Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(71)

Oh, God. The smell. It was just like the lab, an antiseptic waft in the air, and layered on top of that the saltiness of tears and a copper tinge that suggested someone had been bleeding.

Yup, he was back in the lab. He was having one of his lab dreams where he…

No, wait. He had been bleeding. He was the one who’d had blood shed.

His brain was slow on the uptake, but then it all came back: Being at the club with Rahvyn and telling her they could go. Her pulling a yes-please. Them heading out the door.

Andthenacarhadscreechedaroundthecornerandsomeonehadshot—

Nate popped his eyes wide, jacked right up, and threw both hands out in front of himself.

Like that could stop the bullet from hitting him in the stomach.

Except… he instantly realized he wasn’t out on the street, and there was no car, and he wasn’t shot—

Arms were suddenly around him, hugging him, holding him close and comforting him. Two people. One on either side of him. Tears, now, lots of them.

His parents? What were they doing in the lab?

Wait, this wasn’t the lab. This was a hospital room.

His awareness struggled to catch up with it all—until he breathed in deep and smelled his mom’s shampoo, the Pantene kind that she liked and always used.

“Mom?” he said hoarsely, because he was still so confused.

His human mom, the one who had adopted him along with his new father, put her face in his. She looked—well, she looked awful, her cheeks blotchy and slick with tears, her breathing rough like she was about to pass out.

And then his father’s visage was right next to his own, too. In contrast to his mom, his sire was paper white. Murhder had been crying, too, though. Was crying now—

“Am I okay?” Nate blurted. Then he looked down at his stomach.

Okay, so he had actually been shot: Beneath a staining of orange and some dried blood, there was a small round hole over to the left of his belly button. It didn’t hurt. In fact, nothing in his body felt bad—other than a damp patch at the small of his back, which he instinctively took to be where he had bled out.

His mom put her hands on him, patting at his arms, his shoulders, now his cheeks, as if she couldn’t believe she was touching him. And she was talking to him, his father, too. He could hear them pretty well, and he supposed their words made some sense. But he really couldn’t track anything—

“Rahvyn!” he shouted abruptly. “Where is Rahvyn?”

What if she’d been hurt—

“She’s…” His father couldn’t seem to go on.

“Amazing,” his mom finished.

For some reason, this brought out a fresh round of emotion from them both, their hands clasping his, their words rushing out faster.

“Where is she?” He glanced around and saw all kinds of clinical equipment, but nothing else. Not even a chair for someone to sit in. “Is she all right?”

Okay, yeah, sure, fine, they’d kind of answered that—he seriously doubted that anyone would use the word “amazing” if she’d had a bad injury. But he’d feel better if he could just see her.

“She saved you,” Murhder choked out. “I don’t know what she did… but you were… gone.”

“Gone where,” Nate asked. And then he licked his lips. “Can I have something to drink—”

He barely had the request out and his mom was lunging across to a stainless steel sink like if he didn’t have a cup of water in the next two and a quarter seconds, his internal organs were going to fail on him and ooze out the back of his gunshot wound.

As she went to bring a white plastic cup to his mouth, she spilled some on the blue sheet that was draped over his lower body. His hands were steadier than hers, so he helped hold things, and after he finished what was in there, he stared down at his abdomen.

And half expected to see a little arc of H2O coming out of his second belly button.

When he seemed to be water soluble—no, wait, that was the wrong word, and “water resistant” wasn’t right, either—he held the cup out to his mom. He didn’t even get to the first syllable of the request for a little more. She rushed back at the sink, and this time, her hands shook less during the handoff.

He drank three cupfuls, and the taste was magical. Cool and pure. No chemicals.

“Water retention,” he announced. “Or maybe retentive, if that’s a word.”

His parents looked at him in a way that made him wonder if they’d be less surprised if his head spun around.

Patting his tummy, he said, “I’m holding water. No leaks.”

His mom sniffled and wiped her nose with a paper towel. “That’s right. No more leaking.”

“We thought we’d lost you,” Murhder whispered.

Meeting the stare of his father, Nate had a thought that he didn’t really grasp or appreciate what had happened to him. It was as if his parents had been watching a different movie: His had been on cable, where there were commercial breaks that were kind of boring, and a storyline that had a little drama, but nothing that knocked your socks off or was all that revelatory or surprising.

Theirs had been a raw documentary on war atrocities that had won an Oscar for Worst Heartbreaking Thing on Film Ever.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking back and forth between them.