~ 64: The Night of Blessings and Curses - Part 9 ~
The horror that unfurled in front of me made me gasp. The pain was evident and it was only after a while that my brain remembered to scream as the poisonous fluid entered my bloodstream and made me bleed like a haemophiliac. I would have rushed to the stream to wash the blood off if Lucas hadn't pulled me back like a leash.
"Show me," he demanded and I obediently did as he commanded.
The fingers were turning redder by the minute as the cold stung the open wounds and the red, sticky, viscous fluid oozed out of them like a brook.
"Don't move," he ordered as he held my shaking hands which were turning blue by the minute. "You touched the
He closed his eye and murmured something under his breath like he was chanting something. As I was about to speak indignantly against the idea of using magic, his eye immediately flew open. The warning note in the currently red eye had me shut up for good. His vampire side must be acting up again.
"No good," he said with a sigh. "The barrier has been put up from this point on. There's no hope of getting an ounce of magic to heal this."
"Why can't we try the water then? It might have some healing property —"
His daunting eye had opened up, glaring at me for making that comment.
"Would you want to die of electrocution? I still don't understand how you survived although I have a small theory in place. That water is definitely cursed since the beginning of time. How do you expect it to help you when it tried to kill you? In this realm of Mazeria, not a soul shall be helped. They must find the solution themselves using whatever tools they have."
Realising that there was truly no way, not even finding a plant that would naturally heal a wound. The only plant that came into my mind was the nettle, but its salve would do little to reseal the wounds and remove any poison that was beginning to cause blisters on my arms.
I tried to use the small spare handkerchief I had kept in my pockets to absorb the blood. I wasn't even done wiping through halfway of one hand when the cloth had become squelchy and sticky. I sighed with exhaustion and then tried to lick the wounds to seal them. But the amount of blood running out has scarcely reduced.
Before I could give it one more try, my hand was yanked away from my lips. I stared at the figure hovering over me and watched his lips twitch. Perhaps the scent of the blood was unbearable for him.
"Lick them clean before I do something you would dislike," he snarled, causing me to back away a little at his vicious beast nature.
I tried to take my hands back to lick them as he had commanded when he yanked them away again.
"Not there," he said through his gritted teeth and briefly closed his eye in disbelief.
"Then what?" I snapped softly, not liking his way of micing his words.
"Where else do you think you got blood on yourself?" he asked, tilting his head as his left hand rested on his knee as he crouched. He eyed my bloody hands whose wrists were held by his right hand.
I pursed my lips as the slow realisation hit me. My cheeks burned when the thought of what he was going to do if I hadn't realised it any sooner appeared, causing me to bury it in the gap between my arms. I heard him tsk and huff a laugh at a reddening me.
The next moment, as I lay my face between my arms, my wrists were tugged forwards and something soft and supple touched my fingers. I looked up to find him kissing the wounds, avoiding his protracted fangs from ripping open my wounds more.
"Let it be, Lucas," I protested. "Are you asking for death, that too because of me?"
"I suppose I never told you that I have a resistance to poisons," he said after a withdrew for a moment, licking his fangs and smacking his lips in delight. "
I flinched, despite the permission he had asked with his eye, to which I had agreed, when he licked the blood away from every line on my hands. He mumbled an apology for startling me before he went back to savouring every pint of blood that touched his tongue.
Strangely, I calmly watched him work without feeling repulsive. My eyes only looked at the way the knotted hair slipped out of its clasp and bent down as he did to me. My heart squeezed as it realised the age difference and yet the reversed positions of us, where I was supposed to be the one respecting him.
When he was done, he set me free of his grasp, but he didn't let me get up. 'Don't move,' said his red eye that turned black again. The command in them made me obey without a thought like I was hypnotised.
I was lifted up in his arms which astounded me. My arms went automatically around his neck, which startled me a second later. I was about to protest about picking me up, but my lips were sealed like they were a curse from his other eye. Rubbing my wrists at the back of his neck, I nettled my head on his broad shoulder as he walked us to the river bank.
He set down upon the ground and went to fetch water near the edge with his gloved hands when I nudged sharply him on the side. I glared at him while he looked back at me with a question-marked face.
"Did forget already what happened down there?" I asked. "You were the one telling me to not go into it."
"We don't have a cup or a jar to pick the water up with," he said. "And it's freshwater with no curse binding you to it so it's safe."
"It's not safe when you have an eel electrocuting you. Also, nature has many things which one could wield to make their own resource. How do you think people made cups before?"
"Using mud and clay?"
His raised eyebrow with a pout was too cute for me to unleash my fury on him. Even his one eye looking at me didn't make it seem scary despite how every little thing went silent around him. It was as though every creature knew about his powerful aura except myself.
I could only breathe in deeply and wonder if he was purposely trying to irk me by acting silly or he was always like that but too cool for me to see it. I discarded the latter since if that were the case, then he wouldn't even know how to teach me martial arts or even do the presentation for his group's project in the first place.
"Fetch the leaves of a 'common' tree, please," I said nonchalantly. "We don't want another poisoning event with trees we don't know or poisonous trees we know."
He rolled his eyes at the obvious note as he got up, dusting the dirt from his pants. With a twist of his lips, he walked towards the location we had barely managed to escape from. I squinted my eyes at his sense of direction before believing that he knew what he was doing.
'If only you were a dog, I would make you play fetch,' I thought to myself and smirked at the amusing line to prevent myself from laughing.
"I heard that," he said turning around to face me.
I swore at myself for forgetting to pull up the walls and proceeded to buckle my legs to prepare for a run as his deadpan face made me flinch. I froze for a second in my defensive pose when he said, "But I will let you go this time."
I watched his fading back as he strode away into the distance before bending over to dip my fingers into the stream. It was not a good idea to experiment with him not around, but getting the fingers washed while I created threads from the vines was of the utmost importance with sunrise not being too far away. With no phone or watch allowed, we could only depend on the sky to tell the time.
I had immersed my fingers halfway while tilting over slightly to get them in completely before a bloody reflection of my face hovered on its surface.
"What's that?" I asked with great horror as the ghastly face gaped at me as though it was about to swallow me whole.