She wraps both hands around my neck and pulls me down and I sink into her and the van lurches sideways and a sheet pan slides off a stack and crashes to the floor.
Slow. I start slow because my body is wrecked and she is small and the angle is steep and the fifty-pound bag of bread flour keeps sliding under us. She digs her heels into my lower back. Pulls me closer. The flour bag splits.
White powder erupts across the tarp like a smoke bomb. It coats her hair, her eyelashes, the sweat on her collarbone. She coughs. Laughs. Tightens around me.
"That was—oh—that was a twenty-dollar bag of?—"
I roll my hips. She stops counting dollars.
The van rocks in a steady, creaking rhythm that any passing traveler could identify from half a mile away. Sand pings against the dented panels. Her nails score tracks down my back, cutting through dried blood and flour paste, and each bright line of pain grounds me in this moment, in this body, in this ridiculous vehicle.
She breaks first. Her spine curves like a drawn bow, shoulders pressed flat, chin thrown back, and she says my name again. Not a command this time.
A surrender.
I follow her over.
The van settles on its ruined shocks. Flour dust hangs in the air, suspended in shafts of amber light. She breathes beneath me, her body rising and falling against mine, her heartbeat wild and slowing.
My forehead drops against her shoulder. Vanilla. Sugar. Even under everything.
"You split my flour."
"Send me a bill."
The door is gone. I ripped it off its hinges three days ago on a dark highway to wrestle a griffin, and Magnolia never replaced it. Wind screams through the gap at sixty miles an hour, whipping flour dust off my tactical vest and scattering it across the slag road like snow.
I don't mind. The breeze helps. Keeps the venom burn cool.
Magnolia drives the way she bakes. Aggressive cornering, total spatial awareness, absolute refusal to slow down for anything that isn't a direct physical obstacle. She takes the on-ramp to the interstate at forty-five and the van's rear tires break loose on the gravel transition and she corrects without blinking, one hand on the wheel, the other reaching back to grab a roll of gauze from the scattered first aid kit on the flour-dusted cargo floor.
She tosses it into my lap without looking.
"Start with the arm. The one that's turning purple."
"It's green."
"It's green AND purple, which is not a color combination that occurs naturally on living things."
I unroll the gauze with my teeth, hook the end around my bicep, and start wrapping. The venom wound is ugly. Three parallel lacerations from the crawler's forelimb, each one swollen and weeping something translucent that smells like battery acid. The flesh around the cuts has gone a deep eggplant shade that contrasts unpleasantly with my skin. She's right. Not a good color.
The gauze soaks through immediately. I wrap a second layer.
"Tighter."
"If I go tighter, the circulation?—"
"Tighter. Venom moves through lymph, not blood. You want compression."
She cuts her eyes at me for exactly one second, then back to the road. "How do you know that?"
"I've been stung eleven times."
"Eleven."
"This is twelve."
She accelerates past a livestock transport hauling caged basilisks. The driver honks. She doesn't flinch.
