12. Radiobiology #2
“Get behind me.” Ciarán pushed forward on his knees in a feeble attempt to put himself between me and the beast that continued to watch us. His body spasmed, and I caught him before he landed in the rocks.
“It’s fine. I think,” I whispered, lowering Ciarán to his back but watching the monster. “It’s what dragged you out of the water, and it hasn’t eaten us yet.”
Ciarán’s eyes flitted from the monster to me, and something about the way the tether between us twinged told me he’d only just realized I was no longer in my Nightmare form.
The creature whined again, still pawing at the ground.
“It’s an onchú,” Ciarán explained.
“Is that good or bad?”
“I’m not sure—” Ciarán broke off in a grunt, and I tried to pass him what was left in my bottle of Skal. “What’s that supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But you’re hurt and tired, and it’s magick, so…”
I trailed off with a wild gesture. He replied with a half smile and took the bottle.
Sticks clattered to the rocks beside me, and I looked up to see the onchú retreating.
“Does it want to play fetch?” I picked up one of the sticks and turned it in my hand.
“I think it wants you to light a fire before I die of cold,” Ciarán said. “Unless your kisses can heal hypothermia as well?”
“Wasn’t a kiss.” I went to work stacking the sticks the way I’d seen Mom pile them in our backyard fire pit.
“Our lips touched.”
“I don’t know about Skalterra, but in Keldori, when we kiss, we don’t vomit into each other’s mouths.”
“It’s not really the custom here, either, I’ll admit. Besides, Grimguards aren’t supposed to kiss Saergrims.”
“Has that been an issue in the last four hundred years?” I snorted. “With the one Saergrim frozen in a glacier?”
“No, it’s been a relatively easy rule to follow actually.”
“You’re very welcome for that.”
I took back the Skal bottle, helped myself to a sip, and let the magick pool beneath the skin of my palm. A blue flame sparked to life, and I held it against the piled sticks until they burned blue too.
“You really shouldn’t do that without goggles,” Ciarán chided me.
“I’m fine. Also, your clothes are wet.” I cleared my throat to hide the nervous hitch to my voice. “Even with a fire, you won’t be able to get warm with them—”
Ciarán gave a low laugh, and I looked back in time to see his eyes shift back to orange and black. Steam hissed and rose off his cloak, clothing, and leather armor in white wisps.
“Don’t worry about that, Blue. You will have to take my armor off, though. That rotsbane got me good.”
I grimaced and shifted in the rocks to get closer to his side. I balled my own cloak up to shove under his head as a pillow and then went to work unbuckling his armor. He hissed through his teeth as I pulled it away and lifted his tunic.
The rotsbane had got him good, and I tried not to wince at the four ghastly wounds carved into his flank. The sheer amount of torn skin dyed red by congealed blood made it hard to tell exactly what I was looking at.
“That bad?” he asked.
“Nothing Sorcha wouldn’t be able to fix, I’m sure.
” I hovered a hand over the wounds. I’d practiced healing magick on myself the last couple of days, but healing myself would be different from healing Ciarán.
I’d been using my own pain to guide my magick to where it was needed the most. With Ciarán, I’d be working in the dark.
Unless…
“Blue?” Ciarán’s voice had a nervous lilt to it.
“I’m thinking.”
“That’s what’s making me nervous.”
I held a finger against his lips and leaned closer to better inspect his injury.
A proper doctor would know and understand the layers of tissue the rotsbane had cut into, but the injury didn’t look that deep.
In Keldori, he probably would’ve gotten some nasty stitches, but unless there was some hidden internal wound I couldn’t see, he wouldn’t have needed anything as extreme as surgery.
I didn’t need a medical degree to fix this. What I’d learned in Sport Medicine would suffice.
“I think I can try something.”
“Blue—”
I prodded at the tether between us, wrenching my mind open to his, and Ciarán’s thoughts and feelings washed over me in a tangle of fear, apprehension, gratitude, curiosity, confusion, and—
Pain.
I gritted my teeth against the cutting agony that seared into my side.
“Wren!” Ciarán tried to sit up, and the pain cut deeper.
“Don’t!” I pushed him back, taking a moment to lean over him and catch my breath with my eyes screwed shut. “You have very good pain tolerance.”
“You can feel it?” he asked.
I nodded, my eyes still closed. Each rake of the rotsbane’s claws on Ciarán’s side burned as if they were my own injury, and as painful as it was, it told me what I needed to know.
Where Ciarán’s ribs were fractured. Where the claws had cut the deepest.
I straightened up and held my hands against his bloodied mess of flesh. The coagulated blood festering on Ciarán’s side warmed the palms of my hands, and when I pressed into the sticky wounds, I felt the imprint of my hands against my own side.
“If you make a flail grow inside me—” he warned.
“Don’t tempt me.”
But this was different than forming a weapon. This was more like a puzzle that needed to be solved.
Magick heated my veins, and I took one last steadying inhale before imagining something like embroidery working its way through the gashes.
The pain was sharper than it had been when Sorcha had tended to my injuries, and Ciarán tried to flinch away from my touch, but I held him steady and did my best to ignore the pain in my side that mirrored his.
It wasn’t sinew and flesh that I was weaving into his wounds, but an acellular matrix like Sorcha had described.
It would work like a surgeon’s sutures, allowing Ciarán to heal around the patchwork, before dissolving into his soft tissue.
It would work this way because I decided it would, and as far as I could tell, that was how the magick of Skalterra worked at its core.