I looked back at Talbot—only one question playing on my mind. If Dad were given a blood transfusion with my blood, would he be infected by the werewolf curse? Talbot gave me a look like he understood my unspoken question. His eyes seemed to say, I really don’t know.
“No,” I lied. It was too risky.
“Anyone else in your family? His is a hard blood type to match.”
Jude, I thought. As a nurse, my mom insisted we all know one another’s blood type. She kept them written on a laminated card in her wallet.
“No,” I lied again. Jude’s blood would be even more dangerous, considering he was a full-blown werewolf.
“Damn,” Jen mumbled under her breath. “Hopefully, the hospital will have enough.”
How much blood does he need? Why is he still not moving? “How bad is he?”
“Critical,” she said, and grabbed a long needle. I didn’t even want to know what that was for. “Your father must have been thrown several feet by the blast. He’s showing signs of internal bleeding. Still don’t know how the rest of you got out of there with barely a scratch.” She nodded to Talbot and me. “You’re damn lucky.”
Talbot ducked his head. “Yes, the rest of us were lucky.”
I looked at him, wondering about the inflection in his voice. Then I remembered … Marcos had entered that building with the others. Now he was gone. And Talbot didn’t want me to mention him. Marcos was dead, and it would be better if no one knew he’d ever existed.
And you’re the one who sent him to his death, the wolf told me inside my head.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep standing. My legs felt far too soft, and the ground underneath my feet seemed suddenly off-kilter. Talbot’s hand on my back felt like the only thing holding me upright.
I’d known Marcos for only a week, and now he was just gone.
“We need to get your father to the hospital,” the male paramedic said. “I think it’s best if you ride along.” He held his hand out to help me climb into the back of the ambulance. I clung to it for support.
“I’ll meet you there,” Talbot said as they shut the doors between us.
I suddenly felt very alone in the crowded ambulance.
Dad’s eyes flickered open for a second and then closed.
“I’m here, Daddy.” I leaned forward and reached for his hand, but I could barely loop one of my fingers around one of his for all the wires and tubes that protruded from his hand and arm. I could see him straining to open his eyes again, but he couldn’t.
How could I have let this happen?
Chapter Seven
BACKFIRE
SEVERAL HOURS LATER
“I need to be able to do something,” I said to myself as I paced in the corner of Dad’s small ICU room.
Dad hadn’t opened his eyes again since that one time in the ambulance. Doctors and nurses had worked over him in the ER for what felt like an eternity, and then they shuffled us off into this room with grave looks on their faces. At one point someone examined me, and then I was told to wash up in the shower of an empty patient room. One of the nurses gave me a pair of pale green scrubs to change into. She wrapped my tattered and bloody clothes in a plastic bag and then threw them away in a canister marked biohazard.
When had I bled? It must have been my father’s.…
I guess they thought being clean would help me cope better with bad news, because as soon as I was dressed, someone with a clipboard took me aside. She’d said words relating to my father, like trauma and invasive surgery, along with a long string of other phrases that I couldn’t comprehend over the loud pounding of my heartbeat in my ears.
How can I have all these powers, yet there’s nothing I can do?
A muffled stream of what sounded like French curse words came from the sliding glass doorway. I turned to find Gabriel standing there, his hands clasped over his mouth as he looked at my father lying there, helpless and slipping further away.
I was about to mutter something horrible like, “Took you long enough,” because I’d left a string of urgent messages for him, but when Gabriel lowered his hands from his face, I saw a long, pink, newly healed scar marring one of his cheekbones. His reddish beard almost hid the faintest hints of purple bruises along his jaw. He hadn’t had those injuries this morning when I saw him last.
“Are you okay? What happened?” I knew immediately this had something to do with why he hadn’t wanted me to return to the parish. “Did Jude do this to you?” I hated to ask, but I had to. Jude acted placid, but I’d feared he was volatile, like a ticking time bomb … oh hell. Tears stung my eyes from the reminder of the explosion that had harmed my father.
It’s all your fault, the evil wolf inside me growled.
“No,” Gabriel said. “Something else entirely, but it’s not important now. We’ll discuss it later. How is your father?” Gabriel stepped farther into the room, and the glass door slid closed behind him. “I had to convince the nurse I was his brother so she’d allow me in.”
“Critical. That’s all I know.”
The ICU was a busy, noisy place, with nurses and doctors bustling about, but I still felt like I’d been completely alone for the last couple of hours. Talbot had never showed up like he said he would. I hadn’t wanted to call April—because if April knew, then Jude would, too, and I didn’t know how the news would affect him—and after I couldn’t get ahold of Gabriel, there was no one else left to call who could come be with me. Not Daniel. Not Charity. Not even my mom. “They wanted to use my blood for a transfusion, but at the time I thought that would be too risky. It might infect him, you know? But maybe I was wrong. Maybe letting him get infected would help his body heal. Or my blood might do nothing at all.”
“Could you live with yourself knowing you had passed this curse on to him?”
I’d heard Daniel, who had suffered with the effects of the curse most of his life before he was supposedly cured, say that he’d rather die than live with the potential of becoming a monster again. Giving Dad healing powers might help him live, but he might never be the same person again. And I didn’t know what he’d choose if he could.
“But there has to be something I can do. I mean, I’m a freaking superpowered, demon-slaying, pseudo-werewolf, but all the power I have inside of me isn’t worth crap if I can’t use it to help my dad.”