Chapter 13
I found the same pool I sensed the first time I touched him in this way, such nightmarish agony that a normal person probably wouldn't be able to get out of bed.
Something aside from his injuries had to be causing it, though they were undoubtedly making it worse.
Regardless, I siphoned the pain out of his body, like draining blood from a vein.
Reiven gasped. His mouth fell open in surprise, and a myriad of emotions I never thought I'd see flickered through his gaze.
Relief. Shock. Regret. Self-loathing. So much sorrow.
“You're fine,” I whispered, but I couldn't look away from him, and he didn't break my gaze.
He managed another rattling breath, so tortured it was almost a whimper. “It's gone…It's just gone…”
I shushed him and stroked his cheekbones with my thumbs. I lost myself in those conflicting emotions whirling in his eyes now that his pain was temporarily gone.
Is this why he's such a prick all the time? It's not a good excuse, but I almost…pity him…
Rain fell around us again with a crash of sound, breaking me out of my reverie. I hauled him to his feet, and without the unbearable pain, he proved to be less heavy.
“Tell Ash what happened, and to get the medicine and surgical supplies from my bag,” I said. “You need more emergency care than just my first aid. Your blood loss is going to speed up again soon. My power only works for a time…for both things.”
My gentle warning that he would be in pain again soon didn’t seem to affect him at all, but he did listen to me. He raised a shaky hand to his earring. “Ash. Hey. We’re coming back. Ran into some trouble. The carpenter is dead.”
He paused. Ash must have been talking back to him.
Low-hanging branches weighed down with water-laden leaves blocked our way, so I went against my better judgment and pulled him back outside the forest, behind the houses.
The shouts of Vaetrik’s crew seemed more distant, so I could only pray to the Spirits that no one would spot us.
“She's alright. Yeah, I'm fine, too.”
“Reiven Miyasagi,” I said, mimicking the disapproving tone he always used when calling Ash by his full name. “Tell him the truth right now, or I’m going to drop you and drag you through the mud back to the Maiden.”
He winced and spoke again to Ashkade. “I might have been shot once or twice—” He grimaced. I had no doubt Ash was yelling at him through their magical connection, and I didn’t blame him.
Lightning split the black sky above us, but just before the clap of thunder, a voice caught in my mind. Panic cut through me as I whirled, expecting to see one of Vaetrik’s pirate crew.
“Zephra! Hurry!” A drenched, panicked Druinn girl dashed towards us, away from the houses. Without bothering to ask, Calinia hauled Reiven’s other arm over her shoulder and helped me drag him faster towards the beach. “I suppose Shaddan cannot be reasoned with. He was actually going to kill me.”
With Calinia’s help, we made it back to the ship in good time. Ashkade had been waiting on the deck long enough to be as soaked from the rain as us, but he went pale the moment we arrived.
“Calinia?”
She just gave him a stony glare.
“You know her?” I asked.
“She…she’s the Druinn who saved me…” Ash shook himself and refocused on asking Captain Larsel to weigh anchor immediately while Calinia and I lugged Reiven to the captain’s quarters.
We turned Ash’s workbench into an operating table by flinging all his jewelry and tools onto the floor and setting a clean towel on top before resting Reiven on it.
Ash had already brought the sterile equipment I had requested, and he even prepared hot water and iodine, several more towels, and bandages.
His room looked as close to a clinic as we would probably get on this ship.
He motioned for me to hold Reiven down after examining his wounds. “We have to dig the bullet out, and it’s gonna hurt like Mourner Hell.”
“Oh, just slap a bandage on it and I’ll be fine,” Reiven moaned unconvincingly.
Was that how he got through life, slapping bandages on his wounds? What an idiot. Both Calinia and I held him still as he weakly struggled against us.
“You’re just gonna keep hemorrhaging if we leave it there. Luckily, the two in your limbs went straight through. You’re lucky to even be alive.” Ash threw me a meaningful look, but I avoided his eyes, instead focusing intently on Reiven’s face.
