Page 12 of Spears and Shadows (Defenders of the Light)
“Nora? Nora,” he repeated, his tone bordering on pleading.
Her eyes slid over him, distantly noting he had a few small holes charred in his tweed blazer, and the long end of his tie had been singed right off where the creature had grabbed it. He looked otherwise unscathed.
“Nora, are you okay?” His face was frantic, not at all like the grim determination she had seen on it when he was grappling with the shadow creatures.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said as she reached up and grabbed his hand, which was still smoothing over her sweat-soaked hair. She put her other hand on the floor to push herself up to stand but didn’t make it six inches off the ground before she slid back down the table, finding herself quite dizzy and weak. “I think I hit my head a little too hard.”
“That’s not all.” Adam’s face was ashen as he looked down. Nora followed his gaze to find that his knees were soaked in a spreading puddle of blood that flowed from a gash in her upper thigh, right where the creature had grabbed her before she killed it. I killed it, she thought, her mind unable or unwilling to focus on the blood streaming out of her. She had never killed anything before.
“By St. Boogar and all the saints at the backside door of purgatory!”
Adam swore so colorfully that Nora was drawn back to reality enough to gape at him even in her current delirious state.
“One advantage of being an English professor—you’re exposed to a lot of wonderfully creative expletives,” Adam commented in a voice so falsely calm that his intent to distract Nora from her injuries was immediately transparent. As he spoke, Adam pulled off the remnants of his tie. As soon as he had jerked the strip of plaid fabric from his neck, he began fastening it around her upper thigh above the gash. After knotting it securely, he reached up into a drawer of her table and retrieved a pen. He forced the pen into the loop he had made around her leg and twisted it until the binding pulled tight, causing Nora to grunt and jerk away in pain. He paid her distress no heed and used the free end of the fabric to fasten the pen in place, leaving the loop taut around her thigh.
A tourniquet, she mused as she grappled with her receding consciousness. Her eyes began drifting closed, but she forced them open again as Adam murmured, “We have to get you to a hospital.”
She forced herself to form words even though her tongue felt as if it had turned into a large rubber ball in her mouth.
“Dr. Drew Coleman. The emergency room at Northwestern Memorial.” Her voice sounded far away, even to her. “Ask for Drew.”
The world spun dizzily around her and, for a moment, she thought she had finally passed out, until she jerked once again and she realized that Adam had scooped her off the ground and began to run. She tried to move her head, but whether it was to protest or to bury her face in Adam’s chest, she couldn’t say. The last thought she had as she lost her grasp on reality was one of disbelief as she registered that he was reciting a Russian fairytale as he ran with her cradled in his arms.
