They took me to the hospital, and it took me a while to realize that I'm not, like, glitching or something.
It was like this, I came to myself in the ambulance, Lilian was sitting motionless in the sit that was the furthest from the stretcher occupied by me. Surely she'd already been injected with something, just like me, because I didn't feel much pain.
Cold fingers were squeezing my palm - and it was because of the owner of these much cold fingers that I thought I was glitching. Here sat Rosalie Hale herself, while there was a glaring absence of other ghouls, and she kept me company.
She looked at me. I was blinking slowly and having no strength to focus. I realized that she's looking by the turn of her head, which I noticed out of the corner of my eye. So she immediately drew the attention of the medical staff to my condition. I tried to say something, but it turned out I could only cough and mumble.
The medical personell quickly shone a flashlight into my eyes, touched my jaw for some reason and returned to his seat, shrugging his shoulders and then taking out a tablet with a pen.
"Nauseous?" Rosalie's soft voice near my ear made me turn my head, but I couldn't actually see her eyes.
I barely nodded and squeezed her palm, shifting my eyes nervously and trying to make them focus on her face. And I panicked, because the feeling of helplessness could not be accompanied by anything but fright.
For some reason, the place under my collarbones burned strongly, where my Tomiko's gift medallion - and I immediately remembered what it could be - came into contact with the skin. The medics did not undress me, only fixed in one place my leg and neck. I absently thought that I hadn't called Tom before classes started, even though we'd agreed to keep in touch.
Although it's possible that I'm kinda glitching after the concussion, and I just broke something or hurt myself elsewhere, and the medallion has nothing to do with it at all.
No sooner had I finished this thought than my mobile started screeching with the soundtrack from the Witch Delivery Service anime. This woke Lillian, and she gasped as soon as her gaze fell on my helpless little bod. Rosalie reached into her jacket pocket and, as I realized, fished out my phone.
"Give it to me!" Melon said through her teeth, looking me over again, while my gaze wandered over her pose - she was keeping her hand close and slightly hunched.
Rosalie shrugged and threw my Sony Ericsson to Melon. After a momentary pause, Tomiko clearly had something to say after the greeting, to which Lillian did not instantly respond.
"Now is not the time for your games, Tomiko!" Lillian hissed, glancing at me. "She's fine, as much as someone whose life could be fucked by a stupid accident can be fine at all... No! Why do you have to bring this into it?! She broke her leg and seem concussed... Everything will be fine. And why do you need anyway?.."
"We don't know exactly what the consequences of her head trauma are yet," Rosalie said, as it seemed to me that she was looking at the changes in Lillian's behavior with surprise. "There's no way to say for sure she's fine. My father will examine her, then..."
"None of your business!" Melon muttered.
And I didn't quite understand whether she was talking to Tomiko into the phone or towards Hale, but I wasn't surprised when my palm began to ache, as if it was being squeezed in a vice, and not in a cool, perhaps in certain situations even gentle, hand.
"Don't you dare talk to me like that," Rosalie stated.
She stopped squeezing my hand, but at the same time she froze, and her tension could be bottled and sold to the police to scare away crowds of protesters. What is she even doing here? They're supposed to be vampires... I discarded the thought - I was afraid, because even in my state of a crumpled vegetable, I remembered that if I blabbed, they would kill me. And I could blurt it out if I think about it too much.
With the last of my strength, I threw my other hand up. It actually looked like the slight sluggish move that touched Rosalie's hand. Then my fingers stroked the place where the pulse should have been. Why - fucked if I known, but I still squeezed out the thought that came first. Of course, for everything that followed, I blamed the presence of such a good, strong painkiller in my blood, and nothing else.
"Ty tak krasyva," You're so beautiful I muttered in Russian.
All the while her presence seemed to dazzle me, the whole world faded and as if rejected by me, erased by this odd state. And to my own astonishment, I continued with words from that rather old song that has not yet been released here, and I even paused in the right places.
"Nevynosymo, ryadom s toboyu, byt' ne lyubymym, ostanovy, ato nasylye" It is unbearable, next to you, to be unloved, stop it, this is violence..."
I started coughing and leaned back as far as my collar would allow. Closed the eyelids.
"What did she say? Something hurt?" Lillian looked up from the phone.
Tomiko had already dropped the call, but as I understood from the chirping sounds, they continued to send text messages rapidly.
Damn, she'll see how often we communicate, and she'll start her jealous ritual again. Fucks sake, I can't stand it. I sighed wearily, felt sick again and almost vomited. And my thoughts began to get confused even more than before.
"Who was that?"
Rosalie's cold voice didn't answer Lillian's question, so I closed my eyes and exhaled, trying to calm my heartbeat.
Her image continued to haunt me even with my eyes closed.
I could not understand what was happening, and why suddenly the burning sensation from the medallion spread to the whole body. And the perception was filled with smells that were previously inaccessible to me. It was never as obvious, and I wasn't really nuzzling into those smells to be surrounded by them so badly!
The unpleasant and too medical smell of the ambulance cabin, mixed with the smell of the medic's body and aftershave, my own shower gel and shampoo, shared for two. And the smell of rain. But all this was the background for the sweet smell of antifreeze, which was somehow closer to me, mixed with the more subtle smell of orange blossom, cedar, bergamot and frost. The smell of Rosalie irritated and attracted at the same time, of course the notes of antifreeze spoiled the picture, but...
I inhaled again, the burning sensation turned from painful to pleasant - I even felt some relief, and my head seemed to be slightly released from the grip of a possible internal hematoma after that hit on the nape.
The smell of antifreeze somehow almost disappeared. It was this strange combination that flooded my sences - the bride's flower, the almost balsamic aroma of an evergreen tree, tart citrus and winter purity.
I inhaled and exhaled, calmed my heart, tried to detatch myself of the pain that appeared in my leg. And I totally broke it - I remembered this from the crack sound before I was knocked out.
Why did the painkiller stop working?
"Our acquaintance from Phoenix," Mellon finally muttered in response, as always refusing to call things by their proper names.
After all, Tomiko was my best friend and continues to be regardless of Lillian's bullshit.
"As I understand it, they met in the Japanese Friendship Garden at a tea ceremony, or something like that. Izzy was into Japanese those days."
"She knows other languages," Rosalie stated and carefully tried to escape my fingers on her wrist. "Curious."
"Well, she's been learning Russian for quite a while," Lillian's mumbling in response was barely audible to me. "Classes each week, I think."
All my insides seemed to concentrate on the vampire who kept hovering over me, unknowingly drowning me in her scent with every turn of the head - yes, I realized that it was her. The problem was, I didn't know why I started to feel more of the pain, but less of the vertigo. Why I was descending more and more into this primitive desire to bury my nose in this girl's neck and never leave it again?
I vaguely remembered those stupid videos that mocked Edik and his performance to Bella, like he was a perfect predator and all that... Is this her perfect-predatory feature thing? Only for those who are into women, maybe?
On this lovely thought, my pain increased unbearably, but the fatigue also multiplied.
I was knocked out again, but this time I didn't think of death.