The Vampire & Her Witch

Slowly, Ollie clawed his way back from the edge of the void, anchoring himself against its sweet, seductive song as his feet sank deeper into the soft, silty streambed. The cold helped. The cold was real. The earth beneath his feet was real. The cold, icy water flowing around his waist was real and proof that he was still alive, and as long as he was alive, he could fight against the call of the void and the death that threatened to consume him and Lady Cerys both.

Once he’d pulled himself back from the edge, he started to confront the pain that threatened to overwhelm him. All at once, it was too much. He needed to sift through the pain, like sifting through shards of glass with bare hands, in order to find a piece he could deal with. If he could remove just one source of pain, it would get easier, and then he could confront the next and the next...

Ollie gently prodded at the wound in her left arm, feeling the jagged edges of bone grinding against each other with every tiny movement, tearing at her flesh and spilling precious lifeblood into the water.

He felt her broken ribs, six of them, and the way they’d punctured her left lung, filling it with blood and making each breath a desperate, drowning gasp. He felt the massive internal bleeding in her abdomen, where her organs had been torn by the fall, along with the blood pooling in her belly that had nowhere to go.

Worst of all, he felt the crack in her skull, the terrible pressure building inside her head, feeling like a giant hand was crushing her head as her brain swelled against the confines of her cracked and bleeding skull.

It was too much. Too much pain, too many injuries, too many things that needed to be fixed all at once. Ollie felt himself drowning in the sensation, his mind fragmenting under the assault of a hundred different agonies. He couldn’t think, couldn’t focus, couldn’t figure out where to even begin.

The current of the stream pulled at his legs, stronger now, and he felt his feet start to slip on the silt-covered rocks beneath the water. The pain was too much, and his ’roots’ were too shallow to resist it. He was going to fall. He was going to drop Cerys and they were both going to be swept away by the current, and she was going to die and it would be his fault because he wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t skilled enough, wasn’t capable of changing the fate of one injured mother, no matter how much he wanted to return her to her husband and her son.

But suddenly, just as despair threatened to overwhelm him, a strong, steady presence appeared at his side, and Ollie felt a clawed hand grip his shoulder, anchoring him in place. Another hand came up under Cerys’s body, helping to support her weight, and slowly but surely, the crushing burden of holding her above the water was cut in half.

”I’ve got her,” Milo’s voice said in his ear, calm and reassuring. ”And I’ve got you. Just focus on the healing, Sir Ollie. I’ll make sure neither of you drowns.”

Ollie opened his eyes; he hadn’t realized he’d closed them, and found Milo standing beside him in the waist-deep water. The Heartwood warrior’s broad, flat tail swayed back and forth beneath the surface, helping him maintain his balance against the current, and his strong arms cradled Cerys from the other side, taking much of her weight.

On the shore, Ollie could see Cynwrig standing with Dalwyn clutched against his chest, the boy’s face pressed into his father’s shoulder. Harrod stood beside them, looking as if he was ready to charge into the water along with them if Ollie needed even more help.

”Thank you,” Ollie managed to say, his voice hoarse with pain and effort. ”Milo, thank you.”

”Save her,” Milo said, his dark eyes looking worn and filled with worry. ”Help me make this right because... I didn’t want to... I didn’t want to take a mother away from her kit. Not like this. I’ll help you, however I can...”

”I’ll do my best,” Ollie promised solemnly. ”We’ll do it together...”

With Milo’s help bearing the physical burden, Ollie found he could think again. The pain was still there, still overwhelming, but now he could focus through it, could begin to sort through the chaos of injuries and determine what needed to be addressed first.

The head wound. That was the most immediately life-threatening. If the pressure continued to build, it would kill her within minutes regardless of what he did about the rest of her injuries. He had to start there.

Ollie placed one hand on Cerys’s forehead, his fingers gentle against the massive bruise that covered her temple, and began to channel the healing magic through his fingertips and into her broken skull.

The pain that lanced through him was like nothing he had ever experienced. It felt like his own head was being split open, like someone was driving a spike through his temple and into his brain. He felt the pressure, the terrible crushing sensation of his skull trying to contain something too large, and he felt the sharp, stabbing agony of torn flesh and cracked bone.

An anguished cry ripped itself from Ollie’s throat, raw and primal, and he heard Dalwyn’s answering wail from the shore. But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. He pushed the healing magic deeper, using it to knit together the fractured bone, to seal the bleeding arteries and veins, to reduce the swelling in her head that was slowly crushing the life out of her.

It felt like it took hours, though it could only have been minutes. Slowly, painstakingly, the head wound began to heal. The massive bruise faded from deep purple to a lighter lavender, then to yellow-green, then to nothing at all. The blood that had been trickling from her nose stopped flowing, and the terrible pressure inside her skull began to ease.

By the time it was done, Ollie was shaking so hard that he could barely stand. His muscles felt like they’d been torn apart and stitched back together with butcher’s twine, his lungs burned with every breath, and his skin felt like it was on fire despite the icy water that surrounded him. It was the exhaustion of a full day’s labor in the kitchens, the bone-deep weariness of pushing his body beyond its limits, all compressed into a few minutes of intense magical work.

But he’d done it. The head wound was healed, or at least stable enough that it wouldn’t kill her in the next few minutes.

”Sir Ollie,” Milo said softly, his voice full of concern. ”You need to rest. You’re shaking. I’ll help you carry her back. We can... we can try again in a little bit, once you’ve had a chance to rest.”

”Can’t,” Ollie gasped out, his breath coming in ragged pants. ”Not done yet. She’s still dying.”

He turned his attention downward, toward Cerys’s battered torso, and he could feel the broken things inside her. The shattered ribs. The punctured lung. All of the rips and tears caused by the broken bones. Each breath she took was an act of agony, flesh tearing against broken bone, blood filling spaces where there should be only air.

This was going to be worse than the head wound. This was going to hurt more, take longer, and require more strength than he had left.

But Dalwyn was watching from the shore, and Cynwrig was depending on him, and Cerys, for all that she hated him, for all that she would rather die than accept his help, didn’t deserve to die for a hatred that had never been hers to begin with. It was the Church’s fault for teaching her to fear the Eldritch, the Church, and her brother in the Inquisition and everyone else who never once lived among the Eldritch or had the chance to understand what it meant to be a witch...

But underneath all that, she was a kind mother who would do anything to save her children, and for that alone, she deserved to live.

So Ollie gathered what remained of his strength, placed his hand over Cerys’s chest, and prepared to endure once again.