Chapter 28 – — Veilguard Field Manual, margin note, author unknown #3
“I cut again, and that time I did it right. I don’t know how I did it, but I did.
I opened the wound and could see the forceps inside him.
It was up against something pulsing that I couldn’t name in the moment.
He told me to identify it before I clamped, and I tried to look closer, and his voice was getting quieter, and I was trying to find the clamp on the tray and his voice was getting quieter, and I told him I had it.
He didn’t answer me, and I looked up at him and saw his eyes were heavy and distant. ”
I wipe the back of my hand over my cheek where a stray tear had fallen.
“His pulse was still there when I checked it. Fast and weak. I told myself he’d passed out from the pain and the blood loss and kept going.
I clamped what I thought was the source.
I think I did it correctly. The bleeding slowed.
I withdrew the forceps the way he’d told me to, slowly, and the bleeding came back, and I tried to find what I’d clamped in the field but couldn’t see anymore because there was too much blood.
I packed the wound, held pressure, and kept telling him I was almost done. ”
I take another drink.
“His pulse stopped while I was holding pressure on his abdomen. I climbed onto the table. I’d seen him do compressions before on an old woman who’d collapsed at the market when I was younger, and I knew the rhythm of it and the depth.
I started compressions on his chest. I gave him breaths.
I checked his pulse between rounds. I kept going for I don’t know how long.
My arms were shaking, and I kept going. I was still doing compressions when my mother and sister came in through the front of the clinic. ”
Draven’s hand had found mine across the blanket. I don’t know when it happened.
“They’d been at my aunt’s house across the village.
They walked back together. The clinic door was unlocked because we hadn’t closed up yet.
My mother came in first and saw him on the table and saw me on top of him.
The sound she made will live in me for the rest of my life, the most blood curdling scream.
She came across the room and pulled me off him.
My little sister stood in the doorway and didn’t move. ”
I rub the tears out of my eyes.
“My mother kept asking me what I’d done. Her hands were on my shoulders and she was shaking me. I tried to tell her about the forceps and about him slipping on the floor I’d mopped and about him telling me what to do. I don’t think she heard any of it.”
I take a long breath.
“She hasn’t asked me what happened. I think she can’t bear to hear it. I think if she let me tell her, she’d have to forgive me, and she doesn’t know how. Most days, she can barely look at me.
“And every time I pick up a scalpel, I’m back on that table. His voice is in my ear telling me to find what’s bleeding, and I can’t make my hands do what he’s telling them to do, not when it’s a person on the table and there’s blood in the field and someone’s talking me through it.”
It’s quite for a long minute.
“Until today.”
I look at him.
“Until you.”
He studies my face, and I have to look away.
I keep my eyes on the wall. The crack in the plaster runs from the windowsill all the way up into the corner where the ceiling meets, and I follow it with my eyes and wait.
His thumb shifts once across the back of my hand in a soothing circle.
“He told you to find what was bleeding, and you did, Rose.”
He shifts next to me.
“You just couldn’t stop it in time. That’s not the same thing.”
I close my eyes. The tears come faster. They’ve been coming the whole time but now they’re coming the way they should have been coming for a year. I don’t try to stop them, because there’s no one in this room who’s going to look at me wrong for it.
“Come here.”
His voice is rough. He shifts on the bed, slow and careful with the wing behind him, and his arm comes around my shoulders and pulls me into his chest. His hand finds the back of my head and stays there. His other arm settles across my back.
I press my face into his shoulder and his shirt is rough against my cheek and warm from him, and I can hear his heartbeat under my ear, slow and steady, slower than mine, a vampire’s heart at rest. I stay where I am with my face against his shoulder and my fingers gripping a fistful of his shirt.
His thumb has started moving in a slow line at the back of my neck, under my hair, so light I would have missed it if I hadn’t been so still.
I think about how much of him is touching me.
His chest. His arm across my back. His hand at the back of my head. His other hand at my neck.
If anyone had told me yesterday that Draven Alucard would be holding me through a crying fit at the end of a terrible day, I would have laughed in their face.
My face heats when I remember my dream, and I push off his shoulder and settle back under the covers, wiping my face clean.
Poppy appears and presses her fluffy body between us, rolling onto her back to look up at the two of us.
Draven chuckles, and I can’t help smiling, because she’s ridiculous and adorable, and I don’t think I could have cut today without her.
Professor Nestor was right. I’m training to be a healer, and I was blessed with a second pair of hands.
“Why Poppy?” Draven asks. I turn onto my side so we’re facing each other.
“I buried my father behind our home in a field of poppies.”