Miracle (boyxboy)

Chapter Ten

"What are you doing?" Maddy demanded as Ezra shook a blanket out over the ground, then picked me up and laid me on it with the hard round thing tucked behind me so that I couldn't lay all the way down. It turned out to be a motorcycle helmet. A really big one.

"How long ago was he bitten?" Ezra asked. He had a flashlight in his teeth, and after he finished settling me down he passed the light over my leg.

"I don't know! Maybe like twenty minutes?"

Ezra grunted and produced a magic marker from somewhere inside his big hoodie. He started drawing on my leg, around the bite inside my knee.

"What the hell? Mister, we don't have time for this. You gotta get him into town."

"That's what we don't have time for," Ezra said around the pen cap in his mouth. He lifted my leg up, found the second bite on the back of my thigh, and drew around it, too. "Your brother needs antivenin. The nearest hospital that carries it is a hundred miles from here. We're going to have to improvise."

"Improvise how?" Maddy barked.

Ezra pointed behind him. "Bring my bag from the bike." He pointed the flashlight into my eyes then. It kind of stung but I was too busy staring at him to care. My head felt light, and my leg hurt in deep, throbbing, stabbing waves. I was also really, really sleepy. And I noticed that Ezra had sweat dripping down the sides of his face, with shadows under his eyes that I hadn't seen before. His complexion looked kind of gray.

I frowned. "You don't look so good."

"You're one to talk."

Did he just joke with me? He hadn't cracked a smile, but I could have sworn I caught a glint of teasing in his eyes. I smiled back at him and fought to keep my eyelids open. "I didn't think you were coming."

"I keep my promises," he said, directing the light onto my busted lip, then down to my colorfully bruised stomach. Three deep lines formed across his forehead, and his jaw clenched up. "You're going into shock."

"Here," Maddy said, dropping some kind of black bag next to Ezra's hip, then falling to her knees beside me. "Shit, his leg's so swollen. Aren't we supposed to tie it off or suck the poison out or something?"

"No." He didn't elaborate, just opened up the bag and started pulling stuff out. Bottles, and little metal tools, and a zippered pouch that, when he opened it, was full of syringes. He held a few of the bottles up to the light and when he found the one he wanted, shook a white pill into his hand. A silver flask came out of his pocket, and he showed them both to me. "Open up."

I didn't even ask what it was, just let him put the pill on my tongue and swallowed it down with the contents of the flask, which turned out to be water. "My head hurts," I said thickly.

"I know. That one will help with the nausea. And this one," he put another pill in my mouth, "is for pain."

I swallowed it down too.

"You some kind of doctor?" Maddy asked with wide eyes.

"Something like that." He unzipped his giant hoodie and pulled it off. Underneath, he had on a black tank top. Damn, his arms and chest were all muscle. I sighed a little as he laid his hoodie over me, tucking it up under my chin. I guess I had been cold, because it felt so wonderfully warm and smelled so incredibly good that all I wanted was to curl up under it and sleep forever.

My head fell forward onto my chest, and I tried to push the helmet out from under me because it was uncomfortable and I really wanted to lie down. Ezra wouldn't let me, and he lifted my face up again. "You can't go to sleep, Connor. Okay? This is important."