Page 1 of Vervain

PROLOGUE

THE OTHER SIDE

Leon Rielly

“He’s fucking bleeding out!” Fluorescent light bites harshly from inside the once-white room, now painted red. I lay the body of a boy on the steel table, my hands coming away sticky, but I ignore it and put pressure on the wound on his back. “We need to close the wound, then start a blood transfusion!”

Imogen, dressed in blue scrubs, enters and bypasses Jax while he stares ahead, but not actually at us. He is in a fucking daze. His blue eyes are glazed over, the colour drained from his face.

“Jax, do you know the boy’s blood type?” Imogen says, tugging on gloves. She steps towards me, her deep brown eyes glancing in my direction and then down at the tools on the tray beside her. The boy is still, only a whimpering breath that tells us he is holding on to whatever air he can breathe.

“Jax!” I snap. His blue eyes drag upwards to stare blankly at me. “Do you know his blood type?”

“O-positive,” he murmurs, his focus lowering to the blood covering his hands. “You killed her.”

Fuck me. I don’t have time for this shit.

Imogen touches my shoulder and squeezes, but her eyes are on my brother. “Are you certain that’s his blood type, Jaxton? Did he tell you that?”

“Saya told me. It was one thing she willingly told me.” He laughs, but it sounds bitter. “Now I know why she kept so many secrets from me. My girlfriend was a vegodian…”

Vegodian. I still can’t believe we found one. No matter. She’s fucking dead now. We don’t need to deal with them on top of the ever-growing threat of nightwalkers. Jax will understand after he lets go of thinking of her as human and finally sees her as an alien being with unnatural, tarnished magik.

She must have seeped her venom into him real fucking good.

“A vegodian?” Imogen breathes, a glimmer in her eyes.

“Don’t,” I strain out. “Focus on the boy. She’s dead.”

Imogen sighs sharply while she pours iodine on a rag. “Jax, talk to the doctor next door and get a bag off him, now! This boy has lost a lot of blood!”

In the corner of my eye, I catch Jax pushing off from the wall and leaving the room.

“Move your hand, love,” Imogen says. “I need to clean the area before I start.”

“Check the other side afterwards,” I say, stepping aside to let her do her thing. “Oscar and I did what we could to patch up the wound in the field.”

Her eyes narrow as she works. “Oscar? That would have been fun.”

I take the bloody rag from her as she finishes and wipe my hands with it. “He threw up twice, but at least he didn’t stop applying pressure while I did what I could.” I pause. “I gave the kid my blood…”

“What?!” She tosses another rag aside and grabs a needle and surgical thread. “The council will take him to the tank when they find out!”

I lean closer to her while she sterilises the needle. “What if that was Jade? I had to! I couldn’t just…”

Her soft eyes narrow, and she shakes her head in grudging acceptance. “Do you think he will, you know…live?”

“I don’t want to think about it.” A flash of pain sharpens my dorsum at the memory of waking in a fluid tank when I was just a kid.

“We won’t, then.” She threads the needle. “Pinch his skin shut for me—and your stitching is shit, so I am most definitely going to check your work after I deal with this.”

“Hey,” I snap while I pinch the wound closed. “Fuck you.”

Imogen smiles, and I like it. But before I can get too carried away with that thought, I turn my attention to the boy. He is young—a fucking kid in a feeding ground. How the fuck did that happen?

He looks grey. Not white or blue, but as though the reaper stands over him, waiting.

Imogen begins suturing as Jaxton returns with a blood bag. If I hadn’t known he was a slayer, I’d have killed my brother for looking like a damn nightwalker. He hangs the bag on the stand before stepping back to watch.