A Dark and Stormy Knight Read online

  She’s alive.

  At last, after a hell of a lot of wheezing, her long, black hair hanging in front of her face, the woman rolls onto her back tiredly, a hand pressed to her stomach as she faces the sky, breathing in and out raggedly.

  Her full lips are parted, and when she raises her lashes to gaze up at the stars, I stare into her eyes for the first time.

  Her eyes are blue. Bright blue. Ice blue.

  Star blue.

  She flicks her gaze from the sky...to me. And she watches me for a long moment—silent, just breathing. We stare at one another for a minute, two, as if mesmerized. I can't look away.

  And then, finally, she speaks.

  “You saved me,” she murmurs.

  It’s not a question.

  I blink down at her, the hairs on the back of my neck rising because...her voice. It’s low and deep, almost a growl. Gruff.

  And I… I could swear I’ve heard it before.

  But that’s impossible. I’ve never seen this woman before in my life. I’d remember if I had. She’s striking. It would be impossible to look at her face even once and then forget it. Her features are smooth and chiseled, as if she’s a walking statue. People don’t spend months of their lives sculpting not-beautiful people. A sculpture is exquisite because an artist pours his or her own desires into it, forming the perfect person.

  And that’s what she is, lying there with her wet hair spread around her face like a dark halo.

  She’s…exquisite.

  “Yes,” I say, and then I cough a little in embarrassment, realizing that there was a long pause between her words and mine. I reach up, brush my fingers against my gold pendant nervously. “Yes—I...I got you out of the water. Are you okay?”

  She grimaces a little and flicks her gaze from my eyes back up to the sky. “No,” she replies simply, her jaw clenching as she curls her gloved hand upon her middle.

  She’s wearing leather gloves and, well, armor. Those metal pieces on her body are armor, I realize now. But…we don’t have a local Renaissance festival (the closest one is a few hours away). And there aren’t any other festivals in town right now that somebody would dress up for. No conventions. I would have probably heard of a medieval-style performance art piece going on tonight, if there was one, and we don’t even have a big Live Action Role Playing community in the city.

  So, why is she wearing armor?

  “So…you’re not okay?” I ask, sitting back on my heels. “Do you need to go to the hospital?”

  She exhales and winces, her brow furrowing deeply as she tries to sit up. I reach out to help her, putting an arm around her shoulders, which feels oddly intimate…though I just lugged her unconscious body up a ladder and put my mouth on hers. There’s a small part of me that’s recognizing I’m kind of attracted to her, and that makes me feel awkward as I touch her now.

  But most of me is focused on the fact that this woman is not okay.

  She slumps forward a little when I help her rise to a seated position, and she groans, pressing her gloved hand even harder against her middle. “I need a healer,” she growls, and then she falls against me.

  “Wait—a healer?” Maybe she is into Live Action Role Playing. Or maybe she’s part of a theater troupe.

  “I have been stabbed,” the woman growls to me, her voice even, calm. “I must be healed, or I will die. I do not have the energy to heal myself.”

  Stabbed. Healed.

  Energy?

  What?

  “I think you must have hit your head,” I venture nervously.

  She grips my arm and turns her face toward me; we’re practically nose to nose. There's so much pain in her ice blue eyes that they look flat, glassy.

  “I need to get back,” she whispers, feverish. And she closes her eyes, her face as white as a ghost.

  Get back where?

  Then I stare down in horror at the place where she held my arm. Because her gloved palm was slick with blood, and blood stains my skin now.

  “Oh, my God,” I whisper, shifting my gaze to her stomach, where she’d been clenching her hand.

  She’s bleeding. She’s bleeding a lot. The acrid scent of blood stings my nose as she sags against me, incapable of holding herself upright.

  “Shit,” I whisper, and then, heart pounding a thousand beats per minute, I ease her gently to the ground, cradling her head until it rests on the pavement, the metal of her back piece making another dull clang.

  “I’ll be… I’ll be right back,” I croak, my mouth completely dry. I stumble to my feet, and I run to Sammie, feeling the katana bang against the small of my back, thinking vaguely, Hey, the ribbon held up.

