He grazed a spot on my lower right side, and I flew about an inch off the ground. I yelped. “Hurts.”
“Be still.” His tone was stern, but I saw the concern clear on his brow. “If a rib has snapped in two, it could pierce an organ.”
That stilled me, all right.
He used his thumb now, drawing along the edge of the rib. The pain was so unbearable, I wondered if I might faint from it. I bit my lips to not make a sound, but tears ran unbidden down my face.
He squeezed my shoulder. “Breathe.”
Each breath was an agony, and now I was scared if I inhaled, I’d puncture a lung. I shivered uncontrollably, trying to shake my head but quivering too hard to do so.
He rubbed my arm. “Breathe,” he ordered. “Now. In and out.”
My chest was too tight. The gray sky grew dimmer, and distantly I registered how odd the light became as darkness closed around my vision. But still I took only tiny sips of air—the pressure across my ribs was too great. My ears began to buzz.
“Annelise.” His tone was unforgiving. “Stay with me.”
He gave me a quick shake, and I inhaled sharply then, crying out with the stab of pain. I hunched over, leaning into it. I made unintelligible sounds—it hurt so badly.
But I was breathing regularly again, and the world became clear again. My scalp and lips prickled with cold, like numbed parts returning to life.
“Now keep breathing,” he said.
I did, and I found my voice, too, complaining between breaths, “But…it hurts.”
“Hush. I need to make sure the lung wasn’t punctured.” He put his hand near my mouth. “Exhale. When a lung collapses, air goes in but doesn’t come out.”
I did as he told me, afraid to do otherwise. Biology was hideous enough; my biology was unthinkable.
“No,” he said, “your lungs are good.”
Simply hearing that my lungs were intact eased my chest until my sips of air slowly elongated into longer, steadier inhales.
His eyes went to my bloodied arm. “But this…” He gently took my arm, turning it this way and that. Then, scooting back, he peeled off his black sweater.
He kept a slim wooden stake strapped to his left forearm. I imagined the stake that currently protruded from the Draug’s back had once been attached to Ronan’s right arm.
But then my eyes went to his shirt, a plain white cotton tee. I could see the planes of his chest and the faint shadow and texture of hair running in a line down his chest.
“What—?” What are you doing? I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t finish the thought, because Ronan had begun to strip off his undershirt, too.
My cheeks blazed hot, and I looked away, then back again. But he’d slipped his sweater back on and had begun to tear the white cotton T-shirt into strips. He worked silently, and I wondered if he was as self-conscious about all this as I was.
“We need to stop the bleeding,” he explained.
“Of course,” I stammered. “It’s okay. Since drinking the blood, I’ve been clotting quickly.”
“It’s not your healing I worry about. It’s your scent.” He met my eyes, looking grave. “The blood will call the others.”
“You mean I’d be bait?” I gave a nervous laugh. “Like chumming for sharks?”
But he answered in all seriousness, “Precisely like that.”
He wound the strip around my arm. The fabric was still warm from his body, and ironically it gave me a shiver. He knotted it off and pulled me to standing, supporting me for a moment at the elbows.
His hands went to my face, cupping it. I held my breath again, but this time for an entirely different reason. His eyes were so green and so deeply locked with mine, but I didn’t for a second think he was doing his hypnotic thing. I knew in my heart, in this moment there were just the two of us—no magic, no vampires, no compulsion—just Ronan and me. Not taking his eyes from mine, he tenderly smudged the tears from my cheeks. The gesture cracked my heart as surely as my rib had been.
But then he thumbed some foul sludge from my cheek and wiped it on his pants. I drooped. Of course. It was Ronan and me—Tracer and Acari. So much for our moment.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
I managed one step and then another. I hunched to the right, curling into the pain, but I was mobile. “Yeah,” I said, a little surprised at myself. “I can.”
He nodded. “Lying down is more painful than walking.”
I frowned at that.
“Don’t worry,” he added, with a sarcastic gleam in his eye. “The worst is always the second day.”
Now I really frowned at him. “I think you’re happy I got hurt.”
He ignored that. For now. “You’ll need to massage the muscles to keep them from hardening up.”
He bent over the Draug’s body, retrieving our weapons and calmly pulling them out as if he were carving the Thanksgiving turkey. Black sludge had puddled around the monster’s head and oozed from the stake wound. “Others will come soon, drawn to the smell.”
