Where A Witch Goeth

Chapter Fifty-Five: To Save A Life

A real cave-in is not like a movie cave-in. If you're not crushed to a pulp by several hundred thousand pounds of granite, then you are likely to die from suffocation because trying to breathe in the air, thick with fine particulate debris, is just as bad as trying to breathe smoky air in a fire.

Or so I imagined as I tried not cough while I took very slow and shallow breaths through a cloth Abraham just handed me, wetted from the Source Spring. It was still glowing with light, and the only reason Abraham and I were not a mixed pile of goo was that the light was not only light, but some kind of otherwordly force field that had graced us with a sphere of security, about a dozen feet in radius. I glanced above me, where hundreds of boulders seemed to have settled in a dome that defied the physics of the natural world.

Well, of this natural world, anyway.

Anxiety at the thought of what would happen when the portal closed sent me into a coughing fit.

"Shhh, try to relax your lungs, chéri," Abraham soothed as he lightly rubbed my back with cool fingers. "Do you want to drink some water?"

"From that?" I gasped. I shook my head in a violent no as I eyed the churning, illuminated pool.

"Afraid you'll fall in?" he asked cynically. "I know the feeling."

"Afraid...to... disturb this," I choked as I gestured to the force-field.

"This?" He looked up at the temporary ceiling, still spilling cave dirt on us as the rock vibrated ominously. "You think the portal is keeping the boulders at bay?"

"What else?"

Abraham blinked at me. By the light of the Source Spring, I realized  he'd used the shirt off his back as my mouth cover, and his perfect porcelain form was lined with dust, his dark straight hair coated so that he looked as gray as an old man.

"What else?" he repeated. "You. Me. Us. Our little coven of two," He held out his hand to me, and when I took it, a shock of power thrummed through me, but I wasn't the receptive vessel. When we touched, I felt my own power amplified. "I do not think, if the Source Spring was holding this space open, that I would still exist. The vampire part of me is not particularly compatible with most things Faery."

I eyed the ceiling again, then the portal. "I don't know. Maybe it is us. But I didn't do it on purpose."

He shrugged. "I don't care what or how this ward came to be. As long as it holds, and they dig us out quickly." He winced,  his left hand trailing towards his back before he stilled it and readjusted his features, clearing the pained expression.

That got my attention, as I had never seen a vampire respond to physical pain in any way. I scrambled forward, grabbing his arm and hauling myself around him to see his back, as I could not pull him any more than I could pull a mountain toward me.

"You are one brave witch to come so close," he hissed, two fangs involuntarily descending as I ruthlessly pushed into his personal space.  He averted his head from me and took in a large snort of cave dirt, trying to filter my scent.

I ignored his proximity warning. "Abraham, you're hemorrhaging!" I exclaimed at the crater in his back roughly the size of a grapefruit, pouring nearly black blood from where I thought his kidney should be.

"Hemorrhaging? Mais non, je ne crois pas. I am dead. Better to say that I am leaking, n'est-ce pas?" he joked.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "How much can you leak before it becomes a problem?"

He picked up a stalactite from the ground—the one that impaled him as he saved me from certain death. He crushed the bloody point beneath his fingers, crumbling walnut-sized rocks from it. "Putain de merde. I was certain, after my making, I had shat and puked out every possible internal part of me. But apparently, I still have organs that fill with blood when I am well-fed. And apparently, my kidney can still be induced to bleed like a stuck pig."