Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 113936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 570(@200wpm)___ 456(@250wpm)___ 380(@300wpm)
You aren’t a curse, he thought. Not at all.
“What happened next?” He held out another slice. “Did your intended show up?”
Kane was relieved when she accepted the piece.
“Not that night, no.” She shifted herself around. “But he came and found me a week later. I don’t know if he’d learned the truth about why the mating was happening or whether he decided he was just going to get out of the arrangement any way he could.”
“What did he do,” Kane said—and mostly kept the growl out of his voice.
“I, ah… it was in the nineteen eighties. I was volunteering at a human library because I had access to all those books about medicine I couldn’t afford to buy. I’d always wanted to be a nurse, you see, and I just wanted to learn. I was in charge of the last shift, and that meant I did the sweep of all the floors and locked up everything at midnight. I always left through the back door because I could dematerialize out of the shadows from there and he knew that. He was waiting for me.”
Kane closed his eyes. “What happened.”
“As I locked the dead bolt, I turned around and he stepped out next to me. I was so surprised to see him, I just froze. And that meant, when he threw the acid at me, he had good aim—”
“Goddamn it—”
“—and it was as I put my hands up to my face and started to scream… that he threw the salt at me.”
Which was why the scarring was permanent, Kane thought grimly. Vampires could heal back to their original state under most circumstances, provided that they were otherwise healthy and well-fed, and that the injuries were not as severe as his burns had been. Surgical scars, puncture wounds, gunshots… all of it could regenerate.
Unless there was salt involved. Salt sealed up the imperfections, making them permanent.
“I tried to get away from him.” Nadya made rolling motions with her arms like she was panicked and off-balance. “I was up on a set of steps. I couldn’t see, I was in pain, I was worried that he had more acid. I spun around and fell. I broke my leg when I landed and I’ve never screamed so loud in my life. I was just… screaming.”
Nadya sat there for the longest time, shaking her head, lost in the attack. “I clearly remember him standing over me. He was… shocked. But what did he think was going to happen? And then my father showed up. I wasn’t allowed to drive a car because I was a female, and my father always dropped me off and picked me up at the library. And it was as I was lying there that I realized I was the message back to my father. My injuries… were the message back to him that he shouldn’t have tried to force the sire and the son like that. Anyway, that’s the story, and that’s how I ended up in the prison camp.”
“Wait—what? Why were you blamed and sentenced for what he did?” Kane sat forward, like there was someone in the underground hideout he could take the injustice to. “How does that make any sense—”
“No, it wasn’t like that. My father immediately took me to a nurse who was of the species. My injuries were so severe, I had to stay with her, and she attended to me as if I were her own. As I got better, she started teaching me about taking care of patients. She was very kind to me, very generous with her knowledge. She was just starting her decline of old age, and I know that she was happy to have someone to pass on what she had learned over a lifetime.”
“But where were your parents?”
She shook her head sharply. Then had to clear her throat. “I made the nurse tell them I had died. That I couldn’t handle the pain and that I took myself out unto the sunlight and there was nothing left of me.”
Kane lowered his head. “Oh, Nadya—”
“It was better than them having to see me all the time. My father was consumed with guilt and regret, weeping at my bedside. It seemed kind of ironic that I became the curse for him as opposed to the sire of my intended. I just knew, if I went home, he’d never be able to move on and neither would my mahmen. At least if I were dead, they could grieve and find some kind of a new life.”
Kane couldn’t imagine any part of the situation she’d been put in. “And where did you go after you were with the nurse? I still don’t know how you ended up in the camp.”
“After I was as healed as I was going to get, I continued to stay with my mentor, but I kept hidden from everyone. Around the time I developed some stamina, she started going to the prison camp to treat the sick and injured. I wanted to go there with her because I needed to do something to be of use to someone. I always went draped, of course, and it became something we did together. It saved me, the purpose I found therein.” There was a silence. And then she accepted another apple slice from him. “Under her instruction, I took care of so many different males and females, and I got to be a really good nurse. When my mentor finally went unto the Fade, I assumed all her duties, and as her house was left unto her relations and I had nowhere to go, I began to stay in the camp.”