Kinked (38 page)

“Hey, beautiful,” he said.

Her eyebrows rose as she gave him the ultimate in skeptical looks. “You need more healing potion,” she told him. She picked up another small bottle and raised it to her mouth to bite out the cork.

He grabbed her wrist. “Wait, how many was that again? We only had five each.”

“I drank one. One of the shadow wolves tagged me and I wouldn’t stop bleeding,” she said. Her voice was beginning to slur. “I had to set my broken leg first. Nothing I
could do about the wings. They’re so messed up, just, whatever.”

The exhausted hopelessness in that made his heart constrict. She had taken so much damage, one potion would have barely taken the edge off of it, just enough to start the healing process again on that bite wound. “You need that one too.”

“No.” She bit out the cork. “You do, because you’re the one-trick pony guy, right? You get better, and then you can help me.”

She made sense. As he got stronger, he could help her with at least some basic healing. Reluctantly he let go of her wrist. “Yeah, okay.”

She held the bottle up to him, and he drank. Fiery pain started to build again, as the Power in the potion forced injuries to heal. Healing potion could only do so much. The rest was up to the body’s resources, but it could sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and it was a strong step forward.

“So you’re alive now,” Aryal mumbled. “Okay then.”

Her arm loosened from around him, and he caught himself on one elbow as he spilled out of her hold. He twisted around to find that she had slumped over in the sand.

His overworked heart thumped. He reached to check her pulse, and while it raced too fast, it beat strongly against his fingers. Relief spun in his head. This trip had aged him something like twenty years.

He looked down her sprawled body and around at the surrounding area. She had maneuvered to the pier and found his longbow too, along with his supply sack, and she had splinted one of her legs with the wood from their longbows, tying them with the bowstrings. The length of wood was much too long for her leg, and she had drawn crazy patterns in the sand as she worked back to his side.

The kind of passion and determination that took made the back of his eyes smart. He had no words for what he saw.

No words, except: “I think you might be both my suicide and my salvation.” And he needed her for both. “I love you like a heart attack, woman.”

She didn’t reply. She was out cold. He turned onto his uninjured side and curled around her, blood, filth, sand and all, and then somebody must have shot out his headlights inside because darkness slammed down on him again.

T
he sun woke him. He didn’t want it to. He covered his head with one arm and drifted for a while, but then it got too fierce. Finally he sat up to look around.

The fucked-up, perforated bitch’s body still lay sprawled on the sand where Aryal had left it. Several feet away her head bobbed at the edge of the shoreline. A single bark of laughter burst out of him at the gruesome sight. It hurt so much that he stopped. It wasn’t funny anyway.

He bent over Aryal, gently pushing her bloody hair back from her face. Her pulse had slowed to a less alarming pace, and it still beat steadily. The sun had already started to turn her pale skin pink.

It was his turn now to deal with things. He managed to get up on his knees, then to his feet. Part of him was wild to get out of his own armor, but as he looked down at the half-melted mess at his chest, he knew that was going to hurt like a son of a bitch. So first things first.

His supply sack lay beside her, along with all the scattered, empty bottles that had held the healing potion. Okay, there was food in that sack, and hopefully the brandy bottle hadn’t broken. Day was looking up. He limped to the last boat on the pier to retrieve the wineskin of water. Now for shelter. He looked in the boats until he found a folded canvas sail. Then he walked back to Aryal, dragging the sail behind him.

Jamming their swords tip first into the sand on either side of her, he took one end of the sail and draped it across the hilts so that the top half of Aryal’s body lay in shade.

“I am a goddamn genius,” he told her. The cry of seagulls answered him.

After he took two swallows of water, he knelt and lifted her head to moisten her lips with a small trickle. Then he stopped the wineskin and sprawled beside her, half in the
shade. He would work off the armor after a little rest. Just needed to close his eyes for a few minutes.

He found one of her hands and laced his fingers through hers.

This time when the darkness sucked him down, it was mingled with peace.

This time he dreamed he was in a sauna. Galya’s severed head sat on the bench and sneered at him. She tried to convince him that he wanted to become her shadow panther, and he kicked her into a corner, which was against sauna rules, and somebody started tapping on the door in reprimand, and that pissed him off so much he woke with a start.

