15. Darcy
15
DARCY
O nce out of the gate, I didn’t run long. There wasn’t much of anywhere left to go. Beyond the far fence of Fallon’s property sprang up scraggly trees that slowed me down, and a lick of lightning through the air illuminated a creek, swollen from the heavy rain, rushing in an inky line ahead.
On the other side of that creek?
Sora and the calf.
Shit.
Fumbling around in the slick dark, I grabbed at a metre-long stick, using it to probe the creek and test the depth. It wasn’t much deeper than a metre – at least where I could reach – and despite the cacophony of thunder and water sounds, the creek wasn’t moving so rapidly that the stick got yanked out of my hand.
Another flash of lightning showed Sora cantering back and forth in front of the calf. She appeared to see me, and gave two frantic barks.
I can make it.
There wasn’t even a question in my mind. I could do it. I would do it.
I didn’t spare a thought for the fact that wading through water in the middle of a thunderstorm was possibly the worst idea I’d ever had. It could be cold, or deeper than it looked in the middle, or faster than my now-wobbly legs were prepared for. Not to mention being in water during lightning.
But literally not a single bit of that mattered. Because Sora and the calf were over there, and they were scared, and maybe Maple had been scared, too, and I couldn’t just turn around, I couldn’t just leave. Fallon had to fix his gate.
I had to fix this.
Sucking in a breath, I waded into the water. I kept hold of my big stick, using it as a support as I shakily put one foot in front of the other. The water was cold as fuck, but it wasn’t going to wash me away, at least.
It did get deeper, though. Past my waist in the middle. My breath hissed. My skin hurt and then went numb. My legs threatened to give out. But they didn’t. I shoved my way through the water until, gradually, then all at once, it was only knee high.
Sora bounded up to me, leaping about, giving worried little yips and yelps.
“It’s alright, girl. I got you,” I said through chattering teeth, petting her half-blindly in the storm-black night. My tingling fingers seized upon something in her mouth. Rope.
“Drop it!” I said. Thankfully, she did so, maybe recognizing some of the authority I’d tried to infuse my voice with even if she didn’t know the language. Last thing I needed right now was some doggy-Darcy tug-o’-war.
The soaked rope in my hands, I spun and squinted at the calf.
“Please don’t kick me,” I muttered, throwing a loop of rope around its midsection and doing my best to tie it there. There wasn’t enough rope to leave a leash at the end, but I was too scared to tie it around the calf’s narrower neck in case it got too tight.
“Alright, friends. Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “Your daddy Fallon is fixing the fence right now and we are on our own. So we are going to get across that water. It might be a little deeper than when you first crossed it, but we’ll make it.”
Both the creatures were pretty fucking big, even the calf. Their heads would be above water the whole time, as long as we didn’t wait much longer. The rain hadn’t let up one bit. As far as I could tell in the darkness, there wasn’t a better place to cross or any easy way to go around.
“OK! Time to go!” I said, grasping the loop of rope around the calf’s middle and shoving my other hand into Sora’s fur. I started walking, and thank the lord, they both came with me. But when we got to the water’s edge, the calf balked.
“Oh, crap, come on,” I muttered, pulling on the rope. “We can’t stay here, little buddy!”
Luckily, Sora seemed to know what needed to be done. She wrenched out of my hold and got behind the calf, giving loud barks in rapid succession that sent the calf startling forwards.
“You are the best fucking dog in the universe, Sora,” I muttered with appreciation as the three of us splashed forward into the water.
How the hell was the water even colder now? I was already half numb. Shouldn’t it have been less of a shock this time?
Fucking Jesus Christ, this sucked the biggest, iciest balls in the galaxy. It took everything I had to keep moving my shaking legs forward. The water seemed to be rushing faster now.
Or maybe I’d just gotten weaker.
We’d reached the deepest point. I kept the frozen fingers of my left hand twined in the fur on the back of Sora’s neck, gritting my teeth and clenching my right hand around the rope on the calf. Even with the numbness, I could tell the rope was scraping my palm raw.
But we were doing it. We were slowly getting into shallower waters. I’d drag these two back to Fallon, help him with the gate, and then we’d –
The calf stumbled. The full weight of the big creature crashed into my hip. Sora sensed me going down and tried to stop it, but it was no use. The water that hadn’t felt all that fast before suddenly became a tsunami against my aching limbs.
Water crashed in and over my head, and instantly I was moving, tumbling, fighting to find which way was up in that terrible, frothing black. My hands scraped against mud and sticks and stones. I fought as hard as I could to hold onto my last bit of breath.
But I lost that breath in an underwater shout of shock when something powerful squeezed me, just below my ribs. When I took in a ragged, involuntary breath, I didn’t get a lungful of creek water, but rather air.
Completely disoriented, I writhed weakly, still feeling like I was fighting the water as my dripping body came down to rest on something solid.
Fallon’s shoulder.
His tail, lasso-like, wrapped fiercely around me, holding me in place with my belly folded over his shoulder. One of his big hands went to Sora’s collar, the other to one of the calf’s short baby horns, righting the heavy creature like it was nothing at all. A vicious streak of lightning showed me glimpses, through the curtain of my sopping wet hair, of Fallon’s muscled legs moving powerfully through the rushing water, his grip never faltering. On any of us.
