Gerry the paramedic was pushing out from behind me and fell out the open door of the ambulance. I thought he was running away, but when Edward helped me out of the ambulance Gerry was kneeling beside his friend, taking over first aid from Nolan, who’d been trying to stop the blood from pouring out quite as fast. Gerry had bits of burned flesh and small bits of bone sticking out of his face like shrapnel, but he did his job. He stayed with it. I wasn’t sure I had enough brownie points to give him for that. He didn’t seem to have any bone fragments as long as the one in my arm, so we let him do his job. I saw the flashing lights before I realized a second ambulance was pulling up. I hadn’t really heard it, or if I had, the ringing in my ears kept me from understanding what I was hearing.

   Nicky pulled the body of the vampire out into the light. It started to combust on the street almost immediately. This time when someone suggested putting extra bullets into the body to put it out of its misery, or to keep it from attacking anyone else—I honestly couldn’t hear which was offered, but whichever—Pearson let it happen. Nicky shot until what was left of the vampire’s head was gone and the burned rib cage splintered into pieces, spilling the still red and bloody heart out into the street, where it pulsed for a second and then burst into flames.

68

   NEW AMBULANCES AND new paramedics arrived at the scene. They triaged the injuries, and I was happy not to be in the front of the line. It meant I wasn’t dying. They had taken both the men who’d had their throats torn open; I hoped that meant that they would make it, but I knew that in America the ambulance crews in some states are not allowed to declare someone dead at a scene, especially if lifesaving measures have already been started. I prayed that they would be all right, but it really depended on if the vampire had gotten the jugular vein, and then whether he’d just nicked it or torn it wide open. The last possibility was that they were transporting corpses but weren’t willing to admit it, but the first two left hope. I prayed for that hope. I prayed even though the memory of the spray of blood inside the station house made me worry the most about the first man. I didn’t know what else would make that amount of blood pour from the neck that fast except for the jugular to be torn wide open. You didn’t live long once that happened.

   I did want to pray for them, but concentrating on almost anything else beat the hell out of looking at my own injury. The blackened bone splinter hurt, but mostly it looked alarming. It’s just not okay to look down at your arm and see something foreign sticking out of it. If I thought about exactly what was sticking out of my arm—a piece of someone’s skull, okay; a piece of a vampire’s blackened and burned skull—then it got a little creepy. The sensation of something stuck in your body that is big enough to move around in a sort of painful wriggly feeling if you move too much went way beyond just the pain of it. Or maybe the sensation made it hurt more?

   I started to get queasy as I tried to hold my arm absolutely still, waiting for the medics to get around to me. Edward was talking to the police that he’d made work friends with in the days he’d been here ahead of me. He’d been wearing the super-duper earplugs that he’d recommended to me, and I had a pair, but I had been in a police station. I had thought we were safe and I didn’t put hearing protection in, so although my head was still ringing from the noise of the shots inside the ambulance so that I couldn’t really hear what people were saying, or a lot of other sounds, Edward was fine. Later, I’d ask him if he just lived in the damn earplugs. Knowing Edward, he probably did. The ringing in my head had stopped, and my hearing was returning faster than I’d thought it would. Yay for super-healing ability!

   Nolan was staying with him, though I wasn’t sure he was helping with the making-friends part. Jake and Kaazim were searching the crowd for threats, or old friends. I wasn’t exactly sure which, and not sure I cared as much as I should have, because I was fighting not to throw up. One, it would make the Irish cops think less of me, and two, there was no way to throw up without moving more of my body than I’d want to move, like my arm.

   Domino, Nicky, and Damian were with me at the ambulance full of exploded bits of vampire like the one in my arm. It was considered unsanitary now, so until they cleaned it up, no one would be using it unless they ran out of supplies in the other ambulances, or got desperate to transport someone. There really weren’t messy bits until farther into the ambulance, so Damian was sitting just inside it out of direct sunlight. I sat on the edge of the open back of it with my feet swinging so that I felt like I was five again. Damian had his hand resting against my back. He wasn’t rubbing it, or petting me, because that had made my body move minutely, which wasn’t good right now. The doors of the ambulance were still open, so we were blocked from sight of most of the crowd that had gathered outside the police tape and barriers. Nice to see some things were the same as back home; if there was a crime scene, you always got a crowd.

   I could look up at Domino standing in front of me like a living shield, blocking me and Damian from sight of pretty much anyone. Nicky had been doing the same on the other side of the door, but now he was kneeling in front of me, helping me hold my arm very still. It wasn’t bleeding much, which was both good and bad. The bad was that it meant the bone shard was probably in deep and tight, so that it acted like a cork in the wound stopping me from bleeding much at all, which was good, but it also might mean that they’d want a surgeon to help them take it out of my arm.

   Nicky waved his hand in front of my face, so I’d look at him. He directed my line of sight to his face. I looked into that one blue eye with the fall of his blond hair hiding the other one, if it had been there. I did the long blink, which usually meant I was a little shocky.

   “Is she okay?” Domino asked.

   Nicky didn’t answer him, just kept staring at me, so I could keep my focus on his face, on the blue of his eye. Damian answered, “She’s a little in shock, but her hearing has come back better than I’d feared.”

   I blinked at Nicky and turned my head back to look at Damian, which made my arm move just a fraction too much. My stomach tightened and the wave of nausea rolled up my throat and over me. I felt the sick sweat starting as I swallowed hard.

   Domino touched his own stomach and said, “I felt that one even through shielding. If she throws up, I’m not sure I can keep from joining her.”

   “Don’t you start,” I said; my voice sounded normal in my head, which it shouldn’t have, not that soon after all the shooting in the confined space of the ambulance. When Nathaniel had called on my phone earlier I hadn’t heard it. Damian had taken it and talked to him. Apparently Nathaniel and Dev—Devereux—had both felt the shadow of the sound concussion and the wound in my arm. At that point, I couldn’t hear well enough to talk on the phone; now I was hearing just fine. What the hell? My ears should still have been ringing with it, at the very least. The thought helped chase back the nausea.

   I looked at Nicky where he was kneeling in front of me. “Can you hear me?”