Overhead, the edge of the sail flapped rhythmically in a steady breeze that blew off the water. The sun had begun its descent in the sky. They had slept the day away.

Alarmed, he sat quickly, ignoring the twinge of protest in his sore muscles and in the giant scabs at his chest, shoulder, neck and face. He hadn’t meant to rest that long.

His injured eye had gummed up, but when he eased it open with a thumb and forefinger, he was profoundly relieved to discover that his sight had almost returned to normal. Hopefully the rest of that damage would heal over the next couple of days.

Turning, he bent over Aryal’s still form. Was she sleeping—or unconscious? It was past time that she got more healing herself. Gently he felt down her body. Broken leg, cracked ribs, severely sprained wrist that was now so swollen he couldn’t wrap his fingers around it. He lifted up the bottom of her tunic and was horrified to discover that the blackened contusion at her shoulder continued down the entire length of her torso. From the size of it at the edge of her trousers, it probably went down the length of her leg as well.

What the hell happened to her? Was that all from her fall from the bluff? And there were her wings to consider as well. She had taken damage on top of damage.

I’m broken up six ways to Sunday,
she had said.

He rubbed the back of his head. The one-trick pony
could only do so much, and he didn’t know enough about the healing arts to know if he would hurt her even more by healing whatever had happened to her unseen wings. Caerreth had been right. When an injury was severe enough, as in her crushed carpal joint, sometimes a simple healing spell just fused the damage together.

But he had to start somewhere. He just had to keep it localized. First he worked on her leg, pouring the healing spell over the femur to ensure the break had fused. Then he worked on her wrist. As his Power reduced the swollen flesh, he ripped a length off the edge of the sail so that he could wrap it. That joint was going to need some support as it finished healing.

Next he turned his attention to her cracked ribs, placing a hand along the curve of her torso. He had barely begun when she took his wrist. “Stop,” she croaked.

Blood had dried all over her, so that she was almost unrecognizable. He scowled. “No.”

“It’s too much. You can’t spare the strength.”

“I can spare it. Just a little more.”

“Everything always has to be a fight with you,” she grumbled.

He cocked an eyebrow incredulously at her but didn’t bother to dignify that with a reply. Instead, sensing how her stressed, injured flesh soaked up the healing like a sponge, he eked out a little more Power before he had to concede that he was tapped, and he had to stop.

She struggled to sit up, and he slipped his good arm underneath her shoulders to help. Her arms slipped around his waist, and they ended up simply leaning against each other. He tucked her head into the crook of his neck and held her carefully.

After a while she reached for the wineskin of water, and when she drank her fill, he did the same. The skin was nearly empty when he had finished. He stoppered and shook it. “Gonna have to deal with that issue soon.”

“There’ll be fresh water at the top of the bluff.” She eyed the path tiredly. “We just have to get up there.”

“One step at a time.” He dug in the sack and pulled out
wayfarer bread. The apple brandy bottle hadn’t broken. Fuck yeah. They ate slowly and took sips of the brandy as they watched the sunset. He said, “If I don’t see another wafer of wayfarer bread for a hundred years or so, I’ll be okay with that.”

She nodded as she looked around, and he did too. The current had washed Galya’s head onto the beach beside the nearest pier. A few minutes later, she said as she chewed, “I like to see her rotting.”

She sounded so peaceful. He snorted, which didn’t hurt quite as badly as it had before. He told her about his dream, and she gave him a dark look that was almost laughter. Of course, that also meant he had to tell her what the shadow wolf had told him, and she paled underneath the coat of her grime.

She whispered, “They were Wyr after all.”

“Yeah. Hopefully they’re at peace now. Have you ever heard of this Phoenix Cauldron that the wolf mentioned?”

She shook her head and shrugged. “I wonder if it’s one of the seven God Machines. Except all the stories say that Numenlaur had only one.”

He pushed the mystery aside, finished his wafer and said, “Paragliding is not stupid.”

She looked at him blankly.

