by E. M. Hardy
“A thing? C’mon, Isiah,” countered Hasan. “You think we’re not going to back you up with whatever’s bugging you? You all but threw yourself at Blevins when he pulled that stunt in the cafeteria, and you think we’re going to drop you when you need us? That I’m going to just drop you after what you did for me?”
Isiah looked up and saw the fierce loyalty in Hasan’s eyes. The boy’s brows were so deep together in annoyance they almost connected. Isiah realized that Hasan was genuinely insulted with how he was hiding his troubles away from his friends.
And why should he? Why shouldn’t he tell Haz, Livy, Eddy, Abigail, and Bear about this thing with Kurdan? What would he lose when he consulted his best friends about the troubles of teaching orcs how to build new weapons, how to better manage farms and workshops staffed by slaves, how to create an empire that could possibly invade the rest of their world?
He was thinking rhetorical questions, but Kurdan answered him all the same.
“I do not see the problem in this,” said the orc as he inserted himself into Isiah’s thoughts. “You place so much faith in these friends of yours, and they with you. If your faith is well-placed, then you gain allies to your cause. I get more humans to assist me with my conquest. If your faith is not well-placed and they betray your trust? Well, you can always hunt them from the shadows.”
Isiah sighed within his mind-space. “No, Kurdan, I am not going to kill my friends,” he thought back to the orc. “Though you do have a point. Maybe it’s been one gigantic mistake to keep our bond a secret from them. I mean, it’s the gang we’re talking about here. We’ve got each other’s backs, helped each other out through thick and thin. Maybe I really should just tell them—”
One glance at the threat, and Isiah immediately willed his bloodlust to boil cold.
His heart went into overdrive as it pumped hard and fast, breaking itself with the force Isiah exerted upon it. It didn’t matter though since Isiah’s blood-trained instincts immediately began repairing the damaged heart. Once Isiah had enough time to verify and assess the threat, he willed his blood to go hot. Churning blood poured power into his legs, his calves swelling with force as they twisted his body around and propelled it forward with blinding speed and power.
He slammed a palm into Olivia’s left shoulder, causing her to spin away from the sidewalk. Isiah’s muscles tore as he willed them to fight against the centrifugal forces he placed upon them, this time slamming another palm into Bernabé’s pelvic bone. The boy huffed as he found himself hurtling forward. Meanwhile, Isiah’s leg lashed out and booted Hasan squarely in the gut. He joined Bernabé in his backward flight—both boys bowling over Abigail and Eddison, knocking them out of the way as well.
Isiah did not have enough leverage to throw himself out of the way, nor brace for the impact. He watched the van careen into the sidewalk—then found himself strangely drawn to the eyes of the driver. The man did not wear the face of someone who was panicking over losing control of the wheel. This man had a cold, calculating expression on his face. He gripped the steering wheel with determination, with purpose.
This was no road accident; it was an attack—one with a specific target in mind, even if Isiah didn’t know who.
Isiah felt no fear, though. He was confident that Kurdan’s blood magic would keep him safe. He had shared Kurdan’s pain during his battles against the Greater Tribes. He was intimately familiar with it, from the sharp tearing of flesh to the blunt rupturing of internal organs. The orc would knit him back together the same way orcs knitted themselves back together after being hacked apart by their enemies.
Assuming of course that he didn’t die first.
The last thing he saw was the van’s driver bracing his head behind his arms, preparing to absorb the blow from an airbag, right before his entire consciousness was consumed by the violence of screeching steel and breaking bones.
Chapter 22
A pierced lung, a cracked skull, eight shattered ribs, shoulder and knee ligaments torn to shreds, a cracked spine… Kurdan’s annoyance soared as the list of injuries grew longer and longer.
“Humans are just too weak,” thought Kurdan as he wrapped up his examination of Isiah’s bent and broken form. If Isiah’s strengthened body was damaged to this extent, Kurdan could only grunt in disgust at how fragile a normal human’s body would be. Such a frail vessel would have turned into a useless sack of crushed gore if the speeding vehicle had slammed into it.
