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Simply hearing that my lungs were intact eased my chest until my sips of air slowly elongated into longer, steadier inhales.
His eyes went to my bloodied arm. “But this…” He gently took my arm, turning it this way and that. Then, scooting back, he peeled off his black sweater.
He kept a slim wooden stake strapped to his left forearm. I imagined the stake that currently protruded from the Draug’s back had once been attached to Ronan’s right arm.
But then my eyes went to his shirt, a plain white cotton tee. I could see the planes of his chest and the faint shadow and texture of hair running in a line down his chest.
“What—?” What are you doing? I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t finish the thought, because Ronan had begun to strip off his undershirt, too.
My cheeks blazed hot, and I looked away, then back again. But he’d slipped his sweater back on and had begun to tear the white cotton T-shirt into strips. He worked silently, and I wondered if he was as self-conscious about all this as I was.
“We need to stop the bleeding,” he explained.
“Of course,” I stammered. “It’s okay. Since drinking the blood, I’ve been clotting quickly. ”
“It’s not your healing I worry about. It’s your scent. ” He met my eyes, looking grave. “The blood will call the others. ”
“You mean I’d be bait?” I gave a nervous laugh. “Like chumming for sharks?”
But he answered in all seriousness, “Precisely like that. ”
He wound the strip around my arm. The fabric was still warm from his body, and ironically it gave me a shiver. He knotted it off and pulled me to standing, supporting me for a moment at the elbows.
His hands went to my face, cupping it. I held my breath again, but this time for an entirely different reason. His eyes were so green and so deeply locked with mine, but I didn’t for a second think he was doing his hypnotic thing. I knew in my heart, in this moment there were just the two of us—no magic, no vampires, no compulsion—just Ronan and me. Not taking his eyes from mine, he tenderly smudged the tears from my cheeks. The gesture cracked my heart as surely as my rib had been.
But then he thumbed some foul sludge from my cheek and wiped it on his pants. I drooped. Of course. It was Ronan and me—Tracer and Acari. So much for our moment.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
I managed one step and then another. I hunched to the right, curling into the pain, but I was mobile. “Yeah,” I said, a little surprised at myself. “I can. ”
He nodded. “Lying down is more painful than walking. ”
I frowned at that.
“Don’t worry,” he added, with a sarcastic gleam in his eye. “The worst is always the second day. ”
Now I really frowned at him. “I think you’re happy I got hurt. ”
He ignored that. For now. “You’ll need to massage the muscles to keep them from hardening up. ”
He bent over the Draug’s body, retrieving our weapons and calmly pulling them out as if he were carving the Thanksgiving turkey. Black sludge had puddled around the monster’s head and oozed from the stake wound. “Others will come soon, drawn to the smell. ”
Ronan’s jostling made more of that tarry crap seep from the body, and I held a hand over my nose and mouth. “The smell? They can probably smell this in Iceland. ”
“A Draug is rotting. It carries diseases. How do you think it’d smell?” He grabbed a clump of coarse grass and cleaned my stars and his stake, then offered my weapons back. “They’ll need a more thorough cleaning when you get back. ”
“Gross,” I murmured, although I was thrilled I wasn’t the one who’d done the initial scrub. The gore really was thick like tar, looking all gummy and bubbly.
“Now,” he said, “we’ve got to get out of here. ”
I spun on my heel, gritting my teeth through the pain. “You don’t have to tell me twice. ” I wasn’t eager to meet whatever creatures there were that’d actually be drawn to such a putrid thing.
With my injury to contend with, our progress was slow, but once we put some distance between us and the corpse, I began to talk. I had questions, yes. But mostly I was worried about whatever lecture Ronan was cooking up for me in his head. Wanting to distract him, I asked, “So there are other Draug on the island?”
He gave a tight nod.
Okay. Apparently, he wasn’t going to be chatty. But then I began to wonder. …“Why do the Draug just roam around waiting to attack us? I mean, you’d think they’d just attack and eat one another. ”
