10. Chapter
713 Words
Corin
The darkness was not complete. It felt as though I were floating at the bottom of a deep, murky swamp, where sounds and lights reached me only as dull fragments. I had no sense of how much time had passed. Minutes? Days? I only knew that my body was no longer lying on frozen, damp forest litter. Something soft was beneath me, but that softness felt alien and dangerous.
Suddenly, a sharp, corrosive pain tore through my back. I groaned, but the sound caught in my throat, which was so dry it felt as if I had swallowed sand. I felt some kind of liquid trickling over the places where the whip had struck—not cooling, but burning, as if liquid fire were being poured into open wounds.
“Stay… still…” I heard a voice. It was deep, rumbling, like the low growl before an earthquake. The meaning of the words slipped past me; I only felt the weight of the sound.
The pain became so intense that my mind simply shut down. Darkness swallowed me again.
When I came to next, I wanted to scream because of my arm. My right arm—the one the wolf had torn apart—was throbbing as if a red-hot iron were being pressed into my flesh. I felt the bandages wrapped tightly around the limb, but the dull, grinding pain deep in my bones told me the injury went far deeper.
I tried to open my eyes. My vision was blurred; I saw only patches—a high, dark ceiling of wooden beams and the flickering light of a fireplace casting an orange dance across the walls. I tried to move, but my body refused to obey.
Then everything changed at once. Strong hands slid beneath me and lifted me up. The movement was agony; my back and my arm screamed together.
“Too hot… the fever isn’t breaking,” the rumbling voice said.
Before I could grasp what was happening, my body met icy water. I was plunged into a massive tub filled with chunks of ice and freezing water. The shock was primal; my lungs seized. The cold stabbed into my inflamed skin like knives, and the fever-burning wounds seemed to hiss beneath the ice.
I tried to thrash, tried to escape the frozen death gripping me, but a huge hand held me down by the shoulder, keeping me submerged.
“We have to,” the voice thundered. “Your brain will boil if we don’t cool you down.”
I was shaking violently, my teeth chattering, my body convulsing from shock. The mixture of cold and pain was unbearable. Then the hands lifted me out again and wrapped me in something soft and warm. The contrast sent me back into unconsciousness.
When I woke again, cold sweat covered my body. In my fever dreams, I saw Glacier laughing as he watched the wolves tear me apart. But whenever the nightmares tried to pull me under, that rumbling voice dragged me back.
I felt someone gently lift my head and pour a bitter liquid into my mouth. I swallowed, because my instincts told me this meant life. The liquid burned its way down my throat, but a few minutes later the pounding in my back and arm began to dull.
For a moment, I managed to focus. I saw a figure looming above me in the shadows. He was enormous, his face blurred by the half-light, but his eyes glowed like two dark embers. I didn’t know who he was. Another tormentor? Or a savior? Fear still lurked in my numbed limbs.
I wanted to ask where my mother was. I wanted to ask why they hadn’t left me to die in the mud. But my eyelids grew heavy again. The last thing I felt before sinking back into a coma-like sleep was a large, hot hand closing firmly around my uninjured left one. It did not let go. It felt like an anchor in the middle of a storm.
“Rest…” the voice whispered, and this time, beneath the anger, I sensed something strange—raw, instinctive protectiveness.
With that awareness, I fell back into the darkness, but after the ice, this darkness no longer felt hostile.
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