Chapter 4
Chapter four
Ethan
I need the pain back.
It was the first coherent thought that drifted through Ethan’s brain as he struggled against the fog holding him under.
He’d been back there. Back with that… that thing again. Staring into the soulless depths of its eyes.
Then it sank its fangs into his neck once more and vanished.
With the vampire gone, he was trapped between the real world and the dream world.
The more he fought his way toward reality, straining to open his eyes, the more he realized there was no pain.
Only a faint buzzy feeling throughout his body.
There should be pain. Pain meant reality. Pain meant he wasn’t trapped in that never-ending nightmare. Pain was something he could latch onto as evidence that he was alive and awake. Pain was something he could remember.
And he could remember so many things. The agony of sharp teeth tearing into his neck.
His bloody hands clutching at the wound and stumbling away on shaky legs as the creature laughed at him.
Crashing into a table of beakers and microscopes, shards of glass stabbing into his hands and arms as they shattered under his weight.
But the worst part was that he could remember sliding off the bloody table and landing on the floor next to Jake’s body.
For too long, he stared into his best friend’s vacant eyes, savoring the pain that he was due.
Then everything went black, and he could remember nothing aside from the nightmare.
With a last effort of will, Ethan managed to pry his eyes open and drag a heavy hand up to block the bright lights above his head.
“You’re awake.”
The voice startled him, and most of his confusion dissipated between one blink and the next—high alert mode activated.
His pulse raced, and a cold sweat broke out across his forehead as he snapped his head to the corner of the room, his gaze landing on an attractive woman watching him intently.
There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t place where he’d seen her since his brain was still half lost in a bloody fog of screams and fangs.
Glancing to the side, he found his glasses and settled them on his face.
Maybe I did die, Ethan thought as he took in the goddess perched on the edge of the chair. Her long black hair glistened like she stepped straight out of a cheesy shampoo commercial, and her smooth bronze skin had the kind of glow that normally only photoshop could achieve.
His eyes drifted lower as he took in her outfit.
The pale yellow sweater popped against her darker skin, drawing him in like a beacon of light, and the matching short skirt slid up her enticing thighs when she crossed her legs.
To his dismay, the image had something twitching under the thin hospital sheet that probably shouldn’t be awake.
Not when he was still trying to ascertain the where, what, and how that landed him in a hospital to begin with.
He should be dead.
“Are you a doctor?” he croaked out, his voice hoarse and scratchy as if he’d been screaming for hours.
A grin spread across her face at his words—a strange response to a legitimate question.
Or maybe it wasn’t legitimate given that women as gorgeous and glowing as her only worked in hospitals on TV shows.
Every doctor he’d ever seen looked like they might slice him open and sell one of his kidneys for a cup of coffee or a twenty-minute nap.
And he’d spent more than his fair share of time with them.
When the woman’s smile faded and she hesitantly approached his bedside, flashbacks of his mother’s illness pounded on the door of his mind. Nothing good ever happened when hospital staff addressed you with caution.
The woman must have tracked his apprehension, because she paused her approach and gave him that megawatt smile again. “Not quite,” she said. “I’m actually…” Her words trailed off, and she chewed on her lip for a second.
The action was somewhat adorable, if oddly unprofessional.
“Actually what?” he asked, pushing himself up in the bed.
It was more difficult than it should have been, and his frustration leaked into his words.
“Spit it out. Are you a nurse, then? I have more than a few questions, and I’d like to know if you’re qualified to give me the answers I need. ”
The woman frowned, but Ethan could only bring himself to feel a little bad about his brusque tone.
He’d been called blunt often enough to realize it wasn’t ever a compliment, but this wasn’t the time to worry about niceties.
Because if he wasn’t dead, then he had more important things to worry about.
It was still out there.
The monster.
Ethan didn’t believe in flights of fancy or mythological creatures. He believed in things that could be measured, studied, and explained. Every part of his scientific brain told him that thing couldn’t be real. That he was suffering from some kind of trauma-induced hallucination.
But no matter how often he tried to get himself to accept that logic, it just wouldn’t stick. He knew what he saw; it wasn’t the kind of thing you just imagined.
And despite his rational brain’s tendency to go full analytical mode, something about the being he’d encountered demanded he blow past researching its origins and skip straight to figuring out how to kill it.
He’d looked into its eyes. There was no soul in that vampire.
Nothing redeeming. Just a virus that consumed and destroyed.
A virus, like so many others, that needed to be eradicated.
The woman studied him for a moment, and Ethan could practically see the wheels turning in her head.
Deciding how much to tell him, probably.
It seemed like hospital staff loved to make assumptions about how much truth he could handle.
After a long, heavy moment, her expression shifted—a decision made.
“I’m a counselor,” she said, her voice still unnecessarily perky but at least toned down a fraction.
Ethan groaned and slumped back, losing some of his vertical progress. “A counselor? Sorry, ma’am. I’m sure you’re very good at your job, but I don’t need a counselor. I need answers.”
“I can help you with that,” she replied, taking a step closer to the bed.
He eyed her warily. “Shouldn’t I be discussing my situation with a doctor? Or at least the nurse who actually does all the work?”
The woman grabbed a clip from the seat behind her and focused on drawing her hair up into a bun, looking everywhere in the room but at him.
“You’re right,” she said once she seemed satisfied that every strand was tucked away.
“You should go over things with a doctor. It’s just…
the staff thought perhaps you might need someone to speak with when you woke up, given how things went last time. ”
He frowned. “Last time?”
Then it hit him. A split second of lucidity where he recalled images of people in white coats and purple scrubs shouting at him to lay down and breathe. But before that, before the noise and confusion, there had been… her. She had been the angel who pulled him from the dark, if only for a moment.
And he suddenly felt like a massive dick.
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Oh, yeah, sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” the woman dismissed. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” he muttered, and his hand absently drifted up to his neck, settling on the patch of ridges that broke up his otherwise smooth skin.
A small part of his brain wondered why it felt like a scar instead of a fresh wound, but he was preoccupied with the stunning woman in front of him.
“So, what’s your name, anyway? I don’t want to call you Counselor. ”
She smiled again, and he couldn’t help but be intrigued by the way the corners of her lips tugged up slowly, almost like she was deciding how big or wide to smile.
“Tressa,” she replied pleasantly, holding out her hand. “And you’re Ethan.”
He shook her hand, flinching slightly when a zap of static electricity lit up his skin. She didn’t seem bothered by his reaction, and he found himself reluctant to let go of her. “Thanks for the reminder,” he said, eventually withdrawing his hand. “Good to know I’m not completely crazy.”
Her grin dropped away. “Why would you say that?”
He settled back onto the pile of pillows. Maybe it was the drugs still coursing through his brain or maybe it was the fact that his ‘give a damn’ died with Jake, but he had no desire to lie to Tressa. Something about her made him think he could tell her anything. Maybe everything.
“Why do I think I’m crazy?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Because I was attacked by a vampire.”