by Ciara Graves
“Hey. Can you hear me?”
She was motionless.
I wasn’t going to stand here wasting time trying to wake her up. Looked like she had a head wound, amongst other injuries. She was small, thankfully, but solid muscle, judging from her arms. I cradled her body and hurried to get her into the backseat of my old pickup. Her combat boots told me she was not merely an average civilian fae. The one mark I could see well enough to identify told me she was from the Fighters Guild.
I slammed the door shut, fetched my flashlight, then sped down the dirt road.
The woman muttered a few times when the road grew bumpy, but she never woke up. By the time I reached the cabin, though, she’d fallen quiet. My home was lit up by a yellow porch light and nothing else. Not like I had anyone to leave lights on for me. I threw the truck in park, rushed inside to flip on more lights and clear off the cot I used for cases such as this, then sprinted back to the truck.
I pressed my fingers to her neck again. Her pulse was weaker, and her breathing had turned ragged, as if she was fighting to get air. Her body seized violently in my arms. Foam formed at her lips, and I almost dropped her. I managed to lay her on the cot.
In the full light of the cabin, I was able to see the extent of her wounds. “What happened to you?” I muttered as she continued to shake. “Where did you even come from?”
The shaking ceased suddenly. She sucked in one more breath, then went completely still. I checked for a pulse again, and when I found none, started compressions. As I counted them off, I noticed the wound on her right arm. It looked like a gunshot wound. There was another injury on her left, but I couldn’t decide what it was from without taking a closer look. If I couldn’t get her heart beating again, it wouldn’t even matter.
“Come on,” I snapped when there was no reaction. “I found you on that road for a reason. You’re not going to die in my cabin. No one’s ever died here. You’re not going to be the first.”
Her body jerked with each hard compression.
I paused long enough to check for a pulse. Still nothing.
“You have to have something to live for,” I told her firmly. “Someone in your life who’s going to miss you. Don’t die, you hear me? Don’t die.”
As a last resort, I slammed my fist onto her chest. On the third try, she gasped for air. Her eyes fluttered open long enough for me to see how dark those irises were. Black. Pure black. Then they closed, and she went limp. At least, this time there was a pulse.
I scrambled to grab clean towels, ointments, bandaging, and anything else I thought I might need. Thankfully, unlike some healers I knew, my cabin was usually in some semblance of order. Everything was easy to find. As I laid it out on the rolling cart beside the cot, I picked up my phone and called Teresa. She’d been training to be a healer as long as I had. The only difference was she couldn’t join a guild. Only half fae-goblins or pureblood fae could. I passed on everything I knew about healing to Teresa anyway. If anyone found out, I’d lose my place in the guild. A small price to pay to know Timber Falls had a backup healer if anything happened to me.
The ringing of a phone filled the cabin after I placed the call on speaker.
“Aiden? What’s wrong?”
“How fast can you get to my cabin?”
“How fast do you need me there?” she replied. “What’s wrong?”
“Not sure yet, but I found someone who needs help. Might need an extra set of hands. The faster you can get here, the better.”
“On my way.” She hung up.
I focused on my new patient.
Aside from the head wound and the two injuries on her arms, my new patient had several bruises, a split lip, bloodied nose, and lacerations from glass. The windshield of her truck had been cracked, but the glass shards I began pulling out with tweezers were colored, almost like they came from a stained-glass window. The bits clinked in the metal tray as I removed them from her upper arm, then a few from her cheek and jaw. There was already a pale line that ran from her lower right cheek down to her neck. Her gunshot wound wasn’t as serious as I first believed. More of a graze, really. She was lucky.
I shifted from her right arm to her left. The tattoos there were skulls, five of them. I wasn’t well-versed enough with the other guilds to know what they meant.
I froze. A weird uncertainty hit me that this woman, whoever she might be, was dangerous. And I’d brought her into my home without a second thought.
“Pull yourself together. You’re a healer, and she’s injured. Do your job.”
Squaring my shoulders, I reached down to remove some more glass from a few shallow cuts around the tattooed skin of her arm. I barely touched her skin with the tweezers when the hair on the back of my neck prickled. The air in the cabin that had been warm turned colder than the night outside. Craning my neck, I looked up the woman’s body to find her eyes narrowed in a glare.
I opened my mouth to tell her who I was, but she moved first.
Her hand was around my throat, and she threw me into the nearest wall. My head slammed into the wooden planks and stars appeared in my eyes. She dug black claws into my neck and grabbed something off the cart. The second the cold steel was against the underside of my jaw I threw my head back to stop her from accidentally slicing me open with the scalpel.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Aiden,” I sputtered. “I’m Aiden. I’m a healer.”
Her fingers fidgeted against my neck as confusion fill her eyes. “I don’t know you.”
“I know, but I found you on the road. Your truck crashed into a tree.” I licked my lips nervously, waiting for her to decide what her next move was going to be.
“I don’t—crash? What crash?”
