Blood Truth

by J. R. Ward

  He didn’t so much walk over to the apartment’s door as run headfirst into it, his loose inability to control his legs making proper balance impossible. Fumble . . . fumble . . . fumble with the doorknob. When that didn’t go well, he yanked at the damn thing—

  It was locked. Dead bolted.

  Somehow he sprang things and then—

  “Oh, thank God,” he mumbled as he saw V’s mate standing in the basement hallway.

  As Doc Jane entered and closed things behind herself, he backed up—or rather tripped over his bare feet and fell on his ass. Landing in a heap, he knew he was a total mess.

  And going by the expression on the doctor’s face, she rather agreed.

  “Knock me out,” he mumbled. “Do it first so you won’t have to deal with me. I’m worried I’m dangerous. I can’t . . . think . . .”

  Doc Jane’s mouth started to move, and Boone was instantly transported back to his sire’s Fade Ceremony, someone standing in front of him, communicating in what was theoretically English, but which made no sense to him whatsoever.

  What did make sense?

  The fact that V’s female put her old-fashioned doctor’s bag down. Retrieved from it a syringe and a small clear bottle with a rubber top. And then promptly loaded some kind of drug into the belly of the needle.

  As she knelt beside him, she said, “Roll up your sleeve for me?”

  Roll. Up. Sleeve.

  Got it, he thought.

  He tore the thing off from the shoulder and threw it somewhere. Holding out his bare arm, he watched as she rubbed an alcohol square in a circle on his bicep and then poked him a good one.

  Boone opened up his mouth to thank her.

  But the shit was fast-acting. For real.

  • • •

  Helania’s body was a rope and the hormones flooding her system were angry hands on either end, twisting, twisting . . . pulling . . . until surely the fibers that made up her corporeal form would snap. Facedown on the tile, she was on fire from the inside out, nothing relieving her of the agony, the sawing need, the clawing, useless desire.

  She had no idea where Boone was. But he had left her as she’d told him to.

  At this point, she wasn’t even sure where she was.

  Forcing her lids open, everything was blurry, so she blinked until a small sink became semi-apparent. Bathroom. She was in the bathroom.

  Rolling onto her back, she felt a draft as her belly was exposed to the air. There was no corresponding cool place for her shoulders, though. The furnace inside her body had heated the tiles on the floor.

  Relief, there had to be . . . some relief.

  Again on her stomach. Now on her side. Legs straight. Legs up. One leg down and the other up. Shoulders flat, shoulders curved.

  Nothing helped. But that was the nature of the needing.

  How could she possibly have missed the signs? Restlessness. Being too hot. Bacon and chocolate at that diner, both of which she ordinarily never had an interest in.

  The fact that, for the first time in her life, she’d had sex without really knowing the other person for very long. Her uncharacteristic boldness now made so much sense. It had been a prodromal to this fertile time.

  When had her last needing been? She could not recall.

  Oh, God, Boone. She would have warned him to stay away if she’d been thinking more clearly, if she had caught the signs—

  The cool breeze came from out of nowhere, as if someone had opened a window and let some of the outdoor air in. Except she had no windows to open—

  Lifting her head, she looked up and did not understand what she was seeing. But it appeared as though a female angel had come and covered her in a white cloud. Wait . . . unless it was just a sheet?

  “Hi,” the angel said. “I’m Doc Jane. I’m here to help you.”

  Helania blinked a couple of times to see if the vision before her changed. Nope. Still a female angel with short blond hair, dark green eyes, and . . . a pair of blue doctor’s scrubs for clothes?

  Giving up on trying to make sense of it all, she let her head fall back down to the tile. “Help . . . me . . .”

  “I’m going to check your vitals, and then we’ll see about taking care of you with some meds, is this okay with you?”

  Meds? And what kind of angel talked about vital signs? Besides, if she’d gone unto the Fade, she was now dead for an eternity, so all that was a moot point.

  As another blast of heat churned through her, Helania moaned and abruptly didn’t care what the plan was. Anything was better than this terrible grinding need.

  “Yes, please. Thank you.”

  She had no clue what she was saying.

  Things happened at that point. Something was put on her arm . . . after which there was a slow constriction and a release. Then a cold disk that was heaven pressed into the front of her chest. After that, there was a beep next to her ear—no, wait, that was inside her ear.

  “Helania? I’m going to give you a shot of morphine, with your permission. It will ease you and make this so much more bearable. Is that okay?”

  The angel’s voice was closer now and Helania tried to open her eyes. “Yes. Anything . . .”

  At this point, if she had to get in a bath of dry ice, she’d jump in—

  Another surge owned her, and as she cried out, she was aware that the spikes of hormones were still getting stronger. As impossible as that seemed, she could feel the intensification—

  The easing came on in a wave and flooded through her body, calming down the boil sure as if she were a pot taken off an open flame. But she did not trust the relief, and for a time, she braced herself and waited for the suffering to come back.

  “It’s all right,” that female voice said. “Just let yourself relax. I’m going to stay here and monitor you. I won’t let it get away from us.”

