“Elaine was kind of acting strange too. I think she was actually hitting on you,” James said now.
“Jealous?” Holly muttered, glaring out the window now.
“What?” He laughed, but it didn’t sound like a natural laugh. “Did you just ask me if I was jealous? Why the hell would I be jealous of Elaine?”
Holly opened her mouth, and then closed it and shrugged. “She’s an attractive woman.”
“Maybe. I’ve never noticed,” he lied and Holly turned sharply to peer at him with disbelief.
“Really?” she asked dryly.
James shrugged, his attention firmly on the road ahead. “She’s not my type.”
“Oh, right, so you’ve never imagined it was her you were making love to on a Sunday night?”
“What?” he squawked with obvious alarm. “Where would you get something like that?”
“From you,” Holly snarled, suddenly furious. Between classes, work, and going out it had been a really long day for her, a long two weeks actually, and while she’d tried not to be hurt by all of his little thoughts this past week, she was. They had cut her to the quick and her self-esteem was now bleeding out and turning to red rage.
“Don’t be ridiculous, I would never say something like that,” he protested.
“No. But you sure thought it, James.”
“What, you can read minds now?” He laughed nervously and shook his head. “You’re just being paranoid.”
“Paranoid?” Holly asked in dulcet tones, her temper completely shredded. “Oh no, you don’t get to call me paranoid, James. You can think I’m OCD and socially awkward, and you can pretend it’s Elaine you’re banging to get it up, but you do not get to tell me I’m paranoid for knowing it.”
“What the hell?” He glanced to her with alarm and then back to the road. “Where are you getting this stuff?”
“From you, James,” she repeated grimly. “From your thoughts.”
Grinding his teeth, he tightened his hands on the steering wheel and shook his head. “That’s not—”
“Possible?” Holly finished for him.
“You can’t—”
“Read your mind?” she finished again, and then snorted grimly. “Actually I can. You see, I wasn’t away in New York at the start of the month. I was in Southern California, just outside Los Angeles, learning to be a vampire because I was stupid enough to run with scissors.”
“What?” he squawked turning to peer at her. Then shock turned to anger, and he growled, “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Really. Then what are these?” Holly asked, and opened her mouth to let her fangs slide out.
James stared, his anger slowly giving way to amazement and then fear. Before he could recover or respond, the sound of tearing metal hit her ears and Holly was thrown against the seat belt, then jerked back against the seat as they crashed into something. Even as they came to an abrupt halt, darkness was closing over Holly, dragging her into its soothing depths.
Something was dripping. That was the first thing Holly was aware of. It was followed by a damp sensation everywhere and pain. Lots of pain. Groaning, she opened her eyes and peered around, confused at first as to where she was and what had happened. A red light was glowing nearby, casting a nightmare vision across the interior of the car as it blinked on and off, briefly lighting up the man in the front seat next to her.
“James?” Holly murmured. She started to shift, to try to move closer to him, but sharp pain in her side made her halt and glance down. A tree branch had come through the windshield and impaled her, running through her right side and into the car seat.
“Nice,” she muttered, and then grimaced.
A moan from James drew her attention his way, and Holly frowned and reached her left hand out to touch his shoulder. He was slumped on the deflated airbag draped over the steering wheel. He moaned again at her touch, but didn’t respond otherwise and she glanced over him worriedly and then looked out at the front of the car.
They’d crossed into the oncoming lane and continued right off the road to crash into a tree, she saw. The driver’s side of the car looked like a squeeze-box. Her gaze dropped toward James’s legs then and alarm claimed her as she saw that the metal had been pressed in and crushed his legs. She couldn’t even see most of his legs from the seat down, but she could smell the blood and guessed that was the dripping she heard, it was running over the metal and dripping on the already soaked car carpet.
God, all she could smell was blood.
“James, can you hear me?” she asked, her voice surprisingly strong considering how much it hurt to even breathe.
James moaned again, and this time, started to rouse and try to sit up, but then he cried out in agony and fell back against the steering wheel, unconscious once more.
Cursing, Holly turned her attention to the tree limb pinning her to the seat. It was a smallish branch, about four or five inches in diameter would be her guess. Gritting her teeth, Holly grasped it about six inches in front of her chest and managed to snap it in two.
“Couldn’t have done that as a mortal,” she muttered to herself as she tried to work herself up for what came next.
“This is gonna hurt,” she grumbled, and then grabbed the end of the shaft now protruding from the right side of her stomach and yanked it out with one quick jerk and an agonized scream.
Holly sat clutching the stick and panting as she waited for the pain to ease. It was when she slowly became aware of liquid running down her stomach and soaking her pants that she dared to glance down and see that she was pretty much hemorrhaging blood.
“Crap,” she breathed, and then looked around for something to at least staunch some of the bleeding until her body could repair itself. Not spotting anything right away, Holly dropped the stick, popped open the glove compartment and retrieved the half roll of paper towels she’d placed in there just last week. Pulling off wads of “the quicker picker upper,” she quickly stuffed it into the hole in her stomach, wincing as she did.
“I’d never make it as a field medic,” she muttered to James’s unconscious form as she unrolled more paper towel to add to the first bunch. “I hope the nanos don’t think the paper towel is normal and try to turn me into a big roll of it or something.”
Holly laughed weakly at her own joke, and then shook her head as she pictured herself as a roll of paper towels with arms and legs.
“Must be delirious,” she decided.
When James moaned in response, Holly peered at him sharply, and then eased to the edge of her seat to brush the hair back from his face. She frowned at how pale he was. The man had lost a lot of blood, and he was still losing it. Holly was no doctor, but it seemed pretty obvious that his chances of surviving weren’t good if they didn’t get help soon.
She peered out the car windows, looking for that help. But of course they’d crashed in one of the few stretches of uninhabited road between the restaurant in San Francisco and their home in San Mateo. James would insist on using back roads instead of the freeway. Cursing again, she turned to peer at her husband, her mind working.
This wasn’t his fault; it was hers for arguing with him while he was driving. If she’d just kept her temper in reign and her mouth shut . . . How had she expected him to react when she’d flashed him her fangs? And she shouldn’t have been running with scissors in the first place. If not for that, Justin wouldn’t have turned her to save her life, and everything else that had happened, wouldn’t have, including her husband dying on a dark back road at the age of twenty-six.