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“Mark, what the fuck is wrong with her?”
Is that Malice? It sounds like Malice.
I will my eyes to open but am dragged back into the fog. My head bounces, eliciting a moan. Forcing my lids to separate, I peek up and see Malice looking down at me. He smooths my hair off my face and flashes a concerned smile.
“Apple, baby… stay with me,” he croons.
I must be hallucinating.
Voices drift in and out of my awareness as I struggle to stay awake. No matter how much I command my eyes to open again, they stay locked tight.
“What the hell is wrong with her, Abyss?”
Wait… he’s here too?
“I don’t know. Get her loaded into Stella so I can start an IV, and we’ll figure everything out once we’re back at the clubhouse.”
That’s the last thing to penetrate the fog before I’m sucked into unconsciousness.
“I’ve runevery test I can think of.”
I shoot to my feet and glare at Abyss. Soul stretches an arm out to stop me from launching myself across the table, but I shrug him off. We’ve been in church for ten minutes, and it took Soul and Grim to drag me away from Apple’s bedside. When I left, Mark took over the vigil, and she was still out cold. She was pale and fragile looking, and it terrified me.
“You haven’t found shit!” I shout at our secretary slash club doc. “Which means you haven’t run every fucking test.”
“Sit down, Mal,” Soul orders.
“I’ll sit down whe—”
“Sit. The fuck. Down.”
Soul and I stare at one another for a tense moment before I drop into my chair, running a shaky hand through my hair as I do.
“What the hell do we do now?” I ask no one in particular.
“Well, she’s stable,” Abyss says. “Her blood pressure and heart rate were scary low, but I’ve ruled out anything to do with her heart. I’ve checked her lungs, and those are clear. I’ve done all the standard blood work, and it’s all normal. But she’s still unconscious. It’s like she’s in a coma or something.”
“There’s nothingnormalabout this,” I snarl. “She was completely fine when I talked to her earlier this morning. She said she was tired, but she’s been running herself ragged so it makes sense. But this…” I shake my head. “Nothing fucking normal about it.”
Grim pounds the table to get our attention, and we all face him.
“Is there anything else that could cause her symptoms? Something that standard tests wouldn’t find?”
“What are you implying?” I bark, my fingers flying in tandem with my words.
Grim narrows his eyes. “I’m not implying shit. But it stands to reason that if the standard crap isn’t finding the problem, then the problem isn’t standard.”
“He’s right,” Spike comments from his seat. “We thought Travis and Jason were the only threat, but what if we missed something.”
“Don’t ya think if there was more, it woulda come out in the Confessional?” Thorn asks. “We worked those yahoos over pretty good.”
“What happened in the Confessional doesn’t mean fuckall if Apple’s health decline isn’t linked to what they did or the trap they set for her,” Rogue states.
“What are the chances that there’s a second threat?” I argue, my brain not wanting to accept that sweet, innocent,goodApple would have another threat.
“Malice, look at what we do as a club,” Animal grits out. “There’s evil lurking in every corner of the world.”
“Evil flourishes where it shouldn’t,” Possum tacks on.
