he wasn’t.
“What can you do, and when did it start?” I needed all the information I could get.
“Since you don’t have any idea of what I am, why should I tell you any of that?” he said, grabbing the back of one of my dining room chairs. I was beginning to hate his temper. It was a beast unto itself, and I needed him to keep it on a leash. Too bad I had a similar problem.
“Because I might know someone who can use it to find out what you are!” I yelled back, knowing my eyes were beginning to change in anger. My pupils would go vertical when I was angry. “Cut the fucking attitude with me, asshole! I’ve only been trying to help you since we met!”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he growled. This time, I got to see the change in his face as it happened. The whites of his eyes turned black around his black pupils. The lines bled out from there, looking like they followed his blood vessels. They didn’t go very far.
My fangs were still down, and I knew I could maybe get half a drop of venom out of them. If push came to shove, I could kill one person with that venom before it replenished.
Too bad, I also knew it would be completely ineffectual on Raphael.
“We’re…not doing this right,” I decided. “I’m going to need you to calm down and explain things to me, Raphael. I need to know what I’ve gotten myself into.”
He took several deep breaths, and I watched the signs of his less than human nature disappear. His scent changed from unknown back to his human scent.
“I’m sorry. I’m stressed out. This is…a lot,” he conceded. “It started that night when I…killed my friends. While I was at that place, they kept pushing me further. I lose complete control if it goes too far.” He rolled up a sleeve of his jacket, and I saw a scar that went all the way around his wrist.
“Is that from them binding you?” I asked, wondering how tight something would have to be to cause that sort of scar.
“No. It’s from where they cut my hand off and let it heal back on,” he explained softly. He covered it back up and lifted his shirt. There were at least seven gunshot scars on his abdomen, all healed and scarred. “They’ve shot at me a lot. Every time I get caught and have to run. But it’s like I don’t feel them when they happen, not while I’m like that. I feel them later, as they try to heal. It’s not immediate, and I have to put pressure on them, but I can heal from a gunshot like these in twenty-four hours. Less if I’m…”
“How long did it take your hand?” I was breathing too hard, too mystified by the man in front of me and what he could apparently do.
“It was reattached within a few hours, but it took a few days for feeling to come back, an entire week for full mobility.”
“And you spent five years there,” I mumbled.
“Getting my blood drawn, getting cut open and looked at, getting drugged up and told to fight things. Yeah,” he said, nodding.
Blood drawn.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Hold on for me. I have to do something.” I had left my venom sitting there on the counter like an idiot.
I grabbed a set of keys and unlocked a small cabinet in my kitchen and pulled out a blood draw set, tourniquet, needle, and tube. While he watched, I tied off the tourniquet and stabbed myself right in the vein and drew a vial of my own blood. Without pause, I poured the blood into the small cup of venom and watched them duke it out. I was immune to my own venom and acted as a natural neutralizing agent for it. A naga’s venom was only stoppable by that naga’s blood. There was no anti-venom, though some had tried, which didn’t work because the venom composition for each naga was unique and the effects wildly differed. Someone would have to successfully synthesize anti-venom for each individual naga, which was damn near impossible.
“We’re talking about how I was a science project, and you’re going to do that?” he snapped, waving a hand at the cup of venom and blood.
I looked up at him then back down at the cup. When my eyes met his again, I shrugged. His pale face wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t blame him for