Threadbound, p.9
Threadbound, page 9
It was time for Darach to remove his grandson. And if the geàrd soilleir also found and killed the unfortunate creature tied to him, all the better.
But first they had to find the cursed boy.
Bran mac Cairn was more of a challenge than any of them had anticipated.
Whispers rushed through the room as a shimmer flitted through the air. The tell-tale sign of a pixie.
Darach sat up straight.
“Fianais.” His voice was deep and a little rough, and the whole Court fell silent.
The pixie, her wings a translucent silver, skin shimmered silver, gold, and blue, bowed, the spikes of her short hair as sharp as the nails on her fingers or the knives at her belt. “My king.”
“What have you found?”
“The youngest son of Cairn is in the human city of Edinburgh.”
Darach sucked in a breath. “The human city.” If Cairn’s youngest child was in Dunehame, it was no wonder that his agents had previously failed to find the boy.
“Yes, my lord,” the pixie confirmed.
Darach leaned back in his throne, his expression thoughtful. Dunehame was a dangerous place for a young fae. Human customs had grown strange as the centuries passed, magic all but gone, and it had become a strange and treacherous land. Fae disappeared on the far side of the Gates all too often.
The King of the Sunlit Court flicked a finger.
Two tall solders, one a white lord, the other a ghillie du like her king, bent to hear their king’s wishes.
“Kill him.”
Chapter
Fifteen
It had been nearly two weeks since Bran had left him at St. Andrew’s Square with his fish and chips, and Jamie had replayed the conversation in his head at least a hundred times. Because even though he could rationalize in his mind the fact that Bran clearly wasn’t interested in him—or at least not enough to explain why he was drawn to Jamie—Jamie couldn’t stop thinking about him.
He especially couldn’t stop himself from wishing he hadn’t asked Bran why me?
Because maybe he’d still be wondering about the answer to that question… He was still wondering about the answer to that question. But if he hadn’t opened his big, stupid, American mouth, maybe they’d have enjoyed a nice meal, maybe they’d have spent the evening talking, discussing old herbal remedies and charm lore the way they had after sushi.
Jamie sighed, forcing himself to stop staring off into space and look back down at the lines of careful notes he’d taken in archival pencil in his notebook about the manuscript he’d been studying—the one he’d been talking to Bran about on their good date.
If it even had been a date. Because… Jamie had wanted it to be a date, but in retrospect, it really wasn’t clear that it had been.
But despite the fact that whatever-it-was probably hadn’t been a date, Jamie just couldn’t stop thinking about Bran. About the slightly sardonic smile that would flash across his lips. About the flash in his mossy green eyes. About the sharp lines of his jaw and neck and shoulder…
Stop it, Jamie.
Jamie shook his head to clear it.
Then he forced himself to refocus on the page in front of him and the scrawled loops of fifteenth-century handwriting that was stained and faded and barely legible in places. He was trying to get enough of it down that he might be able to cobble together what the fuck this page was for. He was guessing from one of the drawings that this was supposed to contain bog myrtle, which made him think it was probably tied to fevers. There was also a spiky little thing that might be a thistle and might be burdock, and a flower he thought might be dandelion. Or maybe that was a thistle?
With a sigh, Jamie did his best to copy down the lines of the crude sketches, but drawing was definitely not his strong suit, and he grimaced at the flora monstrosities he created—that were so much worse than the originals, and therefore even less likely to help him identify the actual plants.
Agitated, he fidgeted, his knee bouncing under the table and the fingers holding his pencil see-sawing the implement back and forth. He was polite enough to the other people in the reading room not to tap the pencil on the table, but he was getting glares from the student at the next reading table anyway—probably because he wasn’t sitting still and the rustle of fabric and creak of the wooden chair were irritating her.
He needed to concentrate on this stupid page.
And he couldn’t.
His mind kept going back to Bran. His knee kept bouncing. His pencil wiggling.
His skin was starting to feel tight and itchy, a kind of odd fog wrapping his mind so that it felt like he could barely make out the loops of brownish ink.
Clearly, this was an exercise in futility.
He hadn’t gone for a run that morning. That must be what was making him so restless he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.
He’d all but decided to pack up, but then guilt hit him. He had to at least finish transcribing this page over. Had to. He’d been making little enough progress over the past few weeks, so he needed to at least get this done so that he’d have something to work on for the next few days.
