Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
JULIAN
The untold horrors that I’m going to rain down on Donna and every single nurse that helped her keep Maris from me is going to be unfathomable. So terrible there won’t be any hiding my power from the Varcolacus but it will be fucking worth it just to make them all pay.
But that’s for later, not now. I almost lost control too damn early and in a full ER too. I’ve never been this reckless before but it’s Maris. I look at her, she looks pale and shaky. The bleeding has stopped, mostly clotted and it’s just the one leg but she’s hurting.
I’m going to lose it if I don’t get out of here. I clench my fists and look around the ER. It’s busy, the nurses are doing their very best to avoid looking at me as they work.
Bunch of fucking animals.
I motion for Maris to put her arms around my neck and pick her up.
She doesn’t need to hold on to me but I want her to.
I like having my wife’s arms around me. One touch from Maris is enough to calm my soul.
She gives me a confused look but drapes an arm over my shoulder and leans in close when I turn to leave her bloodied area.
That stupid fucking clipboard fell to the floor earlier and I step on it when we walk past.
“Where are we going?”
“My office,” I tell her and kiss her forehead. “I’m going to get this glass out of you and take care of you.”
Maris nods and leans her head against my shoulder. “Everyone’s staring at us.”
She’s right. People are staring. Good. I want them to see Maris in my arms. There should be no mistaking exactly who I belong to.
I start to walk through the ER and one of the more soft-spoken nurses, Janet, approaches me.
She has medical supplies in her hand, forceps, antiseptic, sutures, ointment, an irrigation bottle with saline and gauze, all together in a procedure bowl.
“I thought you could use this,” Janet says and looks at Maris with a wince. “I didn’t know your wife was here. I’m so sorry, Doctor Vale.”
Donna might not be good for much but she is good for spreading the news that I’ve claimed Maris as mine. Maybe I won’t make her death as long and tortuous as I planned. I take the bowl with the hand I’ve got hooked under Maris’ thighs and nod my thanks to Janet.
“These things do happen,” I tell her quietly.
“I’ll sign off on the report. I mean, when you-when you report Donna. I’ll sign as a witness. What she did was unconscionable.”
“Thank you.”
Janet gives me a tight smile before she hurries off with her head down.
No doubt trying to lay low from Donna’s wrath.
I spot her in the corner with another nurse helping fit a sling on a boy with curly red hair.
Donna looks equal part sick and furious.
She glares at Janet’s back like she might go after her, and she might have until I step into her field of vision.
Donna blanches when we lock eyes. She might not know why she’s scared of me all of a sudden but I do.
I stopped holding back my human facade for her earlier and I do it again now. That cunt sees me for the demon I am and backs away so fast that she trips. Donna goes down with a yelp. Good. She’ll get more than a fall when I pay her back for what she’s done to Maris.
I carry Maris out of the ER and up the flight of stairs to my office. The hospital is quiet now. I only see a couple of other patients and the janitor in the halls. I nudge the door open and bring Maris inside but not before she sees the door with my name on it and taps a finger on my chest.
“Doctor Julian Vale. Very fancy.”
“Not hardly,” I tell her and close the door with a kick of my foot.
I lock it before I take Maris over to my desk and sit her down on it.
There’s plenty of room to work on her here.
I haven’t had time to move in, so the entire desk is bare save for a stack of drug reviews and referrals that I need to look over.
“I’m going to bring your leg up onto the desk and work on it, okay?” I tell her while I set up the supplies I have into a makeshift medical station.
“Okay,” Maris says and then she gives me a weak smile, “just don’t let me pass out again, okay? I’m good at passing out.”
I return her smile and reach for her leg. “I’ll do my best.” I settle her leg on the desk and manage to hold it together when she gasps in pain from the movement. “How are you doing?”
“Never better. Peachy.”
“Don’t lie to me. I’m going to treat you but I need you to be honest.”
“Fine, I feel like absolute shit and I really think I’m gonna pass out, fall off this massive desk and break my head wide open on the floor.”
“You won’t,” I promise. “Not with me here. I’ve got you.”
Maris gives me a weak nod. We fall silent while I work. The dull ping of the glass I toss into the bowl is deafening. Every single glass piece that falls into the bowl makes me angrier. I start counting them. I’m at thirty when I’m finally done.
