“I’m so tired,” Nick whispered. He shuddered all over. “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Nancy said, fierce and biting. “I swear to you, you’re going to live through this. You’re going into shock, but I’ve got this and the ambulance will be here soon. You’re going to be okay. You are.”
“Is it—”
“No, it’s not that bad,” Nancy said. “Not that bad at all. I can have this fixed up in no time. Absolutely.”
“That thing, it—”
“It bit you.” Nancy’s voice was shaking and brittle.
All of the color behind Nick’s eyelids stained to black and warm, easeful currents of sleepiness lulled him deeper into himself. As he lost consciousness, he couldn’t help wondering why Nancy was afraid. The worst part was over.
29
Nick’s stay at Sparrow Falls Memorial was much shorter than anyone thought it should be. He checked himself out of the hospital two days after he was attacked, refusing to listen to reason or logic about the situation or his condition. Even though he was the injured one and in a world of pain, Nick’s phobia of hospitals would not allow him to simply lie back and convalesce like a good trauma victim. He understood just fine that he’d suffered a very serious injury; he’d been present for the event after all. Every time he forgot and moved his left arm it felt like there was a nest of fire ants under his skin. He felt feverish and sick, joints and muscles achy like he had a mild case of the flu that would not quit.
He also had a cousin who wasn’t only a doctor, but his nearest neighbor, too. Nick assured everyone—including Nancy—that he would be fine. He’d been given his rabies treatment, he had painkillers and clean bandages. More than that, he had Wes to stand guard and make sure he didn’t toddle off to the bathroom without assistance. If Wes was unavailable for nursing duties, there was always Hylas to cheerfully fill in and pepper Nick with questions until one or both of them dozed off.
More than the hospital and the cops milling about his sickbed like a bunch of sharks as they got his version of events; regardless of the pain and low, sick feeling, Nick had other problems. Problems he couldn’t even begin to analyze when he was beset by cops and hospital smell all the time. He wanted home where it was quiet. He wanted smells that weren’t so overwhelmingly strong they made his eyes water and sounds that weren’t so loud it was like having them forcibly shoved into his ear canals and battered against his eardrums.
Once he was at home things didn’t get better. The crickets singing at night stopped being the long-standing lullaby they had always been. Their songs were the grinding of hellish organic machinery churning away just out of sight. When Nick stepped outside his second morning home, he took a deep breath and knew that a fox had come through the yard not long before sunrise. He had never smelled a fox before, he had no basis for comparison in regards to fox-smell versus every other smell in his olfactory library. Yet, Nick did know and not only that, he knew it was a female fox in estrus, scent-marking as she made her way across Nick’s forested front yard.
He tipped his head back and took an even deeper breath, holding the scent of the fox in his lungs like it was a fine wine meant to be savored. Overhead, a hawk wheeled through the blue topaz sky, eyeing a squirrel on an exposed branch. Nick saw the concerned flick of the squirrel’s tail, heard its warning bark. Then realized there was no way he should have been able to see the squirrel or the hawk that well. They were both too far away.
He went back inside and did not leave the trailer for the rest of the day or for several days following it, afraid of what he would see or hear or smell.
Inside, Nick watched television with the volume turned down low while anxiety gnawed at his gut and gave him indigestion. Something was wrong because what was happening to him was not normal. The issue was exacerbated by the fact that Nick did not feel bad any longer. His queasy, weak flu-like symptoms had disappeared and Nick felt better than he had in years. He’d been in good health before, but he felt invigorated; renewed somehow, like he could run a marathon and climb a mountain all in the same day and never get tired.
His wounds itched fiercely beneath their wrappings of gauze and he growled through his clenched teeth at the nuisance of it. Nick went still as the sound died away in his throat as abruptly as it had come. His brows drew together in confusion until he decided it was a fluke. He hadn’t heard it right was all; he had been distracted by the ungodly fucking itch in every single hole that son of a bitch had poked in him.
