Chapter 161

My chest still heaving, I walked over to the side of Nolan’s hospital bed and climbed up into it, trying to catch my breath. His huge frame filled the entire bed. I had to straddle him.

And I could feel, as our bodies came into contact with each other, how very close to death he was. His usually hot skin was cold to the touch. The bandages wrapped all around his chest were red-soaked, wet and tacky and getting darker every second.

“Oh, Nolan,” I mumbled over and over. I placed my hands carefully on either side of his face, stroking the scruff on his cheeks. A tube was stuffed into his mouth and down his throat. It connected to one of the machines and was doing his breathing for him.

I had to take it out.

Nolan needed to drink my blood, and he wasn’t going to do it with that thing in his mouth.

I went ahead and just grabbed the tube and wrenched it up and out from his throat before I could overthink what I was doing. A deep, gravelly gasping sound came from Nolan’s throat as I pulled the tube out. Then the machine started beeping like crazy and his chest stopped moving up and down.

“It’s okay,” I heard myself saying. “I’m here now. It’s going to be okay.” I threw the breathing tube aside, heard it clatter to the ground.

Then I bit into my lip. Hard and fast, before I could hesitate.

The taste of blood was a glimmer of hope.

I kissed his lips on impulse. Covered them in red. But he needed to drink my blood. I propped his mouth open with one hand, positioned my mouth over his and pressed and pinched my lip to get it bleeding more, dripping down onto his tongue.

“Please,” I started begging. “Please, Nolan, wake up. You’re gonna be okay now, I promise. I’m gonna get you better. You have to wake up and drink though.”

His tongue was soaking through with my blood, but it wasn’t working yet. He was still cold and limp. And he wasn’t breathing, I remembered. The machines were all going crazy.

Someone outside the room tried the handle, found I’d locked it. They knocked, pounding hard, and insisted I open up.

I covered Nolan’s open mouth with my own and breathed into it. He wasn’t waking up as fast as I needed him to. I pulled back and took another big inhale, then exhaled into Nolan’s mouth again. And again. Doing his breathing for him like the machine had been, and getting a little more of my blood into his mouth each time as well.

I glanced at my wrist. I could get more blood from there than from my lip. But it would be even better if Nolan could bite into the big artery in my neck and drink straight from there.

“Nolan, you have to wake up,” I said between breaths, stroking his face. The both of us were a mess of blood now. Mine was all over both our mouths. His was all over both our bodies.

My hands started ripping the bloody bandages off of his chest. They were dense and sodden, sticky and hot. The wrapping was taped in several places, tedious and enraging to tear apart, something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I weren’t still in such an animal state.

But I got through it finally. Nolan’s big chest, which the doctors had shaved, was covered with fresh blood, and more was still coming from the circular wound in the middle of it. They’d sewn it closed with thick black stitches, but the stitches weren’t doing their job. The continuous onslaught of blood was still forcing its way out through the tiny spaces between them, like it was desperate to escape his body.

I felt my face twist into a pained expression. The doctors kept knocking on the door and threatening to break it down. I kept breathing and bleeding into Nolan’s mouth.

And pleading, between breaths, for him to wake up.

“Please come back to me, Nolan. I’m so sorry it took me so long to get here. I’m so sorry. I never want to leave you again. Please just come back to me now, baby. Please wake up.”

The tears were coming now, flicking off my eyelashes onto Nolan’s face in a fine mist, and I was starting to freak out. I had to stop breathing for him to keep from hyperventilating myself.

Why wasn’t he waking up?

Was I too late?

ADAN

“Home sweet home, I guess,” Kerr mumbled, opening the passenger door and jumping out before the car had even come to a complete stop.

Adan shifted into park and pressed his hands to his eyes. There was a stabbing pain starting behind them. Suddenly he felt like berating Kerr. Or attacking him.

But that was only because Adan was thisclose to losing his shit, and Kerr was the only person around. So instead of needlessly assaulting his friend and most devoted follower, Adan took a long, slow breath with his eyes closed. It did not make him feel calm by any means, but maybe a little less dangerous.

He killed the engine and got out, slammed the door shut. “We can hide the car later,” he said. “Start unloading the trunk. We’ll get everything inside first.”

Kerr loosened another button on his shirt, which was soaked with sweat around the neck and armpits. He had started pacing around the clearing the second he got out of the car, but looped back quickly at Adan’s instruction, nodding.

Adan retrieved a small duffel bag from the backseat, then headed across the clearing and walked a few yards into the woods. He stopped when he reached a wide-trunked tree, against the base of which leaned a large, flat rock with rounded edges. It was about three feet across at its widest point, big and heavy but not immovable for someone as strong as him.

He dropped the bag a few feet away and set about moving the rock. It just needed a good shove and some momentum to get rolling.

Then he crouched, grabbed what looked a handful of the forest floor, and pulled up what was actually a loose blanket of moss. Underneath was a metal hatch.

He pulled the handle and swung the hatch lid open, revealing a long, dark tunnel down into the earth. Cool, damp air floated up through the passage.

Adan cracked a few of the glowsticks from the duffel bag and dropped them down. They hit the bottom and cast a faint glow all the way up, illuminating a metal ladder.

“Everything’s out.” Kerr dropped their bags a few feet away and leaned his body against a tree, grunting.

“Good.” Adan stood up and evaluated his comrade. Kerr’s face was pale and sweaty, greenish and tired. He shouldn’t have been drinking so much, Adan thought, irritated. “You handle the car, I’ll take everything down.”

Again, Kerr nodded obediently. But he hesitated, taking a step back toward the car but then pausing, looking at his friend.

Adan raised his eyebrows. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah.” Kerr finished unbuttoning his shirt and peeled it off, leaving him in a sweat-soaked white undershirt. “Guess I was just thinking I didn’t actually expect we’d have to use this place.”

Adan started picking up their bags, strapping them across his chest. “We won’t be here long. Just go hide the damn car.” His chest vibrated with a suppressed growl of frustration.

Not safe yet, he reminded himself. No time for anger. No time for the spiraling thoughts about why his stupid brother was not dead yet.

If anyone had followed Adan and Kerr on their way here, they’d done a remarkable job of not being seen. It seemed most likely that the two men were truly alone out here.

But that didn’t mean they could dawdle. The sooner they could get the car covered up and hustle their bodies down into the bunker, the better.