  The tears came hard and heavy, Helania weeping for no cogent reason and every variation of an exhausted one.

  “Mother Nature can be so cruel to females,” said the voice.

  Wiping her eyes with her forearm, Helania craned around. As the details of the mystical female came through with greater clarity, she frowned. No wings. No aura. No preternatural presence. Instead . . .

  “You’re not an angel.”

  The female laughed, her forest green eyes flashing. “Oh, trust me, I’m so not. Just ask my hellren.”

  Helania glanced down at herself. What she had assumed was a fluffy white cloud covering her tortured body turned out to be one of her own sheets. She recognized the faded pattern of little pink and yellow flowers.

  “How are you feeling now?” the doctor asked.

  “Where’s Boone?”

  “He’s out cold by the sofa. I’ve given him some help as well.”

  Helania closed her eyes. “I swear, I didn’t know it was coming. The needing.”

  Was she making any sense at all? She felt like she was babbling.

  “From what I understand,” the doctor said, “it is not always possible for you all to guess the timing of it. And Butch tells me that you’ve been dealing with a lot of stress. That can throw things off as well.”

  “You’re not a vampire?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Oh, of course. How else could the female have come here during the day. Wait . . . it was daytime, wasn’t it?

  Whatever. It did not matter.

  “I should have been smarter.” Helania closed her eyes. “I should have . . .”

  “How about we get you to your bed? It’s cold in here and that floor has to be very hard.”

  Was it? Given the morphine, the tiles felt as soft as feathers. Still, when the doctor offered a hand, Helania put her own into it and did her best to participate in the effort of getting her body to the vertical.

  With that goal accomplished, the doctor hitched a hold around Helania’s waist and supported more than half her weight as they hobbled out into the living area, the tails of the sheet dragging behind.

&nb
sp; As they rounded the corner to enter the bedroom, she finally saw Boone. He was on the floor in front of the sofa, his arms and legs flopped in a disjointed series of angles, his torso twisted so he was half on his back, half facedown. He looked like he’d been sucker punched and had gone down hard.

  “He’s fine,” the doctor said. “I gave him a lighter dose and he’s slipped into sleep. And before you ask, I checked his vitals. He is just exhausted.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He fed from a Chosen just three nights ago.”

  A Chosen, Helania thought.

  “It was a medical-need feed,” the doctor said gently. “Not to worry. There is nothing there.”

  “It’s not my business.”

  “That’s for you and him to decide.” The doctor smiled. “Come on, let’s get you to lie down. If you faint on me, I may not be able to keep you from crashing to the floor.”

  Helania allowed herself to be drawn over to her mattress—which, for some reason, had been moved out of place. But what did she care. As she lay down, she knew the doctor was right to get her back on the horizontal. A wave of dizziness made the room spin, and then her body got so weak, she wondered if she’d had a stroke or something.

  Staring at the wall, she thought of Boone, there on the floor, stuck with her indoors for what was no doubt going to be the longest day of their lives. Even with the doctor’s kind ministrations.

  At least she wasn’t pregnant. As far as she knew, they hadn’t had sex after the fertile time had come.

  Otherwise, she would have felt even worse than she already did.

  Still . . . what a mess this all was.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Boone regained consciousness and was surprised to find himself on the sofa. But at least he knew where he was—Helania’s apartment while she was going through her needing . . . although he did not remember getting up off the floor. Maybe he’d done it when Doc Jane had given him the second shot. Or the third.

  What time was it—

  “It’s after midnight.”

  He jerked his head up. Doc Jane was sitting at Helania’s kitchen table, a tablet propped open in front of her, some kind of movie playing on its little screen.

  “Did I say that out loud or do you read minds?” he asked as he struggled to sit up.

  Man, his shirt was more wrinkled than a map at the end of a long trip.

  The doctor smiled and turned off whatever was playing. “You spoke the words.”

  Boone stretched and cracked his shoulder. Then he looked toward the bedroom. The door was open, but the lights were off inside so he couldn’t see Helania.

  “Don’t worry, she’s fine. I just checked on her twenty minutes ago.”

  With a groan, he leaned forward and plugged his elbows into his knees. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

  “You have been. The hormone load you’ve been under with the opiates chaser? You’re going to feel logy for a while.”

  “I didn’t expect this.”

  “Neither did she.” Doc Jane shook her head. “Female bodies of any species are a thing, but vampire ones? It’s so unfair.”

  “Is it over? For her?”

  “Hard to say. From what I understand, she’s been under a lot of stress, and that could shorten or lengthen the course of the needing. Or she could follow the typical timeline. I will say, in the last hour there’s been an improvement compared to how she was. I think the worst of it is behind her, and she’ll feel a lot better in another six hours.”

  “Thank God.”

  “She will need to feed. And she has to come in for a checkup tomorrow night.”

  “For what?”

  “To see if she’s pregnant.”

  Boone went very, very still. “But we didn’t have sex.”

