Chapter Text
Sadie smiled, and the spirit rushed. It zagged around Stephen and slammed straight into Boo, blossoming out of her back with a hellish shriek. Agony, or maybe terror. I held up my hands, but there was no way to stop it.
The impact was heart-deep. The electric stiffness of power arrested my limbs, and I tumbled back, into the bridge barrier. Over.
I was falling. There was nothing but gray sky, and brown river, and the smell of burning flowers, until I crashed through the frigid murk of river below. Then there was nothing at all.
#
The safe house was forty minutes outside London. Well, forty minutes at Stephen-speed, which I guess meant it would have taken mortal drivers at least an hour. I’d curled in the back seat, bleeding into his coat, with Boo and Callum on either side, trying to keep pressure on my my wound. An equally soaked Thorpe made call after angry-sounding call from the passenger’s seat.
Apparently, he’d gone in after me. Just dove, straight into the Thames in his three-thousand-dollar suit and Michael Phelpsed it to the piling I’d managed to tangle myself in. Incidentally, the piling that saved my life had also sliced open my shoulder with a jagged piece of rusted steel strut, exposing me to whatever zombie outbreak viruses lived in the river. Zombie viruses were bad, but Thorpe was good. I officially liked Thorpe. Go Thorpe. If we both ended up as zombies, I would totally join his brain-eating team.
Stephen drove. Tense shoulders, slow, even breathing, laser focus. Almost. In the moments when I was lucid, when pain dragged me out of dizzy-town, I looked at his eyes in the rearview. Every time, the blue irises snapped to me, bright with an emotion somewhere between horror and fury and impossible guilt. Every time we locked eyes, I swear he drove just a little faster.
The house was small, a single downstairs kitchen and den combo with a series of small upstairs rooms. The air had that dense smell, like it had been shut inside for too long and all sunk to the bottom floor. Every footstep creaked.
Callum carried me through the doorway and up the stairs. Then, somehow, I was sitting fully clothed in a discolored porcelain tub, water sluicing over me from a sputtering showerhead. Boo was behind me, keeping a drenched towel pressed into my shoulder.
Pinkish brown liquid swirled down the drain at my feet. I stared at the vortex in fascination--It reminded me of Granny Deveaux’s sherbet punch, that time Miss Rhonda Raine’s six-year-old nephew tossed a boomerang into the Junior League’s drink table and knocked the bowl into the gator pond. It had foamed up, neapolitan swirls of passion-fruit and pond scum.
I told this to Boo, who humored me with a laugh.
“Who keeps an alligator pond?”
“Well, it’s not really supposed to be a gator pond. The country club actually made it to be a duck pond, but it’s Louisiana, so of course the gators fund it, and once they eat all the ducks, you can’t really call it a duck pond anymore.”
“I guess not,” she said.
There was a commotion of opening and closing doors downstairs, followed by muffled voices. Boo leaned forward and turned off the shower.
“Right then, come on,” she said, and hauled me up onto the side of the tub, where I sat shivering like one of those little dogs inbred into neurological dysfunction. Moments later, the voices on the stairs got clearer, and I recognized Dr. Marigold’s smooth, cultured alto.
“I was not aware anyone had the ability to command ghosts,” she said, coming to the doorway, Thorpe in tow behind her.
“We’re still putting together the picture of what exactly Sidney and Sarah Smithfield-Wyatt are capable of.”
I looked up at Dr. Marigold, and Dr. Marigold looked down at the puddle I was making on the old-fashioned tile floor. She took a dainty step back in her shiny leather pumps.
“I brought antibiotics, Agent Thorpe--not a surgical kit,” she snapped. “You should have said it was this bad.” She followed the comment with a list of commands so efficient, even Thorpe hustled. She extracted a pair of scissors from her neon blue Coach bag--which she placed on the counter, well away from my puddle.
The next few minutes were spent cutting off my sweater. Marigold slid the scissors under the collar and cut down the length of my arm, then took my opposite hand and cut up the other sleeve. Finally, the only thing holding it up was the water suctioning it to my skin. I plucked at it with my good hand, but my fingers shook too hard to peel the sweater away. In the end, Boo helped me.
My sports bra--which, thanks to Boo’s shopping habits, had once been a glass-shattering shade of turquoise--was discolored with watercolor stains of rusty blood. The brief deluge of shower water hadn’t managed to wash away all the blood that had dried on my chest and stomach, and I finally noticed the rip in the calf of my jeans, and the gummy cut still oozing down my ankle. Marigold cut away the bottom leg of my jeans on that side, but left the other side untouched.
Dr. Marigold pulled out a couple antiseptic wipes, some tweezers, and a lighter from her purse. This seemed to upset her, though, because she was catching up to Stephen in the Olympic sport of frowning.
The bathroom room door opened and cold hallway air snaked around my shoulders. Callum leaned in and looked me over, apparently unimpressed by the eyeful of bloody, sports-bra clad Rory.