  Sammie is staring up at me with wide eyes, and he starts to sniff me like crazy when I reach him. I unloop his leash from the metal wall, and we both sprint as fast we can (which is, admittedly, not very fast, considering how winded and broken I feel) back to the Ceres.

  I left my purse with my keys in it back by the riverfront, so I bang on the locked front door frantically.

  “All right, all right. God,” says Toby, as he swings open the door with a flourish and a distasteful frown. “What…Mara...” And then he trails off as I push past him, running into the building.

  “Here—someone take Sammie,” I say quickly, and I’m shrugging out of the katana, setting it on the counter before I scoop up the roll of paper towels and find the first aid kit—kept in the kitchen because we’re all terrible at using knives—under the sink. I throw open the kit, and then I’m staring down at all of the supplies but not really seeing them as it hits me how terrible this situation is…

  The woman still might not make it, even though I saved her from drowning and managed to drag her up the ladder by myself and brought her back to consciousness.

  After all of that? Yeah, I refuse to let her die.

  I grab an antiseptic wipe and some gauze as Toby gapes at me, holding onto Sammie’s leash. The game of cards in the living area falls silent; Cecile stands up.

  “What’s wrong, Mara?” she asks firmly, but I’m shaking my head.

  “No time—someone’s been hurt, I’ve got to drive her to the hospital,” I tell Cecile in one breath, and her expression changes.

  “Call an ambulance, sweetheart,” she tells me quickly, but I’m racing out the door.

  “There’s no time. She’ll die if we wait for an ambulance!” I call over my shoulder.

  I run to where I left my purse and car keys and am grateful that, when I look over my shoulder, I see all of the inhabitants of the Ceres spilling out of the building and running with me, taking in the sight of the woman lying on her back on the river's edge.

  “Can someone help me get her into the car?” I ask, kneeling beside her and ripping open the antiseptic wipe. It’s too dark to see, but I place the wipe against her leather undershirt (she’s wearing a leather undershirt?), and then I put the gauze on top of that, and I pick up her hand, pressing it down on the wound.

  “Please apply pressure here,” I tell the woman, whose eyelids flutter. I’m not sure if she heard me or not, but I can only hope that she did.

  “You should really call an ambulance, Mara,” says Iris, staring down at the woman in shock. “She's in bad shape.”

  “I would if I thought they’d get here in time,” I tell her, glancing up quickly, and I ask again, “Can someone help me lift her into the car?”

  “But what if she dies? Will you get in trouble?” asks Iris, her face as white as the woman's now.

  “I can’t sit here and wait for an ambulance to show up while she bleeds out onto the pavement,” I say simply, and Toby comes to stand beside me, his boyfriend Rod right behind him, and Miyoko joins us in her Elizabethan dress.

  “We’ll help you,” says Miyoko quietly, and then I hand the keys, my hands slippery with blood, to Cecile.

  “Can you unlock my car door?” I ask her, and Cecile nods, racing over to my car, which is only about twenty feet away, parked in its usual spot. She unlocks
the door, and then I’m gesturing to Toby, Rod and Miyoko to take up positions at the woman's shoulders and feet. I’m holding onto her right shoulder. “Okay, we’re all going to lift on three and carry her to the passenger side.”

  “Right,” says Miyoko, her skirts ballooning around her as she crouches beside me at the woman’s other shoulder.

  “One, two, three,” I say quickly, and we’re all lifting the woman at the same time. She weighs a ton with her metal armor—good Lord. But I dragged her up the ladder with only adrenaline on my side, and adrenaline pumps through me again as we carry her to the open passenger door of my vintage VW bug.

  I begin to calculate the fastest route to Mercy Hospital in my head.

  “Hey, easy, easy,” I murmur, as Miyoko and I lift up the front part of her body and Toby and Rod tuck her legs into the car; then we’re sort of pushing her to a seated position on her side.

