The doctor cleaned a little too deep, and I moved again, my hands convulsing on the table. “I can’t not move,” I finally admitted.
“Bernardo, Olaf,” he said.
“Shit,” I said. I did not want to be held down, but… there was no way I wasn’t going to fight some. I couldn’t not.
It was funny how none of us argued that we didn’t want to be here when Victor’s mom arrived. She’d almost rolled me under her power when I was well; this weak, this hurt… I didn’t know if I could keep her out of my head.
Bernardo took my right arm and held it in two places. Victor took my other arm with the IV drip still in it. When I felt a hand on either of my thighs, I knew whose hands were left to touch me: Olaf.
“Shit,” I said.
“Just look at me, Anita. Talk to me.”
“You talk to me,” I said.
I felt hands on my stomach.
“What are you doing?” And I hated how high and frightened my voice sounded.
“I’m going to start stitching. I am sorry to cause you pain.” Then I felt the prick of the first needle pass, but it would not be the last. To avoid scars they’d use a finer needle, a finer thread. It would take more time, more stitches all together. I wasn’t sure my vanity was worth it.
Edward talked to me, while the others tried to hold me still. He talked about Donna and the kids. He whispered about missions in South America where I’d never gone with him, and he’d killed things I’d never seen outside books. It was more personal details than he’d ever given me. If I could just lie still, he’d keep whispering his secrets.
I kept waiting for the pain to dull, but some pain doesn’t. This stayed sharp and nauseating, and the sensation of my skin being pulled together was more than my stomach could take.
“Going to be sick,” I managed to say.
“She’s going to be sick,” Edward said, and the hands moved away. I tried to roll too fast onto my side, and lost the food I’d tried to keep down at the last murder scene. Vegas was turning out to be a real fun town.
The pain in my stomach was fresh and cutting somewhere in the middle of vomiting. The doctor wiped my mouth for me, then laid me back on my back. “She’s pulled some of the stitches out.”
“Sorry,” I managed.
The doc sounded angry now. “I need her held down; she’s still moving, and if she keeps throwing up from the pain, the stitches may not hold.”
“What do you want us to do?” Victor asked.
I was just happy that he wasn’t sewing me up. They could talk forever if he just didn’t start again. I realized it wasn’t just the pain, but the sensations.
“Hold her,” the doctor said.
The fluids had helped clear my mind and my vision, so that I could see him clearly now. He was African American, hair cut close to his head, medium build, small sure hands. He was wearing a green surgical gown over his clothes, along with the gloves to match.
Edward’s hands went from my face to pressing my shoulders to the table. Victor took my legs and let Olaf have the arm he’d been holding; when the man protested, Victor had said, “I am a weretiger; no human, no matter how strong, can match me.”
Olaf didn’t like it, but he put a hand on my arm, above the elbow, and Victor climbed onto the table to pin my lower body. He was strong. They were all strong, but thanks to Jean-Claude’s vampire marks, so was I.
Edward pressed down hard enough to hold my shoulders still, but I couldn’t help but move as the needle began to move through my skin again.
“Scream,” he said.
“What?”
“Scream, Anita, you have to let it out one way or another. If you scream, maybe you won’t keep moving.”
“If I start screaming, I won’t stop.”
“We won’t tell,” Bernardo said from the arm he was pressing, sort of desperately, into the table.
The needle bit into my skin, and tugged. I opened my mouth and screamed. I put all the fear, all the fight-or- flight into that sound. I screamed as fast as I could draw breath. I screamed loud, long, and let myself sink into it. I screamed and wept and cursed, but I stopped moving so much.
When the doctor was finished, I was shaking and sweat covered, and nauseous, unable to focus my eyes, and my throat hurt, but we were done.
The doctor switched out the empty bag of clear fluid with a fresh one. “She’s in shock again. I don’t like that.”
Someone brought a blanket and covered me with it. I managed to say, in a voice that sounded so rough it wasn’t mine, “We need to go. Bibi will be here, and Paula Chu needs looking at.”
“You aren’t going anywhere until you have another bag of fluids in you,” the doctor said.
Edward was back at my head, smoothing down the edge of my hair, where the curls had stuck to the side of my face. “He’s right. You can’t go out like this.”
“We will go and make sure Paula Chu does not get away,” Olaf said.
“Yeah,” Bernardo said, “we can do that.”
They left, and another blanket went over me because my teeth had started to chatter. Edward touched my face again. “Rest, I’ll be here.”
I didn’t mean to sleep, but once I stopped shaking, it just seemed so hard to keep my eyes open. Bibiana was coming, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I slept and let my body start to heal. The last thing I saw was Edward pulling up a chair so he’d be beside me and able to see all the doors at the same time. It made me smile, and then I was gone to the warmth of the blankets and the tiredness of my body.
50
I DREAMED, AND in the dream I walked down a white hallway with doors on either side. I knew there was something behind the doors, but I didn’t know what. One of the doorknobs rattled, and it frightened me. I started to move faster down the hallway and realized I was wearing some long, white dress. It was heavy and hard to move in. I’d never owned anything like it. Mirrors showed between the doors, and I caught glimpses of myself in them. Pale oval face, black hair piled high on top of my head, curls artfully around my shoulders. There was a feather in my hair, and jewels around my throat. This was not my dream.
The next mirror showed a second figure keeping pace with me. She wore red, the color of crushed velvet and rose petals. Gold flashed here and there as she moved. She’d put me in white and silver, with the flash of diamonds. She wore gold and rubies.
I forced myself to stop running down the hallway that never seemed to get any shorter. I faced one of the mirrors, and there she was looking back at me, standing just over the shoulder of my reflection.
“Belle Morte,” I whispered, and it was as if her name conjured her, because I felt her hand slide around my shoulders, draw my back against her front. She was a touch shorter than I was, but heels gave her height. Our hair was nearly the same shade of black, but where my eyes were deepest brown, hers were almost amber.
“
“No,” I said.
She left only a perfect print of her lipstick on my skin. She smiled at me over my shoulder, putting our faces together. “Didn’t you enjoy our time together,
I wanted to say no, but her ego was too large, and too strangely fragile for truths. If it was a truth. She’d come to me when I was unconscious, near death, and we’d had sex. She’d fed me enough energy to come to, and feed in the real world and save myself and Jean-Claude and Richard, though I wasn’t sure how much she cared about our wolf king. But she had wanted to save me and Jean-Claude. I still wasn’t entirely certain why she’d done
