The Wrong Leg

"Surviving the monster was the easy part. It's the cure that terrifies me."

"Kain."

The voice drifted through the darkness like honey, sweet and warm, wrapping around me in a cocoon of comfort that I never wanted to leave. Brianne's voice. Had to be. That melodic quality, that gentle lilt that made my name sound like a song.

I smiled, letting myself sink deeper into the warmth.

"Kain."

Sharper now. Wrong. The melody stripped away, replaced by something urgent and insistent, and then a finger jabbed into my ribs hard enough to make me jerk like I'd grabbed a live wire.

My eyes flew open.

The tent. Canvas walls. Golden light streaming through the fabric, painting everything in shades of amber and cream. Morning. It was morning, which meant I'd slept through the night, which meant I was still alive, which meant—

"Good, you're awake," Glenda said, her face swimming into focus above me.

Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, blonde strands catching the light like spun gold. She was smiling, but there was something behind the expression — a tightness around her eyes that didn't match the curve of her lips.

I tried to stretch, to work the stiffness from muscles that felt like they'd been replaced with concrete. The movement woke my wounded leg, pain flaring through the torn flesh with a viciousness that made me suck air through my teeth.

The night came flooding back. The darkness. The teeth. Being dragged through the dust like a piece of meat. Charity emerging from the shadows with blood on her hands. The agonising journey back to camp, the morphine, Brianne's face floating above me as I slipped into oblivion.

I wanted to go back there. Wanted another dose of whatever Glenda had given me, another ticket to that warm place where pain couldn't reach and Brianne was real and close and mine.

"Try and hold still," Glenda instructed, tearing open an alcohol swab.

The sharp scent of disinfectant cut through the musty air of the tent, and I watched as she rubbed the cool pad against my upper arm. The needle followed before I could brace for it — a quick sting, a pressure beneath my skin, and then the slow spread of whatever medication she was pumping into my bloodstream.

I waited for the relief. For the warmth to begin its journey through my veins, for the pain in my leg to fade to a distant murmur.

Nothing happened.

No — something happened, but it was wrong. The injection site tingled, the sensation spreading down my arm as expected, but my leg... my leg wasn't responding. I tried to move it, tried to shift the wounded limb even slightly, and felt nothing. No pain. No sensation at all. Just absence, a void where feeling should have been.

Panic clawed at my throat.

"I can't feel my leg," I wheezed, the words coming out strangled and desperate.

Glenda's eyes snapped to mine, her expression sharpening with concern. "Are you certain?"

Was I certain? Was I fucking certain? My leg was gone — not physically, I could see the shape of it under the blanket, but neurologically, sensationally, it had ceased to exist. The thing that had attacked me must have done more damage than anyone realised. Severed nerves. Destroyed tissue. Turned my calf into hamburger meat that would never work again.

Tears burned at the corners of my eyes, hot and shameful.

"Am I going to lose it?" The question came out broken, a child's voice from a grown man's throat.

Glenda took a breath, steadying herself, and reached for the bottom of the blanket. The fabric scraped against my skin — the skin I could feel, the parts of me that still worked — as she pulled it back, exposing my wounded leg to the cool morning air.

Then she did something I wasn't expecting.

She grabbed the empty syringe and drove it into the arch of my foot.

Pain exploded up my leg like a firework, a bolt of white-hot agony that tore through the numbness and reminded me in no uncertain terms that the nerves in that limb were very much alive and functioning.

"What the fuck was that for!?" I yelped, my voice cracking on the last word.

Glenda's lips curved into a small smile, the kind doctors give when they're about to deliver news that isn't as bad as you feared. "Your leg still has feeling."

The relief lasted exactly half a second.

Because if I could feel my wounded leg — and Christ, could I feel it now, the throbbing ache reasserting itself with a vengeance — then the numbness I'd noticed wasn't coming from there. It was coming from somewhere else. Somewhere that hadn't been torn apart by monster teeth.

"No!" The word ripped from my throat, tears spilling down my cheeks in hot, salty tracks. "I meant the other leg!"

I watched Glenda's expression shift, confusion clouding her features as she processed what I was saying. Her brow furrowed, her eyes darting between my two legs as if she could see something I couldn't.

"That doesn't make any sense," she muttered, more to herself than to me.

It didn't make sense. None of this made sense. My wounded leg was screaming at me now, every nerve ending firing in protest, but my other leg — the one that should have been fine, that hadn't been anywhere near those teeth — was a dead zone. I couldn't feel it. Couldn't move it. Couldn't even tell if it was still attached without looking.