  “Just be careful,” Cecile says to me, ducking forward to give me a tight hug before pressing my keys back into my hand. She hands me my purse, too, and I nod my thanks, glancing around at the worried faces.

  “I’ll call soon,” I promise, and then I’m in my seat and slamming the door, peeling out of the parking lot with the tires screeching and my head racing.

  Maybe Cecile was right. Maybe I should have called an ambulance. But the woman beside me is fading fast, and what if she’d died while we were waiting, or what if she died while they were transporting her to the hospital? All I know is that she’s bleeding from a wound in her stomach—where she was stabbed, I assume—and I couldn't imagine waiting a moment longer…

  This felt like the best decision, to drive her to the hospital myself.

  I really hope I made the right choice.

  Thankfully, there aren’t many people heading to South Buffalo on a Friday night, so I arrive at Mercy Hospital without any traffic issues, rolling onto the Emergency ramp so quickly that I almost forget to throw the car into park, something that hasn't happened to me since my learner’s permit days.

  I run to open the passenger side door.

  It took four people to lift the woman into the car, but there’s only me now, so I take her by her shoulders and sort of roll her toward me, trying to help her out of the seat. A bored-looking orderly is smoking a cigarette right beside a “no smoking on hospital grounds” sign, and he stubs out the cigarette against the side of the building before pushing off of the wall and trotting over.

  “Hey, you need some help?” he asks, and I nod, and somehow, even with his assistance, it still takes a solid minute for us to pull her out of the car.

  “Shit, what’s she wearing? It's so heavy,” the orderly mutters, but I don’t have the energy to reply. We carry her between us, one of her arms slung around each of our shoulders, into the hospital waiting room.

  The orderly helps me set her down onto an empty seat. I’m surprised to see how many people are sitting around waiting for medical attention… There are probably about twenty people waiting to be seen. I rush up to the nurse behind the desk; she doesn’t look at me when I approach her.

  “Hey, someone needs help,” I gasp, licking my dry lips. Only then does she glance up at me, probably because of my frazzled tone. She raises a brow, and she sweeps her gaze over me. I probably look pretty scary, considering the fact that I climbed out of the Buffalo River minutes ago.

  “Sign in here,” she says in a bored tone, handing me a clipboard and looking back down at her computer monitor.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think this can wait,” I tell her, all in a rush. She glances at me again and sighs for a moment.

  “What’s the nature of your injury?” she says, taking a pen from behind her ear and setting it down on the clipboard.

  “It’s not me. It’s that woman over there,” I say, gesturing behind me. “She nearly drowned, and I think she was…um…stabbed?”

  The nurse appears slightly more interested. “Did you stab her?” she asks.

  “What? God, no,” I say hoarsely, staring at the nurse in shock. “I found her in the river. She was dumped in there by someone after getting stabbed…I guess.” I lean over the desk. “Look, she’s hardly conscious, and she's losing a lot of blood—”

  “So is that guy,” snaps the nurse, pointing to a man holding a towel tightly over his right eye, slouching back in his seat, his upper body curled forward with pain. “And so is she.” The nurse points to a woman with a piece of clothing—a shirt, I think—wrapped around her right thigh, her knuckles white and her hand bloody as she presses the shirt to her leg.

  Then the nurse crosses her arms, shaking her head sharply. “I’m sorry, but this is a busy hour for us. We're two doctors and three nurses short, and we've just taken in five critically injured people from a collision on the 33. So if she’s not at death’s door—”

  “I’m pretty sure she is,” I insist, staring the nurse down. My heart’s in my throat, but I try to remain as calm as possible while I think about the woman bleeding to death in the chair behind me as I argue with this unresponsive nurse. “Can someone just please come look at her quickly, make sure she’s not going to die while we’re waiting?” I lick my lips. “Please?”

  For a long moment, I think the nurse is going to tell me no—but then, miraculously, she’s nodding. “Sign in, and I’ll get someone out onto the floor.”

  I scribble my name onto the clipboard, adding “stab wound,” beside the “reason for your visit” space. And then I turn around and head back toward the woman in armor slumped in one of the blue chairs in the far corner of the waiting room.