He should have gotten at least five pages down, and he’d barely made it halfway through one. There was no way he could leave yet.
So he forced himself to stay, increasingly restless and anxious, his stomach churning and energy buzzing through him like electricity.
The woman at the next table gave up with a huff a few hours later, shooting glares at him as he painstakingly forced himself to try to copy out the last few letters—or what he guessed they were, anyway. He was probably writing the whole thing down horribly wrong, because the damn scrawl might as well have been made by a mad chicken running around on the page for all he was able to actually focus on the shapes of the letters.
It was nearly seven when he finally managed to get the whole page done, and he noted where in the volume he’d stopped so that he could come back to it next week. On a day when he’d gone for a good long run and had the ability to actually concentrate.
As he left the library, his phone buzzed.
Curry and beer? Trixie sent to both him and Rob.
Normally, Jamie would have been all about curry and beer.
But he hesitated before replying with a smiley face or a thumb’s up. He wasn’t good company for anyone right now, not just fellow scholars trying to work through manuscripts. And he’d been out of sorts for a while—Trixie and Rob were far more likely to actually be able to enjoy themselves if his irritable ass wasn’t there dragging the whole social outing down.
So he didn’t reply, putting his phone back in his pocket and shrugging his shoulder up to keep the strap of his satchel in place.
Home was a better idea.
No, a run was a better idea, he decided, as his legs felt twitchy and his palms itched, causing him to flex his fingers. He needed to burn off whatever this toxic energy was that was keeping him from being able to concentrate on anything—work, cooking, even macramé and murder mysteries hadn’t been able to hold his attention for the past few nights.
He walked home quickly and changed into running gear, then headed out into the early twilight. He had time for a decent run before it got dark, and he brought a headlamp—tucked into his running shorts pocket—just in case it got dark more quickly than he was expecting.
The running helped.
It didn’t fix the increasing sense that something was off, but it at least got his mind off its endless cycles of what-ifs about Bran, about his research, and about whether or not Trixie was going to be pissed that he didn’t respond to any of her texts.
Rob had been in for curry, but Jamie hadn’t said a thing, even when Trixie asked him, specifically. They were probably at the curry place right now, Jamie thought as his legs carried him up the slope of Salisbury Crag.
He glanced upward, his eyes scanning the sky for the familiar shadow of the big, black bird that he so often saw when he climbed the crag’s slopes, but the sky was empty even of its frequent dusting of starlings.
For some reason, that made him even more agitated.
The sun was going down by the time he rounded Arthur’s Seat and made it back to Queen’s Drive. Despite the fatigue in his legs and the obvious physical tiredness from poor sleep, he was still jittery and wired, his heart racing faster than it should have been, and his chest tight.
He knew he needed to stop. To rest his muscles and eat something.
But he was too wound up, too agitated.
So he kept running. Following Queen’s around in a half-circle, passing his usual turn-off and continuing past the golf course, past Duddingston Loch, around the curve toward Dunsapie, then past the parking lot—car park—and the smaller loch, toward the entrance to Meadowfield, his heart in his throat the whole time.
The path that led off into the neighborhoods at Meadowfield was shadowed by a smattering of trees, so he almost didn’t see them.
But he heard them.
The unmistakable sounds—to Jamie’s sadly experienced ears—of fist and flesh, boot and bone. The panting of violent breath, muttered curses, grunts, and pain.
He stopped at the top of the pathway.
“Hey!”
The sets of eyes that turned to look at him seemed, for a moment, to gleam and glimmer, reflecting some light source that Jamie couldn’t identify, since he hadn’t yet had to put on his headlamp, although he would have to pretty soon.
“Go on, get the fuck out of here!” he rasped, his own breath coming short into his lungs from running. He took a step onto the path, dirt and gravel crunching under his shoes. Now that he wasn’t running, the sweat on his skin took on a slight edge, clammy in the evening breeze.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom under the trees, his heart beat faster.
Because among the figures in the dappled darkness, he recognized Bran.
Forced down onto his knees, another man’s hand fisted in his dark hair and the other around his throat. Bran’s face was a mess of blood and pain and rage, white-knuckled fingers gripping the arm holding his neck. The other arm hung limply at his side, and Jamie took a step closer, his protective instincts surging.
