Page 59 of Power of Draken

Rowan

Isettle on the floor beside Kai, angling my body to let the maximum light from the torch illuminate the wound. The shaft is broken and there isn't much of a tail left to grab onto. I pull the fabric away from the incision to get a better look at what we are dealing with—only to yank my hands away when Kai chokes on a pained howl.

Shit. I’d already suspected something on the arrow head, and his reaction proves me right. This isn’t just a puncture injury, it’s something else all together.

Kai gulps for breath, his face ashen, his jaw clenched so tight I fear his teeth might shatter. Sweat beads on his forehead despite the wet and cold cellar around us.

“Kai…” I hesitate, my hands hovering over the wound. I don’t know what to do. But I know that I don’t want to hurt him like that again. And I’d hardly done anything.

His ice-blue eyes flash with something. Pain, obviously. Stubbornness, always. But also… fear? No, that can't be right. Kai doesn't do fear.

Reaching down, he grabs the pant leg and tears the fabric himself until the whole calf is exposed. The flesh around the embedded arrowhead isan angry, inflamed red, but it’s the thin black spidery lines that radiate from that puncture wound that make my stomach turn. The skin between the lines is sickly and grayish, as if the arrow is leeching the life from the flesh it punctures.

I use a wet corner of my cloak to wipe away the blood. And he gasps again.

Maybe he is right. Maybe manipulating the wound will do more harm than good. “Do you want me to stop?” I ask.

Kai shakes his head, and for a second I see that glimmer of fear in his gaze again. “No,” he whispers. “Get it out. Please. Get it out of me.”

“All right.” I touch his good leg. “I will.”

Kai blinks and his walls return, his eyes all strength and determination again. "You’ll need something to pull it out with. There. That should do.”

I look to where he is pointing to find a small, rusted pair of pliers beside the wall. I realize they’ve been left behind by accident, not recently brought in on purpose.

Kai braces his hands against the floor in anticipation.

I leave the pliers on the floor. Digging about with them would be madness—crude madness—and rub my hands together instead.

"What are you doing?" He sounds annoyed, but I know better now. I can hear the hidden edge of anxiety in his voice.

"I’m trying to not be stupid. Don’t bother me.” Closing my eyes, I place my hands firmly on either side of the wound and focus on the one thing I know well: alchemy.

I don't usually work with metal through flesh, and the heat of Kai's skin coupled with the sticky wetness of his blood is distracting. Pushing past that, past the way his entire body spasms beneath my hands, I let my magic seek out the metal and the auric alloy I know so well. There, beneath the surface, I feel it. The harsh shape of the arrowhead, its edges jagged and cruel and pliable. But more importantly, I sense the unique signature of auric steel. My auric steel. I made the alloy that went into the arrow. I know it. And it knows me.

I begin to work, my fingers moving in small, precise motions as I manipulate the very structure of the metal. The steel obeys well enough—thegreatest danger is to avoid corroding Kai's flesh along with the projectile—but the auric alloy itself is another story.

"The alloy is reacting to something in your blood," I murmur, trying to pull back the molecules that keep escaping my control. It’s like the metal is alive, hungry, and latching onto Kai’s essence with a viciousness I can’t fully counter. "I don’t understand it.”

“Just get it out,” Kai says through gritted teeth.

Right. I focus on coaxing the alloy toward me, the molecules resisting the eviction from Kai's body. I've never felt them react like this before but I work through it, pouring my concentration and magic into the metal. Into Kai's flesh. Slowly, the metal begins to change at its core, shifting its shape from inside out until the arrow head takes an oval-like form, its edges smoothed and loose speckles of reactive auric alloy clinging to it under protest.

I don't warn Kai before pulling the metal free, but I don't breathe either until it comes out with a sickening pop.

Kai slumps forward slightly, catching his weight by bracing his hand on his good leg. "Thank you," he pants, closing his eyes. “Thank you. Rowan.”

Rowan. Not Ainsley.

I let out a shuddering breath and let my head drop to my chest. I’m exhausted. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Staring down at my hands, still slick with Kai's blood, I discover them trembling. I stick them into my armpits, both to still them and to find warmth. Because I’m cold again. That anger that was keeping heat rolling through me?—it’s gone. Spent. And I can’t get it back.

“Are you alright?” Kai asks. He’s torn the hem of his shirt off and is now wrapping the material around the wound with a great deal less discomfort than he’d had earlier.

“I’m fine.” My head throbs and my vision blurs at the edges. The dank air of the cellar is suffocating, thick with the coppery scent of blood that seems to bother me more than Kai now. How had things shifted so quickly?

“I've never felt metal behave so malevolently before,” I say. “It was actively fighting against my control, as if it had a malicious will of its own. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You concoct an alloy in a workshop. It’s not exactly real life over there.”

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