Page 102 of Forsaking All Others

“Yes.”

“Madonna Santa!”

“Cat, please, time is of the essence.”

“You don’t trust my word, but you’d trust me to do this?”

“What choice do I have? Think of it as the ‘sympathetic restoration’ of an historic T-Rex.”

“How? I don’t have a knife or anything...”

“Push your fingers into the wounds and retrieve the bullets.”

He closes his eyes, his breath coming in shallow, quick gasps, and I grimace at what I’m about to do.

“Mary, mother of God.”

Squatting back down beside him I pause, considering just how to go about it.

“Do it!” he groans, his eyes closing tight.

“I can’t stand the sight of blood; it makes me vomit.”

“Yet you plan to marry a vampire? Fuck me, you’re a piece of work. DO. IT!”

“Ugh!”

Pushing my fingers into one of the wounds a tiny way, I shudder, thankful that my stomach’s empty as I dry retch. Inside, his body is warm and wet, and immediately more blood pulses out, much more.

“Jag, I don’t know. I can’t feel anything. I’m making it worse.”

He opens his eyes and glares at me, spitting, “Get. It. Out!” Through clenched teeth.

Nodding, I take another deep breath.

‘I won’t lose my T-Rex to fucking silver bullets. I know my people didn’t do this. He must have an enemy somewhere. I’ll prove that to him, but first I have to save him.’

“I can do this,” I say quietly under my breath as I push my hand deeper into his chest cavity and feel around for anything hard, “Ugh! Oh, Jesus, yuck, blech! Sooo disgusting! Che schifo, che schifo!”

His chest rocks, and I look up quickly, thinking he’s going into cardiac arrest, but he’s chuckling.

“Shut up,” he laughs, “you’re killing me.”

I roll my eyes and continue my tentative exploration until my fingers touch something hard.

“Either this is your rock-hard heart,” I murmur, “and I’m about to truly take it in every sense, or I have the bullet.”

Gritting my teeth, I grip the bullet between slippery fingers, lose it, grip it again and lose it again. It’s almost as though it’s burrowing deeper into his body every time I drop it, and I realise there’s only one way I’m going to manage to do this.

‘Mannaggia! I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this.’

Ignoring my every impulse, I place a palm on either side of the first bullet hole and force my hands down hard, eliciting a roar of pain from him that I try to ignore as I squeeze hard, exactly as I would if trying to extract a splinter. As the tip of the bullet appears I maintain the pressure with my hands and, leaning down, press my lips to the wound to grip the bullet between my teeth, pulling it clear of his body. Spitting it onto the grass I push away and dry retch half a hundred times, before turning back to the bachelor.

“I did it!” I laugh triumphantly, wiping his blood from my face on the same sleeve I’d wiped off my vomit, and grimacing at the smell.

“Great,” he groans. “Now do it again!”

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