“The shit fit you threw earlier,” he said. “You said—screamed—that paragliding is stupid, and it’s not.
It’s not,
sunshine.”

She ducked her head and muttered so low he almost couldn’t hear her, “It is if you’re not there to do it with me.”

His throat tightened. “That’s not ever going to happen.”

She turned to look at him, and everything was right there in her eyes. Fear, vulnerability, and a startled, fierce love. Uncertainty.

He stamped on that last bit with the whole force of his personality. “You made me a promise that you were going to make it, no matter what,” he growled. “And you will. You will not endanger your mate.”

He held her gaze until, blinking rapidly, she nodded, glanced away and then back at him. “You look terrible,”

she said, her voice unsteady. “Why haven’t you gotten out of that armor yet? You must be baking in this heat.”

He fingered the scab on his cheek as he told her, “I’ve been postponing it. I think the tunic underneath has stuck to my chest.”

Her eyes widened in horror. “You just
left
it stuck to you? Oh gods, where is a knife?”

“You can’t cut it off,” he said, baffled. “I think it needs to be soaked.”

She waved a hand impatiently at him as she looked around. Eventually she settled on one of the short swords and knelt on her good knee beside him, her other leg awkwardly propped to one side. They used the tip of the sword to cut carefully at the fastenings between the plates, which had swollen from his swim in the salt water. Then they stripped the pieces off of him one at a time. He breathed a deep sigh of relief as the last piece, the damaged breastplate, came away without any trouble.

They looked down at his chest where the tunic was indeed stuck to the giant scab.

Aryal’s good hand snaked out. She ripped the tunic off of him.

Fresh fire exploded across his chest.

“GAAAAHHH!”
he roared furiously, his fists clenched.
“Why did you do that?!”

“Isn’t that better?” His demonic mate held up both hands in a placating gesture. “See, it’s done now, it’s all done. We can put it in the past and move on.”

“What ever happened to
ONE-TWO-THREE
!” he shouted.

“That’s a vastly overrated system. I never recommend it. The element of surprise is always best.” She patted at the air, her expression turning worried as she eyed his raw, bleeding wound. “Er, can you do something about that now? You can cast a healing spell on yourself, right?”

His energy had picked up after eating and drinking, but he didn’t feel in the mood to reveal that to her right away. He snarled, “I used up everything I had on healing you, dumb ass, which you would have found out if you had
talked
to me first.”

Her eyes widened in dismay. “Oh God, did you really?”

Inside, his dark sardonic sense of humor had started to chuckle. He told her pathetically, “We’ve got nothing to clean this wound with, and nothing to use as a bandage. I guess we could tear off a corner of the sail and use that if we had to.”

Her dismay turned to outrage. “We’ll do no such thing! That sail has got to be filthy, and besides, it’s thick, rough canvas. We might as well take handfuls of sand and throw it all over you!”

“What am I supposed to do, sit here and bleed?”

She made a face and looked with dread at the steep path that cut up the bluff. “We’ll have to get up there somehow. We’ll need fresh water soon anyway, and somewhere there’ll be something suitable that we can use as a band—”

He cast a light healing spell on himself. The bleeding slowed to a stop as the wound scabbed over.

Her mouth shut with a click and pursed up tight. She accused, “You did that on purpose.”

“You
think?”
He looked over the water and his jaw angled out. “I can’t stand it any longer. I’ve got to get clean. Or at least cleaner. And if you think I look bad, you should look in a mirror.”

“No need. What I can see of myself is bad enough.” She gazed longingly at the water as well. “Are you too mad at me to help me up?”

“Of course not, stupid.” He stood, held his hands out to her and pulled her upright. Her leg, still in the too-long longbow splint, canted to one side at a sharp angle.

“I’m sick of this awful splint,” she snapped. “I might as well cut it off and be done with it.”

“Not yet,” he said. “Give it another night to be on the safe side. And even then you should keep your weight off that leg.”

He put an arm around her waist and helped her hop to the water. Then they both submerged, clothes and all, and rubbed at themselves and each other to clean off as best they could. Aryal scooped up handfuls of sand to scrub the worst of the dried blood out of her hair and skin.