When she turned her head, I caught sight of the dried blood in her hair. I’d given it a cursory glance after I’d gotten her heart going again, but there’d been no sign of major trauma. From this angle, the wound was superficial at best. What had caused the seizure then? Sweat beaded her brow, and then she was shaking again. The scalpel nicked my skin.
I winced. She immediately withdrew it but didn’t remove her other hand from my neck.
“Everything’s fuzzy,” she mumbled, and her breathing was ragged again. “I can’t… I can’t see and you… who…”
The rest of her words trailed off as her eyes rolled back. She crumpled.
I lunged forward to catch her. We hit the floor together as the violent shaking started all over again. This time her skin was on fire.
I lifted her onto the cot and held her there until the shaking stopped. Her pulse remained, at least, but I had to figure out what was causing these symptoms. I stuck a thermometer in her mouth and when I pulled it out, immediately rushed to grab gnarled black root and pixie sunflower seeds. Her fever was over a hundred and five. Any higher and she’d die.
Moving as fast as I could, I ground the ingredients together, added a bit of a healing tonic, then dumped them all into a vial. As I swirled it, my gaze kept drifting back to the tattoos on her left arm. I might not know exactly what they meant, but with how quickly she moved and how easily she could’ve killed me, I had no doubt what they signified. She was a trained killer. The side of me that always lived on the side of caution said she shouldn’t be in my cabin. Anything could go wrong. She could wake up again and decide this time she was going to kill me. There’d be nothing I could do to stop her either. I had very few fighting skills. Throwing a punch in a scuffle was one thing, but defending myself from someone trained to take a life was another.
When the tonic in the vial turned a dark shade of blue, I lifted her head carefully and poured a few drops down her throat. She swallowed instinctively. I kept it up until the entire vial was empty. It would take about an hour to get the fever down enough that she wouldn’t be in immediate danger.
By then, Teresa would be here. She’d probably tell me I was an idiot for bringing this unknown half-goblin into my cabin, especially one that could kill me in a hear
tbeat if she wanted.
Each time I treated a wound on her, I glanced to see if she’d woken up. Those eyes remained closed. Every now and then she shifted and let out a grunt, but she remained unconscious. When I reached the blood smear on her upper left arm, I frowned. I expected to see another graze wound from a bullet, or maybe a stab wound, but there was nothing.
Nothing except a barely visible tiny puncture.
“What are you from?” I whispered to myself as I brought over another light and a magnifying glass. She must’ve been hit by a dart. It was too big to be a needle.
I prodded the slightly reddened skin, and she jerked.
I backed away and held my breath, waiting.
Her head thrashed on the cot, then she stilled, breathing loudly. Her hair covered her face. Not sure why I did it, I reached over and gently swiped it aside. Now that the blood was off, I was able to get a better look at her features. Despite the hardness I’d seen in her eyes as she held a scalpel to my throat, there was a soft curve to her cheeks. The scar on her jaw was hardly noticeable beyond the subtle beauty of her face. She was certainly short, but I knew well enough how much muscle she had. Her whole frame was well-toned.
“Who are you, huh? Killer? Assassin?”
I returned to the puncture on her left arm. Hoping my luck held and she remained unconscious a bit longer, I pinched the wound between my fingers and squeezed. If she had been poisoned and I could figure out by what, I’d be able to treat her symptoms. The tonic I gave her for the fever wouldn’t last forever if poison rampaged through her system. I squeezed harder, and a small drop of lime green sludge appeared, mixed with her blood.
I grabbed a swab and scooped it up.
Placing a small bandage over the wound, I turned to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that took up one whole wall in my cabin. An entire shelf near the bottom was dedicated to poisons and antidotes. Most poisons, sadly, had yet to have an antidote. That had been one of my side projects for the last few years. This lime green color nagged at my mind as I ran my fingers over the old, leather spines with their gold or silver lettering.
I’d seen this lime-green color described recently. The heavy book on the far left with an all-black cover jogged my memory. I snatched it up and hefted it onto my worktable. Holding the swab in one hand, I flipped through, page after page, muttering under my breath as I searched for what I needed to save the mysterious woman.
The silence was only punctuated by the hoot of an owl outside or the occasional rustling of leaves as the wind kicked up. There’d been a chance for a storm tonight and into the morning.
A rumble of thunder shook the walls, and I paused long enough to glance out the window. A flash of lightning lit up the woods. I rubbed my eyes, forcing myself to blink a few times then returned to my search.
Every now and then, the woman twitched and shifted. The cot creaked each time, but she never awoke. I checked her for fever twice and shook my head when I felt it already coming back. I’d have to put the research aside while I made more fever-reducer for her.
I was in the middle of mixing up another batch of the blue tonic when the first drops of rain tapped against the windows. Headlights caught my attention, followed by the slamming of a car door.
“Come in,” I called when there was a knock at the front door a second later.
Teresa rushed in, water dripping from her hair. “Alright, what’s going on?”
I nodded to the woman, and Teresa’s eyes narrowed, then widened.
“You recognize her or something?”
“I think so. If not her face, I for sure know what those marks on her arm mean. Damn, Aiden, what did you just get yourself into?”
