My Precious Nightmare

Chapter 50: Shared Blood

Husani mentally stayed held up between the grinding bars and the glassless window frame. It screamed as Morianton's bloodied wrist slipped from his grasp. It dropped through the window and caught him again, for better or for worse.

But hundreds of years of reflexes snapped him out of the window, allowing the squealing motor to shut the bars the rest of the way. His arms went back around Lea. He cloaked himself in shadows thicker than ever and took to the sky, even as sun-like spotlights switched on and lifted to the clouds like the great, searching eyes of a leviathan. He didn't waste time climbing, but shot out far from the penitentiary's boundaries. Only when the city's lights reached for him did he start to climb. When his back protested and his skin hardened with cold fell into a glide, attention turning to the girl in his arms. He gently put the pads of his fingers to her neck. A warbling, too-fast heartbeat skittered against them.

He couldn't stay up here long. She couldn't.

After only a moment's debate, he figured out his location and pointed himself towards home.

Countless nights before had he flown this way, thoughts only to his safe, warm apartment. The inattention of humans and their modern culture of moving kept his agelessness safe for a remarkably long time. It didn't escape him what a blessing it was to have a home.

An aching longing fisted in his chest as he silently touched down on his tiny landing. His bruised wings withdrew into his flesh with shivers of relief. Someone had been kind enough to lock his door. He found his spare key taped to the gutter and elbowed himself in. Only then did he drop his shadow cover and lock the door behind him. He gentle set Lea in his bean bag, with the arm with her IV propped up and laid out straight. He hadn't been able to bring the pole, but he'd brought the little machine, which chirped every so often as it dispensed another few drops of blood. He checked the tube for kinks, threw some velvet bags of rice into the microwave for warming, then dropped down to take her vitals.

Despite the bag already being half empty, her rapid heartbeat didn't slow. If anything, it increased as her heart struggled to keep blood circling through her body. Her lips still had that gray-white tinge. He held the back of his hand to her mouth and the puffs of air were light, shallow, and weak.

She was dying.

He had watched others die like this whenever the monster had pulled back just a moment too soon and he woke up before they'd stopped breathing. He'd weakly tended to soldiers, thick with shock, bleeding out their last. He'd been by his mother's side when, once, a young mother bled to death shortly after giving birth.

Seeing those familiar signs in the girl who, only days before, smiled as she allowed him to hold her while he slept held a stark and brilliant reality, as though the rest of his life had been a dream or a drunk daze.

His brain exploded with life, buzzing so quickly he could barely keep up.

If she has vampire blood, the human blood will be too diluted to help. Her body will have been adapted to work with the highly concentrated, nutrient dense vampiric blood—it wasn't—blood type? What had her blood tasted of—type—

He found it and dug his teeth into his arm. Stomach turning rust and rot caked his tongue, but he forced down the gag reflex, forced himself to taste deeper for type, type—

Yes!

He jumped to his pantry. A jar of preserved thyme crashed as he yanked out the container of plastic wrapped needles. He already had one out and in his own vein when he jumped back to the blood bag. The tube came out with a sick pop, then onto the other end of the IV in his arm.

Let this work, let this work, it has to work.

His too-fast thoughts fed him facts he didn't want to think about: if his thick blood would diffuse as quick as normal blood; if it was too late; if her body would accept straight vampiric blood; if she would die—she would die, tiny, cold, chapped blue lips parted as though asleep—if she'd finally change--

Though his knees knocked into each other and a hysterical wail gathered at the back of his tongue, he kept upright to keep his blood pressure up, pushing his blood into Lea's beneath him.

The bright red human blood in the IV quickly turned to dark maroon.

What if she doesn't wake up? What if it takes too much and my instincts take over? What if she—

She's dying. She's dying. She might be already dead, just reach down--

"SHUT UP!" The scream didn't even sound like him.

Tears blurred his vision. His throat kept sticking, forcing him to breath in clumpy gasps.

You've taken too much. Her organs will already be damaged beyond repair from going this far. First kidneys, then intestines—cells suffocating by the trillions—

Diagrams of all the books he had read on cellular metabolism in oxygen deprivation rushed through his mind's eye at lightning speeds.

"Shut up!" He hadn't the breath. It came out a gasp. "Lea."

He had to hold her. He had to feel her heartbeat. But he had to stay standing. If there was any chance, any hope—but she would be freezing—then he remembered the rice bags sitting in the microwave and cursed. There could be no going now. He couldn't risk upsetting his needle and getting it clogged. But he had only thrown a blanket on her, he had only—

"Lea," he gasped. "Lea. Lea."

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When my husband got to hold our firstborn son for the first time, he cried. Then proceeded to chew out the doctor and nurses for not giving me food that I was weakly asking for and then glared at them all the rest of the way, all while clutching his newborn.