Chapter 19 #2
Now I had his attention. I nodded and described the two that I’d seen.
Then I said, “Hoffmann’s hourglass broke.
But the other one was just a sculpture. Do you think your brother could’ve meant that one?
If Voss brought it with him when he took me into town, I never saw it.
I haven’t seen it since that first night they came into the hospital. ”
“I haven’t seen any hourglasses,” he said, more to himself than me. “How does the magic work?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. He just wanted me to bring it to him. He said if I told you, the master would know and would punish you.”
Sharp eyes flicked to mine while one brow lifted. “Yet you told me anyway?”
“I figured he was lying.”
Nin snorted softly. “Oh, Molly O’Rinn, you are endlessly fascinating.”
Was I? The bloodied wool finally gave, and his jacket fell away from his bad shoulder.
The strong scent of infection wafted into my face. Nin grunted loudly, squeezing his eyes closed as I stared in horror at what my work had revealed.
His black silk shirt was ripped badly, and the tip of a black bar protruded from the flesh of his shoulder. Or maybe it was a black stick? Surely that wasn’t bone…?
“What’s embedded in you?” I asked.
“I told you,” Nin said, eyes still shut, gritting his teeth. “The master… was bored. He shot me down in the crypt.”
Shot? I was confused for a moment, knowing that the object poking out of his shoulder was no bullet. Of course it wasn’t. Voss hadn’t shot him with a gun.
This was an arrow shaft.
“I broke it off,” Nin told me in a low, small voice that sounded as if it were coming from the bottom of a well.
“But I couldn’t pull it out. The aegis has muffled my strength, and it did something to me…
I’m not supposed to get hurt. I’ve never been hurt before.
But now I think I’m mortal—my mother was mortal, and… ”
“Your mother?” His words came back to me in a flash. You might refer to me as a demigod.
“She can heal me…,” he mumbled hazily.
Panic fired through me. This wasn’t the time to ask him details about his heritage.
Half human or not, he was severely wounded—enough that the infection alone could kill someone.
I quickly checked his body temperature with the back of my hand against his forehead, but that was pointless.
What was the normal temperature of a demigod?
I’d never run across an injury like this in the hospital, had no practice with it. But I’d heard Sister Helen’s lectures about treating battle injuries in the field during the Civil War and knew that bold treatments were necessary.
Nin’s bloodied flesh around the shaft of the arrow was mottled with black lines that radiated away from the wound. Bad. Very bad.
The arrow must come out. And I had to do it.
How? There was only an inch or less of the shaft protruding from the front of the shoulder, and less in the back.
He’d broken it off on both sides. No way could I get my fingers around it and have enough leverage to pull it out without injuring him further.
I didn’t even think I had a tool in my bag that would help.
I stood up and desperately looked around the greenhouse. There were tools hanging up at the potting table, where Filomena had gotten her gardening knife.
“Don’t move!” I told Nin, and raced to the wall of tools.
Small shovels, small hand rakes, knives, twine, a hammer…
And an old pair of pliers. Not ideal at all, but they might work.
Mammy, please help me, I prayed, snatching up the tool and racing back to Nin.
He looked up at me with great trepidation. “Molly….”
“It has to come out right now, but it’s going to be okay,” I told him in my calmest nursing voice.
“I know I’m only as tall as a mouse, but I’m quite strong, yeah?
Sister Helen said I was surprisingly strong when I lifted a patient three times my weight.
So, what I need you to do is…” I looked around and found a broken piece of bamboo that had been used to stake a tomato plant.
I wiped it off on my skirts and held it out.
“Bite down on this, because it’s going to hurt like nothing you’ve ever experienced. ”
He threw the bamboo stake to the ground. “No, Molly—”
I could see the panic in his eyes, but I’d seen that plenty of times before in the hospital. If he wasn’t going to bite down on the stick, then I was going to have to get rough.
“Brace yourself,” I told him, and placed one palm on the center of his chest.
