“Don’t, Flambé. You need to rest up. There is no stopping Flamme. You can’t trap her in your body. She needs to emerge.”
The moment Sevastyan told her the truth she’d known all along, she panicked. She had done her best to help Flamme, but in the end, the pain was too great and her leopard had backed off to spare her.
“It will kill both of us. It would be kinder to just euthanize us like they do animals.” She said it to the doctor. “I tried. I couldn’t stand the pain. I’m really tough, but I couldn’t do it, not even for her.”
Her fingernails dug into Sevastyan’s arm. She didn’t want to start crying again. It seemed as if she’d been crying for hours. Her head hurt, but that was because her skull felt too big, pushing and pushing, just like her jaw. Everything ached. Every joint. Every muscle. How did women do this? How did any shifter do it?
“No one is going to euthanize you, Flambé,” Sevastyan said. His soothing voice was gone and his firm, commanding tone was very much in evidence. “Just relax and rest. I’m here, the doctor is going to give us both instructions and we’re going to get you through this. He does need you to answer a few questions. They’re very important and we might not have a lot of time. Try to concentrate, baby.” One hand began to massage her scalp.
“Did you try the shots to help you with clotting?”
Flambé turned her head toward the voice. She managed to pry her eyes open enough to see a man sitting across the room staring at a computer screen, not at her. The lights were off in the room, which helped considerably. “No, my father said they wouldn’t work. My mother had tried something like that and they didn’t work for her.”
The doctor frowned and glanced up, shook his head and then typed more. “That was over twenty years ago. I think your father was wrong. I think you and any other strawberry leopards with this problem need to be tested and put on the shots if they are appropriate as soon as possible. I’ve given you pills to help with clotting now, and one shot. What are you taking?”
“Iron.”
“Have you heard of gene therapy?”
“No.”
“Simplified, we introduce a virus into your system, not the kind of virus that makes you sick, but one that introduces a copy of the gene that encodes for the clotting factor you’re missing. The hope would be that if it works for you, your body would begin producing your own clotting factor normally. I’d like you to provide me with a list of your clients who are hemophiliacs so we can get them into treatment as soon as possible.”
“That can wait until we get Flambé through her heat, Doc. The most important person to me is her. I don’t like that she’s so fucking miserable and in pain.”
Flambé was a little shocked at the intensity in Sevastyan’s voice. She flicked her gaze up quickly to look at the strong line of his jaw. That was the best she could do. Even her eyelashes seemed to hurt, although the water was definitely soothing on her skin. The heat helped her sore muscles. Whatever was in the water brought some semblance of peace to her burning sex. She wanted to stay there forever, locked in the safety of Sevastyan’s arms surrounded by that hot, soothing water.
“We’ll get her through the heat.”
“And I don’t want her pregnant. She’d not dying in childbirth. Until you get this bleeding thing under control permanently, and you can tell me she’s safe, she’s not going to have a baby. Hell, I’m wrapping her up in Bubble Wrap.”
“Her leopard is in heat. Their cycles are in sync, Sevastyan,” the doctor said, his tone mild as he stared straight ahead at the monitor. “That’s why her leopard is emerging. Birth control doesn’t work on female leopards. She may or may not get pregnant. I’ve told you that already. There’s nothing you can do about that.”
“I’d rather give her up than let something happen to her.”
Flambé felt Sevastyan’s chin drop to the top of her head, nuzzling her there until strands of her hair were tangled in the shadow along his jaw. She closed her eyes against her reaction to the idea of Sevastyan voluntarily giving her up. It was ludicrous and so very silly of her to vacillate back and forth, but she wanted him to want her the way she wanted him.
“Before you ask, condoms don’t work with your kind of sex,” the doc said. “You’d break them most of the time. We’ll just have to work fast to get her blood to clot.”
“We won’t have sex,” Sevastyan declared. “I can live without it until you say it’s safe for her. I’m not losing her. I don’t have anything without her, doc. Nothing that means a damn thing, so figure this out.”
“She’s in heat, Sevastyan, you’re going to have to have sex.” The doctor didn’t even look up. “Flambé, had the burning sensations been increasing prior to you noticing your leopard beginning to show herself or were they staying the same?”
She had to pull her mind back to the questions the doctor was asking and off of Sevastyan’s declarations. She wanted to hold those to her, listen over and over to his tone, his voice, study the words, the way he said each one of them. She forced herself to think about the doctor’s questions. “It was pretty much the same.”
“The sensations weren’t just in your vaginal region, but all over your body?”
“All over.” She curled deeper into Sevastyan’s arms.
“Interesting. This is a much rarer form of persistent genital arousal disorder. I’ve only seen this before in a few other shifters. As I said, it’s genetic. The nerves in your body form pathways and send signals to your brain. Harder pressure feels better than soft?”
“Yes. If someone touches me when I’m like that, it burns so bad I can’t stand it. The tighter or harder the pressure, the better the feeling.”
In spite of being in the soothing water, a wave of itching burned across her skin. Her breath caught in her throat. She recognized immediately what was going to happen. Throughout the night, the pattern had repeated itself until she had clawed at her own skin to try to remove it in an effort to allow her leopard freedom.
“Sevastyan.” There was despair. Fear. No hiding it from him.
“Her leopard is rising, Doc,” Sevastyan said, surging to his feet, Flambé cradled to his chest as if she weighed nothing at all. Water poured off both of them.