Page 44 of Helsing: Demon Slayer
She grabbed his travel wallet with the credit card and cash, which included some euros. Once inside the small, immaculate store, she purchased antiseptic spray, antibiotic cream, cotton swabs and pads, and a plethora of gauze pads and medical tape along with the strongest pain reliever that the pharmacist recommended. Unlike American pharmacies, which had become convenience stores crossed with department stores, the Croatian pharmacy didn’t offer any clothing or Dianne would have grabbed some underwear or socks or white T-shirts to stanch the bleeding. No cheap mobile phones with cards, either.
Back outside, she knelt in the driver’s seat and pulled Ryan’s wet T-shirt from his side. What she saw stopped her cold and made her stomach wrench.
Five deep puncture wounds oozed blood and fluid with every breath Ryan took. Swallowing against queasiness, Dianne forced herself to open the cotton pads before spraying the antiseptic spray over the taut skin of his stomach. She cleaned around the wounds, worried that she would hurt Ryan with her ministrations. But if she hurt him, he didn’t show it. Worse, no matter how much she pressed gauze pads against the holes, they continued to bleed.
Dianne didn’t know as much about emergency medical treatment as Olivia, who’d trained as an EMT during college. But even she knew that if Ryan continued to bleed, he’d go into shock long before they reached the border. In fact, he could be in shock right now.
She needed something to coagulate the blood. When she’d had her wisdom teeth out as a teen, the dentist had told her mom to give her cool, moistened black teabags because the tea’s tannins would help the extraction site to clot.
The pharmacy had a tea section.
Dianne ran back into the pharmacy and grabbed several boxes of black teabags and a few bottles of different juices. Ryan was going to be weak. He’d had nothing to eat except a square of chocolate in the past twelve hours. Juice would be a quick way to get him some sugar.
Dianne had turned and almost left the store when she realized that she could ask an employee the location of the nearest hospital. A young clerk confirmed that it was fifteen minutes away on their route. She took the items and raced back to Ryan. She had no idea what the hospital would think of her improvised first aid, but she had to do everything she could think of to stop the hemorrhaging.
Back at the car, Dianne ripped open a box of black teabags and coated them with antiseptic spray before pressing them into each puncture hole.
Injuries delivered by her best friend.
That’s when, she admitted to herself now, she’d known that Germaine was possessed. How else to explain the ability of a hundred-and-twenty-five-pound woman to punch her fingers into a muscular male abdomen?
Not sure she was doing the right thing but reckoning that it wasn’t too different from the way the oral surgeon had packed the extraction site of her molars, Dianne pressed another teabag on top of each wound, taping them down with medical tape. When she’d finished, she covered the whole group with a large gauze pad and taped that down, too. The last thing that occurred to her was to pull the seatbelt across his waist to keep pressure on the bandage.
Thatturned out to be a fiasco, clever though it was.
She had to lean across Ryan’s lap and dig around for the buckle, which meant pressing herself into his broad chest. Despite the inappropriate timing for noticing how hard and defined it was, she found her nipples tingling, and as soon as she noticed, she remembered his teasing about removing his shirt. She also had to feel his manhood under her hip, which wasn’t something she wanted to be reminded about right now. If he came around with her practically grinding on him, it would be more than a little awkward.
However, while she worked, Ryan didn’t flinch or move. This terrified Dianne. She hadn’t met a man yet who wouldn’t respond to breasts rubbing up against him.
At last, she sat back in the driver’s seat and studied the injured warrior slumped in the seat next to hers, the one who’d saved her life more than once. The man who’d declared that he’d die to protect her.
She couldn’t—shewouldn’t—let this larger-than-life man who’d made her believe in heroes and love again bleed to death. Not now. Not now that she’d finally found him.
At that thought, Dianne snapped the seatbelt across her lap, turned on the car’s engine, and headed back to the highway going south.
Ryan’s awareness slowly returned to Dianne’s muttering and an almost-imperceptible motion of the speeding car. His side burned and ached, the pain radiating throughout his entire torso and sending red-hot tendrils along the nerves of his arms and legs. Despite this, everything felt leaden, even his eyelids. He couldn’t open them. He’d never felt this weak before, and that alone should have scared him, but he didn’t have the energy for it. His head swam. He couldn’t even form a rational thought.
Instead, he focused on Dianne’s mellifluous voice. At first, he couldn’t make out the words, but the sound soothed the fiery pain in his gut like a cool balm. After some vague amount of time, Ryan found himself exploring the connection between his harmonic system and the nanotracker that he’d put on Dianne, the one keyed to her fundamental frequency.
In his mind’s eye, it took on a soft, glowing purple hue that revealed a twisted cord of many strands. When he traced it back to his own harmonics, he found to his shock that the threads had started to interweave with his own system in a complex pattern that made it impossible to tell where his frequency ended and Dianne’s began. He hadn’t experienced this during his short stint as the Kastriotis’ chief of security, and he didn’t know what it meant. But, right now, when his body hurt almost to his soul, he clutched at the connection as if it were a lifeline.
And slowly, painfully, he beat back the enervation keeping his eyes closed as he imagined pulling himself, hand-over-hand, along the braided cord between them.
“Hey,” she said when he looked over at her. “We’re almost at the hospital. I found a pharmacy and got directions. It’s not far from the highway.”
For a moment, Ryan couldn’t comprehend the meaning of Dianne’s words. All he knew was that he could listen to her voice for hours.
And then he took in the wordhospital. “No,” he said. Or rather croaked. He blinked several times trying to clear the lassitude still fogging his brain. “Not while my system is offline. I won’t be able to sensedaemons.”
Even as he said this, he remembered the feeling of being connected to Dianne. That was a good sign. It meant that thedaemonicattack hadn’t blown out the receptors on his harmonics. They were recharging. He’d be able to contact the ops center once they got to the threshold necessary for long-distance communications.
“‘Sensedaemons’? What do you mean? What system?” She glanced over at him, an endearing little line between her brows. “Is that how you talked to my sister before?”
Ryan still felt woozy, but his thoughts had cleared even more as Dianne talked.
“Keep speaking,” he said.
“What?”
