The certainty of this once-learned knowledge flooded her with panic as the fish approached Shehab’s back, bending its own like a snake. She pounced on him, swept around him, exchanging places. The next second pain shot between her shoulder blades, as if she’d been skewered by a red-hot poker.
Her scream gurgled into her regulator.
Seven
Farah would remember what happened after the lionfish stung her in the same way she did her garbled dreams.
She’d felt as if she were outside her pain-ridden body, watching as Shehab swept her up in his arms and torpedoed to the surface before hauling her onto the deck of his yacht as if she weighed no more than a few pounds, not her hundred and forty plus the diving gear.
She lay in a state of shock, the white-hot agony lodged in the middle of her back the one thing telling her this wasn’t a dream. She watched him as he frantically took off his gear, pounced on hers. The moment he divested her of her goggles and breathing equipment the tears and sobs they’d been stifling seeped out of her burning eyes and lips.
His hands were shaking with urgency as he stripped her down to her swimsuit, turned her to her side to examine her injury. At the sight, he inhaled a sharp, taxed breath, reached for something that looked like a walkie-talkie and ground out a string of Arabic, his eyes feverish on her.
Then he threw the thing aside, scooped her up and rushed to the shade of the upper sitting area, placing her on a couch on her side so it wouldn’t chafe against her injury before tearing open a first-aid kit and rummaging through it for a tube, his movements slowing down and gentling only after he produced gel from it and carefully applied it to the sting. She moaned as a freezing sensation poured over the burning, her flaccid body going rigid against the bombardment of confusing signals. He soothed her with hands and voice. The spasm passed, and she felt the whole area going numb. She blinked at his blurred image only to wince at his fierceness and focus, barely managed a rasped, “Thanks.”
“Thanks? Ya Ullah, why did you do that?” She stared at him. Was he mad at her? Or was she hallucinating as the poison coursed through her system? Would she die now? “I told you never to approach anything you don’t know, to look but never touch. But you almost attacked that lionfish and it struck back so hard its spine penetrated your wetsuit. And it could have been worse, a stonefish…” He stopped, his face working, his fists bunching.
From a long distance she heard herself stuttering, “I’m s-sorry…b-but a-all I knew was it’s poisonous and it was going to sting you…”
He went totally still. His face drained of all agitation and expression. Froze. And her ears were filling with thunder.
Then she was again watching it all happen to someone else as Shehab swooped down on her, carried her to the deck where she realized the thunder wasn’t blood roaring in her ears, but his helicopter, which, it turned out, could land on water. He had her inside, she didn’t register how, in the back, secured on a stretcher, then stood up to strip down to his knee-length swimming trunks before kneeling beside her.
She lost all perception of time as the flight ended and he rushed with her in his arms into the mansion, his men streaking before them, opening doors. But this time he took a different path, one leading somewhere she’d never been before.
The sensation of wading in a dream thickened as he swept her through what felt like endless spaces shrouded in dimness and incense, their Spartan sparseness stamped by virility and power. This must be his quarters. Her gaze clung to the huge bed, a bed she’d longed to share with him. Now she might never share it…
Consciousness surged as lights rose, illuminating the space he’d crossed into. The impression of moving through the landscape of One Thousand and One Nights intensified as she gaped around the gigantic, all-marble-and-stone chamber. It interconnected on each side with two others, each space ringed with arches supported by tapering columns. The middle chamber, which he’d just entered, sprawled beneath a soaring dome dotted by circular bottle-glass openings that let sunbeams slash through the half light permeating the place, pouring from the semi-opened windows that ringed the walls beneath the dome.
He gave her no chance to linger over details as he rushed to the chamber on the right. It was dominated by a shallow rectangular pool, tiled in checkered black-and-beige marble. He lowered her onto a long stone seat with utmost care before rushing away. He calibrated some mechanism at the wall, hurried back, jogged her out of her stupor by scooping her up again. She opened groggy eyes to find him stepping into the pool. Her thoughts swirled in confusion, wondering why he considered giving her a bath important as he lowered them both into the water. And she screamed. It was boiling.
He restrained her, his arms cleaving her back to his chest, his legs imprisoning hers. “Shh…shh…ya galbi, it must be done.”
“You must…boil me?” She twisted in his arms, unable to bear the scalding heat. “And…you’re boiling…yourself, too…”
He only lay back in the water, submerging them both, then clamped his limbs around her tighter and crooned, “The water temperature is only 114°F.”
“Only?” she whimpered, the initial shock passing, only for the full measure of discomfort to register, every cell overheating, every drop of moisture pushing to the surface, flooding out, getting lost in the surrounding water.
He kept her submerged, his hands and voice gentleness itself. “I know it’s very uncomfortable, but it’s for the sting.”
She thrashed her head against his chest, feeling as if she were suffocating one cell at a time, her lifeforce seeping out of her every pore. “But I don’t feel it anymore.”
“That’s the effect of the local anesthetic, but it isn’t a treatment for the poison. Only high heat can stop it.”
“So-I won’t die?” she choked, just now realizing she’d been too numb to think, to be really scared.
“Ya Ullah, you thought the poison was fatal?” She nodded, shook her head, nodded again. He let out a dark groan as he hugged her tighter, burying his face in her neck. “The one with fatal consequences is the stonefish’s sting. The worst of the lionfish’s is the pain, which is excruciating. I tried to catch one when I was eleven. Yes, we were both reckless at that age. So I have first-hand experience with the agony you suffered. But the poison isn’t to be treated lightly. If not neutralized by heat, it would have coursed through your blood until you started vomiting before you lost consciousness from hypotension.”