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It happened so quickly that I barely caught it all, but the snake struck at the same time as Ty, who sacrificed his forearm to get a grip on the snake. Ty cursed as he got bitten pretty badly, not that it stopped him. In the meantime, I threw myself down and got my hands around the tail, then hurriedly locked my feet over a higher-up part of its body.
Oh my God.
Its strength took me aback and catapulted me into shock; I wasn’t gonna be able to hold on for very long. The snake slithered and coiled in its struggle, its thick, smooth skin sliding between my hands. But then I had the snake’s midsection curling up around my foot and calf.
“Try to shift closer to the bag,” Ty grunted. “I think we can take him.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and pushed myself off the ground, the tail still in my grasp, and I managed to limp two steps toward the sack before the snake constricted around my leg.
“Jesus,” I groaned. “Ty, I—”
“I see it, kid. I see you. Hold on. One second.”
Adrenaline spiked as the snake tried to coil itself higher up my leg, and it pissed me off too. Anger took over, and I growled at the exertion and pushed through the pain. Inch by inch, I moved us closer to where Ty wanted us, and he seemed to shift gears. He went from reaching for his blade to dragging the snake toward the bag. Blood was seeping out from a wide wound in his arm, and we were already sweating buckets.
“You okay?”
I nodded jerkily, panting, and landed on the grass with a thump. The snake didn’t waste a second to grab on to more of me, but by then, Ty was holding the bag over the snake’s head and shoving the beast inside it.
By squeezing the tail against the ground, I managed to loosen its grip on me somewhat. I knew what cold snaps did to snakes down here, and we could consider ourselves lucky. While the snake had all its strength, it would’ve been faster if it hadn’t been in the process of warming up after a chilly night.
As Ty forced another foot of the snake into the bag, he bumped into me and got down on the ground too. His heavy breaths matched my own, and we wrestled together from different ends of the coiling snake, until my leg was free and I could help him get the last of it into the bag. And throughout it all, he’d worked one-handed, while the other held on to the snake’s head through the fabric, making sure it stayed inside.
“Holy fuck.” My back hit the grass, and I drew a big breath of relief once Ty had closed the bag.
Sidenote, this had to be the most uncomfortable lawn ever cultivated.
Ty was smarter. He slumped down on the deck instead.
“Why is the grass so damn sharp?” I asked, out of breath.
“Because it’s St. Augustine grass. It’s meant to look good, nothing else.” He scrubbed his hands over his face and then cast a glance at the bag. “I’m fuckin’ spent.”
Yeah, me too. But now I couldn’t look away from the grisly bite marks on his arm. The teeth of an anaconda sat backward-facing in its mouth, in several rows, and they were sharp as fuck. So if someone got bitten and a friend tried to pull the snake away, they were more likely to shred the tendons of the person who’d been bitten.
With that said, it was an easy sacrifice, and most bites only required minimal tending to. I would’ve used Ty’s approach too.
I got off the ground with a grunt and made my way over to the deck, where I sat down next to him and hauled out my first aid kit.
Ty glanced at the kit. “You come prepared, huh?”
“Ever since we were called to a ranch outside Richmond and a neglected ball python sank its teeth into my shoulder.” I ignored his extended hand, understanding he was thinking of doing this himself, but I had needs too. I wanted to do it.
He humored me. I felt his eyes on me as I cleaned the wound, but he said nothing.
Countless little puncture wounds formed the shape of the anaconda’s bite mark. Ty’s arm had to hurt. Some punctures were deeper than others.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been bitten, though. Far from it. I spotted hundreds of the tiniest scars along his arm, so small I had to be up close to see them.
“How’s your leg?” he murmured.
“Fine. Just some pulsing and tingling.” After patting his wound dry with a sterile compress, I unwrapped a cotton swab and began applying antiseptic cream to the punctures. “Do you have any reptiles of your own?”
Back in the day, he’d had two snakes and one lizard.
