17 Bullets: becoming the Werewolf Queen

Chapter 32: Venom Spray

33 BULLETS

I ached like I ran a marathon, muscles sore and tight, but I was comfortable in a soft bed somewhere. The gentle trace of a blanket over the top of me. A calming fire cackled in the background. Scent of roasting meat seeped into my nose.

My eyes opened and it took a second for me to recognize my surroundings, but when I did, I screamed.

It was the cave of the assault!

I skimmed around for my gun.

The werewolves were after me again!

"El! El! Shhh. Shhh!" Thann's face was in my view then, hushing my throat.

My breaths came in quick bursts and I remembered that I should be okay. I had killed those werewolves. They were not coming back after me.

"What... what's going on? Why are we back he..." was all I got to before I tried to swing my legs off the bed and felt the agony of thousands of pins and needles coming alive in my right leg.

It knocked the breath clear out of me.

Like fifty daggers pressing into my leg, from my knee down my whole leg stung with the scorching bite.

I didn't scream, but I made some kind of garbled cry and immediately froze any movement.

The pain dulled.

"Thann?" I begged. "What happened to me?"

Memories of being on the rock and then being dipped in acid came inching back.

The pain wasn't as intense now, and more of a deadening ache.

I pressed a toe down and the pain split open again. I screamed out. It was like my foot had been asleep for a hundred years and now it was slowly coming back. The sharp stabs of life cutting through me at any insignificant movement.

Tossing off the blanket, I looked down over my leg.

I almost expected it not to be there.

But it was.

Just barely.

I was not wearing jeans or shoes, and my entire leg from the knee down was covered in black tar.

Recoiling from the sight, I began to panic. "Thann! My leg!"

He grabbed my face in his hands, letting the heat seep in to calm. But he wasn't calm himself. "El hurt. Medicine. Sukumah."

My eyes pricked with tears and I sniffed my pains back as I looked into his eyes. I never realized that he had such dark brown eyes before. Even flecked with gold. It was striking.

The pads of his thumbs caught the wetness at the corner of my eye and he pulled me into a hug.

His relief was like a wave over me and then his hands roved down my body to rest over my belly.

Another worry dawned on me. "Thann, is the baby okay?" I glanced over the bump that seemed visually bigger, even to me. "How long was I out? A month?"

Couldn't be more than a day. Two?

My hand came beside where he'd placed his cheek and I breathed out in relief when the heat still shown brightly there.

"She's okay," I exhaled, making up a gender on the spot.

He leaned back up and looked down my leg. His face still yelled of the worry on his heart.

I bent and thumbed through the tar. It was a paste thick as wet concrete and black as night. "What is this? Medicine?" My face shown skepticism. Was this what hurt me instead?