“How long ago did you say this happened?” Julie asked.
“An hour, less,” I said.
“No way,” she said.
Matt finally met my eyes. He was frowning. “I’d say this was hours, maybe a day old, at least.”
“I told you I carry lycanthropy. It means I heal faster than human-normal.”
“It’s healing so fast it’s going to heal crooked. Stitches would have kept it from doing that,” Matt said.
“Crooked?” I asked.
“It’s going to scar more,” Julie said, “than if a doctor had stitched it for you.”
I looked down at my arm. It was a long, jagged cut, almost like angry lightning going from elbow to almost wrist. “Nothing to be done about it now,” I said.
“Actually if you go to the hospital they can cut it open again, and then sew it up. We just had a seminar on preternatural patients. Lycanthropes can heal so fast that they scar more, or even get their muscles bunched up so the wound gives them pain almost like arthritis.” Matt said it staring down at my arm, as if it were a sort of show-and-tell.
“Is there a time limit for when I need to come in and get this done?”
“Sooner is better, at the rate you’re healing,” he said, poking at the wound again.
“Please, stop poking it,” I said.
He looked up a little startled. “I’m sorry; it’s just the first wound like this I’ve seen since the seminar.”
“Matt’s a big one for theory in the field,” his partner said.
I looked at her, nodding. “I usually heal without scarring now.”
“Well, this is going to scar,” she said.
I looked at it and believed them, but wasn’t sure why it was happening. I thought about it, and then realized I’d absorbed anger when I visited the red tigers, but I hadn’t fed the ardeur. The anger had taken the edge off my hunger, but it hadn’t really refueled me. I wasn’t healing as well as normal, which explained why the tree limb had hurt me so badly in the first place, as well as the scarring. I could go longer between feedings. I could control it, but apparently this was the price. I healed better than a pure human, but not as well as I could heal. That wasn’t good when hunting the Harlequin. Shit.
I tried to imagine what Raborn would say if I actually did take time out for a nookie break. It didn’t even bear thinking about; I couldn’t stop for sex, not until we finished hunting through the woods. Well, fuck, or rather no fuck. Damn it, I was tired of getting punished for not having sex. It was sort of the horror movie cliché turned on its ear; only the slutty survived, not the virginal.
I couldn’t explain any of this to the EMTs, or anyone else here but Edward. Always before with the ardeur it had consumed me, forced me to feed, but now I had enough control that I could delay it. The angry purple and red wound on my arm showed me the price for controlling the ardeur. Staring down at the wound, I realized that I had started counting on healing and being harder to hurt. I tried to remember the last time I’d been hurt by accident like this, and I couldn’t remember. My stomach clenched tight and it wasn’t hunger—that wasn’t where the ardeur’s hunger hit me—it was fear. If a tree limb could do this to me, then what about a sword, or a bullet? Shit.
“You okay?” EMT Julie asked.
I nodded. “Fine.”
“You really need to go to the hospital and let a doctor open the wound and then stitch it back up,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
She frowned at me. “But you’re not going to do it, are you?” She sounded disgusted with me, I really couldn’t blame her.
“I can’t let them go into the woods without me.”
“You know, the marshals around here do just fine when you’re not in town. They hunt vampires and beasts, and they do a good job. Let them do their jobs and let us do ours and take you to the hospital.”
Matt pulled at the edges of the wound. “Stop that,” I said.
“Sorry, but it’s almost like one of those fast-forward films of flowers, you know, where you watch them bloom. I swear I can almost see your skin knitting together. It’s so cool.”
Julie hit him on the shoulder, and it must have been harder than it looked, because he said, “Ow!”
“She’s a live patient, Matt, not a cadaver in class.”
He blinked up at me, and then looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I just . . .”
“It’s okay. Just patch me up so I can finish this hunt.”
“You’re being totally stupid,” Julie said.
“Not as stupid as Marshal Newman. He’s still bleeding.”
“He’s going to keep bleeding until he passes out, too,” she said, and the disgust was thick in her voice.
“Probably,” I said. “At least I’m letting you bandage me up.”
“Your wound will be closed by the time you finish this hunt. You’re not losing more blood.”
“Then just wrap it up so I don’t keep hitting the wound on things.”
She frowned, but got gauze and started wrapping my arm.
“Make sure none of it gets in the wound,” I said.
She looked at me. “I know my job.”
“I don’t mean to imply otherwise, but if I’m healing as fast as you think I am, sometimes the body can heal around the cloth.”
They both looked at me. Matt said, “You mean the body will actually knit closed with some of the bandages inside?”
“I’ve seen it happen,” I said.
“To you?” he asked.
“No, a friend who was a werewolf.”
Matt’s face glowed with eagerness. I could almost feel the questions bubbling to the surface.
“You’re wrapped up. Sign here, so we can say we tried to take you to the hospital in case something goes wrong with your arm, which it will.”
I signed, and hopped off the back of the ambulance. “Sorry I’m being a pain in your ass.”
“When the tall guy passes out in the woods, try to keep things from eating him,” she said.
“I’ll try,” I said, and I would, but with my arm beginning to ache from the rapid healing, I wouldn’t try too hard. Newman had let Raborn talk him out of even a bandage. I’d been green, but never that green. Maybe it was a guy thing and I’d never understand that level of stupid, or maybe mine was a girl thing. My arm began to twitch, the muscles fighting against each other as they knit together. I hadn’t had that happen since I first got lycanthropy in my bloodstream. Shit. Maybe Newman wasn’t being any stupider than I was. I guess I would try to keep him from getting eaten. Damn it.
23
NEWMAN PASSED OUT, but I made sure nothing ate him. We were deep in the trees by the time he went down. He’d done well to make it this far. I stayed by him in the wind-kissed trees with the other police working their long line of searching, but I could see the other stretch of road, and I was pretty certain that there were no monsters to find. The Harlequin had fled. Either they were still trying to stay secret enough to avoid this many cops, or they hadn’t expected Edward to be packing a rocket and they’d retreated to rethink their plans. I think they’d underestimated both of us, hell, all of us. I looked down at Newman where he lay on the ground. Detective Lorenzo was holding his inner suit jacket on Newman’s wound, trying to slow the blood down. He’d put his outer jacket back on so it still read Police, but also it was cold. My hands were numb with it. Weren’t cold summer nights an oxymoron?
Lorenzo’s partner, Detective Jane Stavros, was helping me guard the two men, both the unconscious one and the one who had his head down tending the wounded one.
The police Windbreaker swam on Detective Stavros’s thin frame. The pantsuit that was showing was cheap, black, and too large for her. She was at least five-ten in her sensible and ugly black lace-up shoes. If she’d been dressed better I might have thought she was a professional model, but she had dieted too much for her bone structure, so she looked starved, and she’d dieted away all her curves so she was built like a man. Her straight brunette hair was back in a loose ponytail. Some women on the job try to dress like the men, to fit in, to pretend that they aren’t women. I hadn’t seen any woman who had been on the job long enough to get a detective’s shield carry it to this extreme. Maybe she was a newly minted detective; sometimes that can throw you back to old issues. But it wasn’t just the men’s clothing; it was that she was sloppy, as if she’d rolled out of bed and put on someone else’s clothes by mistake. Nothing fit her right, as if she were wearing someone else’s skin.