The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [48]
Dean gathered me against him. “I’ve got you, Aoife.” His smell of leather and tobacco made my head spin. Dean whispered against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
“It—it talked to me,” I jittered. My skirt and jumper were soaked with melted frost, and trickles of my own blood painted a road map down my arm and over my palm where my blouse had torn away. “The shoggoth. Talked to me …”
Dean snapped his fingers at Cal. “Kid. You got a clean bandanna in that scout pack?”
Cal just stared at the darkening wool of my jumper, his hands slack at his sides, tongue creeping out to catch between his front teeth.
“Doorstop.” Dean’s voice could have drawn blood. “She needs help, double-quick time. You want to gawk, buy a ticket.”
Cal came back to life and dug into his kit bag, drawing out a pristine red bandanna, still with the paper band from the department store around it. He tossed it underhand at Dean, who snatched it out of the air, a cotton bird interrupted in flight.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Aoife,” Dean said as he slid his hand under my jumper, under my blouse, and pressed the cloth against my torn skin. “I’m thinking only the purest of thoughts.”
The pressure of his hand triggered a fresh wave of pain-fueled giddiness. I danced on air, the world a painting that melted off its canvas before my eyes. Looking through the shoggoth’s eyes had been real, too real and too visceral to escape, but this felt like a dream, the kind I lied to Dr. Portnoy about, and I panicked, thrashing against Dean’s touch. I just wanted the pain to stop.
“Hey.” Dean snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Stay with me, Aoife. Still and steady, and you’ll be right as rain.”
“Is she …” Cal’s words twisted down a long and cavernous passage to my ears. “Is she … viral? If she changes …”
“I’m not …” My tongue was thick, and speaking made my head pound, but I found the swirling, twirling giddiness of the necrovirus waited for me whenever I shut my eyes, so I forced them open. “I’m not …” I’m not infected. I’m not mad.
“She’s in a bad way.” Dean peeled back my eyelid and brushed his fingers down my neck to where my carotid pulse throbbed. “It took a piece of her. This bleeding ain’t stopping on its own.”
“Wh-what do I do?” Cal was a pale column of blond and khaki uniform at the edge of my vision.
Dean’s hand slid under my shoulders and his opposite arm wrapped around my knees. The ground fell away and I turned my face into his T-shirt to avoid the waterfall of nausea that swamped me.
“What do I do?” Cal’s shout cracked through the still air.
“Keep up,” Dean said, and started to run. Our route pitched upward, and I felt cold wind on my face cut with low, hot throbs from my shoulder as Dean carried me. I tried not to cry, unsuccessfully. The tears just turned me colder as we climbed higher and higher up the mountainside, and I shivered, my teeth grating. There were things roaming in the night, glass-girls with fingers of ice and teeth of gales that stole your blood and breath and made it so you were never warm again.
I felt them pulling icicle fingers through my hair and heard them whispering their poetry of cold, eternal sleep until I mercifully lost consciousness.
Poison Blood
WHEN I CAME awake again, I was lying on something lumpy and not altogether soft, while the crisp air teased my bare skin from neck to … I flushed, trying to yank the tatters of my blouse together. The last thing I wanted was to be like Stephanie Falacci, the girl Cecelia and her friends had teased mercilessly for still wearing camisoles and long underwear. My brassiere, washed so many times it had gone gray, wasn’t any better.
“Easy!” Dean’s voice came in as I thrashed. “Easy, kiddo! You have to stay still while I clean this wound.”
Everything was out of focus—I felt like I still had a hundred eyes, was still connected to the shoggoth.
Cal’s voice piped in, like I was scanning channels in the aether. “Is she going to die?”
“Not if you shut up so I can stop this poison from pumping all through