Thea Harrison - Rising Darkness

This time, she was going to allocate treatment according to the value of the injured. She eyed Michael’s wounds. “You first.”

A complex expression passed over his grim face, acceptance and understanding, even, oddly, compassion. “We don’t have much time,” he said. “We have to leave here as soon as we can. You might have forced the Deceiver into retreating, but he can still send others after us with a single phone call.”

“Then we’d better get to it,” she said crisply. “I haven’t even examined you closely yet, but I’m still fairly certain you’re going to need stitches. I need my bag.”

“I’ll get it.” Gripping his upper right thigh, Michael made his way to the car.

She put a hand to her injured shoulder. As her adrenaline faded, she felt too hot and cold at the same time. The skin around her shoulder felt raw and painful to the touch. She had slowed her own bleeding and cleansed the wound, but she still needed to be bandaged. She could use some pain medication too. Ideally she should get a blood transfusion, but there was nothing ideal about any of this situation. They should both be in a hospital, and that simply wasn’t going to happen.

Sending a look of silent gratitude to Nicholas’s straight figure, she went into the cabin. Everything inside looked just as it had when they had left it. Items from Michael’s weapons bag lay scattered across the table. The sheets and blankets lay in a rumpled heap on the bed.

Then she saw the bullet holes that scored the cabin walls. Not everything was quite the same. First things first. She couldn’t help anybody else if she was too bad off herself. She rummaged in her purse for a small bottle of Tylenol and dry swallowed two tablets. Then, because she had lost a lot of fluids, she hobbled to the sink and drank as many cups of water as she could. She sprinkled sugar into one cup and gulped it down. Then she sprinkled salt into another cup and drank that down too.

Then she sagged against the sink as the world went gray and formless.

A hand gripped her good shoulder, and she jerked back alert. Michael stood beside her, his eyes dark with worry.

“I’m okay,” she muttered. Her mouth felt filled with cotton.

“Sure you are,” he said. His voice was rough, his face clenched like a fist.

He took a knife and cut through the layers of her sweatshirt and T-shirt. She hadn’t taken the time to put on a bra, so when the pieces of material parted, her torso was bared to view.

They both looked at the wound where a blackened bruise the size of Michael’s spread hand covered her shoulder. She patted the area gingerly with a handful of the ruined T-shirt, until the point of entry was exposed. The merest trickle of blood seeped from the opening. It hurt. It hurt a lot, but she kept the expression on her face stoic.

“See?” she said. “I told you I slowed the bleeding. I remembered how. You can dress it for me, but after I see to the worst of your wounds.”

The tension in his features eased. “Okay.”

All those years she spent in med school. All that money spent on her expensive education, and in some ways, she had been a more powerful healer nine hundred years ago. She sucked on her lower lip, thinking. What would she be able to do, now that she had a modern education and she was recovering her memories?

Shaking two more Tylenol out of the bottle, she gave the pills to him to take, then with her good hand, she helped him to strip off his weapons, armor and clothing. When she found several marks on the chest plate of the Kevlar vest, she bit her lip hard but set it aside without comment. He leaned back against the table while she examined the wounds. He had been shot too, several times, but the wounds were very shallow, just glancing scores along the skin of his arms and legs, and one along the side of his neck. They had to hurt like a son of a bitch, but they weren’t serious.

The serious wounds were made by something sharp. Deep knife wounds along his arms and a bad stab in his right thigh that might have grazed the bone. Thank God he had listened to her and had worn the vest.

She noticed something else that troubled her deeply. His energy, normally such a strong, vibrant and bright presence, was mottled with dark lines, like fractures. Had the Deceiver done that damage? How could it heal, or be healed? He looked like he could be breakable. The sight scared her, but she kept the emotion from her expression.

Michael helped her pull out the necessary supplies from her kit. She taped some of his deeper wounds with non-suture strips, and cleaned and dressed the more shallow wounds. Three of the cuts needed suturing. He held rock steady as she worked, and watched her face.

Finally she said, “Okay. You’re done for now.”

“Your turn,” he told her. She eased into a chair as he ran hot water in a bowl. He washed her torso and shoulder, covered the entrance and exit wounds with thick pads of gauze and bound them in place. He muttered, “Christ, you’re covered in bruises.”

“The last forty-eight hours have been eventful,” she said. “I just wish I had been more useful for some of it.”

He snorted. “You saved my life, and you got one of the nastiest entities on the planet on the run. If you were any more useless, they could make an atom bomb out of you.”

A short laugh broke out of her. It hurt, and she gripped her injured shoulder to brace it. Then she sort of pitched toward him and he leaned forward too, and somehow they ended forehead to forehead, looking deeply into each other’s eyes.

The somberness of his gaze. The emotion pouring out of her. They told each other so much, and all of it in silence.

She stroked his broad, bare chest. Then she said, “I don’t know what to do for your other wounds.”

She didn’t specify further. He seemed to know exactly what she was talking about anyway, as he nodded and straightened. “You do nothing for now. We get dressed, we pack up the car, and after you examine the drones, we leave.”

After she examined them. Not after she healed them. He didn’t believe that she could do anything for them.

Her face tightened, but she said, “Okay.”

She didn’t even try to wriggle into another T-shirt. Instead, he helped her to ease into one of his flannel shirts that could be buttoned down the front. Even though her jeans had gotten smeared with grass and dirt stains, at least she had managed not to bleed on them. Michael constructed a sling out of a kitchen towel, and slipped it over her head.

Then he limped into the bathroom. A moment later she heard the sound of running water. While she waited, she went to the sink and drank more water. Then she collected her purse, a pillow and a blanket. Packing was easy when you didn’t own anything.

She put the blanket and the pillow on the table, and sat and put her head on the pillow until Michael came back out.

He wore a fresh pair of jeans and another of his flannel shirts that he left loose and unbuttoned at the waist. She caught a glimpse of the hard muscles of his bare chest and a flash of white bandage at one wrist. His limp was more pronounced, his long mobile mouth bracketed with lines of pain. She watched him stuff weapons into his long black bag.

She cleared her throat and said in a rusty-sounding voice, “I dropped your other gun outside. Round the back by the path.”

“I’ll get it in a minute.” He looked at her. “Ready to go?”

She stood and scooped up the pillow and blanket with her good arm.

He looked at the way she clutched the bedding. A fugitive amusement ghosted across his face. “Right. Let’s hope he was too rattled and busy to fuck with our car, because otherwise we’re going to be on foot and then I will really be pissed.”

Her eyelids dropped in a slow blink. Now there was a thought. How could they make it if they were on foot? She looked at the leg Michael favored.