"Close your eyes," Glenda commanded, her voice snapping back into that professional tone that meant she was thinking, problem-solving, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening to my body.

I obeyed, my lids dropping closed, plunging me back into darkness. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic rhythm that seemed to echo in the silence of the tent.

I waited. Felt nothing.

"Do you not feel anything?" Glenda's voice broke through.

"No," I replied, shaking my head. "Should I have?"

A pause. A beat of silence that stretched too long, that spoke volumes about things she wasn't saying.

"You're going to be just fine," Glenda said finally.

The words were hollow. A lie wrapped in reassurance, a placebo made of syllables. I could hear the uncertainty beneath them, the fear she was trying to hide. Whatever was wrong with me, she didn't know how to fix it.

The tent rustled, canvas parting to admit a new presence. I didn't open my eyes — couldn't face another concerned expression, another set of worried looks that would only confirm how fucked I truly was.

"We need to get Kain to the lagoon, now!" Glenda's voice had shifted again, urgent now, commanding.

The lagoon.

The word hit me like a bucket of ice water, freezing the blood in my veins and sending my heart into a panicked stutter. The lagoon, where the water did things to you. Where I'd lost control of my own body, had experienced sensations that bypassed consent and rational thought and left you gasping and shamed and desperate to forget.

"Not the lagoon," I whispered, shaking my head so hard the tent spun around me.

"Why not?" Glenda demanded.

Because the last time I was there, I came so hard I blacked out with my uncle watching. Because the water turns my body into something I can't control. Because I'd rather lose my fucking leg than go through that again.

But the words wouldn't come. The shame was too thick, too suffocating, clogging my throat like wet cement. I could only shake my head, my mouth working uselessly, my eyes squeezed shut against the memories that threatened to drown me.

"It's okay," a new voice interjected — Chris, I realised. "The beast has been killed."

But it's not the beast I'm worried about.

The scream stayed trapped inside my skull, a silent howl of anguish that tore at the walls of my mind. They didn't understand. Couldn't understand. The lagoon wasn't dangerous because of what lurked in the shadows around it — it was dangerous because of what it did to you, what it made you feel, what it stripped away and left exposed.

And I couldn't explain that. Not to Glenda, not to Chris, not to anyone. The humiliation was too complete, the memory too raw.

"Help me lift him," Glenda instructed, and I felt hands sliding beneath my body, arms wrapping around my shoulders and legs.

They tried to lift me. Chris's muscles strained, his grunt of effort audible in the quiet tent. But with one leg wounded and the other apparently paralysed, I was dead weight — awkward and unwieldy. We made it perhaps six inches off the mattress before the whole attempt collapsed, my body crumpling back down in a graceless heap.

"I'll get Karen," Glenda said, her voice tight with frustration.

"No need." Karen's voice rang out from the tent's entrance, making me flinch. "I figured you might need some help."

Of course she had. Of course more people needed to witness this, needed to see me helpless and broken and incapable of even standing on my own two feet. The humiliation just kept compounding, layer upon layer of shame stacking up like bricks in a wall.

Karen moved to Chris's side, her presence a new weight in the already crowded tent. "What do you need?"

"We need to carry Kain to the lagoon," Glenda replied, and the dread that had been coiling in my gut tightened another notch.

I was going. Whether I wanted to or not, whether I screamed or begged or cried, they were going to take me to that water and submerge me in its influence. My wishes didn't matter. My terror didn't matter. All that mattered was the leg that might be saved, the body that might be healed, the price that would have to be paid.

"He currently has no use of his legs," Glenda added, the words landing like hammer blows.

No use. Useless. A burden to be carried, a problem to be solved, a thing that had lost the ability to move itself through the world.

"I'll take the bulk of his weight," Chris said, his voice steady with determination. "Can you support his waist and legs?"

"Of course," Karen replied.

I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me.

Not unconsciousness — just surrender. A resignation to the inevitable, a yielding to the fate that had been decided for me without my input. They would carry me to the lagoon. The water would do whatever it did. And I would have to survive it somehow, the way I'd survived everything else since falling through that fucking portal.

Grunts and groans filled the air as they lifted me from the mattress, their combined strength managing what Chris alone couldn't achieve. My body rose, suspended between their grips, and then we were moving — out of the tent, into the bright morning light, toward a destination that filled me with more fear than the shadow panther ever had.