“What the hell sort of safe-house has no rubbing alcohol or mouthwash?”
“The kind that hasn’t been used for twelve years,” Marigold muttered, adding a pair of gray latex gloves and a tiny mending kit to the pile of stuff from her bag. “I'll need some kind of disinfectant. She went into the Thames, and there's no telling what sort of contaminants were on that strut.”
“Yeah, I know. I ran to the liquor store down the street and grabbed this.” He handed over a half pint of clear liquid. Dr. Marigold held it up, her eyebrows slowly lifting.
“You're going to clean it with...whipped cream flavored vodka?” Boo asked.
“They were out of regular,” Callum said, as more footsteps creaked on the stairs. “It was the best I could find.”
“And you didn't think to look for something else?”
“As long as there’s no sugar, it shouldn’t be a problem,” Marigold said, sounding exasperated with the entire conversation.
Then Stephen appeared in the doorway. His brow bore the expected furrow, his mouth the customary frown behind forty-eight hours of stubble. Given another day or two, he’d have enough scruff going to fit in with the English Grad students that smoked outside Benouville’s only used bookstore. At the sight of him, some before-unnoticed tension in my chest relaxed.
“It has to be at least 35% ABV to disinfect,” he said. His voice--already deep--was gravelly with exhaustion. “You couldn't find plain, Callum? We might as well just use vanilla extract--it’s higher proof.”
“No, I couldn't bloody well find plain!” Callum barked. “And I don't want to know how you know the exact proof to disinfect wounds.”
“Field medicine training?” Marigold asked.
“Chemistry,” Stephen replied, inspecting the label. “And curiosity. It’s fine. This will work.” He handed the bottle back to Marigold, who cracked the seal.
“Are you sure ?” Callum drawled. “They didn't have rubbing alcohol or listerine, but they certainly fucking had vanilla extract.”
Stephen lifted an eyebrow, possibly because Callum seemed more stressed about the shop’s poor selection than any of the other weird stuff that had happened. Possibly because he’d made a joke. I decided to make one too, just to show I was okay, and they could all stop worrying.
“I'd smell delicious,” I said. “Or, I guess, with the Thames water and stuff, I’d probably smell like an air freshener someone threw out of a car and ran over a couple times...”
Stephen sighed, clearly not appreciating my humor, which wasn’t exactly a shock. Still, it would have been nice to see that line between his brow disappear. It would have made the fact that I was about to get battlefield stitches feel a little less scary.
Marigold pressed her lips and considered the label again. “It won’t sterilize the needle, unfortunately. And alcohol is a lytic substance, so it will kill healthy cells as well. There will be a fair amount of scar tissue if I clean it with this.”
I put a hand over the big pink line on my abdomen, and felt the hysterical laugh bubble up in my chest. “You mean I’ll have a scar ? My life is over .”
“Sarcasm won’t make this hurt less, Aurora.”
“You must not know me.”
Then Dr. Marigold unfolded the mending kit and pulled out a needle pre-threaded with black string. Suddenly, I had nothing else to say. She fished around in her bag.
“Is there any floss, or fishing line? The cotton will grow into the skin and make removal difficult. Also, some pliers.”
While Callum and Stephen went back on the hunt, Dr. Marigold peeled the towel from my shoulder. Fresh blood oozed down my arm and dripped off my elbow to the edge of the tub. Boo snagged another towel from the rack and started squeezing the water from my hair.
Callum returned first, with a box of dental floss from Freddie--who’d apparently arrived with Dr. Marigold and had time to pack a bag. A minute or two later, Stephen returned with a metal file and a dusty set of pliers from the car.
There were a few minutes of prepping, which consisted of Marigold dousing everything in sweet-smelling vodka. I watched with a combination of interest and nausea as Stephen honed the end of the needle, then heated it with the lighter. He didn’t stop until it glowed bright amber in the grip of the pliers.
Boo chucked my hair towel at the door and held my good shoulder, letting me lean back against her leg. “Is there anything we can do for the pain?”
I swallowed, trying not to look at the needle now sitting on a vodka-soaked washcloth. It should not have been so terrifying--after all, I’ve been stabbed by way worse things than sewing needles. But it was. Probably because I had way too much time to stare at it, and imagine it jabbing into my wound.
Marigold held up the vodka. “Multi-purpose, I suppose.”
“Right.”
We all looked at Stephen. I’m not sure what we expected him to do--have a brilliant alternative, maybe some kitchen chemistry-version of lidocain. At least some hesitation. But he just plucked the bottle from the counter and handed it to me. I pressed my fingers into the thick plastic, trying to still my hands, but the bottle trembled in my grip anyway. Stephen’s fingers returned, curving around mine very gently, steadying the bottle.
“Drink fast. You want it to hit your system quickly if it’s going to make a difference.”
