The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

BloodFire

Lash swum in the darkness for what felt like forever. So long, in fact, he thought he had begun the journey through the Twilight Lands to kneel at the feet of the Night Father and ask for His judgment. Then, with a jerk that sent a firestorm of agony through his body, he was roughly pulled from the darkness and back into the light.

" ... on the ground, we need a straight run to the infirmary!" a hard, female voice directed from somewhere off to his left.

"Understood, captain," a distant voice replied. "The infirmary reports they are already filling a tank for him. It'll be ready by the time we touch down!"

Infirmary? Tank?? What kind of tank?? Before he could get an explanation on either, he was sinking back into unconsciousness. But this time it wasn't into the deep dark he had fallen into after being shot, free of pain and motion. This time it was a gray voice filled with agony and fire, each jolt filling him with more, and more pain.

" ... didn't you give him a shot?" another voice wavered in from the voice to ask.

"There wasn't time," the first voice he had heard out of the darkness, said. "He's taken a fifty caliber round in the back. His aorta is severed and his left atrium is in tatters. The portable heart is keeping him alive but barely. We need ..." And the voices were gone again, lost in the void.

Again Lash swum in the space behind consciousness, the gray void shifting and uneasy all around him. At least the pain was fading, and it felt like he could finally breathe. Taking several deep breaths, he could feel his body putting itself more back together with each lungful, his heart repairing and his aorta knitting the massive hole in it closed.

Then his eyes fluttered open and he found himself gazing into a red, viscous fluid. The way it shifted with each motion of his body seemed achingly familiar. Like he had seen it before, just in a much smaller ...

By the Dark Father! He was floating in a tank of blood! And not just human blood, werewolf blood! Even as he became aware of it, he could feel his skin tingle in response to the extra elements in the lycanthropic mutant blood, like the massive amounts of endorphines, adrenaline, protein and healing factors.

Normally, there would've been almost a visceral thrill at being able to use werewolf blood, fabled for its factors and components, and its capacity to trigger rapid cell regeneration and healing in vampires. Which weren't exaggerations; he had seen the healing power of the miracle fluid with his own eyes.

That being said, to find himself in a tank of werewolf blood didn't thrill him this time like it usually did. Was it because when he was feral, he killed twenty werewolves in their prime and fed from each one of them to bring himself back from the absolute edge of death? He could almost say, at this point, he had had his fill of werewolf blood. Give him a belly full of old fashioned standard human blood and he'd be more than happy to settle with that.

As he was considering that, he felt a dance of energy along his arm, then over his chest from the harness that held him suspended in the thick fluid. Then, with a barely audible alert, the blood was draining, allowing him to finally look out through the heavy clear acrylic that made up the majority of the tube's construction. And found himself looking at a roomful of similar tubes, each still filled to the top with blood.

"Impressive," a voice from just out of sight, slightly muffled by having to travel through the thick acrylic. Then a woman in the standard white garb of a medical professional, white pants, tunic, and lab coat, stepped into view. And immediately Lash's eyes behind the goggles that were part of the face mask that fed oxygen into his lungs, narrowed.

She was human.

The Silver Legion was using a familiar as a doctor?? He had never heard of giving such responsibility to a familiar, not ever! Yet, there was no mistaking the particular way of moving and speaking, even if it was in perfect vampiric, that marked a human living in a vampire's world.