Nature or Nurture Ch. 15

Without taking time to rest or eat and drink something, they set to work.

Adison starts on Vincent, cleaning the wounds carefully and suturing where needed. They are nasty gashes, but the biggest danger lies in infection, poisoning fortunately seems no longer likely since Vincent is not doing worse than before. In half an hour, she is done and with the wounds clean and no longer bleeding, Vincent feels well enough to make them all some nightly snack.

Operating will not be a success if they faint of hunger during the procedure.

Rushing upstairs to the attic, Adison finds Victor busy removing the bullet from Mina's shoulder wound. He has found Bruce an able assistant, but now Adison is here he prefers her expert help. Bruce goes downstairs to help Vincent, if they want him to play tomorrow, he'll need plenty of rest to fight off infection.

The shoulder wound is not a very difficult task for Victor, with his experience in pathology. There are only two problems, live patients tend to bleed a lot, which he is not used to, and they can get infected.

Fortunately, that is Adison's area of expertise, and as they will soon find out, vampire bodies do not react like human ones. As soon as the bullet is removed, Adison readies a thread to close the wound, but a weird thing is happening: looking at it, she can see the edges of the wound closing, angry red tissue knitting together, then fading to pink, then to white.

Mina is healing herself at an incredible rate!

But the chest wound, the dangerous wound, is not closing.

'Do you think the bullet is silver, preventing her from healing herself?'

Adison muses, 'It may very well be, that shoulder wound closed as soon as you got it out. But the other bullet will be a lot more difficult, it may have struck a lung.'

Victor wipes his hands and forehead clean with a rag. There is only one thing to do, go in and try.

He examines the wound first, to see if he can find out how deep the bullet is lodged. If she heals this wound as quickly after the bullet is extracted, he can just cut his way in and the damage will repair itself quickly.

'Do you think her lungs were hit?'

Adison listens to Mina's breathing with her stethoscope, it's shallow but not ragged, so she dares hope they were not hit.

Knowing they cannot wait too long, they decide Victor will remove the bullet as quickly as he can, and let her vampire body heal itself. And he does, Adison keeping the blood away so he can see what he is doing. Soon he can fish it out, and they wait for the miraculous recovery.

But nothing happens.

And Mina starts to look really bad, it seems as if they may be losing her after all.

'The silver is out, what can be the trouble?' Adison wonders.

Suddenly Victor has a revelation, 'What if she has no resources left to heal herself with? She must have had internal damage as well, and it took us quite a long time to get her here. She needs sustenance.'

And before Adison can stop him, he has picked up a clean knife and made a cut across his wrist, opening her mouth and holding the bleeding arm over it.

As soon as his blood touches her tongue, her body springs into action. With both hands she grabs the arm, leading it to her mouth, sucking the blood straight from the wound.

After his first shock at her unexpected action, Victor experiences a really strong lust surging through him, her sucking feels so good! Adison guesses what is happening, and keeping an eye on Victor's colour and on Mina's vital signs, she decides to stop her after a few minutes.

Victor comes to himself quickly.

'Whew, that was quite an experience! I thought vampires were evil, unconscionable killers, but this felt very much like a survival mechanism meant to keep donors alive and happy, blissfully happy.'

A small sound brings their attention back to Mina.

'Thank you, sir!'

They both see that the wound on her chest is well on its way to closing, and she is awake and quite aware. There is no sign of the evil minion in her anymore, she looks like a bewildered young woman. And Victor looks nearly as bewildered, a bit faint, actually.

Mina invites him to her.

'Maybe you want to sit down next to me for a moment, sir? I'm afraid I took quite a lot of your blood being on the brink of true-death. When I am conscious I know when to stop. I think. I can't remember much, actually. What happened?'

Victor does exactly what she offers, he sits down on the edge of the table right next to her. She takes his hand, and he lets her. He feels better immediately, the faintness lessening. He is also famished, and asks Mina, 'Are you up to walking stairs? I want to show you your room, you may want to lie down in a real bed for a good sleep.'

She looks even better now, only a few minutes later, and replies, 'I can walk a bit, yes. Is the window covered? Daylight would kill me, you know.'

'We'll settle that straight away, please don't worry. But we do need to get some food and some rest. Is it all right if we tell you what happened tomorrow? We don't know how much you do remember, but we'll try to fill in the blanks as well as we can.'

She looks up at him thankfully, squeezing his hand lightly.

'It will be fine. Thank you so much for saving my life, doctor.'

His heart racing, Victor says, 'Please call me Victor, Mina.'

'Thank you Victor.'

And to Adison, 'And thank you for saving me, too, Miss, and not just physically. I don't know how you did it, but I know it was you who freed me.'