And then he noticed that Bran—despite being much smaller than all three of his attackers—appeared to have given nearly as good as he’d got. One man’s nose was bleeding profusely, a tall woman held her wrist with one hand and leaned all her weight on a single leg. Even the man holding Bran down had a split lip and blood smeared on the knuckles of the hand holding Bran’s throat.
Jamie was broader than all of them, taller than at least two. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to actually beat them in a fight, but that hadn’t ever stopped him from intervening when Bill Eckel had gone after his mother or one of his half-siblings. He wasn’t about to let it stop him now.
“Let him go,” he ordered, his voice low and angry.
The man holding Bran’s throat bared his teeth. In the weird dappled moonlight, they looked too jagged, like there were too many in his mouth.
Jamie took another step forward, forcing his legs not to shake from the combination of adrenaline and lactic acid. “I said, let him fucking go.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, duine,” the man hissed, something odd and deeply unsettling about his voice.
Jamie didn’t know what a duine was, but he didn’t particularly care. He recognized an insult when he heard one, and he had plenty of practice ignoring them.
He took another step closer, feeling Bran’s eyes on him, reading the tension in the smaller man’s body. Bran hadn’t given up—that much was clear. Jamie knew what that looked like, and Bran was ready to run or fight as he needed to.
And that meant that Bran didn’t think the fight was over.
Jamie felt his own shoulders tighten as he took another step deeper under the trees, knowing that this was a bad idea. No, a terrible fucking idea. This was how you got your ass handed to you and ended up in a hospital is what this was.
But he couldn’t walk away and leave Bran to whatever further violence they intended to inflict on him, because it was absolutely clear that they hadn’t accomplished what they’d set out to do, and, with every step, Jamie was becoming increasingly certain that a beating was only the beginning of what they’d intended.
He swallowed around the lump of fear that formed in the back of his throat, all too aware that if these three meant to kill Bran, they probably wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing to him. He really hoped that he somehow managed to get himself out of this before things got that bad, but he was starting to worry that he might not.
The man to his left moved—too fast, Jamie thought as his body reacted without consulting his brain—one long arm swinging around to strike Jamie’s head. Jamie managed somehow to get an arm in the way, wincing as a fist connected with his lower arm, jarring the bones all the way to his shoulder.
He danced backwards, trying to keep himself out of range while also not getting close enough to the woman to open himself up to another attack. Because while Jamie might have gotten decent at defending himself against his usually-drunken stepfather, he wasn’t a fighter and he definitely didn’t have much experience fending off more than one person at a time.
He had less luck with the second and third blows, managing only to deflect a hit so that it struck the side of his head instead of his face, then taking another to the ribs.
Fuck.
That one hurt. More than he expected.
He lashed out with a long leg, catching the other man on the shin and making him stagger, then stepping close enough to land a hit to the guy’s jaw as he straightened up.
In his peripheral vision, Jamie caught sight of sudden movement, which distracted him enough that he took another hit to the cheekbone and a follow-up punch to the stomach, although he saw that one coming soon enough to brace his abdomen against the strike.
Still hurt like a bitch, though.
The sound of grunting, the grating sound of scrabbling over gravel, and the sound of a fist striking flesh was followed by a gurgling sound that drew Jamie’s attention, even though he knew he should keep an eye on the guy he was fighting.
Bran had somehow freed himself, and was backing toward Jamie, the one arm still hanging down, the other holding his side, and the man who’d been holding him staggering away, his hands at his throat—he was the source of the gurgling sound. The woman looked between Jamie, Bran, and her companion, as though uncertain what to do.
The man who had attacked Jamie lunged toward Bran, and Jamie took advantage of his opponent’s shifted focus to tackle him, keeping him away from Bran.
Straddling the man’s hips, Jamie leaned his weight into an arm pressing down on the man’s throat. “If I let you up, are you going to get the fuck out of here?” he demanded, his heart thudding in his ears, shocked at his own capacity for violence.
The man hissed at him, but since his two companions were heading away from the trail and back into the neighborhoods, Jamie decided that he’d take that as a yes, pushing himself up and backing away, letting the man shove himself to his feet and follow the other two into the darkness.
Then Jamie turned to Bran, who was staring up at him with an expression that Jamie couldn’t read.
“Are—Are you okay?” he panted, reaching out a hand toward Bran.
The smaller man’s eyes were wide, the whites clearly visible around his dark green irises. Jamie watched him swallow a few times, then stagger a step.
Jamie lurched forward, grabbing Bran as he started to fall.
“Shit!”
