Chapter 38: 38

Scarlet was limp.

I had to swallow down the horrible feeling in my gut. She was unconscious. But that didn’t mean dead, not yet. Dead was a different kind of limp and unresponsive. 

Which meant there might still be hope for her. If only I knew how to help her.

We carried Scarlet all the way down the slope to Lee’s garage. Elias didn’t hesitate to throw his jacket onto the floor as a pillow for her while they tried to figure out what to do.

“Oh my god,” Lee was saying, over and over. The blood was endless and Scarlet had mentioned something about poison.

Sierra diligently started to put pressure on the puncture, but with an exit wound on the other side the blood just soaked into the concrete floor faster.

“I’ll call an ambulance,” Christian decided.

“No,” Lee and I said in unison.

I blinked and looked at her. She was scared, but she trusted me.

I took a deep breath, trying not to cry; and reached over to help Sierra keep pressure on the wound.

Her body was cold, which felt unnatural and bad, but her body had always been cold. To my relief, her chest continued to slowly rise and fall and after I started to put even more of my weight down on her side. She gasped and started to sit upright, just to grimace and let her head thud back down.

“Scarlet,” I said. My voice wavered against my will, trying to break. I swallowed, resetting my throat. “What do we need to do?” I asked.

She shook her head. Another rattling breath left her. It didn’t sound good.

“Do you need an antidote?” I asked. “Or— we should stop the bleeding but I don’t know how, and we can’t bring you to the hospital because— of your condition.”

Sierra frowned.

Scarlet shook her head again, and put her hand over mine. I looked down. Her blood had painted my fingers. It oozed thick and unnaturally maroon.

“It’ll be okay,” she said finally. Her voice was raspy.

The human side of me didn’t believe her for a second. She’d bled everywhere at this point. A normal person would’ve been dead by now, surely.

I swallowed. It only took minutes after someone slit their wrists for them to die. I wasn’t sure how many important blood vessels the spear had hit, but it had to be many. 

“I’m gonna go see what I can do about the blood trail,” Lee said and grabbed a watering can. She filled it with water before sliding outside and starting the arduous task of rinsing the drips of blood away.

“I’m sorry,” Scarlet said.

“Huh?” I asked. I leaned in. “For what?”

“For being some kind of crazy bitch,” she said. She licked her teeth pointedly. 

“It’s okay.” I told her.

Elias was hovering now, holding Christian’s hand to keep him calm.

“We’re all… a tad unhinged,” he offered as way of comfort. And it was true. We all had an issue or two we carried with us. 

Scarlet looked at where my hand was still putting pressure on her wound. My finger had snapped back into place at some point, but it was a dark purple color underneath all that blood.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated herself, and held my hand against her.

Lee came back and set the watering can down.

Elias threw an arm around Christian, who still had his phone in hand, looking like he was fighting the urge to call an ambulance. Scarlet’s blood was slowing, though. It was even thicker and more viscous now. Like mucus. I wondered how exactly one became a vampire. I wondered a lot if her blood slowing was a good or bad thing. In a human, I imagined it meant the blood supply was running out. But in a vampire?

Scarlet stirred beneath our hands, and started to sit up. 

“Stay still,” I said. My hand clamped down on her, trying to stifle the resulting gush of blood. But she simply gently put her hand on mine and then picked it up off the wound.

“I’m okay,” she said. “The pain is going down.”

I tried not to cry.

She looked down at her injury. Her skin was ruptured pretty substantially. The spear had gone all the way through. 

She poked at the wound, inviting another fresh ooze of maroon slime.

“He missed,” she said matter-of-factly.

I didn’t care. I threw my arms around her and held her tightly. “I love you,” I said.

She was frozen beneath me but very slowly, I felt her arms snake around me to hug me back. She buried her face against my neck. “I love you, too,” she whispered. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“No,” I told her. But she pulled away from me, letting her head go limp against the floor. “Stay with me,” I said. I didn’t know a lot about how medical things worked but I knew losing consciousness from blood loss was very very bad.

Even worse, her body went limp underneath me.

Sierra looked at me with a grim expression. 

“N-no,no,no,” I stuttered. I tried shaking her, but she was unresponsive. “I– we have to do something.”

Lee  frowned. “What can we do?”

“Call an ambulance?” Christian suggested.

“No,” Sierra told him this time. He looked extremely confused. 

“Uhhh— knife. Knife,” I decided. “I need a knife.”

Elias got his pocket knife out and offered it to me.

I took it without blinking and pulled my sleeve back.

“Whoa wait, Lexi,” Lee put a hand over my exposed wrist. “Let me do this. You’ve already…” she trailed off. 

“What?” I asked. “What do you know…?”

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“Just let me, I know what you’re doing.” She took the knife from me, kneeled down and pulled the bracelets off her wrist to expose the flesh there.

The blade didn’t cut the first time she pulled it across. I stared as she repeated the motion, this time with more force and a bright red line followed as the knife carved through. A second later, fat drips of blood started streaming down her arm. She angled the limb so they ran down to her fingers.

I didn’t need the vague head motion she gave me to know what she needed. I cradled Scarlet’s head, her lips parted on their own.

“Wait…” Christian mumbled. “What?” he asked Ellias.

