Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91636 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
I grit my teeth and swear inwardly to not only survive, but to save everyone. The vampire, the raiders, they’ll all pay.
Sooner than I expected, we’re pulling into Coastwood. It’s a small forestry town located in the hills above the bay. It’s not known for its wealth, but it is known for having five bars and four churches all laid out within two blocks. The houses here are dilapidated, vehicles rusted out from the salt air. Trees up the hill shade half the town most of the time, but the view out to the ocean has been cleared to allow people to enjoy it.
The doctor here has a good reputation. She used to get called down to the port often enough when smugglers arrived with various smuggling-related injuries. Her place is on the edge of the town as you go in, taking up space in a clearing on the right where straggly grass is growing out of control in a lawn on which we park.
“Medic!”
I shout as we pull up to the doc’s house, helpfully denoted by a big red cross painted on the wall. The paint is peeling and fading, but it’s enough to indicate we are in the right place.
I wonder, briefly, what she’s done with the money she got from her port jobs. Maybe that’s the only real income she had aside from forestry-related injuries.
Her door bursts open as if she kicked it off the hinges, and she emerges like a superhero. Graying hair, thick-rimmed glasses, a white coat just barely shrugged on over a sweater fraying at the hem, and denim pants that terminate in scuffed sneakers, she levitates off her porch and to our car.
She has the kind of bearing that suggests crossing her would be a very bad idea. She comes bustling over and barks orders at us in a very comforting way.
“Let me see. Good. Yes. In the house, the two of you, stretcher by the front door, bring it out here and let’s get him on it.”
“He was shot,” I explain. “We were ambushed down in the port. Raiders and scavengers.”
She looks down at Damon with a charming expression. “Now,” she says. “Few questions before we save your life. Is there any chance of you being pregnant?”
Damon coughs up a laugh. Blood comes with it. Fuck.
“Yes. He’s been shot,” she says, as if she’s making a diagnosis. “Go and get the stretcher, will you? He’s probably done enough bleeding out for one day.”
She is capable and confident and shifters heal far better than humans. All she really has to do is stop the bleeding and I think his body will be able to regenerate. That’s easier said than done, though.
Tailor already has the stretcher out beside the car. He and I get in the back, slipping on bloody gold coins as we lever him out as carefully as possible. Kita keeps the pressure on his stomach as well as she can until we’ve got him up and moving.
Kita
It all happens so fast. The doctor lady has Damon in her surgery almost quicker than I can blink. Tailor and Conroy are gone too. I’m standing by the car, in shock.
I can’t believe this. Everything just keeps going badly. Then it gets a little fractionally better, and then it gets worse. It feels like we are being fucked with by the universe, as if we’re not allowed to be happy, or safe, or ever have anything good.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shout the question to the universe.
I am so furious. Damon has been harmed. He might die. And it’s all my fault. I don’t care if Tailor would be angry at me for thinking that, it seems that way to me.
“Kita! Get in here!” Conroy puts his head out the door and shouts at me. “I don’t want you out of my sight.”
I go inside. There’s a faint smell of surgical things coming from the rear of the house. Blood, too. That must be where she’s treating Damon.
Tailor and Conroy are pacing in the front room, which has chairs so you don’t have to pace, and a coffee table so you have something to pace around if you want to pace.
I go in and stand by the front door, arms folded over my chest. I keep my mouth shut, because I want to scream at the top of my lungs. I want to blame them, but really I blame myself.
Tailor comes over and puts what I know he thinks is a comforting hand on my shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not going to be okay!” I reply, more loudly than I probably should. Shout, really. “Nothing has been okay from the beginning and I don’t care what you do to me, it’s all my fault. It’s all my fucking fault.”
Tailor narrows his eyes at me. “I will deal with you later,” he says. “But you’re in trouble. Yes, there was an attack, but unless you planted the bastards behind the rubble, then it wasn’t your fault.”