Page 12 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
I stared at her, breathing fast, knowing that she was absolutely right. Their lives were depending on me. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier. Ru darted forward again, snagging my shirt and ripping a hole in it when I pulled away. She tried to press a gauze pad onto the wound, but with only one arm, she had no hope of succeeding.
“Help me!” Ru begged the blue man. But he stood stiffly, stark desperation on his face.
“Master told me not to,” he murmured, looking horrified at his own refusal.
Ru cursed again. “For fuck’s sake, Zeke, would you tell your fucking slave to help me stop you dying on us?”
“Tell myslaveto…?” Okay, so maybe my brain wasn’t working quite as well as I’d thought it was. My gaze landed on the blue man again, and for the first time, the pieces of his sudden arrival and his manner of addressing me clicked into place. “You’re a Vangravian, aren’t you?” I asked him, as the truth dawned cold and terrible. “A dimari?”
“Yes, Master,” he said, still holding out the wound dressing in a pathetically hopeful gesture.
Fucking hell. That meant he’d bonded with me. I didn’t know much about the dimari, but I knew that they imprinted irreversibly on the first person they laid eyes on, after emerging from their crates. And that had been me, albeit a half-conscious and highly intoxicated me.
And that also meant that unless I gave him permission to touch me, he would very literally just stand there and watch me die. The dimari were compelled to obey their master’s commands, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives.
“What’s your name?” I asked him, somewhat aggrieved that I hadn’t asked him earlier. It must have been a rude shock to come out of his crate and be thrust right into the centre of this shitshow.
“Dax,” the man said.
“Heavens preserve us, priorities here!” Ru shouted. “We can do the fucking introductions later.”
I rolled my eyes, purely to use the pretence at irritation to maintain a grip on my own sanity. “Fine. Dax, you can help Ru bandage me.”
He darted forward, presumably relieved at the instruction, and I stared at the ceiling, pretending I was waiting for them to tie my shoelaces or some shit. Once they were finished, Ru grabbed my hand and pressed it to the outside of the dressing. “Put pressure on it,” she instructed. “And sit the fuck down before you fall over again.”
I did, because my right leg was mostly numb now, so sitting on it didn’t hurt nearly as much. I idly wondered if it was going to have to be amputated when we got back, and then muttered a curse, glancing about the room for something else to think about.
“Gasrin, how’s the leg?” I asked, realising that I hadn’t checked up on him since I’d sliced his leg open.
He shuffled about on his chair at the side of the room. “Not so bad, now that it’s numb. The rest is just bruises.” It was a woeful understatement. He still didn’t have a shirt on; he now had a thick swath of bandages around his leg, but the shirt that had been holding him together in the interim was soaked in blood, wadded up in a bundle in the corner. But his yellow skin was stained purple in large patches all up and down his torso, and I shuddered to think of the beating he must have endured. But bruises and cuts would heal in time. The rest of our wounds were going to be a lot harder to resolve.
“Do you think Legge left any booze in his bunk?” I asked no one in particular. Was it bad manners to be referencing our fallen crewmate so soon after his death? Would stealing his alcohol be in poor taste?
“It might not be a good idea to consume anything if you have an abdominal wound,” Dax advised me from his seat by the wall. Now that we were all as patched up as we were going to get, everyone was making themselves as comfortable as possible. “You’ll probably need to have surgery when we arrive,and drinking anything could cause vomiting under a general anaesthetic.”
“That’s true,” I agreed. “But if I don’t find a way to take the edge off, I’m going to shoot myself in the face before we get there.” That was probably also true, though I’d have to fight Ru to get the chance to do it. But we had an hour and a half wait, to sit here and do nothing but ruminate on our recent march through Hell.
“If there is any booze, I wouldn’t say no to it,” Ru muttered.
I craned my neck, deciding to make use of the fact that Dax was compelled to obey me. “Dax, go down the hall, second door on the right, and look underneath the mattress on the top bunk on the left. Bring back any sort of bottle you find there.”
Dax frowned at me, but he rose obediently to his feet. “Yes, Master,” he said, with clear censure in his voice. Well, wasn’t he a little spitfire? I got the feeling he wasn’t going to let me get away with much without letting me know his opinion about it. He returned a minute later with a half-empty bottle of vodka in hand. I took it from him and took a long swig, then passed it over to Ru. She took a swallow, coughed, cleared her throat, and then took another gulp from the bottle. Then Gasrin held out his hand, and she passed the bottle over to him.
Half an hour later, Ru dared to break the heavy silence that had fallen. “What did they take from you?” she asked, waving vaguely towards my bandaged torso.
The fact that I was willing to answer her was testament to the alcohol having taken effect. “As far as I know, it was just a kidney and a lobe of my liver.” The creatures, whatever they were, apparently liked their food fresh, so they’d carefully cauterised the wounds from the removed organs, leaving the victim alive to be harvested from again at their convenience. I’d found out later, once we’d reached an Alliance hospital, that my assessment had been correct. Livers, I had been shocked to discover, could growback if a part of one was removed, and mine had done exactly that in the weeks that followed. The kidney I had simply learned to live without.
◊◊◊
Back in the present, Aiden was watching me silently as I completed the tale. Dax had waited for me at the hospital for three weeks, until my leg had recovered enough for me to be able to walk, and then he’d come home with me, to begin our slow and mutual slide into depression and despair. A year on, I didn’t really feel any different from the way I had the day I’d left the hospital. The whole of reality had been turned upside down, and I had no idea how I was supposed to pretend to care about the mundanities of everyday life after I’d been forced to watch demons torture and devour my crew.
But none of that was Dax’s fault, and the one thing I could actually care about was making sure I didn’t keep inadvertently torturing him. “So what’s in this magical handbook on how to care for a dimari?” I asked Aiden. He hadn’t run away screaming yet, so I figured we were still on for solving the rest of this problem.
Aiden glanced around, then drained the last of his coffee – most likely cold by now, but he wasn’t complaining. “Here is not the place to talk about it. Some of the things I need to tell you are fairly controversial, so I’d rather we weren’t overheard.” He glanced over to Dax, who now had a mostly empty plate. “Now that you’re both fed and watered, let’s go home and I can explain what we’re going to do from here on in.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Zeke