Whatever it is that I do to Donna, it’s going to be thirty times over. There’s not going to be enough of her for them to identify.
“She’s Billy’s aunt.”
And fuck this, Billy’s dead too. They’re all dead.
“Julian?” Maris’ soft voice breaks me out of my murderous plotting. I look up from the bowl full of glass shards and to her.
“Yes?”
“What was that earlier? With Donna?”
I know what she means. I pretend that I don’t and go back to tending her leg.
She’s bleeding again from the glass I removed.
I start by irrigating and sanitizing her wounds.
I’ll heal her with my blood but it’ll work faster if her leg is tended to first. Vampire blood can heal but there are limitations to its healing properties.
If I was turning her then I wouldn’t have to bother.
Her wounds would heal but that is a decision for Maris alone to make.
“It was a lapse in professionalism and medical care,” I say, still playing the idiot.
Maris scoffs and crosses her arms. “I mean it, Julian. You like, nearly turned her to ice. I felt it. You glamoured her, didn't you?” She kicks at me with her healthy leg.
I catch her leg with one hand. “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better.”
“Did you glamour her?”
I hesitate but then nod. “Yes.”
“Did you glamour me?”
I shake my head. “Not today.”
“I’m not talking about today, Julian.”
I bite my wrist and let the blood drip onto her wounds. The skin starts to heal, her wound knitting together. Fresh new pink skin starts to form a second later.
“Did you glamour me last night? Tell me.”
I smooth blood along the side of her calf.
I turn her leg to the side and make sure to get enough of it where her muscle has been cut the worst. “Yes,” I tell her.
Maris doesn’t say anything and I keep working.
When her leg is healed, I start to wrap it in a bandage.
She won’t be able to show it to anyone for a while.
Her leg healing overnight would be a red flag.
There would be no explaining it away, no matter how good of a doctor I am, no one is that good.
I keep my eyes on her leg, winding the gauze slowly around her leg while I answer her. “I did glamour you last night. I know you want to know exactly what it is that I did, don’t you?”
“I think I already know,” she says softly.
I hum and begin to tie off the bandage. “And what is it that you know?”
“I don’t want to die anymore.”
I finish with her bandage and look at her. She’s staring at me, dark eyes trained intently on my face like she might be able to figure out why I did what I did. I don’t know why she’s wondering. She should know exactly why I glamoured her.
“You never wanted to die. Not really,” I tell her. I take a step closer and then another, before I lean against the desk and stroke her face. “You were lost. That’s all. The only thing I did was bring you home again.”
Her eyes water but she doesn’t cry. Maris blinks away the tears and looks away from me. “How do you know that?”
“That’s exactly your problem, Maris. You have no faith.
” I turn her face towards me and she looks at me when I say, “I know your soul. You’re my mate, Maris.
Mine. My wife. And I’ve seen inside of you.
I know what kind of person you are.” I smooth a thumb along her jaw and Maris’ eyes drift closed.
“Every wrong thing you have ever done, I know. Every sin, every twisted and dark part of you, I’ve seen.
Those things are not the whole of you, though.
I know you believe that, that there’s nothing worth saving in you, Maris but they’re only parts, and those parts somehow became the loudest ones to you.
No one is evil, not entirely and you least of all. ”
She opens her eyes and a tear slides down her cheek. “The Church says we’re all sinners. That we’re evil and in need of redemption. There’s no way I can ever earn it. I never could.”
I chuckle and wipe her tears away. “Maris, the only evil things in the world are demons, it’s our nature but humans?” I shake my head and lean in to kiss her. “Humans are not evil. Why do you think I choose to heal them when I could do anything in the world?”
It’s true. Blood might be what keeps me going but it was different in the beginning. I used to want to fix some of what I’d done, but that was a very, very long time ago. It didn’t mean that it had never been true.
I’d admired humans once. Thought they were worth saving.
I don’t anymore. None of them matter to me but Maris.
“Because it’s free food and you like the way you look in the coat?”
I grin at her. “I do like the way I look. It’s a great coat,” I say, looking down at the white doctor’s coat I’m wearing, “The thing you need to understand is that humans make the choice. They can be good or evil through their own choices and actions, and evil is a choice humans actively choose, but hear me now. No one is simply bad for existing.”
Maris smiles back at me. “Except for you?” she asks, putting a hand to my chest and giving my coat lapel a tug.