Kurdan tried opening Isiah’s eyes to get a better view of his surroundings. No luck; the nerves were damaged. He could hear the mewling and sobbing of familiar voices—Isiah’s friends—but he didn’t care much for their misery right now. His first order of concern was restarting the broken heart. He gathered the remaining healthy blood within Isiah’s body and had it travel to the ruptured organ. The blood converged around it, picking out the damaged flesh and taking its place. It was stupid how humans had one heart, though. If Isiah had a second undamaged heart like orcs did, Kurdan would have a much easier time pushing blood where it was needed.
The one lung was enough to keep Isiah’s body working, but a second lung would bring in additional air to speed up the regeneration process. He willed the blood to coalesce around the damaged organ, peeling out the battered flesh and picking out the shards of bone that punctured it. The lungs and heart secured, he began reattaching the nerves of Isiah’s broken spine. He would have a much easier time repairing the other injuries once he was freed from the burden of having to manually command the blood within Isiah’s heart and lungs.
Kurdan grunted in annoyance as hands began probing Isiah’s body, but brought his attention back to where it was needed. Other organs were still damaged, but he could delay their repair until Isiah’s core organs were healed. He heard voices of authority telling people to clear out and give the boy some space. Those voices then inserted their fingers underneath Isiah’s body. After a short count, they lifted him up and back down again. Soon enough, Kurdan found himself floating through the air. No, Isiah’s body was being carried on something.
Kurdan had enough of being handled like a sack of meat without knowing why. The bones and unimportant organs could wait. He had to know what was being done to Isiah’s body, and so he focused on reattaching the nerves in Isiah’s broken eyes and clearing out the blood in his ruptured ears. When he cracked his eyes open, he found himself in a white room—surrounded by wide-eyed humans backing away from him.
“Where am I?” Kurdan meant to growl the words out loud in warning. What came out instead was a menacing, incomprehensible gurgle. That’s when Kurdan realized that he hadn’t fixed Isiah’s torn tonsils yet.
“Why is the patient conscious!? No, forget that. Someone please call Doctor Roper right away. We can’t operate if the patient is conscious!”
Kurdan burbled sounds through Isiah’s broken tonsils, then gave up trying to speak. He just leaned back, closed his eyes, and focused on repairing the damage. He felt hands push his body aside, exposing his bloody back to the air. He felt something sharp slide into his back, releasing an alien liquid into Isiah’s spine. Numbness spread from the point of entry, deadening the nerves to everything around them. The orc would have none of that. He willed Isiah’s blood to coalesce around the offending substance before pushing it out one of the many openings of sliced flesh around his back. Kurdan shot open Isiah’s eyelids and reached out, gripping the offending limb of the healer beside him.
“Stop,” he growled, the wet gravelly voice rasping through freshly-healed tonsils. “Or I will break your arm.”
“Orderly!” shouted the pale-faced anesthesiologist as she tried in vain to extricate herself from the crazy boy that was either still riding high on adrenaline or doped up on some kind of drug that blocked pain receptors in the body. A heavy-set male beside the doctor moved in to restrain Isiah’s hand, but was surprised by how he failed to budge the steely arm of the broken teen lying on the operating table in front of him.
The orderly was caught in a difficult situation: let go and risk the patient injuring himself, or power on and risk injuring the patient further?
“Enough!” barked Doctor Hayes, the lead surgeon, as he tsked loudly to himself. “Please let our patient go, Mister Arden. Mister—” the surgeon glanced down at the tag on Isiah’s wrist. “—Hunter, please let Doctor Roper do her job. We need to bring you under right now so we can begin surgery. Your injuries are severe, and you will die if we do not stabilize you fast enough…”
The surgeon glanced at the monitor that showed surprisingly normal heart rates. Slightly elevated, but well within healthy parameters. The doctor looked over at Isiah Hunter’s bent femur, slightly depressed chest cavity, and his mangled left arm. He also noted the boy’s unusual vigor, strength, and presence of mind considering the state of his battered body.
