“Okay, got it. Hi, Alice, Abbie, are you guys okay?”
“No,” Abbie wailed.
“I’m so sorry. I know this is scary. I’m going to help get you out.”
This time lifting the car wasn’t an option. The children were inside, and the frame had collapsed around them. Maybethe universe truly had heard her plea, because the girls wore their seatbelts and sat in secure booster seats, ensconced but untouched by the crushed metal.
Siddig talked to the girls, periodically checked Kevin’s vitals, while Claire pulled apart the car piece by piece. The metal groaned as she wrenched it, and every time she snapped off another piece, the cracking noise made Kevin jump. Within about four minutes, she had created a space wide enough for the girls to exit safely.
She checked her surroundings. Tai still worked on the other car, which looked more precarious than this one.
“Anything else I can do?” she said.
Siddig looked up from taking Abbie’s vitals. “I’ve got them from here. Thanks, Claire.”
“Thank you,” Kevin said.
“You’re welcome.” Then she joined Tai at the final task.
Tai’s tux jacket was torn, and grease smeared his cheek. When she reached his side, he glanced away from the car, and his eyes looked…wrong. She tried to figure out why, but there wasn’t time. He had shifted the car, torn pieces of it away, but the middle-aged man inside was still trapped by one foot.
“I can’t do anything else on my own,” Tai said. “Shifting the wreckage any more is causing him pain, and—”
“And I don’t want to lose my foot, vampire!” shouted the man.
“We don’t want that either, George,” Tai said, his baritone extra smooth. Typically humans responded well to a vampire’s soothing tone, but George must be immune.
“Don’t you walk off and leave me like this!”
“No one’s leaving you, George.” To Claire he said, “I think we could do it together. Leverage, see?” He pointed to a few different places where two people might lift the car’s remains without causing a crush.
“Got it. Let’s do it.”
“I don’t want to lose my foot!” George shouted.
He kept shouting the words, on a broken loop of fear and pain, for the next five minutes. Tai and Claire worked an inch at a time. This car was old, rusty, and positioned so badly that moving it even a few feet took all Claire’s strength. Inch by inch, having to be so careful while not allowing the weight to slip began finally to wear her down.
Humans tended to assume nothing could fatigue a vampire, but hefting the weight of multiple vehicles in a short amount of time was incredibly draining. Claire wished for a sip of blood to refresh her. Just one sip went a long way. They were entirely separate in her mind—the cool tang of the blood that kept her alive and the warm odor in the air right now. She worried for the people who had lost blood, including George while he hollered at her. She was grateful none of them had life-threatening injuries, that none of them were losing so much blood she’d become overwhelmed by the stench.
The paramedic called Weiss had situated a gurney a few feet away from the wreck, so that when Tai and Claire lifted enough of it, Weiss could pull George free and deposit him onto the gurney. Just a few more inches should do it.
Tai met her eyes across the broken car. Locks of his hair had fallen across his forehead, and now his chin was smeared with dirt as well. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she said.
“One, two, three.”
They lifted. George didn’t cry out. They hadn’t hurt him.
“Weiss?” Tai called.
“I’ve almost got him. Just hold it there.”
“Holding,” Tai called. The muscles of his arms strained, and Claire felt the effort through her whole body. If this were their first lift of the night, no problem, but now the work was hard. And Tai had moved that whole big truck.
“Okay?” she said.
“Yeah,” Tai said, but he didn’t sound it.
