Vervain (The Script of Serun #2)

Prologue

THE OTHER SIDE

Leon Rielly

“He’s fucking bleeding out!” Fluorescent light bites harshly from inside the once-white room, now painted red.

I lay the body of a boy on the steel table, my hands coming away sticky, but I ignore it and put pressure on the wound on his back.

“We need to close the wound, then start a blood transfusion!”

Imogen, dressed in blue scrubs, enters and bypasses Jax while he stares ahead, but not actually at us. He is in a fucking daze. His blue eyes are glazed over, the colour drained from his face.

“Jax, do you know the boy’s blood type?” Imogen says, tugging on gloves. She steps towards me, her deep brown eyes glancing in my direction and then down at the tools on the tray beside her. The boy is still, only a whimpering breath that tells us he is holding on to whatever air he can breathe.

“Jax!” I snap. His blue eyes drag upwards to stare blankly at me. “Do you know his blood type?”

“O-positive,” he murmurs, his focus lowering to the blood covering his hands. “You killed her.”

Fuck me. I don’t have time for this shit.

Imogen touches my shoulder and squeezes, but her eyes are on my brother. “Are you certain that’s his blood type, Jaxton? Did he tell you that?”

“Saya told me. It was one thing she willingly told me.” He laughs, but it sounds bitter. “Now I know why she kept so many secrets from me. My girlfriend was a vegodian…”

Vegodian. I still can’t believe we found one.

No matter. She’s fucking dead now. We don’t need to deal with them on top of the ever-growing threat of nightwalkers.

Jax will understand after he lets go of thinking of her as human and finally sees her as an alien being with unnatural, tarnished magik.

She must have seeped her venom into him real fucking good.

“A vegodian?” Imogen breathes, a glimmer in her eyes.

“Don’t,” I strain out. “Focus on the boy. She’s dead.”

Imogen sighs sharply while she pours iodine on a rag. “Jax, talk to the doctor next door and get a bag off him, now! This boy has lost a lot of blood!”

In the corner of my eye, I catch Jax pushing off from the wall and leaving the room.

“Move your hand, love,” Imogen says. “I need to clean the area before I start.”

“Check the other side afterwards,” I say, stepping aside to let her do her thing. “Oscar and I did what we could to patch up the wound in the field.”

Her eyes narrow as she works. “Oscar? That would have been fun.”

I take the bloody rag from her as she finishes and wipe my hands with it. “He threw up twice, but at least he didn’t stop applying pressure while I did what I could.” I pause. “I gave the kid my blood…”

“What?!” She tosses another rag aside and grabs a needle and surgical thread. “The council will take him to the tank when they find out!”

I lean closer to her while she sterilises the needle. “What if that was Jade? I had to! I couldn’t just…”

Her soft eyes narrow, and she shakes her head in grudging acceptance. “Do you think he will, you know…live?”

“I don’t want to think about it.” A flash of pain sharpens my dorsum at the memory of waking in a fluid tank when I was just a kid.

“We won’t, then.” She threads the needle. “Pinch his skin shut for me—and your stitching is shit, so I am most definitely going to check your work after I deal with this.”

“Hey,” I snap while I pinch the wound closed. “Fuck you.”

Imogen smiles, and I like it. But before I can get too carried away with that thought, I turn my attention to the boy. He is young—a fucking kid in a feeding ground. How the fuck did that happen?

He looks grey. Not white or blue, but as though the reaper stands over him, waiting.

Imogen begins suturing as Jaxton returns with a blood bag. If I hadn’t known he was a slayer, I’d have killed my brother for looking like a damn nightwalker. He hangs the bag on the stand before stepping back to watch.

“Okay, you can let go now.”

I do.

“Grab me the antiseptic cream.”

I also do that.

Imogen smiles as I hand her the jar. “You should talk to your brother.”

I definitely don’t want to fucking do that.

My lip curls, and the look on my face makes her laugh. “I’ve got this. Let me do my job. You’re distracting me with your bloody self. Besides, Jade misses you.”

The thought of the blue-eyed girl has me leaning in to peck Imogen on the forehead, then make my way over to my brother.

He doesn’t react when I smack my hand on his shoulder and squeeze.

“Come on. I bet your niece missed you too. It’s been a while.

Over a year. She’s grown so much since your mission. ”

“And bring Taryne in here!” Imogen calls out as we leave the room. The lights in the corridor flicker every few seconds, illuminating the sterile, white-tiled floor and walls.

As my brother walks mechanically beside me, I guide us three doors down and into another room. Taryne stands at the end of a hospital bed, clipboard in hand, her dark eyes settled on the woman sitting on the bed.

The woman has light blond hair, and she appears undamaged at first glance. No wounds nor scent of blood linger when I push my senses out further. She must have been one of those lucky ones who hid well.

I rap on the open door with my knuckles, and Taryne turns to me. “My wife needs you in operating room two. I’m assuming she wants to move the kid into intensive care with the woman Ellis saved.”

