AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The room felt blurry, and I realized my eyes were flickering between normal pupils and serpent slits. As my eyes shifted, so did my vision. It was like someone had shoved a broken strobe light inside my head. I swayed and forced down nausea.
“I can carry you,” Jesse offered.
“Piss off.” My bones were intact. My muscles, too. I was going to walk or I could stay on the damned sofa. I took a stumbling step and grumbled, “Fuck it.Fine. I need help.”
Sera and Christy swept in to support me. I had one friend on either side, arms around my waist, guiding me across the open room toward my bedroom. It was one of the few times I’d cursed having a large living space. The distance that seemed fine most of the time was too far tonight.
I wanted to let Jesse keep his gun in hand. Just in case.
A few halting steps later, the pain in my low abdomen made me gasp. The venom was changing me. I felt a burning, like a kidney stone and hangover got together for a tango. It was making puking only one of my worries. Walking felt like I might piss myself—or worse. A part of my brain, a calmly rational streak, reminded me that this was what the human body did at death. Organs gave up, muscles released, and things came gushing out. Ireallydidn’t want that.
“Take his gun, Christy? Swap places, I mean.” As soon as they did, I muttered, “Carry me.”
Jesse swept me up into his arms, and without a word about me admitting my inability to walk there myself, he carried me toward my bedroom.
“I have money saved,” Jesse said as he strode across the hallway to the unit where I slept. “Enough for twelve years in a T-Cell House.”
“Seriously?” I managed to say.
“You’re exposed to biters all the time. Weallencounter them in the city. I know the risks living here,” Sera said from behind him. “I have enough saved up for fifteen years.”
“Eighty here,” Christy offered from my left, where she strolled with a gun in hand.
“Over a hundred years in hand, already.” Jesse stopped at the foot of my bed. The room was darker than the rest of the floor. I’d walled up the windows when I moved in.
Sera tugged back my rumpled bed linens and fluffed my pillows, as I watched from where I was held in Jesse’s arms. “We are a family,” Sera stressed. “Families look out for one another.”
I felt tears well up and sniffled to stop the sob that went with them.
When Jesse lowered me to the bed and got me situated, they all stepped back and stared at me as I sat on my bed. It felt like a wake, but with the corpse still alert. As far as wakes go, it wasn’t awful—but I didn’t want to die.
And I sure as fuck didn’t want to wake again.
I felt the need to puke, but didn’t want to do that either.
As they stood there, gathered around me, I felt like I ought to tell them some sort of deathbed wisdom. I had no insights. No wisdom. Just this ball of terror that whatever happened after this was larger and more overwhelming than I could fathom.
Christy turned to go, and I blurted, “Wait. I’m not ready. I’m not . . .”
“What do you need?” Sera asked softly, and I knew as well as I knew anything about this world that she saw my terror. Her gaze met mine, and I wanted my friends to stay as much as they wanted to do so.
But then a shudder made me lift off the bed, and my magic rolled out with the kind of uncontrolled wave that I hadn’t had since I’d murdered my father. I tamped it down as hard as I could and said, “I need more ice, but also a bowl with hot water, as hot as it can be without burning my skin. Rags. Box with sealed suture supplies. Med gloves.”
Christy and Sera didn’t question me. Not yet at least. I did get a suspicious stare from everyone when I added, “Silver knife. Fire till it’s hot. Keep it in the bowl of water so it stays sterile.”
Once they’d left the room, I stretched out in bed, eyes closed, while Jesse tucked me in as if I simply had the flu.
“Status?” Jesse asked now that we were alone.
“Chills. Fever. I see the venom inside me with my grave vision.” My brain was remarkably clear, even as my ability to convince my tongue to create words at a reasonable pace wasn’t. “Going to need to cut part of venom out.”
“Cut . . .?”
“Cauterize after if necessary.”
Jesse looked as nauseous as I felt. He sat on the edge of my bed. “Ice is what’s keeping the shock down. Is heat a good idea?”
“No, but letting it slowly leak into my organs isn’t working out either. It needs to come out before it finishes melting or whatever the fuck it’s doing.” I had the start of a plan, but it was probably a terrible one.