  God, it’s so surreal to see her sitting in that chair. Now that we’re under the florescent lights, it’s apparent that she's wearing the kind of armor you see on fantasy movies. The metal is jet black, and there are a lot of separate pieces to it. It completely encases her shoulders, her chest—with a sculpted breast plate straight out of Xena—her hips, thighs, and knees, with a black leather shirt and pants beneath the armored pieces. There are black-armored bits on her forearms and her calves, and black spikes on her shoulders. Her long hair is already drying: it spills over her shoulders in unbound waves, the color blue-black.

  Her skin, too, is practically blue, and there are deep gray circles around her eyes.

  The blood spilling from her stomach and over her gloved hand is starting to drip onto the white floor tiles, a bright, ugly red in the disinfected space.

  “Hey,” I tell her, my voice soft as I sit down beside her and grab a box of tissues from a little table. I take out a bunch of the tissues, and then I place them on the floor beside her boot to absorb the blood. “Can I see?” I ask her quietly, pointing to the hand clamped down firmly on top of the gauze.

  The woman is barely conscious, but she nods slowly, letting her hand relax and fall open beside her as she breathes out, long and low.

  “I will die soon,” she tells me, her voice almost a whisper. She licks her dry lips, shakes her head from side to side, her eyes closed, her brow deeply furrowed with pain. “Is there no healer here who can help me?”

  “I…I hope there is.” Her voice is faintly accented... Maybe she’s from a different country, where doctors are called healers? “They’re sending someone out to look at you. The, um, healers are kind of busy right now, so we have to wait our turn,” I tell her. I lean forward, reaching out, my fingers curled into a fist because I don’t want to hurt her; I’m unsure of what to do: the gauze is soaked, blood dripping over her leather shirt.

  “I will die, then,” she says softly, with a small shrug. She opens her eyes, and she gazes at the fluorescent lights overhead calmly. “I have done what I should have done, and there is no shame in my death.” Her voice is low and rasping. She glances at me, blue eyes bright with pain and...something more.

  Something electric pulses between us.

  She breathes in, and she breathes out, and then she shuts her eyes and squeezes them tight, making a low moan as she grips her wound harder. “I only wish…” S
he shakes her head from side to side, and a single tear traces its way out of her eye and along the side of her face, etching a pattern over her pale skin.

  “I’m sorry. Please hang on. They’re going to get someone to treat you as soon as they can,” I say, desperate, swallowing and glancing at the front desk again, but the nurse has turned away, isn't looking. I wonder if she really did send for someone at all. I’ve been to this hospital before, and they’ve always been really awesome. They must be severely understaffed...

  “Look, just…just hang on. Please. Just hang on,” I tell her again, grabbing a few tissues out of the box and wiping them over her black leather shirt to try to sop up the blood.

  The woman opens her eyes again and stares at me. She looks feverish now, her eyes much too bright, as if there’s a fire burning somewhere inside of her. “I do not fear death,” she whispers to me, her full lips forming the words with surety. I stare at her mouth, and then I wrench my gaze up, look into her eyes. She leans forward just a little more, and then she’s reaching out with her gloved hand, and she’s gripping my forearm with surprisingly strong fingers. “But…can you do something for me?” she asks, her voice low, urgent.

  “Yes,” I tell her, swallowing the lump in my throat. I wrap my fingers around my little gold pendant, anxiety racing through me, in time to the beat of my blood. “Of course. What do you need?”

  The woman regards me for a long moment, her blue eyes practically sparking as she weighs something internally. Then she lifts her chin, she takes a deep breath, and she whispers softly, “Can you get a message to my queen?”

  I stare at her, and I whisper, “Your…queen.”

  “Queen Calla. She’s not from… She's not from this world, this…this Earth.” It’s hard for her to speak for a moment, so she swallows, drops of sweat appearing on her brow as she struggles with the pain. “Queen Calla is from my world, Agrotera. And it is far…” She winces, letting me go and covering the wound again with her gloved hand. “But you must get the message to her. Please.”