Page 9 of Caution to the Wind

Seconds later, Henning descended the steps at a run with one of the carnie’s axes in one hand, his thick thighs eating up the steep stairs in short order. He caught sight of us before he reached the floor, eyes blown wide, face a mask of shocked horror, and then he jumped the remaining six steps to land heavily at the bottom.

Another man was behind him, a big man dressed in leather who I barely noticed in my relief at seeing Henning and my overall shock.

“Henning,” I murmured, suddenly shaking so hard I couldn’t lift the sword anymore, and it went clanking to the ground again. My knees caved in after that, and I fell with a short cry to the ground. “K-Kate, she’s hurt so badly.”

Henning was already moving toward us, his long legs eating up the space in seconds. His big hand found my head, threading through my hair to hold it, to anchor me, even as he addressed Kate first.

“Katie Kay,” he murmured, his voice filled with heartbreak and barely bottled rage. I watched as his free hand fluttered over her, heavy palm and thick fingers helpless against her many wounds. I knew he was taking stock, his doctor’s mind searching for where to start saving her. Only, even I could see there was too much blood spilling out of her. Fountains of it. “Fuck. What the fuck happened?”

“H-h-Henning.” She was barely conscious now, her head lolling back between her shoulders, an unsteady smile on her face. “The white knight come to save me.”

“I will,” he said viciously, releasing my hair so he could rip off the bottom of his tee before wrapping it tight around Kate’s left thigh where a deep slice had opened an artery.

I pressed closer to his feet, sprawled slightly over one of them as he worked. Pain blurred time and the edges of my vision as I watched him talk to Kate, reassure her, love her as she slowly, drip by drip, died.

The other man was in front of me, crouched, shoulder pinning a cell to his ear. He was speaking to the authorities, I thought. With his free hands, he gently moved his tattooed fingers over my body, cataloguing my wounds.

“Help Kate,” I pleaded, but the words were thick in my mouth, and my vision was tunnelling narrower and narrower like a scope.

“Hush,” he ordered me before returning to the phone.

I tried to get up, to help Kate and Henning myself, but the stranger pushed me back to the ground gently but firmly with one hand.

“Still.”

“Help Kate,” I repeated, an edge of hysteria bubbling up my throat along with a surge of bile. I gagged, then turned my head and lost the cotton candy and corn dog I’d had for dinner.

The man held my hair back with one hand.

When I was finished, I heard Henning muttering fiercely to Kate, begging her to stay with him, cajoling her to keep breathing as if she had a choice.

“Bat, hold her still,” Henning barked to the man beside me, who immediately stood to gently clasp Kate’s hips.

Hen raised his axe and brought it down with a harsh metallic clatter on the joint of the locked chains. After two firm strikes, one side fell to the floor with a muted clamour. Bat caught Kate as she swayed unbalanced to one side, but as soon as the other chain was broken, Henning quickly but reverently swung her into his arms.

“Hold on, Kate,” he murmured, adjusting her gently before he stared across the ground to the staircase. “Bat, take care of Mei. Kate, come on, love. Stay with me.”

But I could tell the moment I swung my bleary gaze toward her that Kate’s last choice was being taken from her. Her head lolled against Henning’s massive chest, limbs dangling, soaked in blood and dripping to the ground.

She was gone.

But Henning sprinted up the stairs like Atlas used to carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and seconds later, they disappeared.

HENNING

The first timeI saw Katherine Kay, she was lyin’ in a hospital bed in the emergency room of Rockyview Hospital. It was my second day in residency, and I was doin’ my first six-month rotation in the ER after finishing two other rotations in internal medicine and orthopaedics. After a few more weeks, maybe I wouldn’t have felt the sight of her as acutely as I did. Maybe I would’ve been better steeled for the sight of a young, beautiful woman broken down by the brutality of a deviant customer and an unforgivin’ pimp.

I was old for med school, old for residency. My peers were all early twentysomethings with fresh, dewy-eyed optimism, but I was twenty-six, and after a tour in the Middle East when I’d first enlisted in the military when I was eighteen, I thought I’d seen it all.

So I was unprepared for Kate.

As Dr. Pandey checked her chart and issued orders to the rest of us, I couldn’t stop starin’ at her.

“How old?” I asked low as I instinctively obeyed her instruction and took over for the paramedic holdin’ the compress to the wet mess between her legs. “How old is she?” I bit out again when no one answered me.

“Twenty-three.”

Just a kid, really.