30. Anatomy and Physiology #2
His face broke, and he turned away to look at my real self. His brow softened at the sight of me, and he took my limp hand in his.
“You,” he whispered. “You are the perfect one. But we are tethered, and I don’t remember how to be whole without you. So I need you to try to fix this.”
A cold weight settled in my stomach, and an unseen something nudged at the edge of my mind, guiding me towards a darkness that was just out of reach.
“Please, Ciarán. I don’t have long. I can feel it. My mom—”
Ciarán lifted my body’s hand to his face and he pressed his lips against my knuckles. I felt the ghost of the kiss against my Nightmare hand, but suddenly felt like I was watching something not meant for me.
Something private. Something sacred.
I looked away, blush rising in my cheeks, and instead pretended to be focused on the discarded bone blade on the floor.
It must’ve snapped off from my arm in the fight while the others had retracted, just as they had at the canyon. I shouldn’t have been able to make them at all in my real body. It defied everything I’d been told about Skalmagick.
I picked the blade up, turning it in my hands to inspect the trabecular grain of its surface.
“Bone is alive,” I murmured.
As a Nightmare, I had total control over my anatomy. Bone blades were a party trick for a Nightmare. They should’ve been impossible to create with my real body, but I’d done it twice now.
Bone blades made of living bone cells.
And I’d infected Kamryn with a living fungus of my own creation.
And if I could create those things, if I could create living cells—
“Step back.” I took Ciarán's place at my body’s side and pressed my palms against my ribs.
“Wren—”
“You’re right. I can do it.” I took a steadying breath. “But if it doesn’t work, you have to go to Keldori and find my mother and tell her to her face that you are the reason she didn’t get to say goodbye.”
“Tell her I did everything in my power to save you?” Ciarán said. “I will proudly tell her so.”
I nodded and trained my gaze on my hands where they rested on my real body’s ribs. Ciarán’s magick flowed easy, willingly given through our tether.
Bones shifted beneath my hand as I worked. Kamryn had snapped several of them when he’d kicked me, but they snaked back into place at my bidding and sealed their own fractures shut.
Bone was the easy bit, however. I’d learned healing magick on bones.
My lung, collapsed and shriveled, was next.
I found the wound. Fresh lung tissue sealed the organ shut, but when I took a heavy breath and waited for my real body to mirror the action, nothing happened. That terrible heaviness remained like the left side of my chest was full of sand.
“There’s air in the space outside the lung,” I muttered. Pneumothoraxes weren’t something we were qualified to treat in high school Sports Medicine, but we had at least discussed how they worked.
I needed to remove the air that had escaped into my chest if I wanted the lung to work again.
I’d stolen Skal out of pipes by fashioning my fingernail into a siphon once. This would work the same way. My nail elongated, thickened, and hollowed into a straw, and I transformed the keratin into stainless steel and stuck it between my ribs.
Air hissed as it escaped through the exit I’d given it. I sealed the puncture wound as I withdrew my nail, and my ribcage expanded and fell beneath my hand.
“It’s working,” Ciarán breathed.
“Maybe.” Pain seared in my abdomen. I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. My pancreas, maybe? Or spleen?
Whatever it was, it hurt like hell, and whatever it was, I would will it back together.
The metal taste of Ciarán’s magick flooded my mouth and sinuses, turning my head light. I wanted more, and luckily, as long as I needed more, Ciarán would happily give it.
I relished the way the magick buzzed along my extremities and electrified my abdomen as organs, serosa, and sinew stitched themselves back together.
I did my arms next, and watched in fascination as the gaping holes my bone blades had left in my muscle sealed shut.
“Wren…”
I turned to see Ciarán breathing heavily and leaning back. He’d gone pale, and sweat shone on his brow, but he kept his eyes focused on the gentle rise and fall of my real body’s chest.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded, but I could feel his exhaustion. His magick was fueling mine, and I was creating new life, interweaving it with the cells that already made up my body.
It was a massive feat, and he was shouldering the burden as I drained him dry of Skal.
“Did you do it?” he asked. “You still look so…”
He trailed off, and we both stared at my real body in tense silence.
I still looked like I was dying.
It was because I was. I’d fixed my bones and healed my organs, but there was one last thing my body needed.
“I don’t have enough blood,” I admitted. “And you don’t have enough magick.”
“But I have blood.”
“I don’t suppose you happen to know your blood type.” My laugh wavered over a sob.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means if your blood doesn’t match mine, it’ll hurt me. There’s a good chance it could kill me with how much I need.”
“And if you don’t take it?”
“Then, I’ll die anyway.”
“What are the odds our blood matches?” Ciarán whispered.
“I don’t remember the numbers from class.” I screwed my eyes shut, trying to think, but the pounding in my head made it hard to concentrate.
Fingers wrapped around mine, and I opened my eyes to see Ciarán looking up at me.
“If it’s the only chance we have, then we do it.”
I nodded and swallowed the lump in my throat.
Ciarán pushed his sleeve up and bared his arm at me, and I laughed through my gathering tears.
“My Grimguard,” I said. “You’re either going to save my life or be the death of me, but hasn’t that always been the case with us?”
He took a steadying breath. “Every drop is yours, for better or for worse.”
“For better or for worse,” I repeated, then dropped my hands to his arm.
I pulled a vessel out of the air and draped it like a fragile thread between Ciarán’s arm and mine.
It looked more like a thread, too, than a vein or artery, and it glowed a faint orange.
Its ends sank beneath our skin, tethering us in a new way and highlighting our surrounding blood vessels with its light.
We held our breath, waiting, and then the thread’s glow pulsed, and heat tickled at my arm as I felt the ghost of Ciarán’s blood pumping into mine.
“It’s working,” I murmured.
Ciarán nodded and finally let himself relax. I helped him to lie down next to my body, propping him up against Una’s flank to keep him elevated and to help his blood flow to me.
His eyelids drooped, but he kept his eyes on my body. “I don’t have the energy to keep you here.”