  Doc Jane’s face became professionally composed. “During the needing or at all in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Ah . . .” As he blushed, he cleared his throat. “During the needing.”

  “When was the last time you were with her.”

  He closed his eyes and reminded himself that to Doc Jane, the sexual act was part of the medical record, a biological event. But damn, he felt a little like he was confessing to a mahmen.

  “Boone,” she said quietly, “it matters. For her health and well-being, it’s better that we know—although if you’d prefer that I ask her personally, I’m happy to wait until she’s better able to talk to me—”

  “Maybe six hours before the needing hit. At least four.”

  Doc Jane nodded. “Okay, then she should be checked out. If she is pregnant, she is going to need prenatal care immediately.”

  Boone blinked. Then blurted, “I’m going to mate her if she is.”

  Doc Jane’s smile was steady. “Let’s take this situation one step at a time. You can cross that bridge if you get to it.”

  • • •

  Helania woke up slowly. Her first thought was that the morphine must still be heavily in her system: She couldn’t feel her arms or her legs, and the buoyancy of the bed was overexaggerated, as if she were in a canoe in a still body of water rather than lying on a mattress.

  Turning on her side, she looked toward the open doorway of her bedroom and wondered what time it was. Whether the doctor was still in the apartment. If Boone had—

  Sure as if she’d called his name, he appeared in between the jambs. He looked as wiped-out as she felt, his hair sticking up at bad angles, his shirt wrinkled to the point of ruin, his slacks hanging low on his hips as if he had lost ten pounds of water weight.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  His voice was rough, and as he came in the room, she braced herself for an onslaught of painful desire.

  “I think so.” When her body didn’t grind in on itself, she exhaled. “I’m a lot better. Where is . . .”

  “Doc Jane? She had to go to the clinic. But I told her I’d call her back immediately if you needed anything.”

  Helania tried to sit up, and when the world spun, she debated letting that idea go. But as her equilibrium returned, she tucked the sheets around her naked body and shoved her hair out of her face.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Four o’clock.”

  “In the afternoon? It only lasted three hours?”

  “In the morning.”

  “Oh.”

  Boone sat on the bed carefully, as if he were trying not to put all his weight on the mattress. As they stared at each other, she felt the opposite from what the previous night at Remi’s had been like with him: Instead of him being unusually easy to talk to, now she was tongue-tied worse than ever.

  But she had to speak. “I’m so sorry.”

  He recoiled. “For what? You didn’t have any control over any part of it.”

  Okay, so that was technically true. But as soon as she thought of what Boone had looked like, drugged on the floor in front of her sofa, she still felt responsible.

  Helania stared him right in the eye. “It is important for me to say this and for you to hear it. I did not know my needing was coming. If I had, I would have sent you away or not even let you in. You need to believe me.”

  “Helania, I totally believe you—”

  “Do you?”

  Boone shook his head in confusion. “Where is this coming from? I’ve never doubted you about anything.”

  Exhaustion made her more candid than she would have been otherwise. “I just want to make sure you know I’m not trying to force you into a mating or anything.”

  “Whoa . . .” He leaned forward, as if he might be able to understand her better if they were closer together physically. “Why would I ever think that?”

  “You’re a member of the glymera and have money. I don’t want you to think I’m looking for a free ride.”

  “Are you—do you remember the conversation we had last night? About how I might be poor and I asked you whether that would be a problem?”

  God, he was right, sh
e thought. Her brain . . . nothing was working right up there. And yet it was still a good point to be clear on.

  “I just think things need to be said out loud.”

  Boone steepled his hands and rested his chin on the tips of his fingers. “Fair enough.”

  They sat in awkward silence for a time, and all she could think about was how she wished the night before had ended differently. If only his emergency with that human woman had lasted a little longer, daylight would have kept them apart, and then none of this would have happened.

  “Doc Jane would like you to come into our clinic,” he said.

  Helania shook her head. “There’s no need to. This isn’t the first time for me. I’ve always been fine afterward.”

  “You need to be checked out.”

  “Why?” As he just stared at her, her thought process slowly came around. “I’m not pregnant.”

  “We had sex right before it hit.”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “You may be.”

  “I’m not.”

  As they got quiet again, she realized she was being unreasonable, but she couldn’t back down. The idea that she might be responsible for another living thing? She refused to contemplate the possibility—and she felt like as long as she didn’t open that door mentally, then that outcome would not be part of her destiny.

  She was a hermit who could barely take care of herself. How in the world . . .

  “Do you need to feed?” he asked.

  Helania looked up at him. “Feed?”

  As he popped his brows—like he was wondering if her mental lapse was something medically significant—she shook her head. “No, I don’t have to take a vein.”

  “When was the last time you did?”

  “Before Isobel died. She had a friend who let us take his vein, but I haven’t been in touch with him since she passed.”

  “Eight months?”

  “I don’t need to more than once a year, really.” God, if that wasn’t shining down on how infrequently she left the damn house, she didn’t know what a bright light was. “I’m fine—”