Wounded (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 24.5)

We all turned and looked at him. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"Doctors told you that you might lose the use of your arm, but you hit the gym harder than ever and were fine."

I glanced down at my arm as if I'd forgotten it was there, because I knew exactly the injury he meant. The bend of my left arm was a mound of white scar tissue. It worked just fine, but it was the worst scar I had, and the one that had made the doctors talk about permanent disability.

Mercedes said, "Anita is almost a shapeshifter herself, without all the metaphysics. We've talked about her healing abilities; it's not human normal."

"Tomas asked if becoming a shapeshifter would heal him," Micah said.

"He's too young to make that call," I said.

"Yes, it's illegal to contaminate anyone with lycanthropy who's below the age of eighteen, even with their permission, but Tomas is asking, and I thought his family should know," Micah said.

"I wasn't all vampire and shapeshifter super-healing when I got my arm torn up, Mercedes. In fact, they thought I would probably lose at least some use of my arm. I healed like a normal human back in the day."

"What did you do to heal?" she asked.

"Physical therapy like it was my new religion, and I hit the weight room really seriously for the first time. I lifted in college a little for judo, but putting muscle around my elbow . . . one of the doctors told me that it could make all the difference. PT was strength and flexibility, and the weights helped keep the scar tissue from foreshortening the ligaments and tendons as they healed."

"You're like a walking example of what Frankie and I do, and how much it can help people. Frankie likes working with the pro athletes, and I do, too, but I really like helping ordinary people be more athletic, healthier, especially after an injury. It's like they don't know what their bodies can do until after the accident."

"It's more that after you come so close to losing the use of your body, you want to use it more," I said.

She nodded. "That makes sense."

"Anita could talk to Tomas," Micah said.

"Only if you're there to help me communicate the message," I said.

"I'll help, too," Nathaniel said.

"I appreciate the moral support," I said, smiling.

"It's not just that, Anita. I've been the victim as a child and a teenager, and survived. I know what's it like to be hurt, bad, and not know if your body is going to come back." I didn't know every injury that Nathaniel had endured before I met him, but I knew that he'd run away from home after he'd witnessed his stepfather beat his older brother to death with a baseball bat. Nathaniel had been seven when it happened; by ten he'd been on the streets selling the only thing he had--himself. Saying Nathaniel had had a hard childhood was like calling the Titanic a boating accident.

"You weren't a lycanthrope as a child," Mercedes said.

"No, I was just human."

"How old were you when you became a shapeshifter?" she asked.

"Eighteen."

I'd met Nathaniel when he was nineteen, only a year after he became a wereleopard. I hadn't really done that math in my head. He'd always seemed so controlled, like he'd had years of practice with his beast when I met him. Enough control that he was already stripping and changing shape on stage at Guilty Pleasures with nothing between him and the audience but his self-control and club security, though that was more to keep the customers off the dancers than the other way around.

"God, not even twenty; you were just a kid, too," she said.

"Everyone's a kid once, Mercedes," I said.

She glanced at me. "You were about my age when you started working with Papa. I thought you were all grown up, but you're only what, eight years older than me?"

"I'm six years older than Connie, so I guess that's about right."

"You're my age," Nathaniel said.

She looked at him then. "I didn't know you were that much younger than Anita, or maybe it's just that she so doesn't look thirty."

"Thirty-one," I said.

Micah took my hand, smiling. "Anita and I are the same age."

"Neither of you looks thirty," she said, and she studied our faces as she said it.

