Page 3 of Vampire Visions

But, before I ended the call or made it to my car, I was hit with a vision. I didn’t have them often enough to feel the warning signs, so it knocked me to my knees in the long driveway at the House of Vampyre. The images stole the breath from my lungs. The center of my forehead pounded to an angry rhythm. Gun shots, blood, panic. It all came in flashes of silver and red placed in a black and white background. Blurry faces were all around me, but only one was clear enough to see.

“Novak? Novak?” Vaughn bellowed my name over and over. I hit the speakerphone button, feeling too weak to even hold my phone up to my ear.

“I’m here,” I whispered. “I just had a vision.”

“Tell me about it when you get here,” Vaughn said soothingly. “I’ll start loading up the essentials.”

The premonition left me shaken. I reached my car and slid down the side, landing on my ass and just breathing deep for a few minutes as I processed what I had witnessed. Or, would witness. The strong feeling of panic was something new to me. I couldn’t fight off the anxiety that was accompanied by dread and fear. Dark thoughts swirled through my mind followed by questions. Would Vaughn and I witness a murder? Was it someone we knew? When would this uneasy feeling fade? Where the fuck were we moving to?

Novak

Tuesday Early Morning

“What the fuck? What the fuck?” I chanted like a whispered prayer. Running my hands through my hair, I turned my panicked eyes to York. “What the fuck just happened?”

“Someone shot her.” York’s jaw ticked. He turned his Caribbean colored eyes to Sloane for a moment. Taking a deep breath, he pushed his hands down with the exhale. York was being too calm for me to comprehend.

“Yeah. I can see that!” I shouted at him before he could continue his fucking breathing exercises. “But from where? What do we do?” The trepidation coursing through my mind overshadowed all other rational thoughts.

“We call Jack and Franklin,” he told me casually. What!? “It’s just a couple bullets, Novak. She won’t die. The one in her head probably hurts like hell. That’s why-”

“WHAT!? I know she won’t die, but it’s just a bullet? Are you serious? It’s in her fucking brain.” I was panicking. I could admit that. It was the strongest feeling I had right now.

He just shrugged his fucking shoulders. “She’s been shot before. We just need to call Jack.”

“Well, fucking call him!” I screamed.

York walked away from me, shaking his head. Sloane was crumpled in my lap. When that bullet hit her skull, I collapsed to the ground with her. As York started talking on the phone, I tried to survey the damage done. It wasn’t the smartest idea, but it was all I could do while I held her.

She had a wound in her right thigh that was slowly trickling blood, a hole in her left shoulder that was gushing and needed more urgent care, and one gaping abyss in her forehead that let me see almost all the way through. Maybe not that far. It could’ve been my imagination running wild, but it was still bad. I’d seen a bunch of gory shit in my life, and it had never bothered me. Looking at her wounds made me gag.

“Jack and Grim should be here in a moment. Just calm down, Novak,” York softly chastised me, placing his large toffee colored hand on my too pale shoulder. He gave it a gentle squeeze as he moved around to watch behind me.

“Calm down?” I whispered to him in confusion. “How? She’s got a fucking hole in her head, York. I can’t just not freak the fuck out. Someone needs to be out there searching for whoever did this.” I hadn’t ever been the queasy type, that was typically Vaughn’s role, but I felt really sick. How long would it take her to heal from the trauma? Weeks, surely. Normal people didn’t just get up and walk away the next day after taking a bullet to the head like that. Knowing Sloane, though, she’d be back to normal by lunchtime.

I looked down at her slightly parted lips as I tried to calm myself. A panicked vampire was no good to anyone. It was like a mantra I repeated to myself. I could stay calm, I just needed someone other than me to find whoever shot her. I would lose what was left of my sanity if I went to hunt down her attacker. So, no. I wasn’t going to leave her lying here, not when I could wake everyone else in the house without lifting a finger. I reached out mentally to the others and called them down to me. They’d probably be pissed about being woken up. I thought this may be important enough that they would get over it, though.

Viewing Sloane’s silver hair spread around me with all the metallic red blood gave me deja vu. I’d had a vision of this five years ago. Before Vaughn and I moved in with the guys in Nashville. It was eerie to watch it play out after not seeing it again. I thought I had changed the course of my future since the vision never came to me more than that one time. I had hoped that this wouldn’t happen, but it looked like I failed at that. Once everyone was down here, the vision would begin to play out. The thing was, I didn’t know how it ended. I never saw that far into the premonition.

How could we fix this? We knew next to nothing about her. We didn’t know how she healed. We knew absolutely zero things about gunshot wounds… We didn’t even know what kind of gun was used or what kind of bullets these were.

The thought of not having Sloane tomorrow left a heavy weight in my chest. Any chance for rational thoughts had fled my mind as soon as I caught her. My brain seized up, unable to think of anything positive or useful. How could I live without her? One taste and I was an addict. One touch and I was spellbound. I wouldn’t be able to function without her voice in my head. It had only been hours since I could hear her almost completely, and I couldn’t bring myself to think about that being gone. Her thoughts had consumed me immediately. The intricate way her mind worked wove colorful images into mine. Pictures I wanted to spend my lifetime memorizing. Now that I found her, what would I possibly do without her?

Somehow, though, I knew I was already sunk too deeply. I was floating, barely able to fight the swell of waves, with no life preserver in sight. I was drowning for her. I knew without a doubt, as I held her in my lap, that I was in love. I mean, I knew it had only been a few days, and I’d never been in love before, but I was pretty sure that this was what it felt like. This wasn’t the lustful feeling that I was used to. This, whatever it was, was so deep that I couldn’t fathom where the bottom of the well was. Was it endless? Would I ever stop falling? When would the weightless excitement fade?

“I can see you freaking out,” Jack spoke quietly to me as he stepped through the void. Grim followed grimly behind him. “I know it’s a shock, Novak, but she’ll be fine. That bitch is tough as nails. It may not be the case today, but she’s been doing dumb shit since we were little. She gets hurt, she heals, and then she does it all over again. You should ask her about the time she thought she could fly.” He chuckled under his breath.

Cronus walked around the corner then, heading straight for Sloane and growling under his breath. The hellhound stalked stiffly toward us, but I didn’t dare move away. Tension radiated from his body, his paws singed the ground with every step, acrid smoke wafted from his nostrils.

“Cronus, come,” Grim commanded, not at all threatened by the hound's presence.

Grim silently slid to the ground beside me and held his right hand over Sloane’s head. “I’ll heal the worst of it, but first I have to pull the bullets out. When they’re out and the bleeding has been stopped, we can move her.” His hand began to glow an eerie light grey as it hovered over Sloane’s wound. He didn’t touch her, but he was so close that I briefly wondered if he’d washed his hands before he got here. The ridiculous thought almost made me crack a smile.

The bullet in her head made a nauseating suction sound when it popped out of her skull. The noise was enough to make me lightheaded, but no one else seemed bothered by it. Blinking a few times to rid my vision of dark spots, I decided to ask them about their behavior. “Why are you guys not freaking out right now? Why is it just me?”

Grim moved his hand to her shoulder and started his magic up again. “She wouldn’t die from it, but it would have taken her a few days to heal on her own,” he supplied simply. I felt my mouth gape open.

“She’s been shot before,” Jack cut in with an eye roll. “This one isn’t as bad as the last one, but she still needs a little help healing,” he informed me. “It’s been like three years or so since she’s had any major trauma.”