Chapter Thirteen #2
“Shut up, Ettore,” I ground out. He closed his mouth, but there was something off about him; there was something off with all of them.
Oskar’s muscles expanded and contracted, hard and soft and hard again around me.
Bartosz’s jaw was going like he was chewing gum, even though I knew he wasn’t.
Ettore almost seemed drunk, and the bloody guard next to him flicked his finger on and off and on and off the trigger of his gun.
Bloody.
Of course! Blood.
Bartosz had mentioned that they became more aggressive when blood was spilled. I was a normal human, and even I was on edge when I smelled it. It seemed that the soldier's nose had mostly clotted; there were only occasional drips onto his uniform, but that was no doubt keeping them all on edge.
“Excuse me, soldier with blood on you,”
“Ginne!” Oskar hissed, but none of them were saying anything. I was a human woman, I wasn’t dangerous, I wouldn’t come off as mocking like Ettore or Bartosz would, or like a threat, like Jin Woo and Oskar would.
“Sorry about your bloody nose, would you mind changing your jacket or maybe using something to plug your nose? I think it’s making everyone a little agitated.”
Especially in combination with Constantine’s blood, but I didn’t say that part aloud.
The soldier jumped up from where he had been sitting.
“What the fuck did you say to me bitch!” He spat at me; there went my thought that they wouldn’t take me as mocking. I promptly closed my mouth, but it was too late. Ettore and Bartosz were on their feet, and now there were guns pointed at them, and everything was falling apart.
“What the fuck did you say, Stronzo?” Ettore hissed.
“I said that your fucking whore bitch needs to close her mouth before I fill it with lead.”
Uh oh.
I wasn’t sure how it started, maybe with Ettore lunging at the soldier, or Bartosz kicking at the soldier’s head like a madman, but suddenly the boat was in chaos.
Soldiers were on Bartosz, and Ettore was scrapping with the bloody soldier.
A soldier raised his gun like it was a cudgel and moved to clobber Ettore in the head with it, but suddenly Jin Woo was there blocking the weapon.
I didn’t know how I saw it before Oskar, maybe he was too wrapped up in the action to see it, but while the brawl happened, I saw a soldier taking advantage of the fact that Jin Woo was no longer next to us to creep to the side of us.
He was positioning himself so that he could shoot Oskar’s arm, stopping him from holding a knife to Constantine’s neck.
However, I knew with a deep, quiet knowledge that had never poured into me before, that with the rocking of the boat, he was going to hit Oskar’s chest instead.
He was going to hit Oskar’s chest, and he would bleed and bleed and bleed out, long before we reached the mainland.
I made up my mind before I even knew what I was doing, throwing myself up and to the side, covering the place that the deep knowledge told me that Oskar would be shot, springing up frog-like from the ground.
It was like I had been slugged in my stomach, an awful punch that pushed all the air out of my lungs, and then there was heat, not quite boiling or burning, but unpleasant.
The sound of the gun still rang in the air, the sound louder than the waves, the boat’s engine, and the rapid beating of my heart.
The fight had paused, all of the combatants turning towards the noise. I locked eyes with Jin Woo, at the shock and then blossoming horror on his face. Horror? I thought, What had horrified him?
There was something damp in my lap, and I saw a rapidly spreading wet splotch on my shirt, spreading underneath my gaze. I reached down and touched the wet spot, and when I pulled my fingers away, they were shiny and red.
“Oskar,” I whimpered before the pain hit, an electric agony in my stomach, causing me to hunch and keel to the side, gripping my belly.
But it wasn’t Oskar who caught me, it was Constantine, his pale blue eyes all I could see, his hand cooled by the cold and the spray coming down on mine over the wound.
“You fools!” he barked, “you utter fools, she’s Renai, you just shot an unregistered female Renai for no fucking reason!”
The agony was a pulsating mess in my abdomen. Everything was too much, the pain and the sharp little wails that wouldn’t stop, they were like nails driven into my ears. It took me several seconds to realize that those wails were coming from me.
Oskar was holding my head. I could smell him, I could smell all of them, and I reached out to them with my free hand, in too much agony to speak, but still wanting them close.
“Floor it, idiot!” came a voice that, and, in my pain, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, “If she dies, I will kill you, fuck the council.”
There were hands on me, hands that I knew, one against my cheek, another on top of the other two on my stomach, one holding my hair as I tried to wretch. I could taste thick blood and bile in my mouth.
“Ettore,” I said faintly, my vision was going in and out, the edges fuzzing. They peeled and cracked like an old painting, whether my eyes were closed or not.
“Si, salvatrice, what is it amore?” There was something wrong with his voice; it was…was stuffy almost. He was holding my hand. I knew it was him, even if my vision was whited out with pain, I knew those finely boned fingers.
“Am I going to die, Ettore? I don’t want to die.” I felt like a little girl again, a child on a train, rushing to a destination that I wasn’t sure I wanted to arrive at. At least this time, I wasn’t alone; at least this time, someone was holding my hand.
“No, piccola, his voice reassured me. If Ettore said I wasn’t going to die, then I wasn’t going to die.
Even as my vision went dark and my world was boiling agony that never abated, only rose in higher and higher waves, the knowledge that I wasn’t going to die kept me grounded. I couldn’t die, right?