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By Root 7195 0

of the heart I couldn’t reach. I started to slide my hand out as I felt him grab the piece of muscle or ligament. He laid the other heart on the dead vampire’s groin and grabbed my arm before I could pull it out of the chest cavity. He held my hand inside so we’d be touching the heart together. If I struggled, he’d like it. I could yell for help, but he almost had it loose, and it would be over. I hesitated. He pulled the heart free of whatever had been holding it in place, and it spilled into both our hands. He kept his free hand on my arm, controlling how slow we eased out of the chest cavity. He made it last, and he stared at my face while we did it. I normally don’t have much problem fishing around inside dead bodies anymore, but the sensation of our hands holding the heart, our arms pressed together as we slid out of the thick, bloody muscle, was too strangely intimate. For the last few inches of arm he looked down at the wound and not at my face. He watched our arms emerge from the bloody hole just under the sternum. He kept his hand on my arm and forced our hands upward, so that for a moment we held the heart together, and he looked at me over that bleeding muscle.

I knew I went pale. I couldn’t help it. I knew he would enjoy my fear, and I couldn’t stop it. Then he leaned in toward me. He leaned in over the bloody heart, the body, our bloody arms. He leaned in for a kiss.

I whispered, “Don’t.”

“You don’t want me to kiss you,” he whispered back.

“I don’t want you to touch me,” I said.

He smiled then. “Perfect.”

He kissed me.

I had Fredo’s blade going for a different chest when Olaf pulled back, out of reach. He laughed, a rich, deep laugh. A happy sound that didn’t match anything we were doing. He’d left me with the heart in one hand and the knife in the other. If my hands hadn’t been full I might have gone for my gun. Surely I could claim temporary insanity.

He wiped his bloody hands on his clothes, not just on his shirt, but wiped his bloody hands down his body, showing off all that muscled chest, stomach, and finally groin. He massaged his groin with his bloody hands, and looked at me while he did it.

That was it. I set the knife and heart on the floor and tried to run for the bathroom and never made it. I threw up in front of the door to the recreation hall. I threw up until there was nothing left. I threw up until my head was pounding and I was spitting up bile. Micah laid a cool and human hand against my forehead while I was sick. Nathaniel held my hair back, because my hands were still covered in blood.

Olaf left town. I’ve got a new recurring nightmare to add to the list. It’s Olaf and me cutting up the body, except in the dream it’s bloodier, and Giovanni is screaming, and I kiss Olaf back. Maybe the temporary insanity was not to shoot him.

Peter didn’t take the injection, and he didn’t catch lycanthropy. He’s back home recovering, human-slow, but he’s sixteen and in good shape. He’ll heal, but he’s going to have some seriously macho scars. I have no idea what Edward told Donna. I’m not sure I want to know.

Doc Lillian sewed up the marks on my breast. She said, “Unless you don’t care if it scars?” I guess I did care. I asked her why the breast would scar when the stomach and side healed clean. They were more serious wounds. What the doc and the other doctors think happened is that the feeding on the swans gave enough energy not only to save everyone, but also to heal the injuries completely, and even faster than a normal lycanthrope could have done it. I’m not sure what a “normal” lycanthrope is, but Lillian has warned me to be more careful. “You can’t find an entire animal group to feed off every night.” She has a point.

Jean-Claude sent Sampson home to Cape Cod before the fight. He didn’t want to get his friend’s son killed. Sampson left without having sex with me. His mother’s plans spoiled by the Harlequin’s arrival.

There’s a tiger inside me now, thanks to Marmee Noir and Soledad. We’re trying to find some tigers willing to come to St. Louis. Though, strangely, something about what happened