Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 130991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 437(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 437(@300wpm)
Dear universe, what the hell happened here?
“Clear,” Sean said.
I rushed to Gorvar. His fur was matted with congealing blood, still viscous but old. I put my hand on his neck, searching for a pulse. His eyelids trembled. He raised his head, trying to snap, but he had nothing left.
“It’s me,” I told him.
Recognition sparked in his green eyes. Gorvar whined softly.
“Hold on, big guy.” I spun to Sean. “We have to get him to the inn.”
Sean scooped the massive beast into his arms and carried him out like a puppy. I followed, pushing the door shut behind me. The lock clicked.
We hurried through the streets, dodging traffic. The shoppers of Baha-char had seen everything, and nobody paid us any mind. In fifteen minutes, we reached the inn’s entrance. Sean handed Gorvar to the inn.
“I have to go back.”
I brushed a kiss against his lips. “Be careful.”
He nodded and took off at superhuman speed.
I entered Gertrude Hunt. “Medward. Quickly.”
The inn gulped Gorvar’s body and opened the stairs. I took them two at a time. I had no idea how, but I had to save Wilmos’ wolf.
The medward was hidden in the lower levels of the inn, just under the main floor. A sterile room that could be hermetically sealed off in an emergency, it housed a decontamination shower, a storage with six different stasis pods, and until recently, a single ancient med unit that was barely up to the task. Fortunately, we had junked it three months ago and replaced it with three brand new, state-of-the-art robotic stations, upgrading our medbay to the full medward.
The new med units were a gift from Maud. My sister was now the Maven of House Krahr, which meant she was in charge of all of their diplomatic efforts, and her position came with a significant salary. She bought the units for us with her new Maven money and had them sent over on one of Arland’s scout ships. According to Maud, Gertrude Hunt was seeing more action than an average vampire stronghold on a hostile planet, and thinking of us trying to cope with our outdated med unit kept her from sleeping at night.
When I was a kid, Maud would buy me cute clothes at discount sites online. Now she bought me advanced medical equipment. Nothing really changed. My big sister was still trying to take care of me.
I looked at Gorvar sprawled in a complex medunit. He had four deep lacerations that carved him from his belly halfway up his side. Something had dug into his stomach with its claws and dragged them up, ripping gashes in his flesh. The edges of the wounds were trying their best to turn necrotic, but Auul wolves had insane immune systems. It was part of the reason their DNA had been used to bioengineer werewolfism. Whatever contamination had invaded his body had to be very potent, because normally the wounds would’ve closed by now.
Gorvar had lost a lot of blood. Our old medunit wouldn’t have known what to do with him, but the new one analyzed his injuries in seconds. It had pumped him full of antibiotics and fluids, and its robotic surgery arms repaired the cut in his liver, cleaned his wounds, cut off a very thin sliver of the injured tissue to combat the worst of the necrosis, and sealed the lacerations. His pulse was weak but steady, and the medical unit’s read outs assured me that in its opinion, he was stable.
Now I just had to wait for Sean to come back.
He had smelled corruption by Wilmos’ store. Wilmos wasn’t at the store, so Sean would follow that corrupted trail. He told me before that the stench of corruption lingered much longer than normal scents. It stained everything it touched.
Corrupted Michael had thick yellowed claws. Sometimes I had nightmares of him chasing me through Red Deer dripping decay and reaching for me with those claws while I desperately tried to find my way back to the inn. My distorted memory made them much bigger in my mind, but objectively speaking, the wounds on Gorvar could have been made by claws just like those.
After I brought Michael’s corpse to the inn to analyze it, the corruption that inhabited his body acted almost like a living thing, a pathogen that actively tried to contaminate the inn. I had purged that infection from Gertrude Hunt, but I had done it in my inn, where I was strongest. When Sean and I fought Michael on the streets of Baha-char, we almost lost. We might have died, if Wilmos hadn’t jumped in with a high-impact version of an alien Gatling gun.
Was the damage at Wilmos’ shop a retaliation for that fight? If so, why now? That happened months ago. Or was it something else? It couldn’t be a coincidence.
I had hoped Michael was the only one. I had alerted the Innkeeper Assembly to what happened, but they hadn’t said anything about it.