Nick tried to recreate the sound and froze when an even deeper, louder growl rolled in his throat. It was not the sound of a human trying to growl, it was the sound of a large animal growling. Nick tried to chalk it up to one more weird detail on his ever-evolving canvas that painted him a nice, sweet picture of Bizarro World. Yet he could not shake the heavy sense of unease and dread that shivered in his nerves and made his muscles tremble faintly, quivering. Expectant.
Nick rubbed his face and decided that the best way to deal with that was to toss back one of his handy-dandy narcotic painkillers then take a nap.
Impressed with his own sound advice, Nick got up, took the pills off the kitchen table and shook out two of them. He washed them down with the bottle of whiskey Tobias had sent along with a Get Well Soon card. The whiskey was good and he took it down the hall with him and sipped from the bottle until he began to feel drowsy and lay down.
A little while later he woke up to a sensation like having a mouthful of burning razor blades. He sat up with a gasp, automatically reaching to touch his mouth, wondering if he had bitten his tongue in his sleep. His hand came away wet with blood and upon further inspection, Nick found his chin wet with it, too. It had run from the corner of his mouth out onto his right cheek and soaked into his pillowcase.
As he inspected the mess on his face and bedclothes, blood filled his mouth again and he swallowed it reflexively. Hot, salty copper blood ran down his throat and he swallowed again. He opened his mouth and prodded at his teeth with a tentative finger, wincing when the tip brushed against one of his incisors. That didn’t feel right.
Nick got up from the bed and rushed to the bathroom to inspect his mouth, worrying that he’d broken one of the caps on his teeth. He flipped on the light and went straight to the mirror. The sight of his bloody face reflected back at him looked like someone had punched him repeatedly. Nick opened his mouth, not worried about the blood on his face, only in the source of it. His teeth were streaked with red and watery pink; his gums throbbed and burned. Leaning close to the mirror he inspected his teeth for any damage and reeled back at what he saw.
He wasn’t missing any teeth, he had grown new ones; four new sharp, pointy teeth where his blunt, barely pointed incisors had once rested comfortably. Two on top and two on bottom, as though his old incisors had been shoved out of the way and replaced by a maniac dentist. Maybe he was hallucinating, maybe it was all the blood on his teeth making them look strangely formed because the four sharp fangs in his mouth were not the teeth Nick had been born with. His first reaction was to think he had busted the caps on his teeth after all and they had broken at odd angles. However, all of his front teeth had been present and accounted for at the time of his incarceration and subsequent detoxification.
Nick turned on the faucet, cupped water in his hands and rinsed out his bloody mouth. He spat three mouthfuls of rusty pink water and watched it swirl down the drain. His gums still ached, the pain centralized around the base of each of his impostor teeth, but he did not think his mouth was bleeding any longer. He looked into the mirror again and opened his mouth, fighting the urge to flinch away from his reflection.
The new teeth were still there, white and sharp, teeth made for gripping and holding onto prey. Nick shuddered all over. He pulled his lips up and away from his gums to double check, like that would reveal it all to be some kind of elaborate hoax. But no. They were his teeth, set firmly in his pink gums; thread-thin rivulets of blood wending down over the smooth white surface of
each.
“What the fuck?” Nick snapped at his reflection. The dried blood on his face was wet again and dripping off his chin like running watercolor paint. “Where are my teeth?”
It occurred to him that if they had fallen out—and that looked more likely all the time—then he had probably swallowed them in his sleep while the new teeth grew in.
“Fuck! What the fuck’s going on here?” Nick smacked the mirror when no answers were forthcoming from his bewildered reflection. The glass cracked beneath the force; crazed, jagged lines radiating around his palm. Nick jerked his hand away and shook his head as he turned on his heel to go back down the hall.
It bit you.
Nancy’s voice was sudden and loud in Nick’s head. Yes, it had bitten him; that weird, mutated animal had latched onto him like shark on a seal, but Nick didn’t have any kind of diseases. All of his tests were clean and the rabies treatments were just an extra precaution, a just in case kind of thing since rabies took a while to incubate. Either way, Nick was not sick, he had caught no potentially fatal illness from the wolf-headed thing that night. Even if he had, there was no such thing as a disease that made you grow new teeth.
