The Storm and the Darkness by Sarah M. Cradit

father had been waiting on the dock, and picked up Finn as if he weighed nothing at all. He sprinted back to the house, with Jon in tow.
    “What does your brother need Jon?” His father asked as he cut what was left of Finn’s shirt off.
    “You’re asking me that now? NOW?”
    “Calm down and tell me what your brother needs,” his father said evenly. His hands were pushing down on Finn’s chest, but the towel continued to blossom red more and more so that the original white could no longer be seen.
    Jon’s breaths were coming short and forced and his whole body was hot, his pulse throbbing so hard he thought his heart might burst right through his chest. This was Finn on the table, not just some patient. Finn...his little brother. His only brother.
    Jon gripped the table and forced himself to breathe in, slowly; out slowly. “We need to close his wound and dress it. He needs something to stave off infection, and…he needs something for the pain.”
    “What else does Finn need?” Andrew St. Andrews asked as he replaced the towel with another, never letting the pressure off.
    “He needs blood,” Jon said finally. “He’s lost too much.”
    His father looked at him squarely, and then Jon understood. They would stabilize Finn together, and then Jon would need to give his own blood to save his brother.
    The next couple of hours were endless to Jon, and, despite his father’s cool demeanor, he saw the wideness of his father’s pupils and the sweat beading around his face and neck. His dad was scared too.
    Jon had laid down on a gurney next to his brother then, and let his father take Jon’s own crucial life force and transfer some of it to his brother. Jon was overcome with exhaustion, but before he nodded off, he felt his father pull off the gauze, stitching his wound. In all the commotion, Jon only vaguely recalled his father putting the gauze on to begin with.
    “Superficial, but you’ll have a scar to remember it,” was the last thing Jon heard before he drifted off to sleep. Years later, a thin white line, from chest to navel, was the least of Jon’s reminders of the incident.
    He never understood how Finn could return so easily to the boat after that. He couldn’t wait to go back out and was on the sea a week later, to their mother’s dismay and their father’s annoyance. “He’s on his own,” his father had said with a dismissive wave of the hand. But Jon never relaxed when he knew his brother was out to sea, even though Forbia was twice the boat that old skiff had ever been. Even now, Jon’s fear was still very real.

    As the day wore on, the rain turned to hail and the sky took on a dark, ominous aspect. It crackled with thunder and the air felt still and electric. Jon hoped Finn had the good sense to end early, as he could see more dark clouds rolling in on the horizon. Finn had been saying that the first big storm was coming in about a week, which was a couple of weeks before the weathermen were predicting it. Jon, though a man of science, trusted his brother more.
    It had been slow day at the office, but that was to be expected. As that Deschanel girl had rudely pointed out a week earlier, business wasn’t exactly booming on an island of two hundred people. But Jon had earned the respect of veterinarians on the mainland during his residency. Several of them made sincere, ongoing attempts to entice him to practice in a larger office with better equipment, though Jon would not be swayed into leaving Summer Island. They settled for his consultation services, and this is what he did on days when there was little else to do. He liked knowing what was on his schedule for the day. Jonathan was no fan of surprises.
    It was not just ritual he craved though, it was quiet. Seclusion. The avoidance of the inevitable awkwardness of small talk or getting to know someone. Uncomfortable silences.
    When Jonathan met someone new, he was unable to find within himself the desire to learn about them, talk to