Undercover Badge; Next Generation

Chapter eighteen

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The sound of my neck's vertebra being wretched back into place filled my ears and brought the gasp of air down my throat.

My torso lurched up and my chin arched as vision returned to my already open eyes. My neck bowed backwards and each vertebra therein clicked as they were stretched. When the procession of rapid cracks reached the broken area, the two sides fused with a wickedly painful SNAP.

Tears immediately poured from my eyes to wet the tissue that had begun to dry with out the nourishment of blinking.

A whine built in my throat that gargled and turned into a mewl that was becoming a scream as I felt the collapsed lung pull back into itself and then stretch to its size. Shattered bits of bone swam around in my flesh to find its neighbor and fit back together like a Reena sized puzzle. My elbow bent at an unnatural angle and suddenly retracted, reared up and twisted hard, the tissue at the joint suddenly renewed. The inhuman pain-sound gargling at my throat - filled with blood from my torn up lung, I later realized - became an entirely human scream then, even if only for a second as i became aware of my surroundings.

Two huge, warm hands gripped my face, one on each side. The thumbs fit under the hollows of my cheeks. I realized that these hands had been the one that snapped my neck back into place.

Now the fingers dug in deeper and tried to coax my head back from its position on my neck, straining as it bowed back.

"Shhhh, shhh, Reena, Shhh!" the words were warm and quiet and desperate.
"Shh, its okay, I'm here. Come on, Little Girl, I'm here." My muscles unclenched from their hold and my jaw ground shut, the screams still coming but through my teeth as I tried to quiet them.

The pain was the kind of excruciating i'd only ever heard of in theory.

"Come here, Little girl, come here, its alright. Shh." the warm hands found their way down the sides of my neck and the arch of my back collapsed in on itself, curling my body forward into a loose ball.

It was then that I realized I was in someone's lap, held against a large, warm chest. I knew who it was and my body was not going to allow me to pretend to fight it. My muscles liquefied against him and they began to vibrate as my whole body shattered into shakes, groans pushing up through my vocal cords as the pain began to bleed away.

Matthew's substantial arms were folded around me, his face pressed to my hair and muttering warm things in my ear in another language.

Somehow it was more soothing than any words he could have said to me in English. My exhausted mind caught the words "vita", "dolor", "deliciae" and "pulchra". Was he speaking Latin?

"Matthew, get her inside, if someone sees you two-" Gabbe started soothingly.
"No." Matthew snarled.
"If I move her now the tissue will detach at the break."
"And her body will regenerate it, Matthew, the kids are on their way home from the school, we cant afford the attention." She said back calmly. Matthew swore enthusiastically and rapidly.
"Okay, Little girl, this is going to hurt, but I'm here, all right?" he murmured down to me.

He slowly pulled me even closer, tucking me under his left arm and gently encouraging my head to lie on his shoulder. His arm reached down across my back and his other tucked under my knees up closer and then caught under them.

The wining in my throat intensified, the bones in my leg still attaching and my hip filled with shards of bone from the ruined joint. My neck tensed and my teeth ground together as the screams came again.
"I'm so sorry Reena, I'm here, okay?" he lifted me off the floor and the scream filled with renewed vigor.
"Shh, its okay." he walked to the house and up the stairs, me shrieking all the way. He sat down on the couch with me in his lap, holding me to him, Latin coming from him again. It took fifteen minutes for every bone to be fusing back into place and twenty for my screaming to stop, half an hour for the pain to fully exit my system. I felt exhausted.