Then what was happening to him?
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Nick said as he snatched the bottle of whiskey off his nightstand then marched back down the hall.
Nancy would be by soon to change his bandages before she went in for her shift in the ER. She came every evening before work and every morning after. She had tried to set up camp in Nick’s living room, but he wouldn’t have that and had told her she didn’t need to babysit him.
Only after he found out she was crashing in Hylas’s spare bedroom did he really get it and he’d felt like a prick. Nancy had wanted to stay with him to keep an eye on him, but she was also scared half to death to stay in her own home now. The home she had been born in (right on the kitchen floor, Nick’s uncle was pleased to tell anyone who asked—and those who didn’t) was no longer the safe place it always had been. To make it worse, her pigheaded cousin insisted on staying in his trailer out in the woods where there was no one to even hear him scream. Not that Nancy’s house was in the center of a metropolis, but there were closer neighbors on that part of the property; Nick was on his own so far back in the woods.
He sat down on the couch with a thump and drank his whiskey in between prodding his new teeth like a sore spot he couldn’t leave alone. He thought he should show Nancy, then changed his mind. She was a good doctor, but even she wouldn’t know what to make of this newest development in Nick’s ongoing Bizarro World saga. He was warming to the idea of Bizarro World though and was thinking they should change the name of Sparrow Falls to that.
“It’d be a better fit,” he mumbled into the neck of the whiskey bottle before he took another swallow.
He heard Nancy pull up outside and got up to go let her in. He opened the door and stood there, watching Nancy get her stuff together and get out of the car. He didn’t realize he was sniffing the air until he noticed that the fox had been through again only moments before Nancy arrived. Its scent and scent markings were still fresh on the light breeze. He backed farther inside the doorway when he realized that he had been sniffing around for something a lot more specific than a horny vixen. He’d been scenting the air for it and listening to the sounds of the nighttime world, still too loud to Nick’s ears, but more bearable than they had been. He was adjusting and as he tilted his head, listening to the whippoorwills crying and the bob-white quails answering back, he found the early springtime noise to be gloriously raucous. That much racket meant Nick’s little corner of the world was safe and secure.
“They better get my windows fixed soon,” Nancy said by way of greeting as she walked past Nick into the trailer. “At this rate, I am going to fail my next piss test at work because of Hylas smoking the place out all the time. He fell asleep microwaving a pizza this morning—which you are not supposed to do, by the way—and hit his head on the floor. That was five stitches before I ever saw my bed this morning. I worry about him.”
Nick laughed as he shut and locked the door then went to sit on the kitchen table so Nancy could look him over. “I do, too, but what can we do?” Nick asked.
“Convince him to go live with Tobias so someone is there to deal with him when he falls over?” Nancy suggested. “It’s not safe for him to live alone with narcolepsy as severe as his. Especially not when he smokes pot all the damn time and only makes himself sleepier.” She pushed her hair out of her face then gestured at Nick. “Off with your shirt.”
“Better than off with my head,” Nick said as he unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off.
“That would be bad, yes,” Nancy said as she began peeling off the tape holding the gauze in place. “How are you feeling today?”
Like I woke up in an alternate reality.
“Good,” Nick said. “Really good.”
Aside from some lingering pain in his mouth, it was the truth. He was a little drunk and a lot freaked out, but physically, he felt fantastic.
“That’s great, Nicky,” Nancy said. “I worry about you, too.” She paused while unwrapping the gauze from his upper arm and looked at him. “Do we need to talk about what happened? We haven’t done that, you know. I’ve talked to the cops—I’ve lied to them—and so have you. But me and you, we haven’t said a word to each other about it.”
