Frayed Ties (Ties, Book 1) | ✓

Chapter 20

Simon didn't seem overly concerned by it, though. He slammed his bracer into the vampire's face, knocking it to the ground, and then turned to help Hamish with the other one.

Lucas drove his knife into the chest of the vampire on the ground, but its energy wasn't silenced. He'd missed its heart. It was weakened and blinded and confused, but still too fast, too strong. Before it could turn the situation around on Lucas, Danya joined the fray, driving his knife into the vampire's chest just below Lucas'. Its body went limp and its energy dropped away.

A second later Simon and Hamish finished with the other vampire, too, and its body fell heavy to the ground next to them.

Simon took a moment to catch his breath, his parted lips revealing a red tint to his teeth. "Everyone okay?"

Danya nodded along with everyone else. "You're bleeding."

"I just cut the inside of my cheek open on my teeth. I'm fine."

Hamish shook his head. "Simon, we've talked about keeping your blood inside your body. The last thing we need is to start smelling of blood around here."

"It's inside my mouth, which is part of my body." Simon swished saliva around his mouth and then swallowed. "Inside my stomach, now."

"I might be able to stop the bleeding," Danya offered.

"Sure, give it a go."

"Wait, Danya can heal now?" Hamish asked.

"Oh, yeah," Simon said. "I forgot to mention that."

"You forgot to mention that? Kind of important, Simon!"

"It's not," Danya insisted as he adjusted his magelight to better illuminate the inside of Simon's mouth. "I can barely do it at all. Halting the bleeding of this small wound is about my limit, and it would have stopped on its own soon enough."

"Okay, well, maybe not imminently crucial information, then, but still important," Hamish said. "I thought those kinds of talents had been completely wiped out."

Danya found the ragged cut inside Simon's cheek and pushed energy into it. "Perhaps only inadvertently bred out, though who knows if the potential for a true healer still exists in our bloodline."

"I always thought of it as a kind of karmic consequence for everything we did to your kind," Hamish said. "We used to have access to that kind of life saving magic, but we fucked ourselves over because... hell, I'm not even sure I know why. Humans get to write the history books, and I doubt we're being completely honest."

Danya remembered what Slone had said on the matter. Even he hadn't seemed to know why it had happened. He finished doing what he could for Simon and pulled back. The bleeding had stopped.

Simon probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue and nodded, satisfied. "I think it happened because humans are bad at sharing."

Hamish sent him a quizzical smile as they started walking again. "Bad at sharing?"

"We used to have the whole world. We don't talk about that much, but think about how big that is. The small human territories we have now barely register on a map of the world. We used to have the whole thing and still had wars over land. Can you imagine?"

"Maybe it is karma."

Simon shook his head. "No, this is a punishment and it has been thoughtfully handed out to us by conscious beings. We're told to stay on the roads, stay within this safe area, because there are dangerous things out there. And there are, because they've formed a carefully guarded perimeter around human territories. This was a war without winners, but it did have losers and that was us."