Page 71 of Katya and the Young God

Katya would like to think of herself as used to dog behavior by now, but this is a new one. She shimmies out from underneath the blankets, hugging herself in the chilly air of the cabin.

She stares at the dog, who spins around again, before it fixes her with a wild-eyed glance, the most happy and playful she’s seen him since...since before they went under the mountain.

Then, again, all of a sudden, Stepan stops in his tracks, drops to a sitting position, and waits, mouth open in a wide grin.

Katya eyes the dog, the thunder and lightning outside shaking the roof, but the dog just stares back after the impromptu freak out, happy.

“Are you going to —" she starts, before the hair on the back of her arms sticks up, and —

With a crack, all of a sudden, Pieter’s in front of her. Too close, in her personal space, no warning and —

She jerks away, but he stumbles, clutching at his midsection, his knees giving out.

“Fuck,” she blurts, catching him before he falls to the floor. He leans heavily against her, forehead against her shoulder, visibly weaving in and out of consciousness.

Blood seeps out between his fingers, as he jerks, and a pocket knife clatters to the floor. Bright and copper.

Stepan the dog only thumps his tail.

“Whoa, okay, you okay?” Katya asks, uselessly. There’s blood, there’s so much blood, he’s obviously not okay, and she can see that, but... “What happened, where is she?”

He breathes out, hard, a raspy noise that strikes everything as wrong, but he jerks his head upright.

His eyes are fever bright, not at all lucid. “They’re torturing her,” he pants out, his bloody hand coming up and grabbing Katya’s chin. “You have to get her, you have to get her out.”

“Where is she?” Katya’s brain kicks in. She’s gonna need a place, she’s going to need security measures in place, she’s going to need weapons and back up and —

“They’ve got her up North,” he says, and his voice weakens, and if she wasn’t holding him up he would’ve fallen. A flair of panic hits his eyes. “You need to get help, you need —"

Suddenly, he jerks her chin towards him, crushing his mouth against hers.

Katya freezes, just a moment, before he slumps, eyes rolling back, passing the fuck out.

“Oh Christ,” Katya blurts out, his entire body weight leaning against her, and all she can do is control his fall down onto the ugly floral couch.

Stepan the dog wags his tail again, trotting over and sticking his nose in Pieter’s face.

Pieter’s entire front is soaked with blood, and with the bloody copper knife on the floor, that’s going to be the first of Katya’s problems.

Her lips burning, she shakes herself loose, hiking up Pieter’s shirt to the injury. It’s a gut wound, obviously a last moment stab, and the knife isn’t big, but...

“Fuck.”

She rips the rest of his shirt, wadding it up and holding it against the wound. He’ll need surgery, stitches, something, not to mention any poisoning from the copper and —

Standard operating procedure for any injuries on an other is to call in an Organization medic, as taking them to a hospital could jeopardize more than they know, but —

But he’s bleeding, and bad, and —

She dashes to the sink, her bloody hands scrabbling for her medical kit, pulling out the gauze and medical tape, something, anything to hold the wound together, staunch some bleeding, stabilize him. Disinfect the wound, clean it out, get a blood transfusion, something —

It’s too low to hit his lungs, too small to hit many organs, and the blood is too dull and too slow to have hit an artery, but his pulse flutters underneath her fingers, too inconsistent for her to count.

She snaps on the gloves from the medical kit, unrolling the emergency saline IV, and fixes it in his arm. First things first.

Leaving the gauze taped against the wound, she fills up a bowl of water from her tap, and begins to wipe up the blood covering his chest. He moves, restlessly, but his eyes remain shut.

Good. Giving stitches to a Demigod doesn’t seem like fun to do when they’re conscious.

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