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How the hell was the water even colder now? I was already half numb. Shouldn’t it have been less of a shock this time?
Fucking Jesus Christ, this sucked the biggest, iciest balls in the galaxy. It took everything I had to keep moving my shaking legs forward. The water seemed to be rushing faster now.
Or maybe I’d just gotten weaker.
We’d reached the deepest point. I kept the frozen fingers of my left hand twined in the fur on the back of Sora’s neck, gritting my teeth and clenching my right hand around the rope on the calf. Even with the numbness, I could tell the rope was scraping my palm raw.
But we were doing it. We were slowly getting into shallower waters. I’d drag these two back to Fallon, help him with the gate, and then we’d –
The calf stumbled. The full weight of the big creature crashed into my hip. Sora sensed me going down and tried to stop it, but it was no use. The water that hadn’t felt all that fast before suddenly became a tsunami against my aching limbs.
Water crashed in and over my head, and instantly I was moving, tumbling, fighting to find which way was up in that terrible, frothing black. My hands scraped against mud and sticks and stones. I fought as hard as I could to hold onto my last bit of breath.
But I lost that breath in an underwater shout of shock when something powerful squeezed me, just below my ribs. When I took in a ragged, involuntary breath, I didn’t get a lungful of creek water, but rather air.
Completely disoriented, I writhed weakly, still feeling like I was fighting the water as my dripping body came down to rest on something solid.
Fallon’s shoulder.
His tail, lasso-like, wrapped fiercely around me, holding me in place with my belly folded over his shoulder. One of his big hands went to Sora’s collar, the other to one of the calf’s short baby horns, righting the heavy creature like it was nothing at all. A vicious streak of lightning showed me glimpses, through the curtain of my sopping wet hair, of Fallon’s muscled legs moving powerfully through the rushing water, his grip never faltering. On any of us.
His grip didn’t even let up once we’d cleared the creek’s banks. He kept hold of all three of us, half-dragging the calf up the incline towards the gate. I wasn’t sure how he got it open, but he did. Sora rushed inside, ushering the calf along after Fallon released its horn.
“You can put me down,” I said through trembling lips.
“No, I can’t.” Gone was Fallon’s typical easy demeanour. His voice cracked like quiet thunder.
“I can walk.”
“No, you can’t.”
Annoyingly, he might have been right about that. My legs felt like they weighed a thousand pounds each. My whole body convulsed with shivers.
“I need to get you warm,” Fallon hissed, securing the gate and breaking into a run.
“Sora first. And the calf…”
“They’ll be fine,” he snapped, legs pumping. “I already lit a fire for them in the birthing area of the barn. I lit it before the rain even began. The calf’s mother will take care of it, and Sora knows to dry off by the fire. I’d wager that both of them can handle cold water better than you can.”
Oh. Well, that was good, then. I couldn’t think of anything else to argue with him about. My head felt clogged with brackish water. Like my brain had drowned even though I hadn’t.
Fallon had a big distance to cover, but in no time at all we’d reached the house. He didn’t stop to kick off his soaking boots in the mudroom, instead charging right through into the kitchen where the fire blazed.
“What happened?” came the question shaped by Magnolia’s voice. I barely heard it above the violent chattering of my teeth.
“Help me get her clothes off,” Fallon said tightly. I would have argued against that little declaration of Fallon’s, but my jaw was too fucking tense and jittery to respond.
I shook so hard I couldn’t stand on my own when Fallon lowered me gingerly to my water-logged boots. He oriented himself behind me, each of his arms beneath my armpits, easily holding me upright while Magnolia immediately got to work yanking off my soaked boots and peeling down my pants and underwear.
This should have been embarrassing, but honestly I was just too freaking cold. Once my bottom half had been completely stripped of soaked clothing, Magnolia said, “Get a chair to – oh.”
Fallon was way ahead of her. His tail snapped out like a whip, wrapping around the back of a chair and dragging it over to the fire without letting go of me. Once the chair was positioned, he lifted me over and placed me into it. Immediately, I hunched over, hugging myself, trying to hold on to the tiny stores of heat that remained in my body.
“We need something warm and dry to cover her,” Magnolia said. Fallon raced from the room, very nearly crashing into the doorframe that led from the kitchen to the hallway towards his bedroom.
When he was gone, Magnolia started quickly undoing the buttons at the front of my top. Even though I knew she was helping, for a second, I tried to stop her, some idiotic part of my brain thinking that the wet clothing was actually helping me stay warm even though, logically, I knew I had to get dry.
She made soothing sounds, gently knocking away my hands. Then, without warning, she broke into song, singing something soft and so lovely it froze me even more than the water had.
