Chapter 35
"Thanks for letting me kip here, doc," Kenzi yawned and stretched her aching back.
"I am not sure letting would be quite the right word with you," Lauren smiled dryly scraping a lab stool closer to the arm-chair the girl had appropriated herself of when she was refused a bunk. "It was more like you graciously allowed me to let you stay."
The blonde put a gloved hand onto Kenzi's chin and turned her head slightly, "Now let me get a look at those punctures." She unpeeled the band aid from the tiny wounds on the girl's neck for a check and gave a satisfied nod. "They are closing nicely and the transfusion did you good."
"Yeah, I am more rosy-cheeked than I've ever been in my life. That's my pale and interesting look out of the window," Kenzi sniped but not without a note of gratitude and went straight to what had been dominating her thoughts for the last twenty-four hours. "Pleasantries aside, how's Dyson?"
"Better, but still critical," Lauren didn't find it in her to lie under the young girl's scrutinizing glare.
"I am not sure I catch the full meaning of better but critical," Kenzi practically hissed, "It's either one or the other."
"He is in critical condition but the fact that he hasn't got worse gives us to hope he'll get better soon," the doctor herself felt she was running low both on clarity and comfort.
"He's a shifter, he's supposed to be healing in no time," the spunky 17-year-old was suddenly unravelling before very Lauren's eyes, her cheeks getting smudged anew with the leftovers of yet-unwashed-off mascara. "Why is he still unconscious?"
"It's because of silver that got into his system. It inhibits healing in most types of fae, shifters are especially susceptible to its effects. Had the bullet struck his heart it would have been fatal but it only pierced his lung and it took his body over twelve hours to restore its breathing capacity. But now he's off the machine, he shouldn't be long in regaining consciousness," the blonde was watching Kenzi's expressive face sympathetically and with a trace of surprise. They hadn't met for just a year since the attempted rape accident but the girl had managed to change quite significantly in such a relatively short period of time.
"A year is nothing when you are a mature personality but for a teenager or a young adult a year is a whole formative stage," the doctor mused with a detached curiosity, "Last I met her she was a frightened abused child clinging to her protector, now she is a young woman worried sick for the life of her …" Here Lauren had to pause in her inner monologue for the lack of appropriate word. What Dyson really was for this young human? Friend? Family? Everything?
"How should I know," Lauren told herself to the accompaniment of an internal sigh, "if I've never loved anyone myself. Ice Queen of the lab – that's who I am." "Are you hungry, Kenzi?" she asked out loud to derail the self-deprecating train of thought her mind was pursuing.
"Not after the pomegranate you forced into me," the girl shook her head and got out of her chair. "My tongue still feels like I was licking a plasticine-coated grater. And don't tell me it's good for my depleted blood cell count, I'll never forgive you for that and from now on I'll call you doctor Cold-heart."
With this declaration Kenzi walked over to the curtain that was drawn around Dyson's bed and slipped inside the improvised ward. Lauren shrugged her shoulders resignedly – the tiny human girl had steadfastly refused to leave the compound infirmary without the wolf and had been alternatively taking naps and checking on him since Hale brought them both here.
"Doctor Cold Heart?" the blonde whispered bitterly rolling the moniker on her tongue, "Put your finger on it, young Kenzi. Am I that obvious?"
Kenzi at that moment was leaning over the wolf's lying form and taking his motionless hand into hers. She had never seen Dyson looking that pale and vulnerable, emptied of his usual deep-running alertness, of his wild, as if contained, energy. "Dy, I am getting a bit fed-up with saying it myself but bugging has always worked on you. Wake up, please," the girl implored squeezing his hand with her slender fingers and leaning down so that her breath was blowing the coiled hair at his temple. "I've been sleeping in this awful arm-chair and by no feat of body-flexing can I make myself comfortable in it and the doctor's kicked-puppy face does nothing to improve my mood and I want home with you. She actually made me eat something useful, Dy!"
For a few minutes Kenzi listened to his uneven breathing, then she brushed a curl off Dyson's forehead and ran a gentle hand over cheek. "Wake up or I'll kiss you again," the girl whispered not sure which of the options appealed to her more at that particular moment.
"Again? So it was you the first time and not Hale. What a relief!" she heard a soft raspy voice say and saw Dyson's eyelashes flutter open.
Lauren was fumbling with the plastic bottles of medication at the glass cabinet when she heard a shriek and then loud sobbing from behind the curtain and dropped a yellow container in sync with her heart skipping a beat. She crossed the room at what could have passed for a run had her legs not turned to jelly, yanked the curtain apart and stopped terrified and moved beyond tears at the sight. Kenzi was practically wrapped around the shifter, her lightest-weight form pressed against the good side of his bandaged chest, her raven hair tangled with his dirty blonde. The girl's body was shaking with what the doctor took for all-out crying. At the sound of Lauren's hoarse adrenaline-quickened breathing the girl looked up and then the doctor noticed that Dyson's hand was lopped around the girl's waist and his blue eyes were open and almost shining either from fever or from emotion or both.
"He's come to!" the blonde woman exclaimed her usual calm tone going up to an unaccustomed high and an unrestrained happy.
Kenzi took her attention off the wolf for a second and transferred it to her fellow human and broke into a sincere smile. "Scrap the doctor Cold Heart, Lolo," she announced, "From now on I crown you with doctor Hotpants cause you are hot of pants and warm of heart but doctor Warm heart doesn't sound half as awesome. Dy's back under your care and your past sins of Ash-ass-licking are forgiven." The girl fell back into her position on the shifter's chest and tucked her positively tear-moisturized face into his shoulder while Lauren circled her to get closer to her patient and check his vitals.
