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“No, dumbass.” Christy shook her head. “You just did.”
I laughed, the movement spilling more venom from the injection in my belly. I typically healed faster than this. I sopped it up again with the rag, noting that the ooze was leaving red trails on my skin. I dabbed instead, trying to absorb it.
“Christy? I want to hear more about you two later, and you”—Sera pointed at me— “can stop with distracting or magicking me to forget or whatever else you want to do to avoid discussing this.”
“I can’t magic you to forget,” I muttered. Of all the traits I wished my dad had given me,thatone had yet to show up. I wasn’t sure it was even real. Coulddraugrmake people forget? There was speculation, but my father, frat boy of darkness, was dead so I couldn’t ask. Sometimes I was livid about that, that my temper slipped so badly, that I was not as in control as I wanted--but most of the time I thought the decision to murder him was a good one.
Being covered in ice wasn’t going to work long-term. Freezing the venom to buy my body time to eject it was a start. What would happen when the rest of it hit my system though? Would I die? Re-wake? Transform without dying? I had no answers.
Christy plopped another bag of ice on me. “Keep it cold.”
My brain was zinging in overtime. Colder was making my mind clearer. I wanted to ponder everything except what was happening to me right then. Maybe if I survived, I’d ask Beatrice about what exactlydraugrcould truly do. My accidental mind-reading skills might be either my dead bio-father’s genes or the result of being a hybrid. My witchy mother couldn’t do it.
“Get your arm. You’re bleeding there, too,” Sera muttered, pulling my focus back to now before she flounced out of the room again.
I felt my arm. It was oozing, too. Worse yet, it felt icy to the touch without any ice packs. No venom ball there. It was in me. Magic wasn’t necessary to see the venom under my skin.
“Going to fill us in?” Christy asked.
“I was injected.”
“Obviously. With what?” Jesse prompted, even though he knew. Of course he did. They knew I was at the morgue because someone was injecting people. They still stared at me with hope.
“Draugrvenom, I think.” I dabbed my stomach. It was oozing more than my arm. “My blood isn’t coagulating right. Did it feel cold through the glove?”
“Chilly, but not icy.” Jesse met my eyes. “Will your bio offset this?”
He didn’t say “bio-dead-dad” or even “biology,” but I knew exactly what he meant. Would my bio-deadbeatdraugrand the fucked-up biology from him offset my reaction? I mean, I couldn’t really say for sure. I hadn’t been injected before now. Obviously, to some degree, there was offset. I wasn’t dead.
“So far, I think it helps,” I said. “They thought I would be dead after the first dose.”
“Why aren’t you dead then?” Christy asked.
“Weird biology,” I said lightly. I was glad I sounded much calmer than I felt. The widow and her friend had tried to kill me. Lots of dead things had tried to kill me, but having a human woman try it was new.
I’d rarely had such cause to celebrate my mother’s bad taste in bedmates. If I were simply human, I’d be dead. Of course, I wouldn’t be a target for well-dressed women with poison if I were merely human—or able to stop them if I survived.
That aside, I didn’t get it. Why inject people withdraugrvenom? There were much easier ways to kill someone, but draugr venom had killed Chaddock and Odem. I had been guessing the other woman was Odem’s widow, but she was young. Odem’s wife supposedly wasn’t. Daughter? Another dead man’s wife? Either way, she was a woman who had tried to murder me. Why me? Why them? Why venom? And where did they get it? Only venom from a century-old draugr was lethal, and none of those would be easy to milk like snakes.
“How did they get to you?” Jesse asked. “Were you distracted? Were there a lot of attackers?”
Thatwas not the question I wanted to answer.
“She hugged me,” I said sheepishly. I could face monsters, kill, hunt, and generally bad-ass my way through life. Today, though, I was felled by a hug. It was mortifying.
“The widow was hiding in the lobby when I got home, and she hugged me. I didn’t know she had a syringe. Once I was down, the other woman handed her a second dose because I wasn’t dead yet.” My heart sped in anger, and I stood.
My magic lashed out in a pulse that—based on Jesse’s expression—was visible even to my completely mortal friends, and my eyes slipped toward grave vision so quickly that I felt queasy. I knew my eyes had slid into reptilian slits, that my friends could see that I looked more like adraugrthan I would like them to see. The vision of the grave let me see that they were, all three, healthy. I glanced at my hands. Green glinted under the skin. Venom.
“Talk to me, Gen.” Jesse stepped between me and my other two friends. “Are you . . . still you?”
I flipped him off because speaking was outside my grasp. Some measure of venom was processing, blending with my already fucked biochemistry, and the result was that I felt less human than normal.
“Do we call a doctor?” Christy asked.
“Her mother?” Sera added.
Jesse came closer. I saw my gun in his hand. He held it loosely, but he held it. “Any urge to bite people?”
