Wings

5: Forget Your Engravings

WPOV

Track: Engravings, Ethan Bortnick

I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt.

I had heard the priest say my name, but it had been so difficult to hear from the top of that building. I couldn't quite tell if he was saying something good about me or if it was bad—and then, I mean, my mom was mourning me. I thought she would be happy that I'm alive. I thought I could probably even show them that Nico isn't the evil monster that we've been told he is—I mean, clearly if he brought me back to the marketplace safe and sound, he's not attempting to murder me in cold blood.

I guess I let my hope that they would let me come back to the village go too far, and now Nico has paid the price for my naivety.

I guess I just hoped that having me—their son, their neighbor, their apprentice, their friend—back alive would be more meaningful than punishing me for being...

I don't know if I can say the word, even now.

I can't go home—my mother made that pretty clear when she berated me for not repenting—but Nico won't make it far into the woods, so when we fall through a backdoor, it's to Annabeth's house. I'm really hoping that she can be persuaded to help us. I don't really know what other options we have at this point—we can't fight them, and we can't run from them when Nico can barely stay conscious.

I practically drag Nico through the doorway, and he promptly passes out the moment we're inside. There's blood everywhere—my hands are already covered in his blood and I'm not really sure how that happened. I shut the door behind us, and words are tumbling out of my mouth near-constantly, begging him to stay awake, to stay alive, to be okay.

No one is at Annabeth's house right now—obviously. They were at my funeral. I don't know if I'll be able to come up with an explanation to brush away what the priest called me. I have to hope that Annabeth won't care.

First thing first. I have to get Nico somewhere that I can treat him. I loop one arm under his armpits and the other under his knees, and I grunt from the difficulty of carrying someone. Still, I manage to lift him and stumble toward the back bedroom. I hope Annabeth won't mind that the blankets are going to be bloody. It's for a good cause, though.

I push the bedroom door open with my shoulder and stumble inside, trying my best to be gentle when I drop Nico off on the bed. My mind is buzzing with fear—I'm in way over my head with this. I want Annabeth's father to come home—he's the one that I had planned to be an apprentice for. He'll know how to save Nico, but I'm praying that he can be convinced to even care in the first place.

In the meantime, I run to the medicine closet—there's some alcohol there and a bunch of bandages—good, he's going to need a lot. I grab as much as I can before running back to Nico. I'm not really sure what I'm doing—these kinds of wounds are more serious than what people usually survive. The alcohol is a desperate measure too—Mr. Chase says that most medics don't even believe that the alcohol does anything, but Mr. Chase believes that people are more likely to survive for some reason when he uses it, and I'm willing to try anything.

Nico's shirt sticks to his wounds. It has a flap in the back that ties together as protection for the skin in between his wings—my trembling fingers pull at the knot until it comes loose in my hands, and then I manage to pull the rest of his shirt over his head and toss it aside.

His entire body is marred with scars, and blood paints his skin like a grotesque canvas. I grab the bottle of alcohol and twist off the cap, praying that Mr. Chase isn't crazy about this, and I pour it over the wound on his abdomen. He's got some other open wounds too, but this is the most severe—if I can just save him from the blood loss induced by this stab wound, he should be able to survive the other injuries.