Barely a Scratch

"When a blood-soaked stranger appears out of nowhere speaking a language that sounds like English ran through a medieval blender, you've got two choices: trust her or die. Not much of a choice, really."

"Shit!"

The word tore from my throat before I could stop it, my heart slamming against my ribs as my eyes struggled to make sense of what stood before us.

A woman. Half-naked, skin gleaming with sweat or blood or both in the feeble glow of Glenda's phone. She held an arrow in her hand — not nocked in a bow, just gripped like a knife, the shaft dark and wet with something that dripped slowly toward the pointed end. The droplets fell in a steady rhythm, leaving a trail in the dust that looked black in the dim light.

She'd killed something. Recently. The evidence was still warm on her weapon.

The pain in my leg had faded to a distant throb, pushed aside by the surge of adrenaline that flooded my system at the sight of her. Every instinct I possessed screamed danger — this woman was a predator, had emerged from the same darkness that had spawned the thing that had tried to eat me alive. For all I knew, she was working with the creatures, herding prey toward waiting jaws.

"Like fuck we will," I slurred, forcing the words past teeth that wanted to chatter.

I didn't even know what she'd said. Didn't matter. Whatever command she'd issued, my answer was no. My answer would always be no to someone who appeared out of the night covered in blood and holding a weapon.

I tried to shift my wounded leg, to position myself for... what? Flight? Fight? Both options were laughable given my current state. The movement sent a bolt of agony lancing up through my thigh, and I bit down on a scream that wanted to claw its way out of my chest.

Glenda's hand found Paul's arm, her fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks. I could feel the fear radiating off her body, could see the tension in her shoulders as she positioned herself closer to Paul, making herself a barrier between us and this unknown threat.

"Stay back!" Glenda's voice rang out, sharp with defiance.

The woman moved closer instead.

She dropped the arrow — just let it fall to the dust like it meant nothing, like the blood on its shaft was of no consequence. Her hands came up, palms open, the universal gesture of surrender that meant absolutely fuck-all when the person making it had just emerged from a nightmare.

"Keep yer fuckin' voices doon," she hissed, her accent thick and strange — Scottish, maybe, but not like any Scottish I'd ever heard. The words came out twisted, archaic, as if she'd learned English from a textbook written centuries ago. "It's nae safe. We hae tae gang. Noo."

The words hit me wrong. Nae safe. Gang. My brain scrambled to translate, to find meaning in syllables that were almost familiar but not quite. Not safe. We have to go. Now. That's what she meant. Had to be.

But there was something in her voice — a warning that went beyond our current situation. She wasn't talking about the creature that had attacked me. She was talking about something else, something still out there, something worse.

A growl rolled through the darkness.

Not Lois. This was deeper, wetter, a sound that seemed to come from the earth itself. It resonated in my chest, vibrated through my bones, turned my blood to something cold and sluggish in my veins.

Lois answered with a growl of her own, but hers sounded thin by comparison, a terrier trying to intimidate a wolf. The retriever's hackles were raised, her body rigid with tension, her eyes fixed on something in the darkness that I couldn't see and didn't want to.

"Where are we going?" Paul asked, his voice strained with the effort of staying calm.

"Tae yer camp," the woman replied flatly, as though this should have been obvious.

"There's something else out there," Glenda hissed, swinging the phone's light toward whatever had captured Lois's attention.

The beam cut through the darkness, illuminating nothing but dust and rock and shadow. But at the edge of the light's reach, I caught movement — a shape that seemed to flicker and shift, there and gone before my damaged eyes could focus on it. A ghost made of darkness, hunting at the periphery of perception.

The realisation settled over me like a shroud.

Whatever had attacked me wasn't alone. There were more of them out there, circling, waiting. And this woman — this half-naked warrior with blood on her hands and a voice that sounded like it belonged to another century — might be the only thing standing between us and becoming their next meal.

But how could I outrun the thing that had already tried to devour my leg?

The question spiralled through my mind, spawning darker thoughts, worse possibilities. I was wounded. Bleeding. A liability to anyone trying to flee. They should leave me here, save themselves, let me serve as a distraction while they—

The woman moved.

One moment she was standing several metres away, the next she was crouching directly in front of us, her face suddenly visible in the phone's glow. Up close, I could see the hardness in her eyes — the look of someone who had seen things, done things, survived things that would break a normal person. This wasn't fear or desperation. This was competence. Experience. The calm assessment of a soldier in the field.

