Page 14 of Fangs
He stumbled onto a gravel bar along the side of the river and dropped to his knees with a groan. He laid me down, his fingers pressing against my neck for a pulse. I still couldn’t feel my body, and exhaustion crashed over me, my eyelids fluttering shut.
“Ember!” He might have gripped my chin. “Stay awake!"
I couldn’t get my eyes back open, and he swore, gathering me into his arms again.
“Don’t you dare fuckin’ die on me,” he growled, and then he started running.
Despite my head bouncing against his chest, I drifted away.
I woke up to darkness. I was lying on a cold rock floor, still shivering, but I couldn’t seeanything.For a terrified moment, I wondered if I was still in that awful cell under the watchtower, but then light flared, blinding me. I blinked, trying to get my eyes to adjust, and focused on Lee’s face as he coaxed a small fire to life. I scanned our surroundings, but all I could see was rock. Were we in a fuckingcave?
Lee stood and grabbed a pack from the cave floor. As the fire illuminated the cave more, I saw several packs and supplies. This wasn’t just a random cave; it was a hideout or?—
My thoughts cut off as Lee started stripping off his wet clothes. He’d turned his back to me, but I stared at his lean, muscled body that emerged. He was more slender than Wolf and less rugged, more like the people in a troupe of performers who had traveled with the Reapers once. Black tattoos covered his back and arms—jagged black strokes that wrapped around his arms and twisted across his back in a fluid, unpredictable design. It looked more like someone had splashed ink across his back than any tattoo I’d ever seen.
A wet slap echoed as his dripping clothes fell heavily to the floor, reminding me how ice-cold and soaked my own clothing was. I might have been scared of his intentions as he stripped naked, but he dressed as quickly as he undressed, moving at a speed that was difficult to follow. As he buttoned up his shirt, he turned around and caught me staring at him, and a corner of his mouth twitched up; I couldn’t find the energy to care.
The parts of my body I could feel burned with cold, while the rest felt like heavy weights attached to me. I tried to curl my stiff fingers, but they simply twitched.
Lee grabbed something from the pack and moved around the fire to kneel beside me.
“Alright, here’s the deal,” he said. “We gotta get you out of those wet clothes so you don’t freeze to death.”
A stab of panic went through me.
“I’m gonna help you,” he continued, “’cause there’s no way you can do it yourself.”
“No,” I croaked.
“If it makes you feel any better, Wolf is gonna beat the shit out of me for all of this.”
“No.” My voice sounded soweak.
“What the fuck did you think was gonna happen when you went charging into a half-frozen river?” His voice grew sharper.
I attempted to move away, fear making my head swim, but all of me was numb and exhausted, and I shivered so hard it felt like I was seizing. He took my arm and pulled me upright, which made the room tilt and spin as pain stabbed through my head. When I could focus again, he was undoing the buttons at the bottom of Scar’s shirt, and panic swallowed me whole.
“No!"
It felt like waking up after being drugged with a narc, and that realization did not help. I tried to smack his hands away from me, but my body moved sluggishly. Still, I managed to make it just difficult enough that he couldn’t hold onto the buttons.
“Ember, stop. I’m trying to help you.”
I didn’t answer, putting all my energy into forcing my numb limbs to move. He suddenly released my shirt and grabbed my face with both hands, forcing me to meet his gaze. He was grimacing like he was in physical pain.
“I am not going to hurt you!"
“Stop!"
“You are gonna die of hypothermia if you stay in these wet clothes.”
I didn’t fucking care. My brain was trying to drag me back to Juck’s tent in the desert. He released my face, and I almost fell over trying to get away.
“Look,” he held up a man’s flannel shirt. “I got you some of my clothes. I’m gonna help you get dressed, that’s it, I swear.”
I managed to shift backward a little, but he caught my arm. I tried to jerk free, my head swimming as I gasped in frantic breaths.
“Gods, Ember,pleasehelp me out here,” he said in a low voice.
