It may have been hundreds of years before, but I still vividly remembered how it felt to have a knife stuck in my stomach and yanked upward, slicing through everything within.
I'd been shot a few times since then, but nothing compared to being gutted like that. The pain had lasted for hours before I finally healed.
I imagined Red felt like that, but from head-to-toe.
"Why isn't she healing?" he asked, needing answers, ones I didn't have for him.
"I don't know," I admitted.
Which was why I wanted to go read. True, the humans didn't have the most comprehensive information about our kind, but some of the old texts had some insights in them that might prove useful.
It wasn't like I carried around ancient texts with me. Hell, it wasn't like I even owned many myself. But the humans had come a long way the past hundred or so years. I had an endless number of scanned ancient texts on my tablet that I could access at any time.
Which was how I planned to spend the rest of my evening if the nurse didn't wake up.
Trying to get answers.
So I could pass them onto my men.
So they didn't keep looking at me like I'd let them down.
I'd avoided that for generations by being proactive, by always being the first to know things, to learn things, so they never had to feel lost in this world as it changed around us.
It was the least I could do.
As the leader.
I'd never felt as undeserving of that title as I did when we all watched Red scream and refuse to heal, and have no explanations for them.
"I will figure it out," I assured Aram. "Why don't you go reach out to the local bikers and see if you can score some better pain medicine. Seems like whatever we gave her isn't cutting it."
"Yeah, okay," he agreed, hopping up, eager for a mission, some way to not feel so useless.
"Take Seven with you. He has a friend who is a patched member."
And it was two of them out of my hair while we tried to figure shit out.
With that, I took off to Aram's room to get some quiet so I could read in peace.
It was several hours later that I heard her.
Not Lenore telling me the nurse was awake.
Oh, no.
The nurse herself, yelling.
I guess I was up.
With a sigh, I put down my tablet, and made my way toward my room to deal with her.
Chapter Four
Jo
The screaming inside my skull was the first thing I became aware of as unconsciousness slowly pulled backward like a fog in the early morning light.
I'd suffered from migraines in the past, and this pain was like that, but amplified, making me try to raise my hands to press the heels to my forehead, always finding that the pressure helped with the pain.
But when I tried to lift them, I felt resistance. As soon as I became aware of that, the pain around my wrists vied for acknowledgment.
It was right then that it all rushed back.
Leaving work.
Worrying about my hair.
Hands.
A body.
A man.
A car.
Cuffs.
A gag.
Trying to break free, tripping, and then nothing.
That nothing was because I'd probably hit my head. Which explained the jackhammering sensation in my temple.
My eyes flew open as I tried to scramble up to a seated position, finding my vision refused to focus for a long second as my stomach flipped, making bile rise up in my throat.
Possible concussion.
That wasn't the least bit surprising, what with not having been able to properly brace my fall and everything.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I took a couple deep breaths, trying to fight back the dizziness and nausea.
The gag was gone, I realized, but felt the remnants of its existence in an aching across my lips, cheeks, and around the back of my head.
"You're okay," a soft female voice declared at my side, making me jolt as my eyes shot open.
Then there she was.
A beautiful woman with long dark black hair that made me miss mine for one absurdly inappropriate second. She was dressed strangely too, in some sort of floor-sweeping green gown with long sleeves. It was a dress out of time, something meant for period piece movies, not modern times, sitting right in front of me on a footstool.
I thought it was a trick of light at first but as she shifted, the lamp shined on her face, making her small tattoo stand out against her pale skin. It was a light blue crescent moon at her uppermost point of her forehead, the pointed edges disappearing up into her hairline.
I'd seen plenty of tattoos in my day, everything from a Miss Piggy pin-up holding a riding crop to the bare ass of Kermit the Frog to an actual Nazi swastika, and everything in between.
I'd never seen one quite like hers before, though.
"Where am I?" I asked, tension uncurling in my stomach.
"Ah, what did they say? Utah, I think," she said, seeming confused by the word.
Of course we were in Utah.
"What is this place?" I asked, eyes begging her to understand.
"Oh, a house. A rental house," she added, giving me an encouraging smile. "You had a bad fall. You cut your forehead," she told me. "I cleaned it out and packed it with a poultice."
A poultice?
Who even used that word anymore, let alone knew how to mix one together?
The part of me that had spent a lot of time learning proper wound care by our modern standards was having a mild heart attack at the idea of some hippie woman playing herbalist putting God-knew what herbs or leaves or spit in my open wound.
But there would be time to worry about that later.
After I got myself free, got away, got some help.
Maybe this woman could help.
But it was right about then that a strange noise sounded from behind me. A muted, shrieking sound, something that immediately put me on edge as I turned, looked back, and found a large bed behind me.
With a mostly naked woman on top.
Completely covered in blood.
With a gag in her mouth.
There was a knee-jerk, selfish moment where I worried about that being me, that I was maybe taken to replace her when he was done with her very badly abused body.
The thoughts were replaced almost instantly, though, with concern. For her. For her wellbeing. For her obvious pain as she screamed against her gag.
"What happened to her?"
"I, ah, I can't tell you that," the woman said, shaking her head.
"What do you mean you can't tell me? Who did that to her? Who are you protecting?" I demanded, voice rising.
Let's just say that I had seen far too many women come into the hospitals I'd worked at with clear signs of abuse from men who'd driven them in for care. And despite trying my best, sometimes, I could never get through to the women, could never get them help.
And it made me have a hair trigger when it came to abusers. And those who enabled them through inaction.
"Lower your voice," another voice joined the conversation. Lower, deeper. Masculine. "Or I will have to put the gag back on you," he added as my gaze lifted, finding a man standing in the doorway, swallowing up the whole space.
He'd had a mask on, of course, but his size was familiar. Tall, strong but not overly bulky. I felt reasonably confident saying this was the man who had abducted me, who had wrestled me into his car, who had cuffed and gagged me, who had chased me until I fell.