"Shit!" The exclamation burst from both Glenda and Paul simultaneously.

"Ye can trust me," the woman said, her voice steady as stone. She reached out and gripped Paul's arm, her fingers wrapping around his bicep with a strength that brooked no argument. "We maun gang."

Maun gang. Must go. The translation came easier this time, my brain starting to adapt to her strange cadence, her twisted vowels and swallowed consonants.

Another growl split the night, closer this time.

Lois's response was immediate — a snarl that bared her teeth, her body dropping into a fighting stance that looked almost comical on a golden retriever but was entirely serious. Whatever was out there, she was ready to die protecting us from it.

"Come on," Paul said, pulling Glenda to her feet as he stood. His voice carried a note of resolve that hadn't been there before. "If this woman wanted to kill us, she would have done it already."

The logic was sound, in a grim sort of way. She'd had every opportunity to attack while we were huddled and helpless. Instead, she'd dropped her weapon and offered her hands in surrender. Either she was genuinely trying to help, or she was playing a game so convoluted that we'd already lost.

"Or feed us to the creature," Glenda whispered, giving voice to the thought I'd been trying to suppress.

"Fer fuck's sake," the woman interjected, impatience sharpening her words. "Dinnae waste ony mair time. We need tae move." She turned to Glenda, her gaze intense and unwavering. "Gie me yer licht."

My throat closed around a protest that never made it past my lips. The phone was our lifeline, our only defence against the absolute darkness that surrounded us. Handing it over felt like surrendering the last piece of control we had, the final barrier between us and the horrors that lurked just beyond its reach.

But all I managed was a hoarse whimper, a pathetic sound that died in the dust between us.

Paul and Glenda moved to either side of me, their hands sliding under my arms, lifting me with a care that did nothing to prevent the fresh wave of agony that crashed through my wounded leg. I bit down on my tongue, tasted copper, focused on that smaller pain to distract from the larger one.

I had no choice. Being alone in the darkness with whatever was growling out there — that was death. Following this stranger, this warrior woman with blood on her hands and a voice from another age — that was at least a chance.

"Bide close," the woman commanded, taking the phone from Glenda and shining its light ahead of us. "And keep up."

Bide close. The words were foreign and familiar at the same time, like hearing your own language spoken by someone who'd learned it from ghosts.

Keep up. As if I had any say in the matter. As if my ruined leg was going to cooperate with demands for speed.

But Paul and Glenda were already moving, half-carrying me between them, my feet barely touching the ground as we lurched forward into the darkness. Lois fell in beside us, her growling a constant undertone to our ragged breathing, her eyes never leaving the shadows that pressed in from all sides.

With each step, each jarring impact that sent pain screaming up my leg, I found myself praying. Not to any god I'd ever believed in. But to something. Anything. The universe itself, maybe, or just the desperate hope that lived in the chest of every terrified animal.

Please. Please let us make it. Please don't let me die here.

The black sky above offered no response. It stretched overhead like a void, a mirror of the emptiness that seemed to yawn at the edges of my consciousness, waiting to swallow me whole.

I kept moving anyway.

There was nothing else to do.

The world became a tunnel of pain and darkness.

Each step was a negotiation between my body's desperate need to collapse and Paul and Glenda's determination to keep me moving. My wounded leg dangled uselessly, a dead weight that screamed with fresh agony every time it brushed against the ground or swung too far in any direction. The blood had soaked through whatever makeshift bandage they'd wrapped around it, warm and wet against my skin, a constant reminder that I was leaking life into the dust with every metre we covered.

The woman — Charity, she'd called herself — moved ahead of us with a confidence that bordered on arrogance. The phone's light in her hand carved a narrow path through the blackness, revealing just enough to place our feet but nothing of what lurked beyond. Her pace was relentless, punishing, as if she'd forgotten that one of her charges was barely conscious and missing chunks of his calf.

I hated her for it.

Hated her for her strength when I had none. Hated her for her certainty when all I felt was terror. Hated her for treating this nightmare as routine, as just another evening stroll through a landscape of monsters and blood.

But hatred required energy I didn't have.

My consciousness began to fragment, reality splintering into disconnected moments separated by gaps of nothing. One second I was stumbling forward between Paul and Glenda, the next I was somewhere else entirely — back home, maybe, or in a dream, or simply floating in the void that had been trying to claim me since the creature's teeth first pierced my flesh.

