Chapter 24
Crumbling
After her uncle left, Brielle went to check on Garenth. The creature was still awake and apparently waiting for her to return.
“How do you feel?”
“Bad.”
“Would you like some water?”
“Na-am.” Yes.
She took the glass from the bedside table and held it out to him, adjusting the straw for him to sip. He took several small swallows before pulling back.
“Enough?”
“Na-am.”
He laid his head back on the pillow, sighing deeply. Brielle eyed the blood-soaked towels. Going into the bathroom, she gathered the remainder of her clean towels. Sometime today she needed to make a trip to the basement laundry room. I hope there’s no one there when I take this load of towels. It’ll be hard to explain where all this blood came from if someone saw them.
“I’m going to check on your wounds. See if the compresses need to be replaced. I don’t want to hurt you, but this might cause you discomfort.”
“Understand.”
She started with the wound on his arm. Carefully untying the towel, she slowly peeled away the washcloth. She hoped to see some sort of clotting going on. In reality, she had no idea what she’d find since his physique was foreign to the point of being alien. What she didn’t want to find, or exacerbate, was to remove any scab that might have formed over the injury, and cause him to start bleeding again.
She held her breath as she lifted the cloth. When a fresh trail of blood failed to appear, she moved the lamp closer to give her a better view of the bullet hole. Saying a silent prayer of thanks, she tapped her phone to reopen the app.
“I think you’re starting to heal.”
Garenth’s eyes remained closed. Neither did he answer.
The fact that an artery hadn’t been hit was a miracle. However, there remained the problem of the bullet still embedded inside. It couldn’t remain there, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She wasn’t a surgeon, and she damn well wasn’t about to probe around inside his arm to try to find it.
She left that wound open to give it a chance to breathe while she checked his other injuries. After which she would bind them all with clean compresses. She felt completely helpless, knowing there was nothing she could give him for pain. Or put on the wounds to help him avoid infection. All she could do was keep the injuries clean and bound.
She reached next for the long gash across his ribcage. Gradually lifting the cotton towel, she leaned over to get a closer look, taking care not to breathe on the laceration.
Good news, there was no bleeding. She frowned. But there wasn’t a scab, either. In fact…
She tilted her head. If that was muscle underneath the stony exterior, it was flesh-colored. There also appeared to be some sort of clear film acting as a sort of liner between the muscle and outer covering.
Garenth suddenly reached up and scratched at the wound. Brielle cried out in alarm and grabbed his hand to keep him from further injuring himself. She jerked his hand away, but instead of the slash bleeding again, pieces of stone and dust fell onto the sheet. But that debris was second to what she found herself staring at.
That’s skin. That flesh-colored muscle isn’t a muscle. It’s skin.
It’s skin!
She snatched up her phone. “Does it itch?”
“Na-am.” Yes.
Serious injuries never itched. They hurt. They were agonizing to endure without pain killers. The only time they would itch is when they were healing.
She recalled the time she’d broken her arm during a high school basketball game. Initially it had given her untold grief. Nothing she could do would rid her of the lancing pain going up her arm. But once it began to heal, the resulting itching nearly drove her out of her mind.
“Tell me if this hurts,” she instructed.
Taking the edge of the towel, she used it to pick at one of the shattered pieces of stone clinging to the clear film. It looked like the thin sheet of rock had been broken and only needed to be peeled away to reveal the healthy skin underneath.
Garenth didn’t flinch. “Itch,” he told her.
“Wait here. Don’t move.” She hurried into the bathroom to fetch a pair of tweezers and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol to take back to the bed. She sterilized the tweezers as best she could with the alcohol, then used them to remove more and more pieces of the slate-like covering.
It was like pulling sunburned skin that was starting to peel away from the new skin underneath.
He wasn’t solid stone, as she’d first believed. The rock exterior was more like his armor, a shell preserving the real him inside. The image of an insect’s carapace came to her.
She paused and stared at him. His eyes were still closed but he was awake. After a moment, he opened them to give her a questioning stare. Brielle flashed him a smile. “Does that feel better?”
She removed another, slightly larger piece. It briefly clung to the skin underneath before detaching.
“Itch,” he told her.
By this time she’d removed enough of the rough exterior to show a large expanse of skin. Definitely skin. To be certain, she touched it with a fingertip. Garenth reacted with a jerk.
“What do.”
“That’s your skin. You’re not solid stone.” She laughed softly. “You’re not made of solid stone!”
He struggled to sit up, but she stopped him. “Whoa, whoa. Stop. You could start bleeding again.”
He brushed away her hand and craned his neck to stare at where she’d been removing his exterior casing. With a talon tip, he lightly scraped the exposed skin, and she realized there was no wound on the inner layer. Unmarked skin. Skin that showed no bullet puncture or lesion.
“Garenth, your skin’s unscathed. There’s no wound!”
He unwrapped the towel around his chest to reveal the bullet holes left from his first encounter. Using the tip of his clawed finger again, he picked at the indentations. Bits of rock began falling into his lap, gradually increasing in size as the pieces became chunks.
A sense of urgency seemed to overcome him, and he started tearing at the stony remnants. Small clouds of dust erupted where his claws raked across the exterior.
She was hit with inspiration and grabbed his arm. “Wait. This is getting messy. Come with me.”
She helped him to his feet, letting him rest much of his bulk on her shoulders. They slowly made their way into the bathroom. After dropping the lid on the toilet, she sat him down, placing the cell phone on the sink countertop.
“I bet that stuff will come off easier if it’s wet. I mean, that section on your hip didn’t start to peel away until after you bled a bit.” She bit her lower lip as another thought came to her. “I’m willing to bet your bleeding isn’t coming from your veins. I bet it’s coming from some kind of membrane that’s between your skin and this outer covering. I bet that when the bullets hit you, they ripped into that membrane, and that’s where the blood is coming from. I know it’s a long shot, but if you get into the shower, it might be easier to peel that stuff off of you.”
He said a few words. The only one the app managed to translate was “wet”. She repeated the word, adding, “Na-am?”
A faint smile came over his face. “Na-am.”
Pushing aside the bathtub’s curtain, she turned on the faucet and adjusted the water’s temperature until it was slightly warm before initiating the shower spray. “All right, Garenth. Get in. Let’s see if we can peel you like a hard-boiled egg.”