Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
You got all kinds of contusions, bruises, and broken things. Especially if a foreign body four times the size of a beer keg busted through the front windshield.
Noses… for example. Just as a hypothetical.
Now, given that V was the smarty-pants of the Brotherhood, he had a corollary skill that helped in the aftermath of these kinds of vehicular meet-and-greets. He was professionally trained as a paramedic, and that meant over the course of the last hundred years or so, he had attended… fuck, he didn’t know how many patients in all kinds of tits-up situations. Compound fractures? Been there. Pleural effusions? Done that. Stab wounds, gunshots, blunt force trauma. The aforementioned contusions, bruises, concussions, and broken bones.
The one thing he could not deal with? On any goddamn level at all?
“Here, let’s get you on the bed.”
Annnnnnnnnnnd there it was. The well-meaning, perfectly appropriate, royal-we offer to help the patient to the horizontal.
Bonus if it came with a sympathetic smile.
“I’m fine,” he gritted out.
Dr. Jane Whitcomb, trauma surgeon extraordinaire, all-around female of worth, and the only shellan he would ever have, paid absolutely no attention to the brush-off. She kept her arm around his waist to make sure his leaning-tower-of-hellren stayed right where it was against her, their forward motion molasses slow because of his limping.
Which was nothing compared to the pounding pain of his schnoz.
The closer they got to their mated bed, the crankier he became, so he kept his mouth shut. Better to save his energy for when they argued about her helping him to light up a hand-rolled. That was going to be loads of fun.
“Here we go,” she murmured.
“I can do this by myself,” he countered in his very best toddler.
“I know you can, but you’re a fall risk and I’ve already reset your nose once tonight. Let’s at least give it twenty-four hours before we get to relive that marital moment.”
V glanced over at her. Her short blond hair was a mess, there was blood on her blue scrubs, and the mismatched Crocs on her feet made him smile a little even though he was not a smiler and his face was so fucked up it hurt to move his lips. Whether in her ghostly form or the corporeal one, Jane was always by his side, and as usual, she was right. His I-am-an-island bullshit went out the window as they arrived at the mattress and the fucking thing looked tall as Everest. Still, because he was who he was, he had to back her off and attempt to get his knee up on his own. He was barely halfway to the duvet when the world went on a spin—
“I got you,” she said calmly as she caught his lurch with a grunt.
And it was true. Jane grabbed him and pulled back before he fell forward face-first onto the pillows—which would have been like landing on a bomb. Yes, there was the whole Rudolph-the-fucked-nosed-vampire shit, but he also had a concussion, and there was something going on with his sternum that he was refusing to tell anybody about.
Okay, fine, the thing was probably cracked thanks to the seatbelt, but honestly, did it matter? He’d had plenty of broken ribs and it wasn’t like he was taking any deep breaths for the foreseeable future.
“Let’s try this again.” His shellan braced her feet and shifted him like he was a duffle bag full of bowling balls. “Nice… and easy…”
More grunting for her, and wasn’t that a turn-on. Not that he could do anything about that. For the moment.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” he exhaled as he heaved his deadweight body up and over.
As he stretched out, pain played Ping-Pong with every square inch of him, and his brain, that singular vital organ that he considered his most important asset, completely shorted out and took everything with it: Eyesight. Hearing. Thought process.
He was only dimly aware of Jane arranging his limbs in a vaguely Vitruvian fashion so at least he didn’t cut off circulation to any appendages. And then there was a period of time that could have been a minute and a half, or maybe was a month… during which he blinked even though he was blinded to his bedroom and breathed even though his lungs were on fire.
The latter being a nice trick—
The urge to throw up brought him back from whatever parallel dimension he’d been sucked into, and wasn’t that a twist of the nut. You’d think something pleasant might’ve grounded him, like the erection that had sprung up at the sounds his mate made while she was muscling him around. But noooooooooooooo, this was a fucking Wednesday night in Caldwell, New York, which meant that, yes, they’d rear-ended a municipal fucking snowplow in the middle of a fucking blizzard on the fucking Northway. And why had they been in the Suburban instead of safely dematerializing to the Audience House for the night? Because Wrath, son of Wrath, sire of Wrath, the great Blind King, had been sporting a head-fuck-and-a-half and hadn’t been able to get to work the good ol’-fashioned ghost way.