Brianne's face flickered through my mind. Her smile. The way her nose crinkled when she laughed. The swell of her belly where our daughter grew, waiting for a father who might never return.

Stay awake. Stay fucking awake.

I forced my eyes open, forced my brain to engage with the present moment no matter how much it wanted to flee into unconsciousness. The pain helped, in a perverse way — each jolt of agony was a tether to reality, a reminder that I was still alive, still fighting, still moving toward something that might be safety.

The darkness pressed against us from all sides, thick and hungry. Lois's growling had faded to occasional rumbles, her attention fixed on the shadows that followed our progress. I couldn't see them, but I could feel them — presences at the edge of perception, tracking us, waiting for weakness.

Keep moving. Just keep fucking moving.

My head drooped, chin hitting my chest before I jerked it back up. The effort felt monumental, like lifting a boulder with my neck. Paul's grip tightened on my arm, his breathing harsh in my ear, his own exhaustion evident in the tremor of his muscles.

How long had we been walking? Minutes? Hours? Time had lost all meaning, compressed into an endless now of pain and fear and the desperate rhythm of feet on sand.

Then I saw it.

Light. Not the feeble glow of the phone, but something brighter, warmer — flames dancing against the void, their orange tongues reaching toward a sky that remained stubbornly, impossibly dark. The campfire. Someone had rebuilt it, fed it, turned it into a beacon that called to us across the remaining distance.

Hope flared in my chest, painful and sweet.

I tried to focus, to make sense of what I was seeing, but my brain had stopped cooperating. The flames seemed to multiply and merge, their movements leaving trails across my vision like the afterimages of sparklers on a summer night. The throbbing behind my eyes had become a drumbeat, drowning out all other thoughts.

My head drooped again. This time, I didn't have the strength to lift it.

"Wha's the camp leader?" Charity's voice cut through the haze, the strange vowels barely registering through the fog of exhaustion.

"I am," Paul replied without hesitation.

The answer surprised me, some distant part of my brain noting that Paul had claimed a role I hadn't known he'd accepted. But the thought slipped away before I could examine it, lost in the fog that had settled over my consciousness.

"We need tae talk. Ye and I," Charity said, her tone leaving no room for negotiation.

I summoned every remaining scrap of willpower, every last spark of energy that hadn't been bled out through my ruined leg, and forced my eyes to open. The world swam into focus, blurry and tilted, the edges of my vision dark with encroaching unconsciousness.

Movement. In the distance. A figure approaching from the direction of the tents.

"Someone's coming," I managed, the words thick and slurred on my tongue.

"We need to attend to Kain's wounded leg first," Paul interjected, his voice tight with concern.

Charity moved in front of me, dropping into a squat that brought her face level with my injury. Her hands reached for the blood-soaked fabric that had been wrapped around my calf — a shirt, I realised dimly, probably Paul's or Glenda's — and pulled it aside without ceremony.

The pain that erupted was immediate and blinding. A yelp tore from my throat, high and animal, as nerve endings that had briefly quieted screamed back to life. My vision went white, then red, then spotty with black flowers that bloomed and faded at the edges of my sight.

"It's barely a scratch. He'll bide," Charity declared, rising to her feet with a dismissiveness that sent rage flooding through my veins.

Barely a scratch?

I wanted to scream at her. Wanted to show her the chunks of muscle missing from my leg, the puncture wounds that went deep enough to scrape bone, the blood that had soaked through every layer of fabric and painted a trail across half of Clivilius. Barely a scratch. As if the thing that had dragged me through the darkness had been a kitten with attitude problems rather than a monster designed by evolution to kill.

Bitch.

The word echoed in my skull, a silent curse that I was too weak to voice. The fury burned hot in my chest, a welcome alternative to the cold grip of shock and blood loss, but it couldn't sustain itself against the tide of exhaustion that threatened to pull me under.

"I'd hardly call that—" Paul began, his voice rising in protest.

Then he stopped.

I followed his gaze — or tried to, my neck barely cooperating — and saw the figure that had been approaching. Closer now, features becoming distinguishable in the firelight.

"Chris?" I whispered, recognition dawning through the haze.

He was there suddenly, taking Paul's place at my side, his arms wrapping around me with a strength that suggested he hadn't spent the night fleeing monsters through the dark. The shift in position sent fresh waves of pain crashing through my leg, his grip inadvertently pressing against the wound.

