Rachel Vincent - With All My Soul

She was unconscious, her head, arms, and legs hanging limp.

“Someone help me with her!” He kicked the coffee table out of the way and laid the mara on the couch. Chairs scratched the kitchen floor as we all stood at once. Nash made it into the living room at the same time I did—he must have flown down the hall. He shoved the coffee table over even farther and knelt on the floor next to the couch, brushing dark hair back from his girlfriend’s forehead.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded as Sophie and Emma sank onto the coffee table where they could see and Luca stood behind them, watching. Waiting to see how he could help.

“Look at her hand!” Em said, and I glanced at Sabine’s right arm—the one without a cast. Her wrist and hand were swollen to the point that the skin should have split, and a bright red web of veins traced the surface of her inflamed flesh, inching up her arm toward her chest. Toward her heart.

But what stood out to me most was a ring of bright red pinpricks encircling her wrist like a bracelet. Or like a tattoo.

“Oh, shit.” I knew those marks. I had an identical circle of them around my right ankle—permanent reminders of the day I’d been pricked by a crimson creeper vine. I’d nearly died.

“Avari got her ankles, too.” Tod carefully lifted Sabine’s leg, where a severed section of creeper vine dangled from the end of her jeans, its thorns still piercing the denim. A thick, viscous fluid dripped slowly from the cut end of the vine to soak into the carpet. “That cast is the only thing that saved her other arm.”

“Shit!” Nash carefully unwound the vine from her left ankle. “How did this happen?”

“He must have caught her.” Tod lifted the mara ’s other leg so he could unwind the single loop of vine, and I stepped back to give them room. “I found her alone, unconscious, tied to the ground by all four limbs with creeper vines.”

“Live vines?” Sophie’s voice flowed thick with horror.

“Yeah. Dead ones wouldn’t have held. Fortunately, they were young. Thin, as you can see, and just now sprouting through cracks in the concrete.” Tod dropped the severed end of vine on the end table next to the couch, and a single drop of yellow venom leaked onto the wood while the inch-long thorns scratched the already-chipped varnish.

Nash’s vine followed a second later, then each brother rolled up a leg of her jeans and slid her sneakers and socks off so we could get a better look at the damage.

“Not as bad as her arm but not great,” Nash said through clenched teeth. His irises swirled with fear, and his voice shook with it. “If we don’t do something, this’ll kill her.”

Em lifted Sabine’s right arm and examined it, careful not to touch the puffy flesh. “What can we do?” Worry looked much the same on her as it had on Lydia. But Emma’s eyes were all her own, and they were so full of sadness I couldn’t help wondering whether she was syphoning it all from Nash or had actually started to care about Sabine, as I had.

That damn mara was an emotional ninja, sneaking up on your heart when you least expected it.

“Harmony treated me for this once,” I said. “She had this stuff—”

“She still has the stuff!” Nash stood so fast my head spun. “She has jars of it at home—she started making it in larger batches after you got pricked that time—she even carries some in her purse now, just in case.”

“Oh!” Sophie stood and raced into the kitchen. A second later, she was back with Harmony’s purse, shoving it at me. “She left it here when you guys crossed over.”

“Thanks.” I opened the bag and pawed through it, then began laying travel-size plastic bottles on the coffee table. There were three of them, and each was labeled in permanent marker with Harmony’s neat, all-caps print.

Water—amnesia. Obviously, that was what she’d put in Traci’s tea.

Water—analgesic. A painkiller, made from water native to the Netherworld.

XX.

I could only assume that was the one she would have given Traci to help safely end her pregnancy, if that had been Traci’s decision.

“It’s not here.” I pawed through the purse again, but there were no more plastic bottles.

“It’s glass.” Nash took the bag from me and dumped its contents onto the coffee table, and Em stood to get out of the way. “And there should be a syringe. It has to be injected, remember?”

I did remember, but barely. I’d hardly been conscious when Harmony had injected me.

Several of us pawed through the collection of keys, makeup, restaurant ketchup and mayonnaise packets, hand sanitizer, and an assortment of other personal necessities until Em suddenly squealed in triumph.

“Here’s the bottle!” She held up a small glass bottle sealed with a rubber stopper.

Nash unzipped a pocket on the inside of his mother’s purse and scooped out three tampons and a disposable syringe sealed in plastic, as well as a separate disposable needle in a tiny plastic tube. “Thank goodness.” He ripped open the plastic around the syringe, then opened the tube and dumped the needle onto his palm.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Tod watched over his brother’s shoulder. “How do you know how much to give her?”

“Mom taught me a few months ago, after...Kaylee brought me back from the Netherworld.” When Avari had taken him to get to me. “She figured that the chances of someone getting stuck by creeper thorns got better and better every time we crossed over, and she said someone should know how to treat the venom, in case she couldn’t get there in time.”

Nash screwed the needle onto the end of the syringe, then held the glass bottle upside down. We all watched, breath held, while he drew liquid into the syringe, then withdrew the needle from the bottle. He held the syringe up to the light to double-check the dose, then turned back to Sabine.

“Here, can you hold her arm?”

I sank to my knees next to Sabine and held her arm out straight while he stared at it for what felt like forever. Then, finally, Nash sucked in a deep breath and held it while he slid the needle into her skin and carefully depressed the plunger.

Once he’d withdrawn the needle and a drop of blood had welled out of her arm, he frowned and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “I was supposed to clean the injection site first. Damn it!”

“Better late than never,” Tod said. “What do you need?”

“Cotton swabs and alcohol should do it. And a Band-Aid.”

“I’ll get them!” Em stood and raced for the bathroom.

“But that won’t kill any germs I just injected her with,” Nash continued.

Tod put one hand on his shoulder. “Any human doctor can treat an infection. The same cannot be said for crimson creeper venom.”

I gathered the used syringe and wrappers and threw them in the trash while Sophie put Harmony’s stuff back in her purse. Luca slid the coffee table into place, and Nash cleaned the site of Sabine’s injection with a belated dose of alcohol, then covered it with a bandage from the box Emma gave him. Then he sat on the coffee table and stared at her while she slept, periodically checking on her swollen wrist and ankles.

The rest of us gathered around the peninsula in the kitchen, speaking in hushed voices.

“So, how did you find her?” I poured myself a mug of coffee, which had already gone cold. “She was just...lying there?”

Tod nodded. “On the ground, out in the open, about three hundred feet from the hospital. In our world, that would have been the hospital parking lot. Avari must have told everyone not to touch her, because she was all alone, completely unscathed, except for the creeper vines.”