For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
When Kate woke, her mouth tasted like seaweed.
Her head was heavy on the gurney, a pulsing ache, and the tang of astringent in her nostrils. Hospital. They'd driven to a hospital—clinic—a doctor for vampires. The deputy on the side of the road scenting Castle a mile away. The garlic bandages he'd pulled out of his emergency kit, the liver pops.
She was awake. Her every breath hurt on both inhale and exhale. She was awake now.
"Castle," she rasped, opening her hand.
"Is that his name? What kind of—"
She shot upright, snagged the wrist before the needle could come down, glaring at the woman who stood poised above her.
"Let go before I make you," the woman said calmly. "I just finessed a bullet out of you and didn't even report it to the police, so I think you owe me a few blood tests."
"Where's my husband?" she snapped. She felt better with every breath, though it ached. The wound was slow to heal, slower than it should be?, but she couldn't worry about that right now. "Where is Rick?"
"Rick Castle?" the woman groaned. "Are you fucking with me. That man is Rick Castle, the author. You transitioned a damn famous person."
Not that famous.
"Where is he," Kate said flatly, twisting on the bed. "What have you—oh God, what did you do to him?" He was a collapsed form at the glass wall, drenched in sweat, another ten pounds gone, and zip-ties hanging from a wrist, torn at his ankles.
"I had to unthaw him," the woman said. The beads clinked as she turned her head. "After I took lab work, of course, so I knew it was coming and I was prepared. Didn't know he'd be that strong though."
"You zip-tied him," she croaked, and tried to ease her feet to the floor. But Harris stopped her. Kate wasn't sure she could make it either. "You bound him… but he broke free?"
"He didn't even know he did either," the woman said, clucking her tongue. "I'm telling you, this phase is brutal. You're lucky you got to me in time. You driving around wounded in an enclosed space with this one, you never would've made it out alive."
"He's my husband," she said. "He would never."
"You don't know him—that—lying on the floor right now. That is not currently your husband. He's not Rick Castle the author either. He's VL P7, going on three hours and thirteen minutes, and that is all."
Kate tore her eyes from his pathetic form. "What's… VL P7?"
"Vampir Lichen, Phase Seven. Probably nearing the end, considering how drenched in sweat he is."
Kate's jaw dropped. A hissing in her breath as it pressed her lungs against the open wound. "You… it's… did you say lichen?"
"Yes. Lichen: algae-fungus mutualism. What you have crowding in your body in a symbiotic relationship at best, at worst, a fatal morphology."
Everything hurt. She found herself leaning heavily on the raised head of the hospital bed. "A fatal… a lichen."
"From what we've been able to decipher in the short amount of time called the modern medical era, yes. Look, it's disgustingly irresponsible of you to transition this man without—"
"I didn't know," she breathed. Her exhale was a hitch. Every breath was like her lungs were snagging on her ribs, like something was sticky in her torso. "I don't know. Anything. A lichen."
"How do you not know—oh, hell, did your parents die soon after they transitioned you? Oh fuck, you were turned by a God-damned ex-lover, weren't you. That son of a bitch. That fucking son of a bitch. Who is he? He's black-balled. For all his damned eternity—"
"He's dead," Kate frowned. Her eyes were fixed on Castle, but she tentatively touched the wound below her breast, flinched when her fingers encountered wet flesh. "What… is this?"
"It's not healing," Dr Harris clipped. "I don't know why. You two are—" A sharp shake of her head. "I'm running more tests. You're separated, you can't even scent him, and yet your lichen is matching his as he transitions."
"He had to—there wasn't anything for it—he's drunk from me… at least three times now. Four."
Harris cocked her head, eyes dark. The braids looked like an intricate art sculpture, framing the perfect bone structure of her face. "You Let for him? Or he took?"
"Um. Kind of both." Kate slowly traced the edge of the wound, shivering as she felt the ineffectual butterfly bandages trying to hold her together. "Twice when it first happened, he needed the..." She trailed off as Harris scowled. "No? Well, that's what I was told. He would need it. We were shot, multiple shots, there was a federal case, a conspiracy we—"
"I don't need the gruesome details, just the medical ones."
Kate nodded, trying to hold up her head. Her feet dangled to the floor but she couldn't get off the bed; she had no ability to keep herself upright. "He was shot an inch from his heart, too close to… I think I panicked. There wasn't—no one was going to get to us in time. He was dying on our kitchen floor and all I could… it was instinct." She was horrified by that realization, that there had been almost no forethought; she had just moved.
Tears burned her eyes. What she'd done to him.
"Instinct is worthy, don't knock it. What then."
Kate took a shallow breath. "Soon as his heart stopped, and he was cold, I drained the gunman—"
"No, back up. How'd you do it? You scar him with your bite?"
She nodded, throat closing up.
"Okay. You make the sign of the cross?"
Kate blinked. "What?"
Harris suddenly bared her teeth, a violence in her face that caused Kate to jerk back. But the woman was only miming the action, a sharp and practiced slash up and down, then side to side, over so fast, teeth sheathed once more, that Kate was dazzled.
"Sign of the cross is what it's called in the Horde Lore. It's merely the cross-hatch necessary to open up—"
"Oh. Yes, yes, I did." The sign of the cross. It was so… Eva would have never deigned to call it that, and if Royce had ever known, he'd long ago distanced himself from whatever religious symbolism it might have held. "I had to dig for the bullet, it was lodged just against his shoulder blade. With my… teeth. I had to tear at it." Her voice dropped out, her heart thundered at the memory.
How good it had felt to go at him, to make him hers.
"No, it's fine. It's supposed to be pleasurable. There's a high-dose release of dopamine into your blood stream and it hits the brain fast." Harris studied her face a moment and her eyebrows inched up. "Intense pleasure? Well, that hasn't been around for awhile."
Kate closed her hand into a fist, avoided touching the wound. "He's my husband."
"Mm, you've said."
She turned her head from the doc and studied his form through the glass. "Is he… going to be okay?"
"I don't know about okay; that's more in line with a psych rotation and I avoided those like the plague. But he will survive the phase better than you have."
Kate's head whipped around.
Harris gave her a grim look. "That's right. This is my bad news face. Your ex-lover? He's a little shit. You never transitioned fully. You're severely imbalanced, all of your levels are wrong, and they're still changing."
"What?"
"Your VL is out of whack, I'm saying. You don't have enough alliinase inhibitor in your blood; your iron metabolism is shit so it's probably building up in your liver, heart, pancreas—and once it's in your heart and pancreas, it's kinda curtains for you; and your vampo-pressin compound—the blood-thirsty hormone?—it's damn near nonexistent."
Curtains? "I don't… What does that mean?"
"It would mean that you're likely to die in the next few years, without serious medical intervention by a vampire who knows what she's doing, and let me tell you those are few and far between."
"I'm… going to die?" she croaked.
"I said it would. But instead, he's changing you. I've been doing a blood test every hour, and okay, yeah, it's slowed down now that you're separated from him, but you're still undergoing metabolic changes. I thought he was the asshole who caused this damage, but it's clear that you'd have been toast if he hadn't."
Kate pressed a hand to the pain in her ribs, staring at the doctor. "What are you telling me," she said.
"You were malformed, Kate. That's what I'm saying. The son of a bitch who transitioned you? He didn't know shit. He killed you, and you didn't even know it. Slow, long, painful death. Until Richard Castle here."
—-xxx—-