Bite Down on This - Sierra Aguirre-Stoker, Shane Barrett

Sierra’s not sure why it’s always when they’re miles from actual help when one of them gets seriously injured. She’s pretty sure it’s almost every time.
She should probably ask Pete. He might have a spreadsheet for it. 
Rows: Sierra, Wren, Shay, Pete, Saanvi (she’d rank them in order of most likely to be injured, but Pete might have gone alphabetical).
Columns: Miles from assistance when needed (It probably goes up in increments of twenty-five).
Wren would have the most recent column addition, she’s out for the next two weeks. But when Pete and Saanvi dialed in on a location being used as a weapons cache for a couple hunters dealing Agency-grade armaments to vigilantes, it needed to be dealt with immediately. 
Unfortunately, the arms dealers happened to be at home when the raid party showed up. One of them took off in a truck full of goods, and Pete and Saanvi followed him with the Jeep they’d borrowed from the agency that was getting ripped off.
She’d chosen not to ask for local manpower backup, in case these guys were someone’s friends and they wound up double crossed.
Now she sort of wishes she’d at least taken two vehicles.
Because when they took down the guy who’d holed up in the cabin, Shay had taken a silver bullet.
Pete gives her a hard time about getting injured a lot, but Sierra would rather it be her than any of the rest of her team. She’s on this task force to redeem herself. She’s got a lot to make up for. The others are just here because it’s the right thing to do. Even Shay.
“I can’t give you blood until we get that bullet out of your leg, or you’ll heal around it. And the silver would poison you even faster.”
Shay nods, teeth clenched. “Then get it out.” 
Sierra unbuckles her wrist cuff, then hands it to him. “Bite down on this. You don’t need to break a fang while I'm working.” 
He does, sharp teeth sinking deep into the worn leather.
Sierra looks from his bloodied pantleg to his tense face, pulls out the smaller tactical knife that isn’t silver plated, and gets to work.
It’s not like she has a lot of experience in safe field bullet removal, but unless she somehow slices through multiple major blood vessels and he loses more blood than they can replace with the emergency stock in his field kit, that doesn’t really matter. 
A field kit that she just remembered is in the Jeep Pete and Saanvi drove away with.
Well, at least she ate some peanut-butter stuffed crackers on the drive over. 
The bullet thankfully isn’t deep, going through a layer of wooden door first sort of lessened the impact, but she has to make sure it, any wood splinters, and whatever pant leg piece it drove in are all out before the wound closes. Vampires always heal back to their state at the time of turning, but that doesn’t account for foreign bodies in wounds. They learned that the hard way. Sierra doesn’t want a repeat performance. 
Shay whines, the sound buzzing around the leather, as she works the tip of the knife below the bullet and pushes it out. She hopes something in his mouth is at least some sort of distraction from her digging around in his leg.
Truth be told, she couldn’t have focused on the task at hand if she’d heard those tortured screams again. As it is, hurting him even to help him makes her feel too much like the Silver State monsters whose spikes and mallets left the faint silver scars still visible on his wrists. 
She rinses the wound with a bottle of water from these guys’ stash, checking for anything she still needs to pull out. The cloth she catches with the point of her blade and part of a disassembled rifle that had been laying on top of a couple crates of phosphorus grenades, and she’s able to pull out the two wood splinters with her fingers.
“Almost done,” she says, resting a hand on Shay’s shoulder for a moment before stalking over to the guy tied up and snarling through a gag in the corner.
“My partner’s injured. And he needs blood,” she says, bending down next to him.
What she assumes were curses turn into something that sounds a lot more like pleading. He thinks she’s going to feed him to the vampire.
She might consider it, but she’s not supposed to be breaking the rules of engagement for her own personal vendettas anymore. Aside from the fact that he’d probably tell everyone she let it happen while he was unarmed and restrained, and Maira would have her head for it (and possibly her strike team as well), they’d probably never get that far because Shay would flat out refuse the blood.
He’s like that. 
Sierra wonders, at times like this, how she ended up with less moral compass than an undead blood drinker. 
She rifles through his jacket pockets until she finds the packet of jerky she saw him snacking on when they were scouting the place, before they pulled up and all hell broke loose. 
She’s got to bring her iron levels back up afterward.
She turns away from the still panicking arms dealer and sits down next to Shay, holding out her arm.
“Bite down on this.”
“I’m not biting you.”
“You’re losing more blood now that the bullet’s out. By the time Pete and Saanvi get back, you’ll need more than they have in our kit.”
“Can’t you do the knife thing?”
“I can go digging around your leg with unsterile tools, genius, I can’t do that on me.”
He shakes his head, but takes the leather out of his mouth, and a second later, teeth close on her wrist.
She doesn’t think she’s ever going to quite get used to the feel of a bite. The closest thing she can compare it to is the stomach-dropping feeling of driving hills at a speed where when you come over the top and start going down, there’s a second where it feels like the car’s going forward into nothing but thin air like a Wile-e Coyote cartoon. 
Another scream buzzes against her skin this time as the wound in Shay’s leg begins to knit itself back together.
Fast healing is a pretty nice trick, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. 
Numbness creeps up her arm, spidering along the veins as the saliva does its work. She watches muscle and skin cover the bloody gash in Shay’s leg. 
She got all the pieces out. He’s going to be fine.
She works a wrapped pad out of a back pocket of her jeans one-handed, and as soon as the fangs slip out of her skin, she opens the cover and presses it against her arm. Vamp saliva is like mosquito saliva. It makes the blood clot less so they can drink. She’s going to need to apply pressure for a bit.
Shay leans against her, panting even though he no longer physically needs to breathe. They both sit in silence for several minutes, until Shay finally says something in a shallow voice that’s still raw with recent pain.
“Why do you always eat peanut butter when we’re going into danger?”
He was bound to notice sooner or later.
“Because your favorite food is peanut butter pie but I don’t always have enough advance notice or the supplies to make that.”
“Whoa. Hold on. You eat peanut butter before these things because you think I might get injured enough that I have to drink your blood?”
“Beats stale bagels and bad motel coffee, right?”
He shakes his head. “Sierra, I mean this in the best possible way, but you’re really, really weird.”
She just reaches for the packet of jerky and pulls out a strip. “Try not to need a round two. This guy’s taste in dried meat was honey mustard.”
Shay makes a face. “Yeah. Have fun with that.”
Sierra chuckles and leans back into him, the vamp saliva in her blood making even eating honey-mustard flavored jerky in a musty cabin with a soon to be ex-hunter screaming obscenities at them from behind a sock gag feel kind of nice.
Still, nothing is going to make filling out the after action report on this fiasco suck any less.