I nodded, pressed my lips to the bottle, and took a gulp. It hit the back of my throat like a sucker-punch, but I took three or four big swallows, shuddering at the gasoline burn of it going down my chest.
“Whoever said that tasted like whipped cream should be taken to court for fraud,” I said. Then coughed, and tasted just a hint of the reported flavor. I decided not to mention it.
Stephen handed the bottle to Marigold, who was busy snapping a second pair of gloves over her first pair. Why she needed two pairs of gloves, right on top of each other, I had no idea, and I didn’t ask.
I knew what came next, and I wobbled a bit on the edge of the tub, trying to shift so I wouldn’t fall off the edge of the tub when the pain hit. I tried not to concentrate on the weirdly-sweet smell of the alcohol, or the fact that Callum was climbing into the tub to stand behind me with Boo.
“All right. There’s sediment in the gash, so I’ll have to scrub it out.”
“Can you not tell me what you’re going to do?” I asked. “I really, really don’t want to know.”
The doctor gestured at Boo, Callum, and Stephen, I guess to hold me steady. Boo wrapped her hand around my forehead, pulling me back against her stomach, and Callum sat on the side of the tub next to me, gripping my arm. His hand was hot on my skin.
“Is it hitting you yet?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. I think I lost some blood, so it’s pretty much even between that and the vodka.”
Stephen crouched in front of me, crossing a long forearm over my knees, leaning his chest right into them. I froze. I mean, of course I did. Stephen was not the knee-touching type. In any other circumstance, I would have been excited by this, but my jeans were already darkening his shirt, and the way he clenched his jaw set the vodka in my stomach sloshing nervously.
He took my wrist on the injured side, pressing his thumb a little just below the bone. His palm was warm on the back of my hand, and I thought he might be taking my pulse. When he glanced down at his watch, I knew he was.
“What’s my heart rate?” I asked, partly to tease him.
He was quiet for a few more seconds. “About one-fifteen,” he said. He didn’t let go, just glanced up at me with that troubled expression, the corners of his mouth pulling down a little further. It made my heart do a little double-thump. I wondered if he noticed. I kind of hoped he had.
“I guess that’s good?” I said. “Everything’s working.”
Marigold pressed her fingers to my shoulder, using one hand to pry apart the lips of the wound. I gasped at the sudden, rude shock, and all the hands holding onto me tensed. My eyes squeezed shut, and I blew out the breath, very slowly, trying to convince myself it didn’t really hurt.
“Resting tachycardia is only present after injuries with blood-loss of over fifteen percent,” Marigold said. “So, no--not good. Allso not particularly bad, since the tachycardia-vasoconstrictor response drops off after thirty-percent. Also you’re still conscious and relatively lucid.”
I'm sure Stephen understood that, but I sure didn't. At least, until the part about being conscious and lucid. “Lucky me.”
She poured vodka into the wound, and suddenly every nerve ending in my body curled in on itself, burning. I jerked, gagged on the noise of pain, and felt my friends’ hands controlling the instinctive struggle until I managed to control my body again.
Then something wet and rough dug into the gash, digging into the clotting blood and blossoming infection, sweeping it all out. More vodka, rinsing away whatever gunk Marigold’s washcloth had dislodged. I was sweating, biting my cheeks until I wasn’t sure if it was just the smell, or if I was actually tasting blood.
This repeated a few times until Dr. Marigold declared the wound as clean as she could get it. Boo let go of my head, and Callum’s death grip on my arm loosened. Stephen stayed where he was, probably because he was afraid I’d fall of the edge of the tub otherwise. In fairness, I might have.
It was quiet and tense in the little bathroom, which bothered me almost as much as the smell of mingled blood and whipped-cream. I decided to break it.
“I’m going to need, like, five more shots of vodka,” I said. This might have been funnier if my teeth weren’t chattering.
“What you need is to stop getting yourself stabbed,” Callum said.
“That would certainly be better for my blood pressure,” Stephen agreed.
I opened my eyes, training a glare straight through his glasses. “You can talk to me about blood pressure when you’ve had to bring someone back to life, Mr. Just-a-little-bump-on-the-head.”
He almost smiled. Instead, he turned a slightly-squinted gaze onto Dr. Marigold. “Would the stitches be easier somewhere more stable?”
Dr. Marigold gestured at the bathroom counter. My breath was still coming a little short, but I needed to do something on my own--reestablish some personal control before I dissolved into a shaking, nauseated wreck. I shifted forward, testing my weight on my feet and, with Stephen’s hands under my elbows, stood up.
The first second was fine. I was a little unsteady, sure, but the light balance of Stephen’s forearms under my hands was enough. Then my gut went cold, and dropped into my shoes. There was a feeling like someone had jerked a stopper from the base of my skull, a draining sort of pull that emptied my head of warmth. The bathroom twisted around me.