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Day # 92
Theme: pain
Time spent:
The anger in the room was palatable before I even saw the look on Brandon’s face. He stormed over to me, his eyes livid with unrestrained fury. The still mostly full cup of coffee that Dan had given me fell to the floor when Brandon shoved me. The rest of my coworkers watched in silence.
I caught my balance before falling, but Brandon simply shoved me again.
“You lying, leech,” he snarled.
He held his phone up toward me, revealing a paused video of me and Dani talking.
“Thought you said you didn’t know her.”
I tried to keep my emotions settled as I searched for a way out of this situation.
“I don’t,” I said. “She just came up to me. I didn’t even know who it was until she told me.”
Brandon’s face was twisted in anger. “Why would she do that? You’re just a waste of oxygen.”
It seemed Brandon had conveniently forgotten what he told me that other day -- that Dani had a thing for the Immortalis, so her approaching me on the street shouldn’t be surprising.
I wanted to throw his words back in his face, but I also didn’t want to give him the idea that there was something more to Dani and me than a one-time conversation and a promised second chance.
“I don’t know,” I said instead and against my better judgment added, “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”
Brandon shoved me again. “I’ll kill you!”
I moved backward, trying to put some distance between us, but Brandon simply continued to advance. I didn’t know how serious he was when he said he was going to kill me, but the look in his eyes told me that whether or not he actually intended for me to die, it was going to hurt either way.
I was so focused on Brandon’s advance that I hadn’t noticed anyone circling around behind me until they grabbed my arms, forcing them up against my back.
Brandon stopped in front of me, his face so close to mine, I could smell a lingering scent of mint on his breath.
“You know, we’ve all put up with you real well even though you’re a vamp, yet you have the audacity to lie to my ******** face.”
I swallowed back the retort that rose in my throat knowing that any show of hostility on my part would only make things worse for me. I would have to just wait this out, wait until Brandon and the others grew bored enough to let me go.
Brandon fished around in his pocket until he pulled out his lighter, and I felt my stomach sink. The flame flicked on, and he held it near my face, close enough to feel the heat but far enough not to hurt. Then he lowered it. Someone behind me ripped the front of my uniform open and Brandon brought the lighter to my chest.
I jerked backward against the pain, but there was nowhere to go and all I could do was grit my teeth as the flame traced a path along my skin.
When Brandon pulled the lighter away, I was panting hard. I could feel the parasite stirring at the edge of my consciousness. It was trying to provide me with the energy needed for me to get out of this situation, but it was starved of blood.
The lighter came back up to my face, and I stiffened, trying to move my head backward, but a fist in my hair kept my head still enough that Brandon had no trouble letting the flame trail along my cheek.
The skin beneath my eye began to burn, and I jerked in fear, my efforts only increasing when the lighter raised higher.
“Stop!” I said, my voice panicked.
Brandon sneered at me. “What’s the matter? You’ll just heal.”
“It doesn’t work like that!” I struggled harder. “I won’t heal! Stop!”
But he didn’t, and the pain increased dramatically.
I screamed, my muscles tightening up. My vision dimmed and then turned blood red before fading to black.
***
I woke to the sounds of hushed arguing, and when I opened my good eye, I saw faces peering down at me but they were blurred.
“Levin?” The voice was tinged with worry.
I blinked a couple of times until my vision cleared and I could make out the faces of the people staring down at me. One of them, Sam, smiled sympathetically at me.
“You passed out,” he said.
No s**t.
I tried to sit up, and pain flared in my head so I let myself drop back down onto the floor.
“Damn it, Brandon. You went too far.”
Brandon gave a derisive laugh. “He needed to learn his place, to understand he doesn’t belong with us.”
I hadn’t needed someone to burn my eye to figure that out. I hadn’t belonged anywhere since leaving Bowen, and while I didn’t regret leaving, it would be a lie to say that I didn’t miss being with him, that I didn’t miss the feeling of being a part of something.
“He’s not healing,” another coworker said as she stared down at me with a look of bemusement. “I thought vampires could heal themselves.”
“Isn’t that only in movies?”
“No, my cousin said a vampire attacked him and his fiance and after he shot it, the would just closed up.”
“This is why we should just kill vamps on sight!”
“Incorporating them into our world was a huge mistake.”
I closed my eye, feeling dizzy and sick to my stomach, which probably was due in part to being forced to listen to my coworkers talk about things they clearly didn’t understand while I lay there injured.”
“Whoa, are you okay?”
I didn’t bother opening my eye again, but I recognized Sam’s voice. It was nice to have at least one person who was concerned about my well-being but it would have been even nicer if he hadn’t allowed this to happen in the first place.
“Can you get up?”
I ignored him. While I probably could manage to work through the pain if it was necessary, sitting up to ease their minds was extremely low on my list of priorities.
“Come on, Lev,” Brandon said. “Don’t be such a child.”
My good eye opened a fraction, barely enough to see more than a sliver of my surroundings but enough to notice my vision was tinged red again. I had thought the crimson coloring was from my eye being burned but that clearly wasn’t the case now.
I could feel the parasite's energy pooling inside me and my sight turned a deeper red.
And I knew that all I needed to do was sit up and bite into someone’s neck, just to get enough blood for the parasite to be able to heal me, but…it would be all too easy to take more than that, and taking blood directly from a person wasn’t like the blood vials provided by the government; it would be all to easy to get hooked again, to fall back into the mindset that the Immortalis are superior. And it was already far too tempting to give up on humanity and go back to Bowen.
I heard footsteps moving toward me, and I opened my eye further to see Brandon headed in my direction. Sam moved between us, but if Brandon’s mind was set, I doubted Sam would have the resolve to stop him.
“Come on, Lev,” Brandon said, “there’s work to be done. Stop being a lazy s**t and get up.”
Unfortunately, he had a point. I couldn’t afford to be lying around, so I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position and tried my best to ride out the wave of nausea that hit me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sam said. “You’re not going to work like this. You need to go to the hospital.”
I shook my head and pushed Sam’s hands away when he tried to direct me back onto the floor.
“What I need is money,” I said. “And I don’t need two eyes to work.”
I got to my feet, feeling sick and dizzy, but what choice did I really have. Going to the hospital was completely out of the question because there was no way I could afford that, so I would just have to keep working until my next supply of blood came in and hope that was enough to heal my eye.
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