Hunted By Fae (Hunted By Fae #1)

Chapter 6 #2

Beyond those doors are two things: The final exit to the carpark of bodies, and the door to the kitchen.

Nurse Smith has little to do with the corpse dumping, so I suppose she’s off to prepare either canned soup for the remaining survivors in here or heated spam with crackers.

My mouth twists at the thought of the processed meat. The stench of it is enough to make me gag.

She disappears through the swing doors.

I turn my frown on the abandoned beds.

Most are curtained, but a lot of them are tucked together, no drapes, just bodies covered in blankets. The dead, waiting to be discarded outside.

Louise is working fast, or time is slipping by me.

I can’t smell them yet, the bodies, not through the stink of formaldehyde that Louise wiped over surfaces and along the stripped, plastic mattresses too many have died on.

So many.

At first, every few hours, people came rushing through those doors. We were some of them, just people, seeking help for our sick.

But then some started abandoning their loved ones on their deathbeds, leaving them behind.

Things change so quickly.

Human nature reveals so easily from the dismantled practice of civility.

The panic really took hold when the blackout tumbled overhead. It was no longer advancing, coming for us, a threat for another day. It was upon us.

That was just a handful of hours after we arrived.

We lost a few when that happened. Nurses and people who stuck to the bedsides of their loved ones left, just snuck out in the quieter moments when most of us were asleep.

“I would never do that to you,” I find the words whispering from me without much awareness, no intention to actually speak them.

I turn to look at Tesni’s pale face, glistening with a sheen of fresh sweat.

Deep in a fever dream, her long lashes are trembling, her eyelids flickering. Lips so pale—white and chapped—gleam with a constant sweat.

“I won’t leave you.”

She can’t hear me.

Still, I tell her, “You’re going to get better… and then I’m going to get us to safety.” My promise is the softest whisper, one so quiet that no others can hear me.

I run my gaze over her hair.

I know she loathes to have it in her face, always braided back, or in a ponytail, maybe some sort of half-up style she calls a butterfly, I don’t know why.

So I pick at strands now, then finger-comb them to drape over the edges of the pillow, a burnt halo of sorts.

Her hair is such a pale strawberry shade that it’s practically just blonde.

But against the glowing camping lanterns peppered all over the rec centre, the strands look darker, coppery, as if poorly rinsed and stained with blood.

Blood…

Is that why she’s so poorly, and I’m not sick at all?

Our blood is not the same.

Not at all the same.

Would that save her?

To be like me, to share in my secret?

To have my blood…?

My lips part.

The idea is a sick one.

I blink on the poorly vision that she is, the sickliness eating away at her, inching her closer to death. She’s probably hours away from it, if not moments.

So… what’s the harm in trying?

Maybe my blood will save her.

Maybe it will give her the strength to fight.

Maybe this idea is absolutely fucking nuts… but I can’t not try.

I kick up from the chair and, throwing a look around the rec centre, see that just one nurse is still here.

Smith is in the kitchen, Louise has been in and out with the bodies of the dead, and I guess she’s back outside again.

If there’s a time for it, it’s now.

I stalk for the metal cupboard across the court. It’s all stocked neatly with bandages, gauzes, phials—but I lock my sights onto one row.

Nurse Miller doesn’t pay any attention to me, not even with a curious glance, as she holds the hand of a dying man and whispers softly to him.

I know he’s dying, on the verge, because in their final hour of the black plague, they bleed. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Then a seizure strikes them. It ends with their heart stopped—and they are gone.

I won’t let that happen to Tess.

I grab two things from the medical cupboard.

The biggest syringe I can find and a rubber strap.

Truthfully, I have no fucking idea how to do this, but I rush back to her bedside with purpose.

My heart slingshots at the sight of her.

I falter.

A trickle of fresh, crimson blood slips out of her left nostril. It trails over the curve of her top lip and lingers on her cheek.

Her final hour has begun.

I throw myself to the edge of her bed.

I waste no time before I’m ripping the packaging apart, then winding the rubber strap around my bicep. It works, fast, and the veins protrude from the inner soft curve of my arm.

I glide the needle of the syringe into the particularly blue, bulging vein.

It’s awkward to do this on myself, to draw out my own blood with just one hand manoeuvring a syringe so big. It takes a moment longer than I have to waste before the syringe is full of my blood.

Crimson.

Looks just like hers.

But it’s not—and it might just save her life.

I slide the needle out before I move for her.

Guess there’s no need to sanitise the needle, not when I’m doing it like this.

And if I don’t try, if I waste any time, she’ll definitely die within the hour.

If Louise catches me—

I don’t wait for it to happen, for anyone to come back into the rec centre and find me slipping the needle of the syringe full of my blood into Tesni’s arm.

Thank the gods Tess is so fucking pale, I can see all her veins shooting around the soft, fragile skin of her inner arm—and I lock my stare onto one thick vein.

I angle the syringe, and slide it in.

I inject it all.

Maybe it’s enough, but it doesn’t feel like it. Certainly isn’t worth the risk of not doing it again. So I do it again.

And again.

Even a fourth time.

Roughly 500ml of my blood into her body.

I might feel dizzy for a bit, but that’s manageable. People donate blood all the time. About the same amount, too.

I slip the syringe into the bin next the bed—and just as it clatters, the backdoors are knocked open.

I don’t look over my shoulder to see Louise bringing the wheelbarrow inside, I listen to the familiar rolling of the harsh wheels clattering in an annoying echo.

My back to her, to any gazes she might through my way, I am quick to dab a cotton ball over the red spot on Tesni’s limp arm, then toss it into the bin. Then I wipe the damp cloth at her face, at the trail of blood that—if Louise does care to glance at—will reveal her final phase.

I can’t have anyone knowing about that yet.

I need to see if the blood works first.

So now, I just… wait.