“It’ll be fine,” I said quietly, resting one hand on his stomach and one on his cheek. “I’ll slow his blood flow as best I can and take the pain away so he can get through it without passing out.”
It felt like it took hours for Ash to pack and wrap the wounds in his extremities, and to carefully dislodge the bullet in Reiven’s stomach.
I did my best to keep Reiven focused on me, and that same odd mix of emotion filled his eyes as I extracted his pain.
I dried off his face and hair with some of the spare towels, whispering reassurances to keep him comfortable and distracted for the worst of it.
My arms and legs trembled as Ash finally tied a bandage around Reiven’s newly packed wound, and I practically fell over into the chair he offered me. The storm raged outside, tossing the Maiden about to the point I had to hold Reiven steady to keep him from falling off the table.
With some help from Captain Larsel and Lyneca, we transferred him to Ash’s cot for the night.
Ash ordered me to go rest, and Lyneca swept Calinia away to find a place for her to sleep, too.
I used the scratchy wooden wall to support myself as the floor pitched beneath my feet, but I made it to the room Reiven and I shared, and promptly collapsed on his cot.
Everything felt weighed down, from my eyelids to my legs.
“Your bed is mine now, Rei,” I taunted sleepily, my mind caught somewhere between exhaustion and worry.
I buried my face in his pillow and breathed in the unmistakable smoky scent he carried with him—and while I thought I had grown accustomed to it, I detected a new note within that smell.
“Lemons…” A silly grin spread across my face as I gave in to the beckoning darkness of sleep.
The next morning, the sky was as perfect and clear as could be.
We were back on the open sea, putting as much distance between us and Vaetrik’s crew as possible.
I grabbed some bowls of oatmeal sweetened with brown sugar from Lyneca and carried them over to Ash’s room, only to open the door to a commotion.
Poor Ashkade had one hand on Reiven’s chest and was attempting to push him to sit back on the bed, but his wounded bodyguard stood solid as a rock.
“Zephra, help me!” Ash cried. “He’s tryin’ to act like he’s just fine!”
I set down the tray and stalked over. Fresh blood dyed all three of his bandages, but Reiven just glowered like a crow ruffling his feathers, as if we were holding him hostage instead of keeping him healthy.
Ash and I took turns berating him about the dangers of infection and reopening his wounds, that gunshots took time to heal, and that Ash wouldn’t make him any prosthetics if he lost his injured limbs because of his own foolishness, no, sir.
Eventually, we annoyed him into giving up and lying back down with a wince.
After breakfast—which we spoon-fed to a laughably disgruntled Reiven—Ashkade pointed out the cut on my face. I had forgotten about it already, but he applied some ointment and a bandage to help it heal.
“Sorry I didn’t notice it yesterday,” he muttered.
“He was in far worse shape than me.”
Ash turned a withering glare on his bodyguard. “Don’t you have somethin’ to say to her?”
Rei tried to roll away from us but didn’t quite have the strength to. He wrinkled his nose. “No.”
“By the Spirits and all the gods out there in the universe, Rei!”
Ashkade could probably stand to learn some swear words. I noticed that he never used any. Or maybe he was just brought up to watch his tongue, like the sweet young farm boy he was.
While I was curious about what Ash wanted him to say to me, I jumped in to save him.
“It’s alright. I’m sure he’s still drained, and he’s going to need several weeks of rest so that he can heal properly.
Someone’s got to change his bandages regularly, make sure he stays hydrated, and keep him mostly still in bed. ”
I hope you don’t mind, Ash.
The Timebreaker plopped down on the stool beside his worktable with a huff, dropping his crutch to the ground in frustration. “I know. Thanks for volunteerin’, Zephra. I’m ‘bout ready to kill him myself.”
He didn’t care to hear any of my or Reiven’s protests, so it was decided against both of our wills.