While Kurdan appreciated the fact that the he-man ceased his attempts to restrain him, the orc grew increasingly exasperated with the human healers around him. They just wouldn’t let him finish fixing Isiah’s body on his own. He had to admit, however, that the humans did set his bones properly while he was busy repairing Isiah’s torn nerves and shattered spine. Isiah’s memories were also filled with trust for these healers, who relied on more mundane than arcane ways of repairing broken bodies.
“Do what you need to do, healer,” grumbled Kurdan, curiosity scratching his mind as he eyed the he-man returning his stare. “But do not force me to sleep. I will observe and assist where I can.” He leaned his head back on the operating table, then jerked it back up when he realized it was too flat. “Put something behind my head to prop me up. I want to see what you are doing with my own eyes.”
Doctor Hayes raised a brow at the brash commands of the battered youth whose mind and body should have shut down after the abuse heaped upon him. He glanced at Doctor Roper’s empty syringe of sedative, wondering why the boy was still conscious up to this point. Worse, the patient actually wanted to watch him and his team as they cut him up and put him back together.
He shook his head at the absurdity of the situation before gesturing to the orderly to find a pillow or two for their audience-participant.
***
Metal pins inside bone. Metal pins… inside bone… and then leaving them there. Not only pins, but screws and rods attached at various points to connect broken bones together. Kurdan wanted to scream at the human healers that they were idiots, that they would poison Isiah’s body once the metal pole eventually corroded. Even the halest of orcs would not waste the energy keeping a piece of metal inside him, for it would require constant healing just to flush the inevitably toxic buildup.
And yet the confidence of these human healers, these ‘doctors,’ prevented Kurdan from outright bashing them to pieces.
Isiah had mentioned that his world did not have anything like blood magic, that the laws of magic ran differently here. Kurdan watched the doctors as they cut up Isiah’s body, cleaning the lesions and reaching into the open wounds to pick out the leftover bits of bone. They then pushed him through various devices, which let them better understand the extent of his injuries. They were even able to produce images of his skeleton, along with rough approximations of how Isiah’s internal organs looked like. The doctors were surprised by the pristine condition of Isiah’s internal organs. This was because Kurdan had focused his healing efforts on the bags of soft mush to keep Isiah alive, though he planned to leave the bones for later healing. Now that the humans were observing him so keenly, however, he ceased healing Isiah’s body and decided to watch them do their thing.
The humans seemed unnerved by the fact that a young boy was not only conscious throughout the whole ordeal, but was thoroughly engrossed in watching them work on him. They expected him to be unconscious from the pain, to be knocked out by the injury—especially with the damage to Isiah’s brain and spine. Instead, he was wide awake and watching the human doctors with rapt attention.
Truth be told, Kurdan found himself wondering about that as well.
Neither he nor Isiah were immune to the damage they had received. He remembered his own battle with Gnadug, where the big orc had pummeled him into oblivion by focusing his strength on Kurdan’s spine. A single, powerful, and well-placed blow had been enough to seal his doom. He had been lucky that Isiah was there and able to salvage the situation, assuming control over Kurdan’s unconscious body. Now it was Kurdan’s turn to assume control of Isiah’s broken body. He didn’t know what magic bound him and the human together, but it was very convenient for whoever found himself in mortal danger.
Another interesting part of the human healing process was the bags of blood they brought in for the whole procedure. Kurdan was more than able to pull in the blood the doctors spilled as they went about healing in their human ways. Instead, he watched as the human doctors brought in a bag filled with blood and hung it on a pole placed higher than his head. They attached the bag to a narrow, flexible line, which in turn they attached to a fine needle. Kurdan watched the doctor insert that needle into a vein in his arm. He narrowed his eyes and prepared to purge any poisons like the one that would have dulled him and put him to sleep. What he found instead was a fresh supply of blood coursing through his veins. The blood didn’t belong to Isiah, but his own body didn’t recognize the blood as an impurity to be purged. He was surprised at that little bit of information. The stranger’s blood mingled with his own to match the amount that bled out, all while the doctors continued inserting their pins and plates into his bones before tightening them down with screws.