Lee let her blood stream into the girl’s mouth. Scarlet didn’t wake up at first but after a few minutes she started to stir and licked at the cut before it seemed to click in her struggling brain to drink.

Drink she did. She latched onto Lee’s wrist and sucked. Lee grimaced but bore through the pain until Scarlet finally let go, looking dizzy.

“Lexi?” she asked.

“I’m right here,” I reassured her, pushing the hair from her face.

“I really like you,” she admitted. Her skin was even paler than before.

“I know,” I said. I pet her hair some more. I didn’t know if it was at all comforting or not. “What do you need?” I asked.

“I’ll be okay,” she said. “Some blood would be nice but I’ll survive.”

I didn’t hesitate to offer my wrist. She stared at it, uncertain. Lee was still putting pressure on her cut to stop the bleeding and looked concerned at my willingness to endanger myself.

“Wait…” Christian said. He looked at Elias and leaned closer. “Is she… a vampire or something?”

Ellias rubbed his face. “Yes,” he said. “I thought that would be obvious by now.”

I ignored them and instead put my wrist to Scarlet’s lips. She didn’t bite right away. She stared up at me. Her teeth poked at me before she made the decision and broke the skin. I could tell it was a tiny cut compared to what Lee had done to herself.

Scarlet still sucked on it greedily. Her bleeding had slowed to barely a trickle and was now just barely stopped.

By the time she let her head lean back, my bleeding had stopped too. I let her rest and gently lowered her head back down to Ellias’ jacket.

There was a long and very awkward pause as Lee fetched a bandaid to put over the fang mark on my wrist.

“Sooo…. Should we talk about this?” Sierra asked.

“It’s fine,” I sighed. “We don’t have to.”

“You’re dating a vampire,” Lee pointed out.

I instinctively pressed closer to Scarlet. “We’re not dating,” I defended myself. “We’re just friends.”

Scarlet stirred next to me. I looked down to find her scowling.

“Uh…” I realized what I’d just said. “No, what I mean is… we haven’t…” My heart pounded. The blood roared in my ears as I felt my face flush.

Scarlet, with a tremendous amount of effort, sat upright next to me and took my face in her hands again.

I wanted to run. I felt my pulse charging in my veins with the pure panic of the moment. Somehow this was worse than having them all witness Scarlet drink my blood.

“W–wai–” I started to protest but Scarlet pressed her forehead to mine and I shut up as the heat turned from panic to need. Her lips couldn’t be half an inch from mine.  “Are we dating?” I managed. 

“Yes,” Scarlet said.

She pressed her forehead to mine more.

I swallowed before slowly angling my head. Her lips were chapped, probably from the bloodloss or stress. But I didn’t care. Once we were touching all I wanted was to hug her. She leaned against me as I pulled her very close, and felt the tears start to come again.

“Aww,” I heard Lee sigh from the sidelines. It jolted me back to the present.

“We have to get this cleaned up,” I decided. The blood was everywhere. Sierra and I had it all up our arms from putting pressure on the wound.

Lee picked up her watering can again, “I think I can get rid of the visual evidence without much trouble but the scent trail might be harder.”

I looked at Scarlet. “Will they be able to track you by scent?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’d like to go home,” she told me.

“We can get things cleaned up here,” Elias put in. “The two of you should get some rest… and some honeymoon time.”

I flushed again. “Let’s go,” I said. I helped Scarlet to her feet. She needed a lot of support to walk in even a vague sense.

“You can use my bedroom,” Lee said. “I’ll get some spare clothes for her, too.”

I nodded in gratitude. Scarlet clung to me tighter, scared of the strange place.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I reassured. “I think it’ll be too much to bring you all the way to my place right now.”

She nodded against me. “Okay,” she agreed.

Lee brought us to her bedroom and opened the bathroom up for us and ran to fetch bandages.

I helped Scarlet out of her clothes. Unlike the last time though, there was so much blood it didn’t feel steamy at all. Rather, she was in urgent need of getting cleaned up, bandaged and put into bed to get some rest.

Her wounds, I noted, probably needed something better than gauze pads, tape and ace bandages wound round and round her torso, but that was all we had. If I knew someone that wouldn’t ask questions then I’d go to them to get her proper help, but the hospital would tell the police and the police would then interrogate Scarlet about why she was at the scene of what was probably a crime. I wasn’t sure how vampire hunters dealt with getting hit over the head with a metal pipe but I couldn’t risk it. Not to mention, the doctors would find Scarlet’s anatomy interesting at the very least.

After she was all bandaged up I helped her into some of Lee’s old clothes and put her in the bed. She fell asleep fast, but stayed sleeping on her back, probably for the sake of not disrupting her wounds.

I sighed and leaned my head against the wall, my back was to the foot of the bed. I stared at the poster I’d given Lee as a birthday present a few years ago.

When had she figured it all out? I wondered. And what did I do to deserve her?

I couldn’t sleep. I felt dizzy and nauseous, and the idea of letting my body shut down for a few hours was immensely appealing. But the idea of leaving Scarlet to wake up or die alone was horrible. So I stayed up, my back shoved against the uncomfortable wood and listened to Scarlet’s breathing. 

Every time it slowed or got quiet as she shifted in her sleep, which sounded very restless, my heart stopped for a moment before I picked out the tell tale signs of life.

It was a long night.

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