If he went into the hospital with blood on his shirt and in his hair, they'd either arrest him or try to operate on him.
Maybe there was something in his trunk. Hunching his shoulders so that no one in the hospital parking lot would realize he was covered in blood, he unearthed a dirty gray hoodie and pulled it over his head.
The emergency room was lit so brightly lit that it hurt his eyes for a moment. He staggered, blinking his eyes rapidly to adjust, and looked around. Before he could make it to the nurse behind the desk, Jasmine's voice spoke behind him. "Matt? What's going on?"
He turned to see her standing there, crisp and competent in her white coat, the complete opposite of everything he felt right now. When she saw his face, her eyes widened and she pulled him to the side of the room. "What is it?" she asked urgently. "What's happened?"
Matt licked his lips nervously. On the ride over, all he'd been able to think was: Get Jasmine. She can help Trinity. You need Jasmine. And she could help; he knew she could. But he didn't know what to say now.
"Please," he managed, his voice cracking. "Please, we have to hurry."
Jasmine frowned and glanced toward the admitting desk, and Matt angled himself to block her view. "No," he said. "We can't do this here. There'll be too many questions. You have to come with me now."
"Take a breath and tell me what's going on," Jasmine said calmly. Then she got a good look at him, and her eyes widened. "You have blood on your face." She reached out to touch him, clearly worried. "Where are you hurt?"
"It's not mine." Matt took a deep breath, feeling as if he was flinging himself off a high cliff over dark water. If he did this, there was no going back. But he had to. Trinity's life was at stake. "Please, trust me. I'll explain on the way. Vampires are real. Magic is real. A friend is hurt, and we can't bring her here."
Jasmine's eyes flew toward the admitting desk again, and the security guard beside it. "Please," Matt said desperately. "I need your help."
He gazed pleadingly at Jasmine and reached for her hand, trying to throw all the love he felt for her into one look, trying to remind her of how she trusted him. It was a lot to ask. But even if she thought he was having a psychotic break, he didn't mind, as long as he could get her to come help Trinity. She needed a doctor.
Jasmine looked doubtfully between him and the security guard, then finally sighed, her eyes softening. "I'll tell my supervisor I have to leave for personal reasons, and I'll come," she said. "But afterward, Matt, if I ask you to come back to the hospital with me, you're coming."
Matt pulled her into a hug, clinging to her, breathing in the scent of her, the normality and sanity she meant to him. "I'll wait for you out front," he said. "Bring a medical kit if you can. And please hurry."
Chapter 18
Nothing was killing these vampires.
Damon grabbed one by the neck and sank a stake into his heart. His opponent fell, but instead of dying like he should have, he simply pulled the stake out of his chest, scrambled back to his feet, and lunged toward Damon again. What the-? Before the strange vampire could get close enough, Katherine grabbed him from behind and snapped his neck.
The vampire fell like a stone, but by now Damon knew that was only temporary. Breaking their necks kept these vampires down for longer than anything else they'd tried, but it wasn't permanent. Damon knew from experience that they had about half an hour before that vampire would be up and fighting again.
He glared down at the circle of temporarily incapacitated vampires around him. "What the hell?" he growled, kicking at one of them. "Stakes don't kill them, breaking their necks doesn't kill them, it's impossible to pull their heads off or their hearts out, they can walk in the daylight, and apparently they're not affected by holy ground." He gestured around at the baroque-style Russian Orthodox church they were standing in. Some older vampires still refused to go on holy ground, and it had been worth trying. "How are we supposed to kill them?"
"We'll find something," Katherine said grimly. "Let's search the bodies while they're out." She looked tired, Damon thought, her beautiful lapis lazuli eyes sunken and a slight grayish pallor to her skin. She wasn't getting enough to eat, he knew, and she was still letting him feed from her.
Damon used the toe of his extremely expensive-but now, to his dismay, badly scuffed-boot to flip over the vampire closest to him, an East Asian man with short dark hair. "Nothing worthwhile here," he said, going through the fallen vampire's pockets. "A few coins."
"This one's pockets are empty," Katherine reported, bending over another at the other end of the room.
"This one looks like a peasant." Damon glared haughtily down at the next unconscious vampire, who was dressed in ripped jeans and a stained T-shirt. "Terrible taste in clothes." Starving and running for his life made him more irritable than usual.
"We were more discerning when we turned people in the old days." Katherine sniffed. "You and Stefan were the only ones I made for centuries."
"You made up for it these last few years, though, didn't you?" Damon asked absently. Was there something in the peasant's pocket? His fingers closed on a narrow rectangle of cardboard, and he pulled it out. A business card. There was no phone number or address or any information at all, really. Just a company name-Lifetime Solutions-and a stylized black-and-white figure eight. "An infinity symbol?" he asked aloud. "Katherine, this-"
As he looked up, there was a sudden flurry of movement, and Katherine made a high, choking sound, her eyes startled wide open. There was a wooden stake buried in her chest.