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It may have been hundreds of years before, but I still vividly remembered how it felt to have a knife stuck in my stomach and yanked upward, slicing through everything within.
I'd been shot a few times since then, but nothing compared to being gutted like that. The pain had lasted for hours before I finally healed.
I imagined Red felt like that, but from head-to-toe.
"Why isn't she healing?" he asked, needing answers, ones I didn't have for him.
"I don't know," I admitted.
Which was why I wanted to go read. True, the humans didn't have the most comprehensive information about our kind, but some of the old texts had some insights in them that might prove useful.
It wasn't like I carried around ancient texts with me. Hell, it wasn't like I even owned many myself. But the humans had come a long way the past hundred or so years. I had an endless number of scanned ancient texts on my tablet that I could access at any time.
Which was how I planned to spend the rest of my evening if the nurse didn't wake up.
Trying to get answers.
So I could pass them onto my men.
So they didn't keep looking at me like I'd let them down.
I'd avoided that for generations by being proactive, by always being the first to know things, to learn things, so they never had to feel lost in this world as it changed around us.
It was the least I could do.
As the leader.
I'd never felt as undeserving of that title as I did when we all watched Red scream and refuse to heal, and have no explanations for them.
"I will figure it out," I assured Aram. "Why don't you go reach out to the local bikers and see if you can score some better pain medicine. Seems like whatever we gave her isn't cutting it."
"Yeah, okay," he agreed, hopping up, eager for a mission, some way to not feel so useless.
"Take Seven with you. He has a friend who is a patched member."
And it was two of them out of my hair while we tried to figure shit out.
With that, I took off to Aram's room to get some quiet so I could read in peace.
It was several hours later that I heard her.
Not Lenore telling me the nurse was awake.
Oh, no.
The nurse herself, yelling.
I guess I was up.
With a sigh, I put down my tablet, and made my way toward my room to deal with her.
Chapter Four
Jo
The screaming inside my skull was the first thing I became aware of as unconsciousness slowly pulled backward like a fog in the early morning light.
I'd suffered from migraines in the past, and this pain was like that, but amplified, making me try to raise my hands to press the heels to my forehead, always finding that the pressure helped with the pain.
But when I tried to lift them, I felt resistance. As soon as I became aware of that, the pain around my wrists vied for acknowledgment.
It was right then that it all rushed back.
Leaving work.
Worrying about my hair.
Hands.
A body.
A man.
A car.
Cuffs.
A gag.
Trying to break free, tripping, and then nothing.
That nothing was because I'd probably hit my head. Which explained the jackhammering sensation in my temple.
My eyes flew open as I tried to scramble up to a seated position, finding my vision refused to focus for a long second as my stomach flipped, making bile rise up in my throat.
Possible concussion.
That wasn't the least bit surprising, what with not having been able to properly brace my fall and everything.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I took a couple deep breaths, trying to fight back the dizziness and nausea.
The gag was gone, I realized, but felt the remnants of its existence in an aching across my lips, cheeks, and around the back of my head.
"You're okay," a soft female voice declared at my side, making me jolt as my eyes shot open.
Then there she was.
A beautiful woman with long dark black hair that made me miss mine for one absurdly inappropriate second. She was dressed strangely too, in some sort of floor-sweeping green gown with long sleeves. It was a dress out of time, something meant for period piece movies, not modern times, sitting right in front of me on a footstool.
I thought it was a trick of light at first but as she shifted, the lamp shined on her face, making her small tattoo stand out against her pale skin. It was a light blue crescent moon at her uppermost point of her forehead, the pointed edges disappearing up into her hairline.
I'd seen plenty of tattoos in my day, everything from a Miss Piggy pin-up holding a riding crop to the bare ass of Kermit the Frog to an actual Nazi swastika, and everything in between.
I'd never seen one quite like hers before, though.
