Fur

iii | Blood and Water

Very short chapter but it's necessary, I promise!

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The boy named Zakai's ribs were broken, crushed to pieces by the beam Leila had freed him from. The adrenaline kept him going, kept him clung to her as the water rose up the chimney stack and as they were swept away in the flood. When his head dunked under, she pulled him up. When the current careened them toward perilous debris—trees, splintered logs, rocks jutting from the hillsides now turned to towering riverbanks—she twisted so that it was she who absorbed the blow rather than he and his broken ribs.

Leila had witnessed his parents being swept away. She had watched as they were slammed into a cliffside and squished by a log, but miraculously they had established a desperate grip on the earth and climbed their way to the safety of higher ground.

So that's what Leila attempted, left with no alternative other than drowning. Her companion was tiring. Wounded. Sinking. She twisted a final time, lining up her shoulder blades to slam into the hillside and the network of unearthed roots reaching out from it.

"GRAB ON!" She screamed and the both of them did. Mud and woody pulp burrowed into the quicks of her rounded nails. One bent back and broke off in her scramble for security. Tangled briars ripped from their plots but not yet letting go wrapped around her arms and slit her skin.

It was a ten foot climb up the bank. They were shoulder to shoulder as they ascended, Leila carrying with her the awareness of the boy and a readiness to grab him happen he slip. He didn't. He and she managed to make it high enough to where the hill began to slope, to where there was enough horizontal land that they could roll themselves over the threshold and lay, shoulder to shoulder still, on their backs.

They were panting from the exertion. Zakai was groaning from the pain. They laid in mud, the downpour molding them into it. But the rain stopped hitting their faces at the same time a darkness more lightless than the blackened rainclouds fell over them.

They both opened their eyes. Zakai's parents stood over him. Leila's father, over her.

The Belfiores bent to pick up their son. They embraced him, but no joyous expression ever graced his grave face. He looked rigid, Leila thought in the seconds before she was yanked up by the collar of her sopping shirt.

As her father drug her away, wordless and furious—for she knew that the worst kind of anger was silent—she watched the Belfiores, burnt into her brain an image. Zakai's mother lifted his torn shirt to see the damage he assumedly told her about. Leila saw it, too.

The blood that poured from his purple, lacerated flesh was thin, diluted by the rain and the floodwater. It was light in color, nearly pink, and trickled down his hollowed abdomen. It earned his parents' care and affection. If he were in trouble with them, which Leila somehow felt he was, the state of him earned some amount sympathy back.

Leila looked down at herself for evaluating.

The blood that had seeped from her own wounds—the briar cuts, the raw fingertips, the scrapes from the stones of the chimney—had already been washed away. She was clean. Bloodless. She would earn no sympathy.

At the manorhouse, in her bedroom where her open window had since been shut, Leila thought of the image of Zakai's blood as she took her punishment. It was thinner than the rainwater that had pooled in the mud between them, thinner than the soot black water that had ran from her hand to his as he escaped the flooding cabin. She thought of the water that covered her skin when it was all over: a clear sheen. No traces of red, not even any shade of pink.

She didn't bother with wondering If I had bled, would I have earned his sympathy? because she knew the answer. It was all around her, on her. She was bleeding now, and the outcome did not change.

Her mouth was busted open. It bled.

Her tricep and shoulder blades were cut by some corner of furniture. They bled.

Her buttocks and thighs were shredded by a leather strap. They, too, bled.

If I had bled his blood, would I have earned his sympathy? The answer was yes.

She had no blood of his to bleed. If she bled, she would bleed her blood. She would never call it his, nor could she meet the requirements for him to. He was a werewolf, she was... what?