My Precious Nightmare

Chapter 40: Bonfire

The consciousness Sky came to was half-formed and blurred. She saw images, crystal clear, but couldn't process entirely what she was seeing. Fire-like pain sparked from all over her body, though it was concentrated on her right shoulder and beneath her rib cage. Despite the pain, cool, refreshing not-oxygen slipped down her throat, calming her.

Somewhere in her muddled awareness she registered a familiar smell, though not as familiar as...him. The one the rolling waves within her whined for like a troubled child does for their baby blanket. What she fed on smelled a little like him, but she knew it wasn't him. Too small. Too different.

As her perceptions recollected themselves, bit by bit, she began to comprehend them. The beating roar of helicopter blades. Smells of metal, gas, and air. Soft, small hands at her head, along with a cold soft pouch of something she knew of and did not like. And the tell tale scent of a heady, thick sweetness that clogged the back of her throat.

Groaning, she pulled her teeth out from her source of not-oxygen and moved towards it, just to be stopped by the hands. Pain spiked through her shoulder enough to give her a flash of clarity.

Lane was trying to pull her back. Lane with glowing, hungry violet eyes like his brother, his teeth in a blood bag.

And then she saw the bloody mess which was her shoulder. And it didn't stop there. Stripes of torn flesh ran down her arms and chest, even across the side of a breast that she hurriedly tried to cover with what remained of her shirt, to her regret as the pain of moving said arm brought a scream from her throat.

Lane dropped the blood bag and pulled her back more insistently. Sky had no choice. The pain was blinding her, along with panic.

"Lane, I can't-I can't remember—what happened to me?" The words all but vanished as her voice pitched into the hypersonic.

"It's okay, Sky, you'll heal, just come back—"

"No, this--" Sky gasped.

With surprising strength for one his size, but perhaps not for a vampire, Lane shoved Sky's face back to his throat and brought the blood bag back to his own mouth.

The next time Sky came back up, the thundering of the helicopter had vanished and the sharp tang of green, growing things and sea salt stung her nose. The pain of her shoulder and her gut had lessened, but her body still felt bruised and beaten. She could still smell the ultra-sweet something, but it was weaker now. Somehow, she knew that whatever had given off the sweet aroma had been moved and all she was smelling was what remained of it.

She unlatched from Lane slowly, wary of aggravating her wounds. Her mess of a shoulder still oozed, but at least she couldn't see bone anymore.

"You okay?" she asked him.

Lane nodded, mouth full with a fresh blood bag. The glow to his eyes had yet to leave.

Sky bit her lip and glanced towards where the remains of the sweet smell came from—a bloody splotch on the floor. She closed her eyes against the urge to get down and lick it and instead tried to recall what she remembered last. She had jerked awake and broke off from Lane, jumped out of the helicopter, and followed the only scent she knew by heart, that of Aster Morianton. Then she had smelled the stomach clenching sweetness mingled in, gone through the factory, seen Morianton hanging by his throat with that white...thing in front of him—

With an uprush of heat and power from her gut, she had lunged at the white-haired man, and that's where her memories ended.

"Aster should be back soon," said Lane softly, holding his blood bag to his chin.