Swallowing Darkness   ::   Гамильтон Лорел

I heard Rhys say, "Come on, Dawson, let's see if those little nails will help Jonty."

I wanted to melt into Doyle's kiss and never come up for air, but there was duty. There was always duty, and some horror that had to be fought, or healed, or... Everyone thinks they want an extraordinary life, but you don't. When standing knee-deep in yet another disaster, ordinary begins to look very good.

We broke apart, and he led me to Jonty's side. Dawson was already kneeling on the ground. He held the nail that had come out of me when I healed him. He held it point down above one of the wounds.

"We'll have to get the shrapnel out of his body first," Rhys said.

"It didn't work that way for us," Dawson said.

"How did it work?" I asked, my arm wrapped around Doyle's lean waist, the strength of him beside me almost too good to be real.

Galen was carefully not looking at Doyle and me. I realized that he had come to me first. That he had swept me off my feet, and though I had been glad to see him, it hadn't been the feelings I had had for Doyle. It simply hadn't. I couldn't change how my heart felt, not even to save the feelings of one of my best friends.

"Like this," Dawson said, and he began to pass the nail over Jonty's wounds, point down, as if he were invisibly carving something. My hand tingled. The mark of blood on my palm tingled.

I stepped away from Doyle. He tried to catch my hand, but I drew it away before he could touch it. Somehow I wasn't sure that him touching the hand of blood while it was itching to be used would be a good thing. I didn't entirely understand what was happening, but I didn't question the urge to step up and drop to my knees beside Dawson.

I spoke words without willing them, as if the universe had been waiting for me to speak them, and with each word, it was as if time itself let out a breath that it had been holding. "You call me with blood and metal. What would you have of me?"

Dawson looked at me, and his lips moved, but it was as if he too wasn't in complete control of what he said. "Heal him, Meredith. I ask this with blood and metal and the magic you have given to this flesh."

"So be it," I said, and I spread my hand over Jonty's back. My skin ran with heat, as if the blood in my body was turning to molten metal. There was a moment of almost unbearable pain, then blood fountained upward from Jonty's body. Metal rained upward, expelled from the body with the blood.

Jonty came to with a gasp. But the blood kept pouring out. I scrambled back from him, and Dawson came with me.