mind you, but if you’re used to using the dissociation trick, it kicks in for major trauma just like it does for the everyday aches and pains.

I tried to pull the mask off so I could ask more clearly, but her gentle-but-firm hands stopped me. “No, sugar, we need you to stay on the oxygen.”

It was then that I remembered we had been hunting a killer who was trying to spread Arcanavirus. Stupidly, I hadn’t been thinking about it at the scene itself—because this wasn’t an early-morning call, like all the others had been. Because the body had been chilled and dumped, unlike the others. Because this had looked like a stabbing, not blunt force cranial trauma.

But why else would someone aerosolize the victim’s blood, if they didn’t want to infect a whole bunch of cops and crime scene personnel?

Blood I’d aspirated quite a lot of.

I could feel my body trembling, lungs tightening.

I’d had two panic attacks in my life.

The first, when I’d run away from home and gotten lost trying to get to the hospital where they’d taken Noah when his transformation began. Country roads look really similarto each other in the dark when you’re a kid on foot with no cell phone because your parents thought they were tools of the devil. Terrified, I’d sat down next to the highway, shaking and sobbing, praying to a God I didn’t really believe in. I’d thrown up until I had nothing left in my stomach, until the panic had wrung me out and left me lying there, a husk of a fifteen-year-old kid staring at a lightning bug blinking in the grass until I managed to get my shit together, get back on unsteady feet, and walk until I found a sign with directions—and then walked in the right one until I found another sign that pointed me toward the main highway I knew I needed.

The second I’d had, the night after I’d gotten home from Sweet Rose, the old plantation estate where a murderous cult had kept one of their oldest members as a magical revenant. Where Ward had used the dead to destroy said revenant, and a whole bunch of people had nearly been magically cannibalized. I’d been upstairs, and then I’d had to clean up the mess. I’d managed to keep my shit together around a whole bunch of other people who were having meltdowns of their own and then absolutely lost it the second I walked into my apartment.

Devin had brought me a glass of whiskey and asked me what was wrong, and when I couldn’t tell him, had told me that it couldn’t be that bad. At the time, I’d made excuses for him. He couldn’t know how horrific it had been because I couldn’t tell him. That he was trying to help me get myself under control—that his ‘tough love’ was good for me, because I’d always been too emotional.

But he’d probably just been a narcissistic dick.