Page 34 of In This Iron Ground
His blood was warm on his head, dripping down into his eye.
“I’m fine,” he said.
They took him to the hospital, where he got stitches. Nicola showed up looking upset. Damien repeated the phrase—I’m fine, I’m fine—but nobody seemed to be comforted.
Damien didn’t understand why everybody made such a big fuss about it. Koko gaped when she saw him. Hakan approached him during lunch time, looking angry for the first time that Damien had seen. After school, both Mia and Cameron looked stern and worried at the bruise and stitched cut.
“We just want you to be safe,” Cameron said when Damien finally asked why everybody was making such a big deal about something that was clearly an accident. Damien frowned in confusion.
Hewassafe. The cut was just his body. No one was getting to his soul anymore.
“Damien, how would you feel if Lallo got injured? Even if it were an accident?” Mia asked.
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“’Cause…I don’t know. It just is.”
Mia looked at him. Her eyes were sad. Damien didn’t know how to make it better. He froze as Mia leaned down and hugged him tightly, rubbing his back. After a moment, he relaxed against her, tentatively lifting his arms.
He’d been too out of it to appreciate Mia’s hug when he’d been in the hospital. This seemed different. Less desperate. A simple show of comfort.
Damien closed his eyes and let himself feel it for a moment. He didn’t know how long it would last.
**********
Summer arrived with a bleaching heatwave that set the tone for the season. The school year ended with barely a whimper. Damien let himself be dragged through the weeks of tests that dissolved into a week in which they did little more than watch movies and play games as the holidays approached.
Damien was simply grateful that none of the students had found out about what he had tried to do, steadfastly avoiding the spot where he had taken the pills. He had a singularly uncomfortable meeting with the school counsellor in which Damien was monosyllabic, refusing to cause any more trouble. He kept his head down, determined to simply survive the end of the school year.
The summer holidays started with the usual mixture of anxiety and relief. Damien always felt unmoored by the sudden lack of routine, overwhelmed by choices. Despite this, the summer of his fourteenth year turned out to be the best summer in recent memory.
Life in the foster home settled into a soft-edged routine that managed not to feel constraining. Damien mostly got along with the other people in the foster house, building relationships that were not exactly friendships, but eroded into shape by mere exposure. During those months, however, Damien didn’t spend much time there, instead being invited practically daily to the Salgado House.
Damien resisted that first week. He now had a phone and would avoid or deflect Koko and Hakan’s text messages, giving vague excuses when Cameron or Mia invited him in person for the next day. Damien didn’t want to fall into greed, into taking too much until there wasn’t anything left. Mia had cornered him one day, however, sitting him down in the same spot of the couch from that first night.
“You are welcome here,” she had said. Damien had squirmed under the pin of her gaze.
“I know,” he had replied, but it had only made her sterner, in that soft way of hers.
“Damien. If you don’t want to be here, I would never want to force you. But if you are saying no to our invitations for any other reason—if you think for a second we don’t want you here, or that we will ever not want you here, then I need to just…set you straight.We want you here. Okay?” she had said, each word a press of a hand against his chest, making him breathless and warm.
“Okay,” his small voice had replied.
On one of the first weeks thereafter, Damien got to meet the rest of the extended pack. He realized that Mia must have been keeping them away from him purposefully, because they all seemed eager to meet him.
He was instantly overwhelmed. There were uncles and aunts and cousins. There were witches, a seer, and even a necromancer. There were both wolves and humans in the pack, which Damien had not realized was possible. There was name after name after name. Damien couldn’t keep up.
Damien had expected some suspicion, and some members of the pack were definitely friendlier than others. But there was no hostility. It was incomprehensible to Damien that they would simply trust him like that, until he realized it wasn’t him they trusted. It was Mia. Their Kephale. For some reason she had accepted him, and the pack had followed.
All the kids, mostly younger than him, treated him like another cousin.
“You smell like pack,” Koko said like that explained everything. Maybe it did. It was clear that he was being welcomed, but Damien couldn’t help but feel like an intruder. Not just because he wasn’t pack, but because he wasn’t family.
“Hello, there,” Nova said when she spotted him. Suddenly, Damien remembered her promise to teach him about some of her craft. He turned suddenly shy. A lot had happened that year. Maybe she wouldn’t want to anymore. “I believe I owe you some lessons,” she said with an impish smile.
“You don’t have to,” Damien replied.
