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I jumped up, grabbing Boone by the foot, and yanked him down.
“Boone, look out!”
BANG.
Chapter Two
The next day, I was bent over the kitchen table, pants around my ankles, with Dean standing right behind me.
And, no, it wasn’tlike that.
Around us were spare towels that looked like they were part of a crime scene; tweezers, scalpels, and blood-stained rags on either side of the tabletop beside me. Dean was currently digging through the flesh of my posterior, searching for the buckshot round, and I was gripping the table with white knuckles, biting my tongue to hold back the yells of pain that were just threatening.
“Are you…sureyou want me to keep going?” Dean asked, his voice wavering between concern, amusement, and uncertainty. I groaned and rubbed my eyes, hoping my face didn’t look as pale as it felt.
“Yes!” I managed to hiss. “Can you just hurry up? This isn’t the mostcomfortablething in the world.”
“You’d be a lot more comfortable if you went to a hospital...” I heard him mutter, and even the twang of pain as he sliced a bit deeper wasn’t enough to keep me from my retort.
“You want me to show the doctors how my fangs work, too?” I looked over my shoulder at him, but then quickly looked back at the table so I could fight down a blush. It wasquitea sight, seeing Dean Hawke hanging over my bare ass—orthe topof my bare ass. The rest of my modesty was preserved by a towel.
“Can’t you just do that vampire gaze thing that gets everyone to do your bidding?” Dean asked.
“If I could do that, I woulda already done it to you to get you to stop talking about hospitals,” I grumbled.
Dean chuckled at that. “Touché, Twila.”
“And anyway… there’s no hospital that got hit by the Fog,” I continued, my fingers clamping around the table as he went in for another try. “The closest thing we have is Dr. Glover, and he got turned into some kind of fungus creature, so I’d rather take my chances with you.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he laughed and then quieted right quick. “What about that spider woman who treated Mason?” he asked. “Didn’t you say she was a nurse?”
“I did.”
“So?” He seemed to dig especially hard, and I winced in response.
“I’d rather not let all of Windy Ridge know I got shot in the ass, thank you very much.”
He chuckled at that.
As to the buckshot, I wasn’t worried about an infection from the wound, considering my metabolism usually healed any and everything within a week. What I wasreallyconcerned with was what my vampire body would do with metal in its system. It wasn’t like the buckshot was silver (and even if it were, I figured that whole silver bullet thing was a tall-tale) but my body was plenty weird enough as it was—I didn’t need to start developing bionic powers to boot. Vampire wolverine woman? No thanks.
“So… what exactly happened again?” Dean started.
I sighed, exasperated, because I’d tried to explain to him already but the words were hard to come over the pain. “Boone’s stray shot hit me instead of the bat-man…”
“The bat-man being—”
“The monster we were hunting.”
“Right,” he continued with a stiff nod. “A monster no one notifiedmeabout, I’d like to add.”
“We figured you were busy doing… sheriff stuff.” He dug a little harder than he had been. I glanced back at him and frowned. “Ouch!”
“That’s what you get for not letting me do my job,” he answered on a shrug. “This was exactly what I was afraid of.”
“What—that you’d find yourself pulling buckshot out of my backside?”
He chuckled. “No—I can honestly say that thought never even crossed my mind.” Then the smile died from his voice. “I mean—that you and the guys would underestimate me and not include me on these… hunts of yours.”
