Bebe by Darla Phelps Page A

his arms just enough to part the curtains with two fingers. Nothing but white-smothered landscape stretching out over the hillside and through the trees as far as he could see. All those snapping twigs he’d heard rustling up behind him thorough his harried sprint home had been nothing more than the normal sounds of winter. Great. He shook his head at his own foolishness. He’d just been chased two clicks uphill through the snow by his own overactive imagination.
    Stepping back from the window, he glanced down at the semi-conscious female in his arms. Her head dangled backwards over the crook of his arm and she stared up at the ceiling, her eyes fixed and almost glazed. If it weren’t for the fact that she was shivering so violently, he’d almost have thought her dead.
    He had to get her warm.
    Rushing into the bathroom, Tral sat down on the edge of the tub. With her draped across his lap, he ran a hot bath, filling the basin halfway before stripping his coat off her limp, unresponsive frame. She was so small, both dirty and discolored from cold, and covered in thistles, dead leaves and bruises. He touched his fingers to her wrist, and then her neck. Her pulse was faint, but sporadic. Like the spasms of shivers that still ravaged her. Hard one minute, and then absent the next. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or not, and so he held her in his lap while the basin of the tub filled with water.
    “Oh baby,” he tsked, picking bits of twigs out of her tangled hair and brushing at the dead leaves stuck to her skin. Everywhere he touched her, he encountered another thorn. “Someone must have forgot to tell you not to roll in the vouka plants.”
    Half-hidden thistles pricked his fingers, leaving them tingling ominously as the toxin seeped in through his skin. By the morning, his hands were going to be itching like crazy. But while the vouka toxin was little more than a mild irritant to his kind; to humans, the prick of a single thorn could fester quickly into a life-threatening infection. And she’d been stuck by hundreds of them. Literally hundreds.
    Tral shook his head, looking at all the black sliver-sized thistles imbedded all over her—her arms and legs bearing the thickest accumulation—but in the end, it all came down to what he wanted more: to warm her up before she slipped any deeper into shock, or deal with the toxic thistles while she quietly died of hypothermia right here in his arms.
    Lowering himself to one knee, he lay her into the bottom of the tub.
    She reacted as if he were trying to boil her alive.
    Tral very well remembered the one time in his life that he had been so cold that immersing his hands in lukewarm water had felt as if he were instead dousing them in liquid fire. So he was not without sympathy for the agony he knew her to be feeling. But he also knew that he had to get her body temperature up or there was a very real possibility that she could die. Planting the flat of his hand upon her chest, he pushed her down on her back, holding her in the water despite her piercing screams and the weak thrashing of her arms and legs as she struggled to pull herself out. He—indeed, the whole of the small bathroom—were absolutely drenched by the time the burning effects of the water had waned and the last of her strength was exhausted. After that, she lay huddled in the bottom of the tub, gripping his wrist with both hands, staring up at him through slightly glazed eyes, shaking so hard her teeth chattered.
    She barely did more than blink when he slowly withdrew the pressure of his hand from her chest. She gripped his wrist with both hands, her fingers locked around him until he physically peeled himself free. He checked her pulse. It felt stronger, not quite right but not as weak and intermittent as it had been before.
    “Stay,” he told her, and went back out to the main room to fetch his medical kit from the bottom of the pile he’d dumped just inside the front door. He brought it back