I looked back at her and wondered for the first time, Did we look younger than Mercedes? Lycanthropes age slower than human normal anyway, and thanks to surviving several attacks by rogue shapeshifters I carried several strains of lycanthropy in my bloodstream. I shouldn't have been able to "catch" more than one strain of lycanthropy, because it protects its host body from almost all illness and injury, including other kinds of lycanthropy. I was a medical miracle because I didn't change shape either. That might change someday, but so far I was a first for the medical journals, or so a few doctors had told me. We thought that my ties to the vampires, both metaphysically and romantically, had protected me from changing shape somehow, because vampires couldn't catch lycanthropy, just like a lycanthrope couldn't become a vampire. The two supernatural medical conditions canceled each other for modern lycanthropy and vampirism. Thousands of years ago, lycanthropes could catch vampirism and be both, but something about one of the two conditions had changed enough over the millennia that it didn't work that way now.

I'd met a few vampires who were old enough to carry both, and they'd all been either scary as hell or not human at all, ever. Humanoid, but not Homo sapiens, which had been a surprise--okay, a shock. Most of the scientific literature had thought that vampires didn't even exist as a disease/condition until Homo sapiens. Some scientists thought maybe it went back to the Cro-Magnons, or the Neanderthals, but that was seriously disputed. I knew that vampires went back further than that, but I kept having to kill any vampire I met that old, because they were all crazy as hatters and more evil than Hitler's plan to "better" the human race. They were also so powerful it could make my bones ache just standing close to them. Dead was better for them, and safer for the rest of us, but it would be nice to find a sane one who could talk to the paleobiologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and all the other "ists."

Mercedes and Micah talked to Tomas out in the reception area before Nathaniel and I went over. We didn't want him to feel like we were ganging up on him. He agreed almost right away, which I hadn't expected, but as Nathaniel pointed out, I had just saved his life. That might give me more street cred with anyone.

We went back into the break room. Mercedes wheeled Tomas beside the couch, so we had a conversation grouping, though I got one of the chairs from the table, so I could sit on the other side of Tomas, rather than on the couch. It was too low for me to sit and have good eye contact with Tomas without one of us turning our heads oddly. I liked eye contact, and for important talks I liked it even more. Micah sat on the arm of the couch, Nathaniel beside him. Mercedes took the far corner of the couch, not sure Tomas would talk in front of her, since he hadn't talked to any of his family much yet. She'd already told Micah that if the boy wouldn't talk in front of her, she'd leave us to it.

Tomas had been the smallest kid in school for years, taking after Manny, but he was all arms and legs in his tuxedo now. He had to be at least his mother's five-eight, but since her brothers had all turned out to be six-five, except for one who was six-three, nicknamed Bambino not for his birth order but for being "short," Tomas would probably hit at least six feet someday. The brothers looked like a defensive line on the edges of the dance floor, until their wives dragged them onto the floor, and then they were surprisingly graceful, like watching bulls pirouette through a china shop.

His black hair was short, but with enough length so someone had used hair gel to style it back from his face in one of those careless wavy hairdos that some men can pull off. In a few years, when he filled out to his new height, the hair would be a serious selling point, but his face still looked like a little boy's face, so that the combination made him look pretty in a way that most thirteen-year-old boys don't want, but he seemed to be fine with all that hair framing his face. It probably meant the hairdo wasn't just

for the wedding, but something he did regularly, which meant he cared about his hair more than my own little brother had at the same age, a lot more. I remembered Manny telling me that Tomas was already starting to cut quite a swath through the girls in school, so he probably cared about a lot of things that I didn't associate with thirteen. I'd been hopelessly backward at the same age.

He sat slightly crooked, favoring one side heavily. There was a tightness around his eyes, even on the baby face, that said pain. He was hurting, but the kind of meds he was probably getting for pain would have drugged him up or made him sleepy. He was going to hold out from pride. I'd have done the same thing, so I couldn't really throw stones.

Tomas gave me a look out of big, brown eyes, the nice hair spilling forward a little so it framed his face on one side. The gesture reminded me of how Asher used his golden hair to frame his face to such good effect. That let me know that it was on purpose for Tomas, too. He knew he was pretty. It was a level of self-awareness that I didn't associate with most boys his age.

"Hey, Tomas, I won't ask how you're feeling."