Circus of Blood Read Online Free Page B

figure out why she had shifted and then gone rabid. This left Father Mulcahy to stitch me up.
    It wasn’t the first time. Father Mulcahy had been with me since the beginning of my war, visiting me right after my family had been killed by a monster.
    I don’t want to talk about that. It’s too painful. Move on.
    He was my mentor, my spiritual covering, my Church connection, bartender, and sometimes field surgeon. He wasn’t gentle, but he was thorough. He stabbed the needle through one last time and then tied the stitch off in a quick little knot. One snip of scissors and it was done.
    “There. Neat as a pin.” He rolled his stool back and stripped off latex gloves.
    I looked down, the stitches were tight, tiny black lines that lay across the jagged tear like they had been laid in with a sewing machine. The sutured wound was high on my calf. The Were-bat claw had dug down, sinking deep through and behind the muscle. It sat in the center of a swipe of scar tissue that replaced skin. That was left over from a few months ago when I had misjudged how wide a puddle of napalm and liquefied lycanthrope was. It had splashed up over my calf, scorching away the skin. When it healed I had a patch of scar tissue the size of a piece of paper that looked like slick rubber.
    I rolled over and sat up. The cuff of my jeans scraped the stitches in a rub of fire. It was tight over my calf, the muscle sore and swollen. It throbbed, a hot pulse of pain clenching the muscle as I put pressure on it.
    Yeah, this was gonna be awesome.
    Father Mulcahy squinted at me. “You need to lay down and prop that up. Take it easy on it for a few weeks.”
    “You know better than that.”
    “Yeah, but it had to be said.”
    “I’ll get Larson to load me up before we go.”
    Larson kept a cornucopia of painkillers and antibiotics on hand for just such occasions.
    The door crashed opened. Larson wheeled in, face sour and twisted.
    “That looks like good news.”
    His hands grabbed the wheels of his chair, skidding him to a stop. “Rabies.”
    “Rabies? Are you kidding me?”
    “That’s what it is. It’s not just regular old run-of-the-mill rabies though. This strain is virulent and highly contagious.”
    Father Mulcahy took a puff. “Contagious to humans?”
    “No, but it’s not selective among lycanthropes. It’s non-species specific.” A thin hand ran through carrot-colored hair. “It’s not a natural strain of the disease. It causes homicidal aggression and it has accelerated her metabolism, burning her up faster than I can shove food into her through a feeding tube.”
    “How long does she have?”
    “Hours. She won’t last until morning.”
    “How did the Were-bat lassie get exposed to that?”
    I knew the answer to that. To me it was obvious. Again, there are no coincidences when it comes to supernatural shit. You had a Were-bat beaten nearly to death by vampires and infected with a supernatural version of rabies.
    No fucking way that was a coincidence.
    I explained my theory. Larson and the priest nodded in agreement with my hypothesis.
    I looked at Larson. “Can you cure her?”
    “Not without the original strain to manufacture an antivirus or a lot more time.” He stroked his Jesus beard. “There’s more bad news.”
    “Go ahead and get it over with.”
    “The virus seems to have mutated. It’s airborne now.”
    My mind flashed back to the waiting room full of lycanthropes. All of them exposed and carrying this disease. They had scattered, going back to families and friends who were lycanthropes. At this point most of the lycanthrope community could be infected.
    All of them were ticking time bombs. A disease growing inside them that would flip the switch, turning them into murderous, rampaging beasts.
    Lycanthropes are damn hard to kill. Fallene had nearly taken me out earlier and she had already been beat near to death. If all of the healthy lycanthropes who were exposed went berserk at once, it would be a bloodbath.