Ronan’s jostling made more of that tarry crap seep from the body, and I held a hand over my nose and mouth. “The smell? They can probably smell this in Iceland.”
“A Draug is rotting. It carries diseases. How do you think it’d smell?” He grabbed a clump of coarse grass and cleaned my stars and his stake, then offered my weapons back. “They’ll need a more thorough cleaning when you get back.”
“Gross,” I murmured, although I was thrilled I wasn’t the one who’d done the initial scrub. The gore really was thick like tar, looking all gummy and bubbly.
“Now,” he said, “we’ve got to get out of here.”
I spun on my heel, gritting my teeth through the pain. “You don’t have to tell me twice.” I wasn’t eager to meet whatever creatures there were that’d actually be drawn to such a putrid thing.
With my injury to contend with, our progress was slow, but once we put some distance between us and the corpse, I began to talk. I had questions, yes. But mostly I was worried about whatever lecture Ronan was cooking up for me in his head. Wanting to distract him, I asked, “So there are other Draug on the island?”
He gave a tight nod.
Okay. Apparently, he wasn’t going to be chatty. But then I began to wonder.…“Why do the Draug just roam around waiting to attack us? I mean, you’d think they’d just attack and eat one another.”
“They long to eat, yes. They need blood to survive. But there’s another longing, too. To be near the living.”
“I don’t know if I needed to hear that.” I shook off the creepy, goose bumpy feel that thought had given me. I was glad Ronan had shown up when he had, or I wouldn’t have been among the living for much longer. “What was that weapon you used to kill it?”
“I keep these”—he slid the stake from his sleeve—“at all times.” He seemed to unclench at the topic of weaponry, and it was a relief.
My curiosity wasn’t exactly a stretch, either—his stakes might’ve been compact, but they were clearly lethal. Did other people have secret weapons stashed away that I didn’t know about? More important, did I need stakes?
“May I?” I held out a tentative hand and knew a thrilled shiver when, after a pause, he handed it to me. It was long and sharp, with a satisfying heft. I was surprised to realize it was carved of wood. “Cool.”
“So it is.”
“Did you make it yourself?”
He hesitated, then gave a sharp nod. “Aye. Though it’s not something I generally discuss.”
So they were secret stakes. And of course they would be. Vampires wouldn’t want to think about non-vampires roaming around bearing anti-vampire weaponry. The secrecy lit a fuse inside, and I was desperate to know everything. “Is it a special kind of wood? And where did you get it on this island, anyway?” With the isle’s scant, scrubby greenery, a stake chiseled from granite seemed a far easier thing to come by.
“There’s material to be found,” he said. “If you look.”
Questions flooded my mind, and I knew my eyes must’ve burnt bright with them. “Does it have to be wood?” I thought of all the old myths. “Like Dracula—a wooden stake in the heart?”
Reluctantly, he shook his head. “You’re right that only impaling and beheading destroy them for good. As for the material, anything works if the force behind it is great enough. Wood, steel, iron—whatever you have that can do the job.”
I hefted the stake in my hand. It definitely didn’t feel very substantial—it rather reminded me of an oversized pencil. “I’d think you’d have one in steel.”
“And where would I get steel, Annelise? The vampires don’t exactly issue such things.” He snatched it back and returned it up the sleeve of his sweater. “Besides, wood isn’t picked up by metal detectors.”
That shut me up. Why would he need to travel with stakes if the monsters were here? What would happen if a vampire discovered them? And, seriously, why did he need them, really? Had he ever considered escaping?
But I could never ask that—knowing Ronan, he’d see right through me to guess at my own objective. Instead, I chose the most banal of my questions. “Why wouldn’t the vamps want you to have it? Can’t you just say it’s to protect you from the Draug?”
“They believe the way for humans to stay safe is to remain under their purview.”
I watched avidly as he settled them back at his forearms, thinking of all the homegrown weaponry I could make. If I were really going to escape, chances were good I’d need more than just throwing stars and my wits to survive.
I’d be on the lookout for the right kind of wood. When the time came, I could borrow Emma’s Buck knife to shape and sharpen. “I’m totally going to whittle myself a stake.”
“You’ll totally do no such thing. And you won’t be speaking of it to anyone, either. If the vampires were to discover you bore a weapon that they didn’t give you, they’d turn and use it on you. You must promise me you’ll forget we had this conversation.”