“Molly!”
I didn’t give either of us a chance to chicken out. I just opened up the pliers, set their teeth around the protruding arrow shaft, and—
Pulled.
The pliers slipped off immediately. Nin cried out.
Dammit! Sweat bloomed across my forehead. I needed a better grip, but it would require hurting him. I reset the pliers around the shaft, but this time right up against his injured flesh. And as his cry of pain grew more intense, I pulled on the arrow with all my might.
It wasn’t going to come out.
The flesh had already tried to heal around it.
It wasn’t going to, it just wasn’t…
And then, suddenly, his flesh gave way and the arrow moved.
The shaft slid through Nin’s shoulder with a terrible slurping sound and exited the front wound. Dark blood spewed all over the bodice of my dress, and I stumbled backward with the dripping arrow as Nin fell off the bench and collapsed in a heap.
I tossed the arrow onto the floor of the greenhouse and dropped next to Nin to prop him up. “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “It had to be done. It’s terribly infected. I need to clean it up—”
He wasn’t listening. He was barely conscious.
Wild thoughts raced as I worried how I’d be able to carry an extremely tall god back to the crypt without anyone seeing us.
But I tried to push all that down while I hurriedly looked through my medical bag for carbolic acid to use as an antiseptic.
When I found it, I tugged off my white cotton apron and doused the corner with the liquid.
Then I ripped away the sleeve of Nin’s shirt to begin the undesirable work of cleaning his infected wound.
Gold bangles covered his muscular forearm—hundreds of them, as thin as a strand of hair. I’d never seen that much gold at once, nor had I seen any man wearing that much jewelry. But I couldn’t think about that now. I had a job to do, and I set to work.
My apron quickly became soaked with blood and pus, but Nin didn’t rouse.
His head swayed slowly, so I knew he hadn’t passed out, which was good.
I worked quickly to clean his injury up as best I could.
The hardest part was the back of his shoulder, which had formed a dirty scab around the second hole.
I had to hunt for a small scalpel inside my bag and cut away some of the infected scabbing in order to release the infection.
When it was done, I wiped my brow on my sleeve and found a pack of clean wadding in my bag that I carefully tore off to pack the wound.
I’d need to stitch him up, but I feared doing so while fever was still raging.
I didn’t want to trap the infection—I wanted it to breathe and have a chance to clear up.
At least, that’s what I thought was the right thing to do.
In all honesty, I didn’t really know.
But I had a salve for wounds that I smeared over the two holes in his shoulder, and then I tried my best to bandage him. And as I wound gauze around his shoulder, I felt his hand weakly wrap around my wrist. I looked down to see his eyelids fluttering.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “I’ll be needing to check the wadding and change your bandages every day, and we’ll need to pray that the infection doesn’t spread through your blood. If you’re in great pain, I can give you something.”
Silver eyes shot through with red blinked up at me. “I’m in your debt.”
“No need. It’s my pleasure to help. It’s what I do.”
“Just everyday business, removing arrows from the shoulders of gods, I suppose.”
I chuckled, relieved to hear him talking. “Now who’s doing the teasing?”
The smallest of smiles lifted his mouth. It warmed me from the inside to see it. I had no idea if my aid would be enough to save him from further infection and sickness. If he were human, I’d say chances were slim. But he wasn’t, so I couldn’t guess what would happen now.
All I could do was hope.
The door to the greenhouse slammed.
I shot to my feet and froze in place, terrified. I couldn’t see the door from where we were—too many trees and plants blocked the view. But I could hear footfalls.
“Nurse Molly?” Filomena called. “Mr. Hoffmann is asking for you.”
Not knowing what to do, I glanced down to where Nin was propped up against the bench.
He wasn’t there.
Gone. Disappeared like he’d done before throughout my life. Nothing to show that he’d ever been there except the dried blood that covered my hands and bodice, and the tattered remains of his jacket draped on the bench.
A pristine white lily was still pinned to the lapel.