“Not like I intended to find a wounded person on my way home.”
“You just found her?”
“Her truck was crashed on the road. She was banged up pretty bad, but not from the crash.” I mixed the ingredients together in a new vial and swirled them around waiting for the color to change. “Those marks, what do they mean? The skulls?”
“They mean she’s damned good at what she does.” Teresa walked all the way around the cot, taking in the woman’s clothing. “I have seen her before.” Then her eyes went wide, and she stumbled back. “Shit, Aiden! She’s the head of King Jeric’s personal guard.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I think her name’s Iona. This one time I was with Uncle Orion, he went to speak with the advisors about Timber Falls and the other communities. King Jeric made a surprise visit to the meeting, and she was with him.” Teresa shook her head and backed away. “She scared the shit out of me then, and she does now. Some idiot tried to attack the king while we were there. She took him down in three seconds flat. Never seen someone react that quickly. Or kill without a thought,” she added on a whisper. “Was she alone?”
“Yeah. Just her and her truck. Looked like she’d been through one hell of a fight.”
“Why is she out?”
“Poison.” I pointed to the swab on the worktable. “I thought it was just from a head wound, but now she’s got a fever that keeps coming back. That substance came out of the puncture wound.”
The liquid in the vile turned blue and hurried to give the woman a second dose. Usually, a second one wasn’t needed. Teresa watched all the while.
The woman sputtered but swallowed it down. Her hand shot out suddenly, and she latched onto my arm.
Teresa yelled in alarm, but the woman made no move to kill me this time.
“Jeric,” she whispered, her claws digging through my skin. “Jeric—” The rest of the words cut off as she seized again.
“Teresa, help me with her.”
Like any true healer, Teresa didn’t pause. She rushed over and held down the woman’s right side as I did the same to her left. This wasn’t a normal seizure. When the woman’s eyes shot open, they were cloudy, almost like they were turning white. Earlier she’d said she couldn’t see. Now I feared the poison she’d been dosed with was stealing her sight.
When the shaking stopped, I smoothed her hair back from a forehead slicked with sweat.
“We need to figure out what this poison is,” I told Teresa, but my eyes remained on the woman’s face.
“Are you sure? Why don’t we just alert the guard?”
“She could die by the time they get here.”
“Why was she even out here?” Teresa asked quietly, as if afraid the unconscious woman would hear her. “You said she was banged up. Where’s the rest of her guard? Where’s the king?”
“I don’t know, but we’re healers. This is what we do. If you don’t want to help, I understand, and you can go.”
I returned to the leather-bound book and my search.
Teresa muttered several curses that made me smile, then she was at my side with another heavy volume in hand.
“You owe me,” she said as she dropped it on the table.
“If you help me save her life, I’ll owe you twenty favors.” I threw a worried glance over my shoulder at the woman on the cot, quietly promising I wasn’t going to let her die, then went on a hunt for a poison my gut told me had no antidote.
Chapter 5
Iona
Jeric. I had to get to him. I was in the mansion. His study was just at the end of the hall. The door was wide open, and there was no guard there. I called out to him, but my voice was muffled like I was yelling through a pillow. I tried again, but there was still no sound. I was a few yards from the door when the lights went out, plunging me into darkness.
A thud came from the office, then the sounds of a fight.
“Iona!”
“Jeric. No!” I sprinted down the corridor, crashed through the door, and found a shadowy figure holding Jeric with a dagger to his throat. I reached for my weapons, but they weren’t at my hips. I bared my pointed canines and made ready to fight to save Jeric’s life.
Something sharp stabbed into the back of my neck. The room spun, and as I hit the floor, I caught the blur
red images of Jeric being stabbed. The shadowy figure dragged the other dagger across my king’s throat. I stretched out my hand toward him…
Another hand took mine. An unfamiliar one.
“It’s alright. You need to lie still.”
That voice. I’d heard it before, but it wasn’t Jeric.
I jerked my hand back with a growl and shoved at the darkness surrounding me. I couldn’t see anything at first. Then shapes came into view. That’s all they were. Shapes.
“I can’t—I can’t see,” I rasped, blinking furiously to try and clear away the fog. “Why can’t I see?”
“You were poisoned. We’re working on finding an antidote, but you need to lie still. Your fever’s back. It’s making you seize.”
His voice was kind and soft. It soothed me, but then Jeric’s face floated to the surface of my mind. He was dead, with my dagger jutting out of his chest. I attempted to get up again, but more hands grabbed me and held me down. I snarled and cursed, aiming a punch at the moving shape, but was too weak to land it. A larger hand covered mine and rested it back at my side.
“Dead,” I gasped when breathing became hard. “Dead. My fault. Failed him, I failed him.”
“Who’s dead?” the voice asked.
“Jeric. King Jeric—” I gasped as a shock of pain struck my back. I arched upward while two sets of hands held onto my shoulders and arms.
The man’s voice was followed by a woman’s, both frantic. I couldn’t make out what they said over my screams and snarls. When the seizing finally stopped, I collapsed, more exhausted than I had been just a few seconds ago.