"Callum!" Merry cried. The sound was so loud that I winced. My ears were ringing louder now. "I accidentally tased Marcus and I can't tell if he's seriously hurt or not."
"You're joking."
"No. I ramped up a police-issue Taser I bought so that it would be effective on vampires and I was sleeping when he picked me up so I—"
Callum interrupted, repeating what she'd said earlier. "Zapped him?"
"Yes. Can you please come and make sure he's okay? He hit the floor pretty hard."
"Well, I'd say your Taser is definitely effective against vampires," Callum drawled as he sauntered over to me and crouched down. "Wouldn't you, Marcus?"
I glared at him since my tongue still wasn't working right. Which, of course, made him laugh.
"Think you'll live?" he asked me.
I nodded, short and jerky.
"See? He's fine," Callum told Merry.
She smacked his arm. "I could have really hurt him, Callum! Stop joking around."
She leaned over me and put her hands beneath my head. Her fingers were gentle as she lifted my skull and touched the small knot that was rapidly disappearing. It was tender where she pressed on it, but she gasped as the swelling vanished within a few seconds.
My limbs were still tingling like crazy, but my tongue no longer felt as if it had been superglued to the roof of my mouth.
"I'm a'right," I slurred to her. "Just nee' a min't ta...ta..."
"He needs a minute for his brain to unscramble," Callum finished for me. "He's not seriously injured, but electrical pulses can mess with our brains just like a human's. Good job figuring that out, by the way. If he'd been Dumont, he'd have been in for one hell of a shock. Literally." He chuckled to himself.
I was able to roll my eyes and saw that Merry did the same.
"Ah, after a couple thousand years, you can be punny. How cute," she said.
Callum pressed a hand to his chest. "Me?"
Merry had rapidly adjusted to his ridiculous ways and ignored him. "Think you can sit up?" she asked me.
My answer was to do exactly that. The room spun in a single, slow circle before it settled right side up.
"I'm okay," I said, glad my mouth was no longer numb. "But now I understand how the dice feel when Ava makes me play Yahtzee."
Merry smiled at me. "I'm so sorry."
I shook my head and immediately regretted it because the room tried to spin again.
"Don't be sorry. You did exactly what you should have done if someone grabbed you while you were sleeping. You reacted without thinking and took me down. If I'd been an enemy instead of a friend, it would have given you time to call for help or run away."
Merry's fingers were still tangled in my hair, her palms resting against the back of my neck. "Does your head hurt? The lump on the back of it was pretty big a few minutes ago."
"Already faded," I assured her.
"If you were human, you'd probably have a concussion," she argued. "Surely a vampire can't heal from one of those so quickly."
Callum and I glanced at each other, just for a split second, but she caught it.
"But you two aren't just any vampires, are you? Besides Macgrath, you're the oldest."
Callum nodded. "Macgrath isn't much older than us. Maybe by a year or two. We heal almost instantaneously now. And as the years pass, we get faster and stronger. It may take a century or two, but after twenty of them, we're almost impossible to kill."
