Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [142]
“Is there a landline?”
I looked around the room. “I don’t see one.”
“Try another room.”
“I don’t want to leave him alone.”
“We need a location to send help, Marshal.”
She was right, but I hated leaving him like that. I touched his hair, laid my cheek against his, and whispered, “Don’t die on me.” I walked back down the hallway past the bodies and tried the first door. It was a bedroom. No phone. The second door I tried was a kitchen, and there was a phone on the wall. “I see a phone, let me see if it’s working.” I had to put my gun down to pick up the second phone. “I’ve got a dial tone.”
“Call us back on that line, and we’ll be able to trace it to you.”
“Okay.” I clicked the cell phone shut, and dialed 911 again. It was a different woman’s voice, and I told an even shorter version.
“We have your location, Marshal, help is on the way.”
“How long?”
“You’re pretty isolated. We’ll try to get a chopper up, but there’s no place close to you to land it.”
“Okay. We’ll wait.”
“I can stay on the line with you if you want,” she said.
“No, I need to try to stop the bleeding on my friend, and I need my hands for that. Thanks though.” I hung up before she could say anything else. I clicked the safety on the gun and tucked it down the front of my belt. I’d bring Jason in here. I wasn’t sure how to stop the bleeding from so many wounds, but I knew keeping him warm was better.
Help was coming. We just had to hold on until they got here.
I knelt beside him. His hair was strangely clean, except where the side of his face had been on the blood. He looked like Jason again, instead of so much meat. I swallowed past something that tasted like tears. I’d cry later when he was safe. No time now. I rolled him into my arms, and he felt like dead weight. The heart was going and the pulse was moving, but there is a difference in bodies. Even unconscious, a body doesn’t roll like this. Just the way he felt in my arms scared the hell out of me. He rolled, and flopped, like he was already dead. His skin was too cold to the touch. I had to get the bleeding stopped. I had to.
It wasn’t weight, but sheer awkwardness that made me put him in a fireman’s carry across my shoulders. Blood trickled down my body from him. Shit. I tried to think of other things. I was glad that of all the men in my life, it was one my size. There probably wasn’t twenty pounds’ difference in our weight. I could carry him. Not forever, but down the hall. I carried him past the body of the vampire who had tortured him. My only regret in that moment was that I couldn’t kill him again.
I laid Jason down on the bed. He lay so still, so horribly still. I folded the coverlet around him, hoping to keep him warmer, and then I went in search of a first-aid kit, something, anything. I’d have traded my skills at killing for a little more first-aid training right then.
I knew what was in the bathroom, so I checked the kitchen first. There were towels, but no way to bind them in place. Maybe I could cut up a sheet to use as strips?
I got all the small towels and washrags that the kitchen had and carried them back to the bedroom. The only thing that showed above the coverlet was Jason’s hair, so yellow, so vibrant, but he hadn’t moved. I wanted him to move, so badly.
I put the rags down on the unused side of the bed and searched for sheets. They were in the closet. I had to go back to the kitchen to fetch a clean, sharp knife to cut the sheet up. I was glad the vampire hadn’t used all the knives in the kitchen, because I didn’t want to touch the bloody ones in the living room. It felt somehow like they were cursed. Not for real, but unclean, maybe.
I cut the sheet into strips, and then I had to uncover him and start looking at the wounds. They had bled into the coverlet, but no wound seemed worse than the others. It was like any one cut would have been fairly minor, maybe a few stitches. It was the culmination of all of them together that had nearly