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“Take Sora and get inside!” Fallon said again. He sounded weaker now.
And I looked at my husband, doing everything in his power to hold the genka back. I looked at his beautiful, pleading face. The face of the man I’d come to love.
“No.”
Not caring a single fucking iota if I got my throat slashed, I wildly swung the knife at the animal. It didn’t connect. So the next time, I threw it.
It didn’t sink into the genka’s body, but the blade did drag forcefully against the creature’s right eye before it clattered to the dust. The second after it hit the ground, Fallon grabbed it, just as the genka shrieked, blood pouring from its eye, and wrenched out of Fallon’s tail’s hold.
My breath and my blood froze. Fallon’s newly-freed tail snapped around my waist, dragging me forcefully down to the ground behind him and Sora. He grabbed Sora’s collar with his left hand, brandishing the bloodied knife in his right.
But he never had to use it. Apparently, the kick, Sora’s barking, and now the knife to the eye had finally been enough to convince the creature that this wouldn’t be such an easy, worthwhile meal after all. It was already running, a little slower than it had before, for the treeline and the area of the creek. I clutched fiercely to Fallon, not daring to blink until the thing was entirely out of sight.
“There may be others. They’ll smell my blood. You have to go,” Fallon was muttering, pushing me towards Sora.
“What do you mean, ‘you?’ We have to go, Fallon!”
“I’ll slow you down too much. Go with Sora. I’ll… I’ll crawl back on my own.”
“Crawl back?! Not on that leg,” I snapped. I was suddenly struck with a dizzying sense of irony. Remembering Fallon saying the exact same thing to me, back on my very first night here.
“Get up,” I told him, completely ignoring the idiocy of the suggestion that I’d leave without him and watch him fucking crawl back to the ranch, bleeding and alone.
I was already standing up, pulling Fallon’s arm as I did so. “Shut up and get up right now, Fallon. We’re going back together or not at all.”
“You know, in this moment, I rather wish you were not so brave,” Fallon groaned. “If you were a coward, you would already be safe.” He grunted, then hissed loudly as he buried his knifeless hand in Sora’s fur, using her bulky shoulder as a pushing-off point. I kept pulling at his arm, and with a lot of grunting and difficulty, he finally got back up to his feet.
“Lean on me,” I ordered him, already slinging his bulky arm around my shoulders and throwing mine around his waist.
“I’m too heavy.”
“You’re not.”
He was. He most definitely was. Even now, my whole frame threatened to buckle.
But he didn’t need to know that.
“You lean on me, and I’ll lean on Sora if I have to,” I said brusquely, already taking a step forward and dragging him along with me, forcing him to do an unsteady hop to keep up.
“See?” I said. I lifted my chin and kept walking firmly forward. Fallon held onto me, hopping and limping while Sora kept pace anxiously beside us.
She wasn’t barking so much anymore, which had to be a good sign. She didn’t seem to sense any other predators and was now entirely focused on herding us towards the open gate.
By some miracle, we made it without another genka popping up or Fallon passing out or me folding over like a piece of bent paper. Fallon slammed the gate closed behind us, securing the high-up latch with a practised flicker of his tail.
I felt Fallon trying to disentangle himself from me, but I only clutched at his waist harder.
“Don’t stop moving now,” I half-ordered, half-begged. If we lost momentum, I wasn’t sure we’d ever make it into the house. Luckily, this gate wasn’t way at the back of the property or something.
We were close to the house. We could make it.
Fallon didn’t bother trying to argue with me. He just took a stoic, long-suffering sort of breath and started moving in his pained, awkward hop-lurch as Sora raced off to check on the bracku.
The steps up to the porch proved more difficult. Fallon ended up sitting on the bottom one and propelling himself backwards, one step at a time on his butt, while I helped to pull. I swallowed down clutching fear at the streaks and drips of blood he left behind.
By the time we made it into the kitchen, we were both so exhausted that I knew we wouldn’t make it to the bedroom. But at least we were inside. I left Fallon sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, and raced to the bedroom for that metal box of medical supplies he’d pulled out for me. I found it in a drawer, snatched it up, and brought it along with a pillow back to the kitchen.
“Are you injured anywhere else besides your leg?” I asked him as I tried and failed to pull his blood-soaked trousers off. Giving up on that, I pulled the knife from his hand and began to hack the leather, as quickly and carefully as I could, away from his leg.