Nick shifted in his seat and thought about it a second before he shrugged. He did not want to discuss it at all, but if Nancy needed to talk about it then he would listen. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Nancy frowned and went back to unwrapping Nick’s arm like a grisly present. “I don’t know,” Nancy said. “It’s just so… I think about it all the time, to the point of distraction. I think if it wasn’t for work then I’d just sit on my ass all day and ponder the impossibility of what I saw. It defies logic and I like logic, Nick. I can’t pretend it didn’t happen though, I’m no good at that, never have been. What I saw was real and still, I wonder: What did I see? Because I can’t believe that it was a… was… Well. You know.”
Nick grunted, but that was as close as he was going to get to acknowledging what he’d seen. Or rather, what Nancy was suggesting they had seen. Wes said it was a werewolf, Nancy seemed to be leaning that way, too. Nick personally wanted no part of that crazy shit whatsoever. There had been a moment he had thought that was exactly what it was. He had looked into those human eyes (grey, like summer moonlight) and that wicked, toothy grin and for a few eternal seconds the word WEREWOLF had been an alarm blaring inside his head.
The solution to that skewed bit of fantasy was simple: Werewolves did not exist. Natural animals did though and what they had seen was some kind of mutated wolf. That was scary as hell because that thing was a real beast, but it was a lot more acceptable to Nick’s way of thinking than believing it was a werewolf.
“It wasn’t what you’re trying to say it was,” Nick said.
“Then just what the hell was it, smartass?” Nancy asked him. She huffed an exasperated breath as she finished the unveiling of the gore-fest that was Nick’s arm and shoulder.
He was about to happily answer her with his sound theory that it was a mutant animal, not some folkloric relic come a’calling on them all when Nancy said, “Whoa.” Her voice was low; hushed with shock.
“What? What is it?” Nick asked as he craned his neck to try and look at his shoulder. That was not easy and all he really did was manage to pull uncomfortably at his neck. “Is it gross? Infected?”
“No,” Nancy said. “No, it’s fine. It’s… Jesus, Nick.”
“What?” Nick said. “Tell me what the hell the problem is.”
“It’s not a problem,” Nancy said. She spoke haltingly, each word pulled out of her mouth like she was talking in a dream.
“Then what the fuck is it?” Nick was getting anxious. She said there wasn’t a problem with the wound, but the way she was behaving said exactly the opposite.
Nick looked at her, but she was staring at his arm then leaning around to look at the back of his shoulder. Then she repeated the process. Her eyes were big and her face was pale as she licked her lips and finally looked at him.
“It’s healing really, really well,” Nancy said. She licked her lips again. “Much faster than I would have ever imagined something this severe could. It’s some kind of miracle.”
“Bullshit,” Nick said. “What’s so special about it healing a little quicker than you thought?”
“Nick. That’s not what I mean. I mean they’re almost totally healed. Some of the shallower punctures are healed.” Nancy closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Nick pulled back from her. She did not appear elated by what he thought was good news. She looked afraid.
“Bullshit,” Nick said again.
“Go look in the mirror and then come back here and tell me bullshit,” Nancy said.
“Fine then, I will.”
Nick got down from the table and went down the hall to the bathroom, where he spent a good fifteen minutes examining the massive bite on his arm and shoulder. The wounds were indeed nearly healed; some of the smaller punctures were already gone, just like Nancy said. All that remained were livid scars the color of raw liver, such a deep red as to be nearly purple. The punctures that had not yet completely healed were well on their way, scabs dark and dry amid the bristles of stitches that Nick no longer needed.
Much like Nancy, Nick did not feel good about seeing such amazing progress. Such rapid healing was unnatural and it did not bode well for the lifespan of Nick’s carefully constructed house of cards made from denial and avoidance.
He did not look at his arm again before turning away from the mirror and flipping off the bathroom light.
“So that’s not so bad,” Nick said when he walked back into the kitchen.
Nancy was leaning against the counter with her arms crossed, hugging herself. She looked up at Nick when he walked back into the kitchen and forced a smile. “Sure,” she said. “You’re the easiest patient I’ve ever had to deal with.”
Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 35
