Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) by Sara Reinke

overhead, much less witnessed, it didn’t seem possible.
    But it must have been, Jason thought. All of it, a dream, something brought on by the drugs.
    The apartment was empty. A pair of stainless-steel bowls sat on the floor beside the refrigerator, one half-filled with water, the other half-empty with small round pellets of dog food. A coffeemaker with an oversized carafe had been set up on a countertop to brew, and otherwise nothing appeared to be unpacked. A pair of mugs, both with the shallow puddles left over at the bottom, sat beside the sink. A third cup, empty and unused, waited for him by the machine. Sam had also left an opened box of doughnuts on the counter near the coffee, the chocolate-frosted miniature Hostess variety of Donettes, which were her favorites.
    I could eat a whole box of these things.
    He remembered her saying this, lying naked in bed, her perfectly proportioned breasts standing at pert, perky attention, her nipples hardened and round, her skin speckled lightly with goose bumps. She’d balanced a box against the smooth, supple plane of her belly and licked her fingertips as she’d proven true to her word and single-handedly polished off the entire package.
    All except for one. She’d offered him a nibble from this one, then giggled as she’d crammed the whole thing into his mouth. Since she’d been eating one too, and had made him laugh in the process, they’d both wound up spraying each other with little globules of half-chewed cake.
    He poured a cup of coffee and took it into the living room, sitting in one of the stylish but uncomfortable dining chairs. The coffee was hot, scalding his lip when he took a hesitant sip, but he drank anyway, because even though he wasn’t sitting near any windows, the drafts had still found him somehow and he was cold. He was still shivering when he’d emptied the cup, so he went into the bathroom, stripped off his T-shirt and sweatpants and stepped into the shower. Closing his eyes, he stood beneath a stinging, steaming spray.
    As soon as he turned the taps and cut off the water, he was freezing again. And he’d soaked his bandages, rekindling that deep throbbing pain from his shoulder. Shivering, he re-dressed, mopped his damp, disheveled hair back from his face and sat against the bed, carefully peeling back the surgical tape from the sopping gauze pads.
    To his surprise, his forearm was unmarred, the skin whole and unbroken, even though yesterday, the dog, Barton, had torn into him with its teeth, leaving a jagged series of lacerations punched deeply into the meat. Jason rubbed his arm, puzzled, but felt no residual soreness, nothing to suggest there had ever been any injury at all.
    That’s weird, he thought with a frown.
    He wasn’t so lucky with his shoulder. Dean had sutured the wound as neatly as possible and what remained was a red-rimmed, crooked line cinched closed by countless tiny meticulous stitches. Unlike the dog bites, the place where the sword had impaled him was sore to the touch in a broad circumference from the original point of entry, as if it festered beneath the uneven seam of stitches. It had felt like Nemamiah’s sword had been on fire when he’d stabbed Jason, and that heat remained, palpable, nearly boiling beneath the surface.
    Jason grimaced, sucking in repeated, hurting gasps as he tried to bind the wound again himself. He didn’t want one of the narcotics Dean had prescribed for him, but found a bottle of ibuprofen in a small overnight pouch by the sink, where Sam had stowed her toothbrush, deodorant and other toiletries. Downing a handful of them in a single gulp, he hoped it would at least dull the pain to something tolerable.
    He left the apartment, following the narrow staircase down to the exit door leading into the building’s back alley. Here he stood for a long while, because the last concrete, conscious memories he had were of this place. I was shot here, he thought, the idea of this making the hairs along