Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
“Let’s go to my lab,” Severin said. “I have a medic kit there. I can treat his wounds.”
“Not with that hand, you can’t,” Cassie told him. “I’ll be treating you both. Now come on—march.”
She took Ravik by his free hand—the one that wasn’t cupped around his junk—and the three of them trailed down the long bunker hallway.
24
SEVERIN
“This is the lab.” Severin led the way into a side room which was long and narrow, like most of the rooms in the bunker. The front of the room was filled with scientific equipment but the back of the room had a free table and a few chairs to sit on.
He wished, not for the first time, that the space was larger. Back on the Mother Ship, his lab had been three times this size, with separate sterilization chambers, refrigeration walls, multiple scopes, and enough automated equipment to run six different viral assays at once. Here, everything was cramped and improvised.
The counters were crowded with sample tubes, sealed vials, culture plates, and half a dozen makeshift racks he’d built from scavenged polymer strips and old Visskous tool clamps. The air smelled sharply of antiseptic, heated metal, and the faint sour tang of viral medium—a smell he had grown to hate over the last few months.
Still, it was the best-equipped room in the bunker and the only reason he and Ravik had survived as long as they had—if you could call this surviving.
Ravik was shuffling behind him, one huge hand still cupped protectively over his shaft and balls, his broad shoulders hunched and his golden eyes milky with infection again. Cassandra had hold of his other hand and was murmuring to him under her breath as though he was some enormous wounded animal she was trying not to startle.
The big Beast Kindred followed her docilely, his gaze fixed on her face, his nostrils flaring every few seconds as though he needed the scent of her just to remember where he was. Every time Cassandra glanced back at him, his expression cleared a little. Every time she looked away, the fog seemed to thicken again.
Severin’s burned palm throbbed like a bastard. He ignored it—or tried to.
He had been trained to compartmentalize pain. That was a necessary skill for a Blood Kindred medic and xeno-virologist who had spent most of his career in hot zones, battlefields, and infected colonies where stopping to complain about a blistered hand could mean the difference between containment and catastrophe. But the pain was making it difficult to think clearly, and thinking clearly was important right now.
Thinking clearly was the only thing that had kept Ravik alive this long—until Cassandra came along.
The thought twisted inside him, sharp and unpleasant. He was grateful—of course he was. He had spent three solar months watching his best friend slide inch by inch into the Hunger Virus fog, losing words…losing memory…losing himself. If Cassandra’s scent could bring Ravik back, even temporarily, Severin ought to have been on his knees thanking the Goddess.
And he was grateful.
But there was a bitter edge to the gratitude, too. Because he had worked himself half to death trying to save his best friend. He had slept in snatches, eaten when he remembered, and run every test he could think of until the inside of his skull felt scraped raw. He had taken apart the Hunger Virus strand by strand, mapped its replication patterns, isolated its protein shells, tracked the way it hollowed infected cells and repurposed them into viral factories…
But none of it had been enough.
Then Cassandra had arrived wearing a torn red silk nightgown, smelling of fear, sweat, female heat, and something Severin still could not identify, and Ravik had started speaking again, just like that.
The Goddess had a cruel sense of humor sometimes.
“Okay—where’s the First Aid kit?” Cassandra asked, breaking his train of thought.
“Here.” Severin grabbed it with his unhurt hand and set it down on a metal lab table. His injured hand gave a vicious pulse when he moved too quickly and he had to grit his teeth against a hiss of pain.
Cassandra noticed anyway, of course. Her gaze flicked to his blistered palm and her eyes narrowed.
“You need that looked at too,” she said.
“Ravik first,” Severin said shortly.
“Both of you need treatment, as soon as I can manage it,” she said. “But since he’s naked, injured, and apparently one bad moment away from forgetting his own name, Ravik gets priority.”
It should have irritated him, the way she took command of his lab as though she had every right to do so. Instead, Severin found it tugged at his cold, scientific heart.
Cassandra was frightened—he knew she was. She had been bitten by an Infected, abandoned by her mate, dragged into a bunker, stripped, tested, and then thrust into a kind of improvised caretaking role with two dangerous Kindred males she barely knew.