"Yes," I agreed, turning back to the fire.
The questions were... who... and why?
Red could be a lot to handle if you weren't used to her. She could be cocky and forward. She liked to push buttons.
Time moves differently down there. For us, it had been a year and a half, give or take. For her, it had been decades. Long enough to possibly make some enemies, push someone's buttons.
We didn't usually attack one another. That was the base, animalistic shit that the humans did. We punished the humans. That was where we took our rage out.
At least, that was how it used to be, how it had always been.
But who knew what had changed since then.
"Was this commonplace?" I asked, hating having to defer to Bael, but recognizing that I was not the expert in this one way.
"Lashing each other?" he clarified. "No."
"Did it ever happen?"
"Not that I ever saw."
"Hopefully once she is healed, she will be in her right mind again. Then she can tell us what happened," I said, shrugging.
I was a facts-based man. It seemed a waste of time to speculate, bat around ideas that may or may not be true. It was better to wait, to get the information right from the source.
One glance into my bedroom showed Lenore fussing over the nurse's head, muttering under her breath. Whether it was words of encouragement or actual spells, I had no idea. I didn't give a shit. So long as she got her up and working on Red.
"What?" I asked when Drex jerked his chin toward the front room.
"Aram," he said, swirling his glass before taking a sip.
Sighing, I gave up my plans of grabbing a book and getting lost for a while before the nurse woke up and could give us some answers.
"Aram," I called, walking into the front room to find him sitting off the edge of the couch, his head buried in his hands.
"She didn't deserve this."
"No one is saying she did," I said.
"No one is worried about her. You just tossed her on a bed with a gag in her mouth."
"Because I needed to go get someone to help her. I did that. I did what I could do. I think we can all agree that hand-holding and comforting is not my department."
It was more of his, though.
And judging by the blood all over him, he had tried.
Unsuccessfully, it seemed, by his defeated posture.
"She shrieked when I tried to touch her hand."
"She's in pain, Aram," I reminded him.
It was easy to forget pain since we so seldom felt it, and when we did, it was fleeting. And Aram had led a much more charmed life on Earth than I had.
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.
Then, apparently, dragged me inside and sicced his brainwashed female friend on me.
"How about no?" I shot back, jaw tight.
I should have been scared. But I found a surprising amount of anger coursing through my system, making my skin feel electric, my jaw tight.
"What are you going to do? Hit me again?" I added.
"You hit your own fucking head," he reminded me, looking infuriatingly amused by that fact.
I didn't want to think it, but it was impossible not to notice, even in this situation.
The man was gorgeous.
Like Adonis, Greek sculpture, belongs in an art gallery or fancy cologne ad kind of gorgeous.
It was the perfect, classical bone structure with a chiseled jaw, a Greek nose, a high, proud forehead, and stern brows over ice blue eyes that almost seemed to have flecks of a different color in them, but he was too far away to make them out.
His hair was blond and perfectly styled even after having worn a ski mask to kidnap me.
He was dressed like he was planning on spending time outdoors with a tan grandpa sweater over a hooded sweatshirt.
It was hot in the house. Like uncomfortably so. How he wasn't sweating like crazy was beyond me.
"Maybe I wouldn't have hit my head if I wasn't trying to escape a violent psychopath kidnapper," I said, shooting him my best mean face.
He completely ignored me, looking over at the other woman instead. "Lenore, go on. Ly has been waiting impatiently in your room," he said as the woman gave me one last long look before moving away.
"Let me go," I demanded, trying for strong, but with the absence of the woman, I was feeling a lot less comfortable.
Why would he send her away?
So he could do terrible things to me without an audience?
"No," he said, moving over toward the bed, looking down at the woman there.
"What did you do to her?" I demanded, anger rising again as she writhed in pain.
"Nothing."
"Oh, so she hit herself all over and cut herself all over too?" I asked. "How coincidental that things like that keep happening around you, huh?"
"You're not here to run your mouth," he informed me in that cool tone of his.
"Why am I here then?" I asked, trying to wriggle my wrists around, get them loose, but he had the cuffs on me too tight.
"To heal her," he said, wincing a bit as the woman on the bed shrieked against her gag when he tried to brush her bloody hair out of her face.
"Why wouldn't you bring her to the hospital?" I asked.
"For reasons that are none of your fucking business. Just get over here and look her over. Tell me what you need to fix her, and I will have someone get it."