Taryne places the clipboard on the hook at the end of the bed and gives her patient a painfully obvious fake smile. “Get some rest. Dinner will be served soon. If you need anything, push the button beside the bed and a nurse will swing by.”

The woman stares at us and her eyes widen when she sees Jaxton, but when I look to my brother, he has the same disinterested, detached expression. There’s no fucking way I am going to let him see Jade like this. He will give her fucking nightmares.

I step aside as Taryne walks out of the room and she hisses, “What the fuck happened at Darkovish Feeding Ground? I have two hysterical patients and a woman in the ICU. She’s stable but recovering from a skull fracture. I fucking doubt she will remember much—she died on us twice.”

“Ellis brought her from the feeding ground. He won’t say much about it, but he never really was a talker.”

“Ellis? The slayer who disguised himself as a Bleeder to monitor your brother?”

“Yep. Him.”

“Why?”

I shake my head, nudging my chin in the direction of the room Imogen is operating in. Taryne rolls her eyes dramatically. Her gloves snap as she peels each one off, then tosses them into the bin near the door.

“Jax?” the patient calls out as we leave, but my brother storms away, his fists clenched and jaw locked. Fucking petulant child.

I grab the doorknob and say, “Get some rest, human.”

“Human?”

I close the door. Fuck. I slipped up. Jaxton and his mood swings are messing with my head. That vegodian really dug her claws in deep for him to be acting like this.

My jaw tightens further, tense muscles prickling with irritation. They were together for how long? A year at best. That’s fucking nothing.

I shot her. Saw the moonflower on her shoulder and instantly knew she was a vegodian. And she was a vegodian with her so-called brother. Smart move on her fucking part, that’s for sure.

Heading in the direction my brother stormed off, I stop abruptly at the sound of a ruckus next door. Jax stops as well, drawn in by all the shouting.

“Please! Calm down, Feeder!” the doctor pleads.

“Calm down?” a voice booms from inside. “Calm down? No, I can’t fucking calm down! I want to see my girlfriend! Take me to my girlfriend! I know she’s fucking at Padbury! Take me to her NOW!”

“You need to rest,” the doctor…tries.

“Take. Me. To. Bianca! Feeder zero-three-seven! We aren’t far! I need to see her! Please! She is fucking pregnant!” The shouting turns into desperate sobs.

Ugh. Fuck that. I keep walking to avoid that shitfest, my brow twitching at the sight of my brother doing the same.

“Hey, Jaxton!” I shout as he reaches the exit of the Prayer Sanctuary hospital ward.

He grabs the handle, and as he pulls the door open, I reach him and slam it shut.

Grabbing him by the shirt with both hands, I pin him against the wall.

“What the fuck are you right now? A nightwalker shows more fucking emotion than this!”

He stares at me for a long moment. The blue in his eyes seems to bury itself deep inside him.

With a muttered curse, I lift my elbow to his collar. “She was a vegodian. Worse than a bloodsucker. A siphon leech who steals the powers of others. Just one of them can kill ten of us if they know how to abuse their fucking magik. You know this, so why are you acting like you don’t?”

My eyes widen a fraction before narrowing on the tears that slip from Jaxton’s eyes.

“Saya was different. Good.”

I grip his shirt tighter, pull him from the wall, then slam him back against it.

The tiles on the wall crack from the impact.

“There is nothing good about vegodians. Naive or not, once she finds out what happened to the others, all the love she held for you would be out the fucking window, and you know that.”

Jaxton glares at the exit.

“You are a slayer,” I say, giving him a shake. “We protect humans, and there’s a human in that room who needs you now that his leech of a sister is gone. Be there for him.”

“He will hate me…”

My hands slacken their hold on his shirt, and I take a step away.

“Not if he doesn’t remember. Besides, it’s not like he has anyone else.

The echoes massacred almost everyone from Darkovish Feeding Ground.

” I scratch my head and glare back the way we came.

“I should have tossed Serun’s Law and entered earlier. More people would have survived.”

“Fucking Serun,” Jaxton growls, his ghostly pallor turning red as his veins bulge and thicken along his throat. “This was all his fault.”

What the fuck is he talking about?

“Care to—”

“Ever since she entered that damn private room,” he seethes, and I take another step back.

“She went…weird. Wrong. Controlled. I could see it in her eyes. It was controlling her. It was him.” He nods his head as if to convince himself.

“That’s why she was asking so many fucking questions about him while we were trying to escape. ”

I blink and bite my tongue. Anger is good. An emotion I can work with.

I slap my hand on his shoulder. “Come. The council would want to hear everything that has transpired—and then tomorrow, I’m off again.”

“Where are you going?”

“Our vegodian friend told us vervain grows in more than one place. Rumour has it that it grows on the nightwalkers’ border. I’d like to find out if that rumour is true.”