"Keep improving at this rate and I'll let you try to get up tomorrow afternoon. If you do me an extra favour of reigning Kenzi in and sending her home, I might throw a decent dinner into the deal," the woman stated making notes on the clipboard.
"Can't pass up the chance of having someone get on your nerves, doctor," Dyson half-whispered the depth of his voice impaired by the wound, "Besides, I'd prefer to keep her in my sights. That's the only way to reign her in."
"So I get a cheeky hormonal girl, a convalescent wolf and some raw meat to procure for you if I want to ever rid my infirmary of both of you," Lauren summed up with a smile belying the complaint in her words and left to recapture the pills she had spilled.
"I'll get up when I am up to it and not when a smart-alec human tells me to," Dyson grumbled not without a couple of spasmodic pauses and gained a stern look from Kenzi. "Lauren knows her stuff and I'll personally see to it that you don't play dumb. It's easier to handcuff you to the bed than to pick your 200-pound tush off the floor," she tried for her most menacing.
"Good, so if we are both not going anywhere we can talk about the kiss," Dyson responded putting her in quite a tight spot but was too weak to press the point any further. His eyelids drooped and he murmured with the last of his conscious breath, "I'm gonna take a nap and you can make good on your previous threat."
With that he went under and Kenzi wondered whether he was talking about the threat of handcuffing him or kissing him and if the latter was the case whether it was Dyson or the drugs in his system talking.
The girl returned to her arm-chair and curled into it exhaustion, reviving relief and strange longing in the pit of her stomach rolled into one tight knot of emotion somewhere deep inside her. Lauren chose that moment to come up to the younger human with a small plastic tray that she positioned precariously on the wooden arm of the chair.
"Healthy food again?" Kenzi cast a contemptuous look at the mushy substance on a plate and a glass of orange juice. "You don't happen to have a stash of booze anywhere around this sterile prison for the soul?"
"Actually I do," Lauren cracked an unexpected coy smile, "For the rainy days going all askew. But you won't get a shot at it until you layer your stomach with the good stuff." Kenzi noticeably perked up and swung the tray onto her lap. "fetch your bottle, Hot-pants, I am on it!"
Half an hour later both women were sitting at the small desk – minus the microscope plus a bottle a brandy – and were partaking of it in quite a congenial manner.
"I am drinking alcohol with an underage girl in the Ash's lab!" Lauren repeated wonderingly her mantra from the previous toast.
"You're not a lost cause we thought you to be," Kenzi nodded with vigorous approval, "A couple of more Kenzi master-classes and you'll be almost tolerable."
"A couple of your master-classes and I'll be up for a liver treatment," the blonde smirked, "Though I have to admit trouble magnet as you are you make me feel …alive?"
"You make the bodies alive, I make the souls alive, we are quite a team, Lolo?" Kenzi downright refused to use the doctor's name. "You did it for D-man," she added on a more serious note, "And even if the next thing you do is sneaking behind my back to the Ash-hole and rat on my underage non-fae presence I'll still be forever grateful."
"You love him," Lauren stated rather than asked.
"He's been my world since I was eight," the girl nodded looking down into her glass as if seeking fro something in its dark golden depth.
"And now you are discovering he's not just the world to a little girl but a man to a young woman as well," the blonde nudged her gently.
"He's fae, I'm human. I'm in love, he's playing the field chasing supernatural beauties," Kenzi snorted, "Really not Romeo and Juliette material."
"I haven't noticed any fae beauties around him for the past twenty-four hours and I haven't heard of Dyson Thornwood taking a silver bullet for any of them either," the doctor remarked matter-of-factly. "Fae have a lot of time on their hands and sometimes they are not appreciative enough of its run. Believe me, I've studied them beyond mere physiology," she went on tentatively monitoring Kenzi's shifting expressions with warm sympathy, "Sometimes they need a nudge. If you are sure you want this to happen."
"I envy you," Lauren suddenly blurted and hastened to explain as the younger girl's eyebrows shot up in surprised amusement, "You are in love and I've never known what it means. To be ready to take a bullet for somebody, to forget yourself at someone's sick-bed, not because of your duty but because of your heart."
"Your heart is right there," Kenzi pointed at the left side of the doctor's white coat,"it just needs a person to stir it up, a man …"
"Or a woman," the blonde sighed deep in retrospection.
"Yikes, Lolo!" the younger girl cried out immediately leaning back as if to put more distance between them, "You know how to ruin a moment. Whatever, a woman. Just bare in mind I don't roll that way even when smashed."
"It was you who noticed my hot pants in the first place," the blonde couldn't resist a rib but Kenzi was already getting up. "I am going back to my Sleeping Beauty and you can go back to your microscopes and vials. If anyone asks we haven't had that talk."
Lauren followed kenzi's slightly staggering progression across the room with s smile and proceeded to clean up the drinking implements. The girl made it behind the curtain and sat down on the edge of Dyson's bed. "A nudge?" she asked herself heavily in doubt. As if on cue the wolf's eyes snapped open with a new lucidity. "Are you gonna beat me now, babe?" he whispered back.
"Damn your pointy ears. A girl can't have a privacy moment around here," Kenzi mock-complained.
"Seems like you have already had a couple of such with me out for the count," the wolf raised his voice a tiny notch. "What did I do to deserve a kiss?"
"You were you as always," Kenzi was not even sure she said it out loud but the strange disturbed expression in the blue of the shifter's eyes told her she did.
"When I am fully lucid and out of here, we'll talk about it," he promised earnestly.
"Since you are not yet lucid and still in here, I can give you more reason to talk later," the girl was not daunted. She leaned over him again and pressed her lips, her fear of being rejected dissipating as soon as her kiss was returned.
"I am going mad, babe," the wolf whispered when he broke away to drag some air into his underfunctioning lungs.
"You started it when you took on Little Human Red," Kenzi smiled stroking his cheek.