“Thank the goddess,” Trent said, moving toward me. “Eddie couldn’t get to you and then he could but he didn’t come back. Then Fen caught your scent.”
We were levels down, and we’d walked around all yesterday. Fen’s senses were far beyond even a normal alpha. He could track us through thick rock and a throng of other beings worried about what had happened.
“Don’t you change. Luna’s here and she doesn’t need to…” Evan began.
But Fen didn’t listen to her. He changed in between steps going from four to two feet with complete and effortless grace. “What happened? Are you okay?” He took a long breath. “I smell magic. Dark magic. And…” He turned my way. “Mom, you’re hurt.”
“What happened?” Gray asked, moving in, and then there were three big dudes crowding me.
I held my hands out, trying to get some space. “It was Liv. I suspect she’s the one who made the nest shake, though I’d like to know how she did it. I think we should check the wards as soon as possible.”
“Eddie, I need you to take me topside.” Trent held out a hand.
Fen popped right back into wolf form and went to stand beside his dad.
“I don’t think that’s…” I began.
But Eddie had hands on them both and they were gone.
“Necessary.” I sighed and looked to Gray. “Liv’s gone. She’s got a teleportation spell now. It would have been nice back in the old days when I had to drive everywhere.”
“I think she paid dearly for that power.” Gray touched my shirt, pulling it up to get a look at the wound. “Are you okay?”
“We can’t possibly know because she won’t sit long enough to allow me to examine her, and I’m fairly certain she’s going to tell me not to let Relda try to heal her.” The nurse had her daughter on her hip, the little were hanging on her while watching everything that went on.
“I put the king’s blood my mom sent down here.” Evan crossed to the refrigerator. There was a lock on it, and she pressed in the code. “It should work.”
“That’s for you,” I replied.
Evan pulled out the thermos I’d seen Fenrir carrying the day we arrived. “It’s way more than I need, and I happen to know that Relda’s going to have a hard time with that wound. Rose, we were facing one of the Profane.”
Rose set Luna down with a sigh. “She’s right. The Profane use spells that resist magical healing. They resist regular healing. Vampire blood is the only thing that can heal it unless you can find an angel to touch you or you want to wait a couple of weeks before you can move comfortably again. Maybe months, the way that looks.”
“Great. We have a ton of vampires down here,” I pointed out. “If we can’t find Casey, I’ll wait until the primals are up.”
Rose’s head shook vigorously. “No. Oh, no. We don’t use primal blood to heal. It often…changes the person being healed. It can go wrong sometimes.”
There was a piece of trivia I’d never heard. “What do you mean wrong? They turn into primals?”
“Not exactly,” Rose hedged. “Sometimes primal blood takes… I don’t know how to put it but it takes root in a person and changes them. No one’s tried it in many, many years. It’s forbidden for a primal to share blood with a non-primal except in extreme cases when a life is truly in danger. The last person to take primal blood lost their hair and grew fangs that wouldn’t recede. He also developed a…hunger for blood that couldn’t be denied.”
“That’s what always happens?” I was curious.
“Not always. Sometimes it’s smaller changes like talons that grow or a sensitivity to sunlight,” Rose explained. “I read that once the change was nothing more than developing extremely sensitive hearing. But they cannot take the chance that they create a monster. I’m married to a primal, and I don’t share blood with him. The academics are kind enough to send the companions blood so we can stay with our husbands as long as we can.”
It was an exchange begun long ago when companions and vampires realized the way they fit together. Companions fed their vampire husbands, and the hubby paid her back with a much-elongated life through his blood. Anyone marrying a primal apparently would get the shaft if the academics weren’t such a kind group of dudes.
“Okay, but we can wait for…” I was about to say Casey, but that was the moment when Gray’s fingers barely skimmed across the wound, and I groaned because the pain went sky high. The pain had been sitting at a low hum of misery, but I kind of saw stars when anything touched my side.
“And she’s going on the bed.” Gray simply leaned over and picked me up, crossing to the bed, and I clamped my jaw down to keep from shouting out. “We’re not waiting for Casey. That’s a whole damn thermos of king’s blood, and Evan’s not going to be here for more than a couple of days. Evan, I take it your dad got back and realized he could slow down your aging process to match Fen’s.”
I winced as he laid me down on the bed.
Evan handed him the thermos. “Yes. It was pointed out that Fen will outlive me by a couple hundred years, and my dads put me on the every other day blood shot plan. I would rather wait until I’m like twenty-five or so, but they want me to have the healing properties, too. I tried to tell them we all take vamp blood before we go into battle, but my dads are super overbearing and protective.”
“I would like to try to apply it topically,” Rose said, setting her daughter down and crossing to wash her hands. “I worry since we’re dealing with a wound given by one of the Profane that it will scar if we don’t put it directly on the skin. How deep does it go?”
“It looks superficial, but she should be healing this,” Gray said. “Aren’t you supposed to be on king’s blood?”