Tears welled in my eyes, blurring my vision further. I couldn't tell anymore if I was crying from pain or relief or simple overwhelming exhaustion. Maybe all three. Maybe it didn't matter.

"We need to get him to the medical tent," Glenda said, her voice cutting through the chaos with professional urgency.

And then I was moving again, my body dragged along by hands that weren't my own, my mind retreating further into the fog with each jarring step. The world had narrowed to a point — the flames ahead, the pain below, and the desperate hope that wherever they were taking me would offer some relief from this endless nightmare.

The tent flap brushed against my face as we entered, canvas rough against skin that had gone numb and hypersensitive in equal measure. Someone was lowering me onto something soft — a mattress, my brain supplied after a delay — and the sensation of finally being horizontal was so overwhelming that a sob escaped my throat.

"What happened to him?" Chris's voice, somewhere above me.

"We don't know," Glenda replied, and I could hear the worry threading through her words, the uncertainty of a doctor facing an injury she'd never encountered.

"I think..." I started, forcing my voice past the gravel in my throat.

Chris's face appeared above me, his features creased with concern. On the other side of the tent, Glenda was rummaging through supplies, her movements quick and focused.

"I think it was an animal," I managed, the words scraping past teeth that wanted to chatter.

Chris's eyes widened, something flickering in their depths that looked almost like recognition.

"A shadow panther," he breathed, the name carrying a weight that made my stomach clench.

"A what?"

But before Chris could answer, Glenda's voice cracked through the tent like a whip.

"Enough talk. I need to concentrate, or Kain might lose his leg."

The words hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest.

Lose his leg.

Every ounce of fog, every wisp of unconsciousness that had been dragging at my mind — gone. Burned away by a terror so pure and absolute that my entire body went rigid on the mattress. My eyes flew open, wide and staring, fixed on the canvas ceiling above me as if it held the answers to questions I couldn't bear to ask.

My leg. My fucking leg. The thing I walked on, ran on, climbed ladders with, braced against scaffolding while hauling sheets of plasterboard. The leg that had carried me through footy matches and Sunday morning jogs and lazy afternoons wandering through the markets with Brianne. The leg that was supposed to teach my daughter to ride a bike, to kick a ball, to dance at her wedding.

Might lose.

Not will lose. Might. There was still a chance. Still some narrow thread of hope that Glenda could work whatever medical magic she possessed and put me back together. But the word hung in the air like a death sentence, a possibility made real by being spoken aloud.

My eyes found Chris's face, latching onto him with a desperation that had nothing to do with pride. I didn't care anymore about looking strong or composed or any of the masculine bullshit that had been drilled into me since childhood. I was twenty-three years old, lying on a blood-soaked mattress in another dimension, and a woman I barely knew was about to determine whether I'd spend the rest of my life as a cripple.

Please. Please let her save it. Please don't let me wake up with a stump where my calf used to be.

A hand closed around mine.

The grip was firm, warm, an anchor in the storm of panic that threatened to sweep me away. Chris's fingers interlaced with my own, squeezing with a pressure that said I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, you're not alone in this.

"You're going to be fine," Chris said, his voice low and steady. "Just fine."

I wanted to believe him. Wanted to take those words and wrap them around myself like armour, let them shield me from the fear that was eating me alive from the inside out. But he didn't know. Couldn't know. None of us knew what Glenda would find when she started working on the ruin of my leg, what damage the creature's teeth had done beneath the surface, what horrors waited to be discovered in the torn flesh and shattered tissue.

"I'm going to give you a dose of morphine," Glenda announced.

The words registered dimly, their meaning filtering through the haze of terror that had settled over my brain. Morphine. Painkiller. Something to take the edge off, to make whatever came next slightly more bearable.

The needle slid into my upper arm with a sting that barely registered against the symphony of agony already playing through my nervous system. For a moment, nothing happened — just the cold spread of liquid beneath my skin, foreign and intrusive.

Then the warmth came.

It started at the injection site and spread outward in a slow wave, rolling through my bloodstream like honey, coating every nerve ending in a sweetness that made the pain seem distant, irrelevant. The tension that had been holding my body rigid began to unravel, muscles releasing their death grip on bones that had been clenched tight enough to crack.

