Hit List

The EMT with the dark hair was back now with another color of glove on top of the first one. He said, “Excuse me, but I need to look at her wound.” He looked at Raborn until he stepped back. The EMT unfolded my arm, and only then did I realize my right hand was in a fist.

“What did this to your arm?” the EMT asked.

“Tree limb, root,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“I slipped and cut myself on a dry tree branch,” I said.

“It must have been one hell of a tree.”

“Yeah.”

“Both of you come with us to the ambulance so we have more light to work,” the blonde said.

“I’m fine,” Newman said.

I just started letting the man lead me toward the ambulance. Raborn called, “I heard you were tough, Blake.”

I turned, looked at him. “The days when someone like you could make me feel like a wimp because I let the medics work on me is long past, Raborn.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that whatever I needed to prove to myself, I did it years ago, and your opinion of me doesn’t matter.”

Newman’s body reacted as if someone had poked him, as if something about what I’d said mattered, or surprised him. In the swirling color of lights I watched his face debate. Should he go with me to the ambulance or stay with the guys and tough it out?

I also wanted to talk to Edward in semiprivacy away from Raborn and the rest, and he was still by the ambulances. Besides, what I’d said was absolutely true. I had nothing to prove to anyone anymore. I knew how tough, how brave, how good I was at my job. Raborn could go to hell, and I’d actually matured enough that I didn’t have to tell him that last part out loud. It was plenty satisfying to simply walk away.

Raborn’s voice rose as he said, “You going to be a girl about this, Newman, or a man?”

I turned around, still walking, and yelled. “Yeah, Newman, be a man, keep bleeding until you pass out in the middle of the woods with shapeshifters and vampires after your ass.” Then I went back to following the dark-haired EMT.

The light that spilled out from the ambulance seemed terribly bright and totally screwed my night vision, but Matt, the EMT, needed the light.

The blond EMT came to join us, muttering under her breath. I caught, “Stupid . . . men. Scalp wounds bleed . . .”

Matt had cleaned my arm and was squinting at it as if he either needed glasses he wasn’t wearing, or would soon. “Julie, can you look at this?”

The blonde, Julie, stopped cursing the stupidity of men under her breath and just joined him in staring at my arm. She was careful not to touch me, since she hadn’t double-gloved, but she let his fingers do the walking. When he spread the edges of the wound, I protested. “That hurts,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said, but didn’t look up from the wound.

“How long ago did you say this happened?” Julie asked.

“An hour, less,” I said.

“No way,” she said.

Matt finally met my eyes. He was frowning. “I’d say this was hours, maybe a day old, at least.”

“I told you I carry lycanthropy. It means I heal faster than human-normal.”

“It’s healing so fast it’s going to heal crooked. Stitches would have kept it from doing that,” Matt said.

“Crooked?” I asked.

“It’s going to scar more,” Julie said, “than if a doctor had stitched it for you.”

I looked down at my arm. It was a long, jagged cut, almost like angry lightning going from elbow to almost wrist. “Nothing to be done about it now,” I said.

“Actually if you go to the hospital they can cut it open again, and then sew it up. We just had a seminar on preternatural patients. Lycanthropes can heal so fast that they scar more, or even get their muscles bunched up so the wound gives them pain almost like arthritis.” Matt said it staring down at my arm, as if it were a sort of show- and-tell.

“Is there a time limit for when I need to come in and get this done?”

“Sooner is better, at the rate you’re healing,” he said, poking at the wound again.

“Please, stop poking it,” I said.

He looked up a little startled. “I’m sorry; it’s just the first wound like this I’ve seen since the seminar.”

“Matt’s a big one for theory in the field,” his partner said.

I looked at her, nodding. “I usually heal without scarring now.”

“Well, this is going to scar,” she said.

I looked at it and believed them, but wasn’t sure why it was happening. I thought about it, and then realized I’d absorbed anger when I visited the red tigers, but I hadn’t fed the ardeur. The anger had taken the edge off my hunger, but it hadn’t really refueled me. I wasn’t healing as well as normal, which explained why the tree limb had hurt me so badly in the first place, as well as the scarring. I could go longer between feedings. I could control it, but apparently this was the price. I healed better than a pure human, but not as well as I could heal. That wasn’t good when hunting the Harlequin. Shit.

I tried to imagine what Raborn would say if I actually did take time out for a nookie break. It didn’t even bear thinking about; I couldn’t stop for sex, not until we finished hunting through the woods. Well, fuck, or rather no fuck. Damn it, I was tired of getting punished for not having sex. It was sort of the horror movie cliché turned on its ear; only the slutty survived, not the virginal.

I couldn’t explain any of this to the EMTs, or anyone else here but Edward. Always before with the ardeur it had consumed me, forced me to feed, but now I had enough control that I could delay it. The angry purple and red wound on my arm showed me the price for controlling the ardeur. Staring down at the wound, I realized that I had started counting on healing and being harder to hurt. I tried to remember the last time I’d been hurt by accident like this, and I couldn’t remember. My stomach clenched tight and it wasn’t hunger—that wasn’t where the ardeur’s hunger hit me—it was fear. If a tree limb could do this to me, then what about a sword, or a bullet? Shit.

“You okay?” EMT Julie asked.

I nodded. “Fine.”

“You really need to go to the hospital and let a doctor open the wound and then stitch it back up,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She frowned at me. “But you’re not going to do it, are you?” She sounded disgusted with me, I really couldn’t blame her.

“I can’t let them go into the woods without me.”

“You know, the marshals around here do just fine when you’re not in town. They hunt vampires and beasts, and they do a good job. Let them do their jobs and let us do ours and take you to the hospital.”

Matt pulled at the edges of the wound. “Stop that,” I said.

“Sorry, but it’s almost like one of those fast-forward films of flowers, you know, where you watch them bloom. I swear I can almost see your skin knitting together. It’s so cool.”

Julie hit him on the shoulder, and it must have been harder than it looked, because he said, “Ow!”

“She’s a live patient, Matt, not a cadaver in class.”

He blinked up at me, and then looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I just . . .”

“It’s okay. Just patch me up so I can finish this hunt.”

“You’re being totally stupid,” Julie said.

“Not as stupid as Marshal Newman. He’s still bleeding.”

“He’s going to keep bleeding until he passes out, too,” she said, and the disgust was thick in her voice.

“Probably,” I said. “At least I’m letting you bandage me up.”

“Your wound will be closed by the time you finish this hunt. You’re not losing more blood.”