Kurdan continued watching the doctors wrap up their work. He was particularly mesmerized by the way the surgeon sewed his skin back together with such grace and precision. The doctors were clean and accurate, their tonics and ointments cleaning up the wounds to the point where Kurdan found no impurities for his blood to purge. Orcs would have no need for all this considering their grasp over the healing properties of blood magic, but it was nonetheless an interesting procedure to memorize. Such knowledge may prove useful for his slave researchers, especially when they got around to experimenting with herbs and roots that might help them heal better.
The orc chieftain continued watching, learning, and memorizing as much as he could. He ignored the low murmurs of the doctors crowding around the operating room, eager to find out more about the strange boy who watched his own body get sliced open with a grin on his face.
Chapter 23
“Um… I’m sorry?”
Isiah winced and squeezed his eyes shut as his mother tore into him, alternating between sobs of relief and accusations of idiocy. His own father stood beside her, gently shaking his head as he laid a supporting arm on his mother’s shoulder. His two siblings, however, had other plans.
“Wow… it’s like you’re a mummy!” said little Soo-Young, staring wide-eyed at the plaster casting wrapped around Isiah’s legs, arms, and torso.
“That’s so weird,” added James, the brother mimicking his younger sister’s saucer-like eyes. “How are you even still alive?”
“JAMES!” screeched Isiah’s mother, causing everyone in the room to wince. Bradley Hunter clasped the trembling hand of his wife, Hwa-Young, and pulled her in for a wordless hug. He turned around and frowned at James, who had the decency to duck his head in shame.
“You could just cease this pretense of yours and simply heal yourself, you know,” Kurdan said within Isiah’s thoughts. “Maybe then your mother would cease her squawking, which irritates me to no end.”
“Oh, lay off her,” thought Isiah back. “What do you expect her to do? Grunt and move on?”
“Grunt and move on.”
Isiah stopped thinking for a second as Kurdan’s thoughts overlapped with his own. He mentally sighed, refusing to acknowledge the fact that he sort of knew exactly what the orc was going to say.
“She’s not an orc, Kurdan. And besides, she’s always been a worrywart for as long as I can remember.”
&nbs
p; Kurdan huffed in disgust. “It is pitiful how she overreacts.”
“You know what, Kurdan? I would love to nominate you for the Dad of the Year awards. Maybe I’ll even cry for your kids when they finally pop out of their moms.”
“Hah!” barked Kurdan. “I will not cry and mewl over my offspring. I will beat strength and toughness into them, and they will be stronger for it—just as my father did.”
“And your father’s father’s father’s father and stuff,” interrupted Isiah. “Yeah, I get it. But what about your mom? Where was she the whole time you were growing up?”
Kurdan sniffed loudly and arrogantly within Isiah’s mind. “Died when I was young. I think she died to a raiding party when I was younger. Can’t remember which tribe got her though.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Eat your own pity, human. I have no need of it.”
“Well then, you can go suck your own—”
It was at that awkward moment of hostile introspection that a bunch of someones slowly pushed open the door and poked their heads inside with a sheepish smile on their face.
“Hi, Mister and Missis Hunter. We came by to check on Isiah. Is this a good time or…?”
“Hey, Livy,” Isiah said as he smiled and weakly flapped the hand held up by a cast. “Yeah, it’s all good. Is the gang with you?”
The young teen smiled brightly upon seeing Isiah’s liveliness as she nodded emphatically, her eyes moist with emotion. She pushed open the door and led the rest of Isiah’s friends into the small private room, quickly crowding it up.
“We were so relieved to hear that Isiah made it through,” said Hasan, bowing to Isiah’s mother and leaving as positive an impression as possible. “He reacted fast, pushing all of us out of the way before the van hit. If it weren’t for that, we would have all been mown down like bowling pins. I cannot thank him enough for that.”
“Yeah,” said Eddison. “One minute we’re strolling along, chill as can be. The next, Zeyah here went all ballistic and started kicking and shoving us all out of the way all at once like a ninja on steroids.”