Adison offers her hand in greeting, and says, 'I'm Adison, Mina, and I'm pleased to meet you.'

They move downstairs, where Victor shows Mina to a room. Adison brings her a clean nightgown, which she is glad to wear instead of the blood-soaked dress they had to cut her out of. Then she climbs into the bed, and is soon fast asleep. Her breathing slows dramatically, making her look dead.

Victor cannot believe what just happened, he sits down on the bed next to her and tries to get his mind around it. Someone possessed by evil, and Adison took that away, just like that? He feels some distrust of this woman, who has led her father and friend a merry chase, and has undoubtedly killed a lot of innocent people. But she looks so vulnerable.

He very gently touches her face, and it feels cold to the touch. She does not react to his touch, this is clearly not sleep as humans know it, but a much deeper comatose rest.

He closes the curtains, getting nails and a hammer to nail them shut to make sure she won't burn in her bed when the sun comes up. He looks at her in wonder one more time, closing the door behind him. Then it's off to the kitchen for a hearty meal, he has a feeling he will be donating more blood in the future.

Vincent, Bruce and Adison are already seated in the homely kitchen. It is quite spacious and old-fashioned, with a big table in one corner to gather around on nights like these. There is plenty of food, and Victor does Bruce's cooking justice, eating like a harbour labourer.

Vincent remarks, 'Dear Victor, what have you done to work up such an appetite?'

Clearly, he has not been informed yet of Victor's latest medical discovery: vampires heal quicker when fed straight from the artery.

Adison laughs, 'I haven't told them yet, been too busy stuffing myself until now.'

Well, Victor is not going to stop eating yet, so Adison'll have to tell them or they will have to wait. Adison explains.

'Mina heals really quickly, being a vampire. She couldn't heal until Victor got the bullets out, they're probably silver, which is poison to her kind. The arm wound closed immediately after it was out. I wanted to suture it but it was not necessary.

But when he had taken out the one in her chest, she didn't heal at all, and she started to fade a lot. So he guessed she must be running out of energy, dealing with the wounds and of course the poison in her body. He slashed his wrist and let the blood drip in her mouth.

At the first taste of it, she came out of her near coma, got hold of his arm and drank it straight from the vein, until I broke it off when I thought he'd given as much as he could miss. She woke up after that, made a nice apology too, for being greedy.'

Vincent asks, 'Why didn't you stop her yourself, Victor?'

Now that was weird, he recalls, and he tells his friends, 'When she sucked at my vein, I got overpowered by a strong feeling of lust, and I didn't want it to end.'

Bruce prefers to go home for some sleep, he assures them that a vampire in the comatose state Mina is in, will not wake up in daytime, so they can safely leave her alone.

'But won't she attract another one of those creatures?' the doctor asks.

Adison isn't sure, 'But I don't think she will, I got his mark off her really well I think.'

Bruce agrees with her, then sets off for home.

When Victor admits he does not want to stay awake the rest of the night, but doesn't want to leave their guest all alone in a strange house either, they suggest he gets one of the pallets from the attic and into her room, and he decides he will do just that. And though he soon falls into a deep sleep himself, he still feels better knowing she is not alone.

Adison checks the gashes on Vincent's chest once more, seeing they are a bit swollen, but not alarmingly so. She is very relieved that it is all over, though taking Sir Malcolm's daughter with them and keeping her at their own house seems a bit dangerous to her, even if she can feel no evil left in her.

Still, she is too tired to really worry about it, and tomorrow will be very interesting. Maybe they will hear a bit more about the enemy they are up against, and about Vincent's past as Heathcliff. It is clear that Mina knew him under that name. Maybe she can shed a bit of light on his life's history until he was killed in a brawl.

But for now, they crawl into their comfortable warm bed together to enjoy some intimacies after a stressful and exhausting day. Taking care not to touch the claw-marks on his chest and the smaller puncture wounds in his neck, she caresses every inch of him, glad they spent so much time learning how to fight.

'Did you lose control fighting today? Against such a vicious creature you'd almost have to.'

'Now you mention it, no, I didn't', he says, 'I knew exactly what I was doing the whole time. I think we're one again, my violent part and me.'

'Good for you', she breathes, not stopping for one moment with her caresses. Despite a really tough day, he has some energy left in him to produce a surge of passion. He holds her tightly, and a lot less considerate of his own injuries he returns all the caresses to her.

Afraid that if his wild self doesn't surface in such an attack, it may be gone for good, she is tempted to draw it out, but with his injuries and after the events of the day, she cannot exhaust him even more. So they keep it small and tender, and make love carefully. Then they give themselves up to sleep.