Not sure I had a choice, I rose from the couch, feeling my vision swim for a moment before it settled and I could continue across the room, going to the opposite side of the bed than him.
The woman was completely covered in blood.
And it was no wonder.
Because her back looked like it had been whipped, the lacerations deep and long, criss-crossing her entire back from shoulders down to lower hips. There was even one deep lash mark across her butt.
"How long ago did she get these?" I asked, somehow able to think past my kidnapping and focus on the task at hand. But as I raised my hands to try to push her hair out of the way, the cuffs were a painful reminder of my situation.
I raised them at him, giving him a hard look.
To that, he searched my face for a long moment before moving around the bed, coming around to tower over me, reaching out with one hand to encircle my wrist to see the lock, then pulling out the key.
There was not—was absolutely not—a strange little electrical current that coursed over my skin when his fingertips brushed me. Because that would make no sense whatsoever.
"Don't even think about running," he told me, voice low, lethal, drawing my head up to look at his face. "I have men everywhere," he added, holding my gaze for a long second, making me realize that those specks I'd seen in his light blue eyes were actually, well, red. Except that made no sense. Because people didn't have red accents in their eyes.
"I'm not going to promise to be a good little captive," I told him, watching as his lips twitched ever so slightly before they fell back into their stern line.
"Fix Red," he demanded, pulling the cuffs off fully, then moving toward the other side of the room, leaning back against the wall near the door.
I tried not to notice, but there was no way to avoid feeling his gaze on me as I reached out toward the woman—Red—moving her hair, so I could see the outer edges of the wounds better.
They weren't puffy and red like they were older, like they had time to get infected. They seemed fresh.
"These all need to be stitched," I told him, checking out each individual slice for any tiny sign of infection that would need to be left open to drain.
"Give me a list of items," he demanded, curt, no-nonsense.
"A suture kit. Gauze. Saline solution. Antibiotic cream. Some actual antibiotics. Oral. She needs to be in a hospital," I insisted, looking over at him, shaking my head. "This is bad. She needs medical attention."
"She has it. That's why you're here."
"This isn't a sterile environment. I don't have—"
"I told you to give me a fucking list," he interrupted me. "Whatever it is, I can get it," he told me, not a hint of uncertainty in his words. And I guess if you were willing to kidnap a nurse to treat someone, stealing medical supplies wasn't a big deal.
"Everything I just mentioned," I said, feeling it was useless to argue. If she wasn't going to go to the hospital, then I had to treat her to the best of my ability. "Pain medicine. She's screaming. You don't hear her screaming?" I asked, voice tense.
"I have someone getting her pain medicine," he told me, shrugging. "What else?"
Ignoring him, I moved around the bed, inspecting some minor cuts and bruises under the blood on the woman's thighs, legs. They were worse on the bottom of her feet.
"Oh, God," I hissed, feeling my stomach flip over, making me need to take a steadying breath.
"What?" the man asked, not sounding any more concerned than he'd been a moment before.
"Someone removed... did you do this?" I asked, whipping around, ignoring the swirling of my vision, shooting daggers at him.
"Did I do what?" he asked, voice just as cutting as mine.
"Remove all her toenails," I clarified, even thinking of it making me feel sick again. I had a tough stomach when it came to all the various injuries a body could have inflicted upon it.
Two things freaked me out.
Toenails broken off.
And piercings being ripped out.
It was probably because they reminded me of horror movies I'd seen at way too young an age, ones that had stuck with me no matter how hard I tried to shake them.
"What?" he asked, pushing off the wall, taking long-legged strides across the room, moving to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me, bending forward to inspect her feet.
I felt a wave of relief when I realized he hadn't done this. He wouldn't need to inspect his handiwork if he had.
So maybe I wasn't going to end up on a bed covered in my own blood after all.
When the man straightened, I didn't see the shock or horror or disgust I felt myself, just a blankness, a resolve even.
"Do you need anything specific for that?"
"Uhm, not right now. When they heal—if they heal—she might want some glue."
"Glue?"
"To put on the nail beds," I told him. "Your nail beds are sensitive. They feel sore if they are exposed. The glue would protect them and stop the soreness."
"Got it. Anything else?" he asked, not bothering to move out of my way, making me squeeze in front of him to move to the other side of the bed, my whole back brushing against his front.
The Healer (Seven Sins MC Book 2) Page 3