Within the hour, we had moved all the medical supplies and Reiven himself back into our cabin, and I matched his glare as he lay on his cot.
Since Ash put me completely in charge of him, that meant I got to lay down the ground rules and treat him like a sickly child.
At first, it was hilarious to watch him glower and pout when I dictated his meals and forced him to drink water and only allowed him to get up to use the lavatory.
If I turned my back for one second, he’d try to get up and move around, so I had to resort to drastic measures to force him to rest.
“If I see you standing up without me telling you that you can, I’m tying you down to this bed. Do you hear me?”
He grimaced. “Not really interested in your kinks, Blue.”
One stab to the chest wouldn’t be too noticeable amongst his other wounds, would it?
In the days that followed, it quickly felt less like I was in charge of him, and more like I waited on him hand and foot. By the Spirits, the lazy bastard enjoyed it. I tried to annoy him by singing the same Siren lullaby every night while I changed his bandages, but it didn’t seem to work anymore.
A few weeks into our journey away from Redsand Cove, he brightened up considerably.
It shocked me how quickly he bounced back and healed; Ash and I had estimated he would be recovering until we arrived at Ghrysim Isle.
But that only meant he made it nearly impossible to keep him locked down so he didn’t reopen his wounds.
Once he decided on his own that he was better, when he thought I wasn’t looking, he’d get up and attempt to work out.
The first time I caught him, he had reopened his arm wound, so I gave him a good thrashing.
“I’m going stir-crazy in here, Blue,” Reiven whined. “I’m bored as hell.”
“Well, I’m stuck in here with you. How do you think I feel?” I snapped, tearing the loose end of the fresh bandage on his arm with my teeth. “Just lie down and sleep.”
“I’m bored with sleeping. That’s all I’ve been doing,” he complained.
I wasn’t about to offer him any kind of entertainment. I meandered back to the hutch we had stored the medical supplies in and reorganized the contents for the third time that day.
Rei groaned at the top of his lungs, locking his fingers together behind his head as he stared up at the ceiling. “Tell me about the Abyssal Deep.”
“What?”
“I’m bored, and you’re the only interesting thing in here. So, talk to me.”
Sometimes, I wondered if he had been born to some wealthy merchants, and that was where he learned to be so bossy and lazy.
At some point in his life, he probably had everything he wanted handed to him.
Just another reason for us to not get along.
Regardless, I told him about what it was like to live in the Abyssal Deep, and much to my surprise, he probed further with oddly specific questions.
“Do all Sirens have legs like you?”
“It would be a pain in the ass to swim all day with surface-dweller legs. The Water Spirit created us with the ability to walk on land, but in the ocean, we have tails.” When I was younger, I had this hopeful—foolish, more like—inkling that the Water Spirit made us the way we were because she didn’t intend for us to be isolated underwater.
Then again, she probably didn’t count on the way we were treated by Mourners and pirates, or the war that terrorized us into never rising to the surface.
Reiven stared up at the creaky, tilting ceiling. “And are the stories true? The ones where Sirens lure men into the sea with their songs, then pull them underwater and drown them?”
“Who is telling these stories, fear-mongering pirates?” I slammed the hutch’s cabinet door shut. The bottles I had painstakingly arranged rattled, and at least two of them toppled over from the sound of it.
Reiven grinned. “Yeah, you’ve got me there. What does your tail look like?”
“As if I would ever tell you.”
“I bet it’s blue.”
My lips curled as I approached his cot. “Think carefully about mocking the person taking care of you. Especially when you look so adorably vulnerable, lying here wounded.”
He choked on the tea he had been in the process of sipping, clutching at his stomach as it certainly hurt his injury. “I’m not mocking you, Blue. I’m…curious.”
Curious? About me?
After I tired of answering all his questions, I asked if he was going to tell me anything about himself, since I was being so generous with information, only to get a cheeky grin and a, “Hell no.”