The Iron Thorn

9 Poison Blood

WHEN I CAME awake again, I was lying on something lumpy and not altogether soft, while the crisp air teased my bare skin from neck to … I flushed, trying to yank the tatters of my blouse together. The last thing I wanted was to be like Stephanie Falacci, the girl Cecelia and her friends had teased mercilessly for still wearing camisoles and long underwear. My brassiere, washed so many times it had gone gray, wasn’t any better.

“Easy!” Dean’s voice came in as I thrashed. “Easy, kiddo! You have to stay still while I clean this wound.”

Everything was out of focus—I felt like I still had a hundred eyes, was still connected to the shoggoth.

Cal’s voice piped in, like I was scanning channels in the aether. “Is she going to die?”

“Not if you shut up so I can stop this poison from pumping all through her,” Dean snapped. His jacket creaked, and I saw him draw out a flat silver bottle.

Dean unscrewed the cap, took a quick swig and then poised the flask over me. “You have to stay still, Aoife. No matter how much it hurts. You receiving me?”

“You smoke.…” Talking, I sounded as drugged as any of the violent patients in Nerissa’s ward. I felt twice as looped. My words bled together, and my tongue was too fat for my mouth. “You drink.… Is there anything you don’t do, Mr. Harrison?” I heard giggling, and realized it was me.

“I was never much good in a beauty contest,” Dean said shortly. “Cal, hold her shoulders.”

“I’m not getting that close,” Cal said. The gold streak of his head shook vigorously. “If her blood gets on me—”

“Listen up.” Dean’s voice had gone low and hard as the grinding gears of the Proctor’s ravens. “Either she’s your friend and you’re gonna help her survive long enough to get help, or you really are a yellow little bug-eyed worm and you can walk away right now.”

“You don’t understand!” Cal cried. “The blood … it’s just so—”

He let out a yelp as Dean yanked him down. Cal’s impact didn’t make any sound, and I identified the substance under us as moldy hay, the patchwork of sky and dark above as a rotting roof.

“Hold her,” Dean said again. “If she thrashes, she’s just gonna bleed more.”

With that, he tipped the flask over the shoggoth’s bite. The pain that came was so fast and hot, I thought for a moment that I was back in Lovecraft, that I’d been caught on the way to Arkham, and that my bare body was strapped into the castigator.

I shrieked and bucked against Cal’s grip. “All right,” Dean said. “All right, it’s sterilizing your wound. Stopping the poison from spreading any further into you.”

I didn’t care if I was on fire and it was water, I just wanted the pain to stop. I’d had wounds cauterized before, during machine shop classes, but this was worse. It was worse than anything, it was like ice had frozen my veins, was killing me by inches as it reached fingers to my heart.…

“Is she going to go viral?” Cal demanded again, as I collapsed back onto the hay. “Is she going to change?”

My sight and hearing faded in and out, and more than anything I wanted to plunge back into that dreamlike floating world that the shoggoth’s venom had shown me. At least there, I didn’t hurt.

“I look like a damn surgeon to you, cowboy?” Dean snarled. “I don’t friggin’ know.”

Cal let go of me and backed away. “I just thought … you seem like you have experience with virals. Creatures and stuff.”

Dean snorted. “I steer clear of ’em same as any starched-up Academy boy would. I do want to live until I’m twenty.”

Cal started to say something else, but I lurched to the side as I felt my last meal come up. There wasn’t much, just some bile, but I retched until I felt the muscles in my back spasm.

Dean tucked my hair back under my collar until I collapsed into a sweating, shivering heap on the hay once more. “There,” he said. “Yakking’s a good sign. That’s your body trying to get the virus out.”

I didn’t tell him it was already far too late—that a dormant strain of necrovirus had lain in my blood since I was born, and that in a few weeks it would give birth itself, with merciless swiftness, and eat my sanity alive. In a lucid state, I could lie to myself, but not now.

Dean’s arms went around me and I was lifted again. This time vertigo caused a giddy drop in my empty stomach, and my head echoed as he pulled me tight against his chest.

“If she’s sicking up she might have a chance,” Dean told Cal. “We gotta get her up to that house. Get the bleeding stopped. She can sweat it out if we give her proper care.”

“You sure know a lot about the necrovirus.” Cal’s voice made me cold again, even as Dean’s proximity sent fingers of heat lighting across my skin, like when you go outside in a snowstorm without gloves. Dean felt like frostbite.

As he carried me up the path to the mansion, I lost myself again in the sensations the venom brought over me, my skin sensitive enough that even the scratch of my uniform stockings was a small agony.

“Make it stop,” I begged Dean. He pressed me against his chest as his footsteps bounced us up a steep trail. Bare trees laced their branches over our heads, forming a bony canopy that blurred under my sight until it became actual bones, an army of fingers and hands covered in weeping flesh and a tattered shroud reaching for me.

I moaned and pressed my face against Dean’s chest. The nearer to him I stayed, the less it hurt.

“Hang on, Aoife,” Cal said. His voice was like needles through Dean’s comfort. “Hang on, we’re almost there.”

“No …,” I moaned, and clutched at Dean’s shirt. I had fire in my blood, poison burning me inside like oil on the Erebus. “No more, I can’t do it.…”

“Yes, you can,” Dean panted. “You can, Aoife. Just a few minutes more.”

He squeezed me tighter, and in that way I managed to keep myself from crying out again as we climbed, slowly, through the mist and toward the dawn.