There wasn't anything that could take down a vampire, but whatever insect this was, it surely did the trick.
"What sort of insect is this?" I uttered. "I thought nothing could take down a vampire."
"Nothing usually does, but every vampire gets thrown off their game. Without an antidote, Kai would have healed from the venomous sting within a week and a half," Mr. Collin replied as he was tending to Kai's wound with the washcloth.
"Can you heal him?" I asked Zoey.
She frowned. "My healing gift isn't strong enough to heal this venom."
"He's already been healing," Mr. Collin corrected as he cleaned the ooze seeping around his wound. With the antidote in his system, his puncture wound started healing, but he still wasn't waking up. Nor was he in a detained sleep because he was still breathing rapidly.
"What does this insect look like to carry such a lethal venom?" I mumbled to myself while Mr. Collin had finished tending to the wound. So he started to pull Kai's torn suit out from underneath his body to make him more comfortable.
Meanwhile, I didn't anticipate an answer as Chester replied, "It's shaped like a bumblebee that is the prodigious mass of a mammoth, but it's lime green and has bristly hair covering its body. And its stinger is about the length of half a car. We used to use its venom on each other during the vampiric wars until they nearly went extinct on its planet."
"It doesn't look like it's extinct to me," I remarked.
Chester emphasized his words in a stronger voice, "I said nearly. There's roughly sixty left."
Rome spoke a few steps diagonally behind Mr. Collin's back. "Make that fifty-nine. Kai has been resting since after he got stung yesterday. Then, he was going to get us home after he healed. Our main threat was keeping him safe from other vampires."
"Good thing this wasn't Victoria or another human in our Coven. There would be no saving them. The sting will kill a human instantly," Zoey randomly mentioned as her eyes remained on Kai.
"Why would you guys go somewhere that wasn't safe!" I snapped at Rome, and he seemed taken aback by it.
"Easy, Princess, we didn't. That insect slipped through the world like how monsters slip into Earth," Rome sweetly calmed me with his hands briefly up.
I voiced, more softly with a surly expression, "I told him not to go."
Done caring for Kai's wound, Mr. Collin got off the bed and hugged me. "Why don't you lay down and take a nap with him? I'm sure he'll be up soon," he gently advised, and I agreed with him.
After everyone left, I covered Kai with a blanket and lay beside him. Then I snuggled near his left shoulder and went to sleep. Hours into the night, I woke up when I heard a rumbling sound coming from his chest. I turned the light on from my nightstand and rolled back to him.
"Kai, are you ok?"
His breathing wasn't rapid anymore, but his golden sandy tan was more discolored into a brown, and his heavy cupid bow lips were drying out into thinner corpse lips. I tugged the blanket away from his upper body, and my eyes gaped. The entire length of his left arm and up his shoulder became a crisped yellowish brown, and his muscle mass was thinner. He was starting to look like a mummified corpse, like when I found him back in Egypt. Lack of human blood was slowly depleting his body before he would go into a detained sleep. Only his family members or I would be able to wake him with our blood if that were to happen. I wasn't sure what to do, so I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and texted Mr. Collin. In a hastiness, he came into the room.
"He's drying out from lack of blood," I told Mr. Collin when he examined Kai before he tried nudging his shoulders. But there was no response from him, so Mr. Collin replied with a hum, "Hmm, he's healed, but he seems to have gone into a deep sleep from stress."
"What should we do?" I worryingly inquired.
After they reach twenty, vampires and vampiresses no longer require sleep like the little ones and teenagers. However, vampires and vampiresses were known to take mental naps, but stress sleeping was a way for them to disconnect from their worries.
Mr. Collin gently smiled. "He gets this from his mother. I'd never slap my wife, but you could try slapping him awake," he suggested as he chuckled at that last advice he gave me.
"Maybe I'll give him a few more hours of sleep," I frowned, staring at him.
Mr. Collin gently warned. "Be careful with him. If he detains himself, he'll be ravenous when he wakes up. He could unintentionally harm you."
"On second thought, maybe I'll try to wake him now." I timorously gulped at the thought because Kai had come a long way to control his thirst for blood. I'd hate to see him go back to losing himself by even smelling a drop of blood.
So I sat at his bedside as Mr. Collin watched me. "Kai, please wake up." I patted his sunken cheekbones but still got nothing out of him. "Get up!" I shoved my hands on his bony chest, and it still didn't work.
"I'm right here, you dummy!" I spat, frustrated at him because I needed him, and here, he had to try detaining himself over stress and depression.
He put himself in a happy place where he was likely dreaming about us like he had already done before I knew vampires existed. Long before I even knew he was my destined mate, I had to be the one to find him in Egypt without realizing it at the time. In the ancient periods, he put himself into a detained sleep because he couldn't bear to wait for my birth any longer. Now he has me, and yet, he does this!
I sighed because nothing I did or said worked. Birds started to chirp outside as rays of sunshine blessed the horizon with its shine. Today was another glorious morning, yet my heart felt sickened with frustration.
"I'd try later. I suggest that you should at least attend your morning classes and collect your work for the afternoon classes," Mr. Collin advised. After he left, I took his advice and got ready for college.