His grip didn’t even let up once we’d cleared the creek’s banks. He kept hold of all three of us, half-dragging the calf up the incline towards the gate. I wasn’t sure how he got it open, but he did. Sora rushed inside, ushering the calf along after Fallon released its horn.
“You can put me down,” I said through trembling lips.
“No, I can’t.” Gone was Fallon’s typical easy demeanour. His voice cracked like quiet thunder.
“I can walk.”
“No, you can’t.”
Annoyingly, he might have been right about that. My legs felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each. My whole body convulsed with shivers.
“I need to get you warm,” Fallon hissed, securing the gate and breaking into a run.
“Sora first. And the calf…”
“They’ll be fine,” he snapped, legs pumping. “I already lit a fire for them in the birthing area of the barn. I lit it before the rain even began. The calf’s mother will take care of it, and Sora knows to dry off by the fire. I’d wager that both of them can handle cold water better than you can.”
Oh. Well, that was good, then. I couldn’t think of anything else to argue with him about. My head felt clogged with brackish water. Like my brain had drowned even though I hadn’t.
Fallon had a big distance to cover, but in no time at all we’d reached the house. He didn’t stop to kick off his soaking boots in the mudroom, instead charging right through into the kitchen where the fire blazed.
“What happened?” came the question shaped by Magnolia’s voice. I barely heard it above the violent chattering of my teeth.
“Help me get her clothes off,” Fallon said tightly. I would have argued against that little declaration of Fallon’s, but my jaw was too fucking tense and jittery to respond.
I shook so hard I couldn’t stand on my own when Fallon lowered me gingerly to my water-logged boots. He oriented himself behind me, each of his arms beneath my armpits, easily holding me upright while Magnolia immediately got to work yanking off my soaked boots and peeling down my pants and underwear.
This should have been embarrassing, but honestly I was just too freaking cold. Once my bottom half had been completely stripped of soaked clothing, Magnolia said, “Get a chair to – oh.”
Fallon was way ahead of her. His tail snapped out like a whip, wrapping around the back of a chair and dragging it over to the fire without letting go of me. Once the chair was positioned, he lifted me over and placed me into it. Immediately, I hunched over, hugging myself, trying to hold on to the tiny stores of heat that remained in my body.
“We need something warm and dry to cover her,” Magnolia said. Fallon raced from the room, very nearly crashing into the doorframe that led from the kitchen to the hallway towards his bedroom.
When he was gone, Magnolia started quickly undoing the buttons at the front of my top. Even though I knew she was helping, for a second, I tried to stop her, some idiotic part of my brain thinking that the wet clothing was actually helping me stay warm even though, logically, I knew I had to get dry.
She made soothing sounds, gently knocking away my hands. Then, without warning, she broke into song, singing something soft and so lovely it froze me even more than the water had.
“My Nan used to sing me that,” she said as she finally managed to peel away my wet shirt and bra. Before I could respond, Fallon came crashing back into the kitchen, holding the quilt from the bed.
“Perfect,” Magnolia said, taking it from him and wrapping me up until I was a nice, cold-but-dry Darcy burrito.
Fallon didn’t reply, his face turned fiercely downwards towards a book in his hand.
That book.
My jaw loosened enough for me to grit out, “Too cold… to… fuck you.”
“You’re what?” Fallon said, jerking his head up. “Too cold to… No!” He flipped the book around. It wasn’t open to any of the spicy pages, but rather a distinctly un-sexy block of plain Zabrian text. “I’m reading about human hypothermia!”
“I have a temp gauge. Hold on.” Magnolia hurried away while Fallon turned his harried attention back to the book. His eyes were bright, like to twin flashlight beams scanning the pages.
Magnolia returned with a small temp gauge tool. She shone the energy beam into one ear, then the other.
“34.8 degrees Celsius,” she said with a slight shake of her head.
“G-Good?” I stuttered, curling my numb toes against each other.
“Could have been worse,” she said. “Anything under 35 isn’t great, but this is only very mild hypothermia. It’s a good thing you weren’t wet for much longer.” Her gaze slid to Fallon, who was still wearing his own sopping wet, cold clothes.
“F-Fallon… You…” I swallowed, my tongue feeling thick.
“You should get dry things on,” Magnolia interpreted. I tried to nod, but I was pretty sure it just came out like some crazy bobble-headed tremor.
“Not until I know she’s alright!” Fallon said, throwing his book aside. “The book says a human can die from this!”
“We can,” Magnolia said gently, “but Darcy won’t. You got her back here in time.”
“Tell me what to do,” Fallon said, dragging frantic claws through his soaked blond hair.
“We need to keep her warm. It’ll take too long to try to warm enough water for hot water bottles or anything like that. I know you have power here with your data tabs. Do you have any sort of heated blankets or appliances beyond the fireplace?”
Fallon looked devastated.
“No! Nothing like that. I could make one, maybe, but it would take some time, and-”
“That’s alright,” Magnolia said quickly. “OK. Here’s what I want you to do instead…”