Chapter Twenty-Three. A Missed Appointment #2
The familiar scent jolted me to attention. “Acriflavine?” I hadn’t smelled that since the war. An antiseptic solution that had been used frequently on wounds.
“I keep some on me. Though I don’t know what good it’ll do her with a knife in her belly—but I can try. It’s all I can do.”
A strange coldness radiated from the girl’s body to my own fingers as the room filled with the scent of a summer storm—the same electric sharpness that once terrified me now reassured me. The room was thick with it. My gaze shot to Ruan.
He was calling upon his abilities already—long before he’d even laid hands on her.
But this time was different. This time, I could feel him reaching for his power.
It echoed within my own body in a way it never had before.
Previously, I’d only seen it in the silver flecks fleeing his eyes, smelled it in the air, felt its coldness upon me—but never like this.
Never before had it run through me like a lightning rod.
“What are you doing?”
He raised a brow, confusion in his expression. “Preparing supplies.… We don’t have time to get her to a surgeon.”
He did not even know he was doing it. I stared at him in disbelief.
How could he not know? He told me once in Cornwall that he had little understanding of how to control his abilities, that it came and went as it willed.
I watched as he slowly and methodically removed items from his haversack and sat them on a nearby tea tray.
“I’m going to have to be quick. Very quick so she doesn’t bleed out.
I also need to be certain none of her vital organs have been damaged. ”
I nodded numbly—after all, surgery on the parlor floor occurs every day, does it not?
“Are you ready?” His voice was soft and sure, lending me confidence I did not possess. “She has minutes at most. We cannot get her to a hospital in this condition, though the gods know I would prefer it. When I remove the knife, we’ll have even less time. A matter of seconds.”
I wasn’t ready at all, but I was going to have to be.
Ruan began talking to himself in Cornish as he set about laying out his forceps and catgut sutures. He laid the cloth soaked in the antiseptic acriflavine solution on the tea tray near my left hand. “You must remove the knife quickly when I say. Straight up and out. You understand me?”
“It’ll kill her.”
“It’s the only way. She’ll die on her own if you don’t—or we can give her a chance by trying to fix what’s been done to her.”
My hands grew slippery with her blood as I wrapped my fingers around the knife’s handle. “Have you done this before?”
“Not with such a clean wound.”
Did … did they live?
“Now, Ruby…”
Without a thought. Without a prayer to my mother’s beloved saints, I did exactly what he said, watching as Ruan swiftly probed the wound, examining the damage.
He gave me quiet instructions, swift and calm as any formally trained medical officer I’d aided before.
And just as I had during the war, I complied without question.
Ruan made quick work of tying off a small ligature of the large vein that had been severed before confirming the wound itself clear of any foreign materials.
Before I realized what had happened, he was finishing up the stitches on her abdomen.
The whole episode took what … a minute or two at most?
A life reduced to mere seconds on a clock, ticking silently down one by one while Ruan staved off her death until another day.
Refusing the grave by the sheer force of his iron will.
I remained transfixed by his hands as he worked—scarred and strong, but with a delicate grace and speed that I’d not expected.
He’d used those hands on me, fixing me. Taking care of me—but I’d never watched him work on another.
There was a reason he was revered in Cornwall, why people would travel for miles to seek his help.
It was the same reason I loved him beyond all reason. Ruan was the last truly good thing in this world, and I would be damned if I’d let him walk away because of my stubbornness.
Ruan made a soft sound in his chest. “We need to get her out of here. Now.”
I shook my head, staring at my own bloodied hands. “Leona … Leona is missing.”
Ruan touched my shoulder gently. “We have to go. We cannot be found here. Not like this. She needs to be in a hospital.”
I opened my mouth then snapped it back shut, the words taking on some strange, unspeakable shape on my tongue.
The almost-murder weapon was still in my hand.
I turned the ivory-handled blade over in the light.
It was a fine piece, but had no maker’s mark.
A well-crafted, expensive weapon. Not the sort of thing your typical burglar would have.
But who—who had done this thing? The hall clock chimed the half hour. It was nearly eight in the morning. At last, the sounds tumbled out. “Leona. They’ve taken Leona.”
“We’ll find her, I promise, but it will be after we take Annabelle to the hospital, and can be sure she survives this.”
I wrapped the knife in my bloody scarf and shook my head hard. She could not go to the hospital. Julius Harker dead. Mr. Mueller murdered in his jail cell. Leona missing. “She has to stay with us.”
He worried his lower lip. “Ruby, I might be able to do rudimentary battlefield procedures, but I am not able to—”
“There was nothing rudimentary about what you did.” I rocked back onto my heels, wiping the sweat from my brow with my sleeve. “You can take care of her as well as anyone.”
Ruan let out a startled sound. “In case you forget, I am only a pellar.”
“The pellar who saved her life.”
“She’s not saved yet. She needs professional care, someone who can be certain she won’t get infection.”
How could he not see that infection was the least of all risks in this matter?
There was no one in this whole city who could protect her as we could.
“And allow whoever put that knife in her to finish the job? She comes home with us, Ruan Kivell. Someone killed Mr. Mueller under the very nose of the police—likely the police themselves, considering how strangely they’ve all been acting.
Do you truly think that she’ll be safe anywhere else? We can trust no one.”
He hesitated, warring with his own sense of justice before he finally acquiesced.
“I’ll go fetch my car.” I glanced at the dried blood on my hands and hastily tucked the knife away into my large coat pocket.
Leaning down, I tipped his chin up with the crook of my forefinger.
Ruan gave me the strangest small smile and I was lost. Utterly lost. Seeing him on the floor before me, bloody and exhausted, glowing with the quiet self-satisfaction of a job well done sealed my fate.
“Thank you…” I whispered, before brushing a brief, gentle kiss to his lips.
This time, in the broad light of day, he did not pull away from my touch.
I straightened, and without a word ran out the door and home for my car to fetch Annabelle home.