King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,28

sink. Snapped on the gloves Kay had given her.

“Come stand by me,” Kay instructed.

When she peeled the towel away, they found half-clotted blood, and the wound didn’t start weeping again. Still, Kay let out a displeased sigh that rustled against the fabric of her paper mask. “He lost a lot of blood.”

Rose took a steadying breath behind her own mask, and swore she could taste her own fear. “What do we do?”

“Irrigate, first. Then I gotta make sure nothing important got hit. Then sanitize, and stich him up.”

Nausea threatened, but Rose swallowed it down. He wouldn’t die. He wouldn’t. “Tell me what to do.”

“Good girl. Hand me that bottle over there.”

~*~

Once clean, the wound was even deeper than it had looked. Kay clucked and tutted over it, calling Beck an idiot. “The intestine, really?” she muttered, and spread the wound wider.

Rose passed over everything when Kay asked for it; held the basin to catch blood, to catch saline solution. Watched all of it, queasy, pulse pounding in her ears, sweating. Don’t die, please don’t die, please.

Kay’s hands were steady and sure; she never flinched from the blood or the glimpses of viscera, and so Rose refused to, either. Beck had slit a woman’s throat for her, and she could look at his insides without weeping if it meant saving him.

It seemed to be one long, drawn-out moment, the sort of precipice moment when you were caught on the edge of panic, deciding whether to run or fight. But when Kay taped down the last of the bandaging, stepped back and said, “Well, that should do it. Now we have to pump him full of meds and hope infection doesn’t take hold,” Rose looked up at the clock and realized it was nearly five in the morning. It had taken hours.

Rose realized she was shaking. Her legs and back were on fire, her ankles and knees throbbing from standing so long. But the only thing that mattered was the steady, shallow rise and fall of Beck’s chest.

She stared at it now, its light dusting of hair, darker than that on his head, a match for the trail that led down from his navel and disappeared into his waistband. His nipples were drawn up to tight peaks in the cold. His skin was paler on his body than on his face, and even paler now, from the loss of blood. As smooth as his voice – save for the scars, and there were many. A few ugly, puckered marks that looked like old gunshot wounds, and jagged streaks and fishhooks from knives or any number of sharp objects. None looked as wicked as the wound they’d just closed.

“He’ll be okay?”

“Hopefully.” Kay pulled down her mask and stretched out her back with a quiet curse. “He’s strong, and stubborn as all hell. We’ll get him on some meds, make him stay in bed a week or so – or, hell, as long as he’ll let us. He should pull through just fine.” If it was bluster, it sounded real enough.

Rose let out a shaky breath. “I thought…all that blood…”

Kay turned to her, her smile soft and warm. “I know, honey. But you did real good.”

Her eyes burned.

“Nope, no waterworks yet,” Kay said, not unkindly. “We need to move him. That old futon in the pink parlor’s on castors.”

It was, and it wasn’t hard for the two of them to wheel it down the hall and into the kitchen. Rose called on her last reserves of energy, suspecting Kay did the same, and together they laid the futon out flat and made it up with fresh sheets and blankets. Moved all the chairs and maneuvered it in close to the table; locked the wheels and, somehow, slowly, managed to shift Beck over onto it. Gravity helped – the futon was lower – and with Kay cradling his head, and Rose moving his legs, they didn’t jostle him too badly.

Rose helped get his boots and pants off, too tired and worried to spare much thought for the tight black boxer-briefs he wore underneath. Blood had seeped through his jeans and stained his legs, and Rose cleaned it off with a damp towel while Kay stacked two pillows beneath his head.

They built a fire in the kitchen hearth, wheeled the futon close and locked the wheels again. They covered him in blankets, and Kay gave him both a steroid and antibiotic shot. They cleaned up the makeshift operating table, set the med kit to rights.

Now it