The ceiling above me softened, its harsh canvas lines blurring into something gentler, more forgiving. The sounds of the tent — Glenda's movements, Chris's breathing, the distant murmur of voices outside — faded to a pleasant hum, background noise in a world that had suddenly become warm and safe and far, far away from the horrors of the night.

"Try to relax," Glenda's voice reached me, muffled and sweet. "You're safe now."

Safe. The word wrapped around me like a blanket, like arms holding me close, like the feeling of coming home after a long journey to find everything exactly as you'd left it. I let myself sink into it, let the morphine carry me down into depths where pain couldn't follow.

Chris's hand was still in mine, his fingers a lifeline that kept me tethered to reality even as the drug tried to pull me under. I squeezed back, weakly, a thank-you I couldn't find the words to speak.

And then I saw her.

Not with my eyes — those had drifted closed at some point, the lids too heavy to hold open. But she was there, vivid and real in the space behind my vision, more present than the tent or the mattress or the ache that had faded to a whisper in my wounded leg.

Brianne.

Her red hair caught light that didn't exist, glowing like embers, like sunrise, like all the warmth I'd been missing since the moment I'd tumbled through that portal. Her eyes found mine, and in them I saw everything — love and worry and the fierce determination that had made me fall for her in the first place. She was wearing the green sundress she'd bought for our engagement party, the one that showed off her shoulders and made her eyes look like forest pools.

"Brianne," I whispered, my voice cracking on her name.

My hand reached out, trembling fingers extending toward her face. I could see every freckle, every tiny imperfection that made her perfect, the slight asymmetry of her smile that had charmed me from the first moment we'd met. My fingertips brushed against her cheek — warm, impossibly warm, soft as I remembered — and traced the contours I knew better than my own reflection.

She leaned into my touch, her eyes closing, a small sound of contentment escaping her lips.

"I'm sorry," I heard myself say, the words bubbling up from somewhere deep, somewhere that had been holding them since the moment I'd left for Uncle Jamie's house and never come back. "I'm so sorry. I tried to come home. I tried—"

She pressed a finger to my lips, silencing me.

"I know," she said, and her voice was exactly as I remembered — that slight rasp in the lower register, the way certain words curled at their edges. "I know you did."

Her hand moved to her belly, to the gentle swell where our daughter waited. Through the haze of the morphine, I could almost see her there — a tiny life, half me and half Brianne, growing stronger every day in the safety of her mother's body.

"She's beautiful," Brianne said, as if reading my thoughts. "She has your eyes."

The tears came then.

Not the gasping, ugly sobs of fear and pain, but something quieter, deeper — grief and love and longing all tangled together, leaking down my cheeks in streams that I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to. I was crying for everything I'd lost and everything I might never have. For the life that had been stolen from me, the future that might never exist, the daughter I might never hold.

"I love you," I managed, the words thick and broken. "I love you so much. Both of you."

Brianne smiled, and it was the smile she gave me on Sunday mornings when we lay tangled in bed sheets, when the world outside didn't matter and the only thing that existed was the warmth of her body against mine.

"Then fight," she said. "Fight to come back to us. Promise me."

"I promise."

The words left my lips like a vow, like a prayer, like the most sacred oath I'd ever sworn. I would fight. Would claw my way through this nightmare, through shadow panthers and portal worlds and whatever else stood between me and home. I would survive this. I would find a way back.

For her. For our daughter. For the future that refused to die no matter how much the present tried to kill it.

Brianne's image began to fade, the edges of her form blurring, dissolving into the warm darkness that the morphine had woven around me. I tried to hold onto her, to keep her with me for just a moment longer, but she slipped through my fingers like smoke, like a dream upon waking.

"I'll find you," I whispered into the void. "I swear I'll find you."

And then there was nothing but warmth, and darkness, and the distant sensation of hands working on my leg as Glenda fought to save what was left of me. The pain was there, somewhere, a muffled thunder on the horizon, but it couldn't reach me here. Nothing could reach me here.

I let go.

Let the morphine take me down into the depths, into a place where there were no monsters, no blood, no desperate flights through starless nights. A place where Brianne still smiled at me across a breakfast table, where our daughter kicked against my palm through the taut skin of her mother's belly, where the future stretched out bright and full of promise.

Sleep claimed me like a tide claiming the shore — inevitable, irresistible, absolute.

My last conscious thought was her name, a whisper that existed only in the space between heartbeats.

Brianne.

And then even that was gone, and there was only the merciful oblivion of dreamless dark.