Gravel dug into his bare knees as he knelt next to Bran on the pathway, noticing that the hand he’d put on Bran’s side was stained dark with blood. Jamie frowned, trying to figure out where Bran was bleeding from—seeing blood against his black shirt in the dark was all but impossible, so Jamie gently peeled back the fabric to see the gash against Bran’s pale skin. Then he pushed his palm against the wound, applying pressure to slow the bleeding.
Bran grimaced, and his eyelids blinked slowly, which Jamie knew wasn’t a good sign.
“Bran, you have to stay awake.”
He watched as the smaller man forced his eyes open again, the green black in the encroaching darkness. Bran swallowed, then groaned softly.
“Hey, no, no. Stay with me. Look at me.”
Dark eyes focused on his face, then slid away.
Jamie tapped Bran’s cheek gently. “No, no. Right here. Bran. Look at me, please.”
“Jame—Jamie.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Bran’s bloody fingers settled on Jamie’s arm, sticky and weirdly cool. That probably wasn’t good. “Sor—Sorry.”
Jamie frowned. “What are you sorry for?” he asked. “You didn’t pay them to beat you, did you?”
“N—No.”
“Then you don’t have to be sorry.”
“Y—You…” Bran winced, then swallowed.
“We need to get you help,” Jamie said softly, a frown pulling at his brow.
He wished he had his phone, but he didn’t bring his phone with him when he went for a run—he liked hearing the sounds of things around him, the percussion of his feet against the ground, the sounds of birds and wind. And he hated the feeling of his phone bouncing against his leg.
“No. M’all right.”
At least Bran was small enough that Jamie thought he could carry him.
“Like hell you are,” Jamie retorted. Then he took Bran’s hand and pressed it against the wound in his side. “Keep this here.”
Bran stirred, as though trying to resist, but at least he kept his hand where Jamie had placed it.
“Hold still,” Jamie warned him, then scooped the smaller man up in his arms.
“Dinna—”
“Yes, you do,” Jamie interrupted.
“Dinna want—”
“You need a hospital,” Jamie argued. “Whether you want one or not.”
Bran genuinely struggled at that, and Jamie couldn’t hold onto him, cursing as Bran squirmed out of his arms and hit the path barely a foot away from the paved bike and running lane on Queen’s Drive.
But first they had to find the cursed boy.
Bran mac Cairn was more of a challenge than any of them had anticipated.
Whispers rushed through the room as a shimmer flitted through the air. The tell-tale sign of a pixie.
Darach sat up straight.
“Fianais.” His voice was deep and a little rough, and the whole Court fell silent.
The pixie, her wings a translucent silver, skin shimmered silver, gold, and blue, bowed, the spikes of her short hair as sharp as the nails on her fingers or the knives at her belt. “My king.”
“What have you found?”
“The youngest son of Cairn is in the human city of Edinburgh.”
Darach sucked in a breath. “The human city.” If Cairn’s youngest child was in Dunehame, it was no wonder that his agents had previously failed to find the boy.
“Yes, my lord,” the pixie confirmed.
Darach leaned back in his throne, his expression thoughtful. Dunehame was a dangerous place for a young fae. Human customs had grown strange as the centuries passed, magic all but gone, and it had become a strange and treacherous land. Fae disappeared on the far side of the Gates all too often.
The King of the Sunlit Court flicked a finger.
Two tall solders, one a white lord, the other a ghillie du like her king, bent to hear their king’s wishes.
“Kill him.”
Chapter
Fifteen
It had been nearly two weeks since Bran had left him at St. Andrew’s Square with his fish and chips, and Jamie had replayed the conversation in his head at least a hundred times. Because even though he could rationalize in his mind the fact that Bran clearly wasn’t interested in him—or at least not enough to explain why he was drawn to Jamie—Jamie couldn’t stop thinking about him.
He especially couldn’t stop himself from wishing he hadn’t asked Bran why me?
Because maybe he’d still be wondering about the answer to that question… He was still wondering about the answer to that question. But if he hadn’t opened his big, stupid, American mouth, maybe they’d have enjoyed a nice meal, maybe they’d have spent the evening talking, discussing old herbal remedies and charm lore the way they had after sushi.
Jamie sighed, forcing himself to stop staring off into space and look back down at the lines of careful notes he’d taken in archival pencil in his notebook about the manuscript he’d been studying—the one he’d been talking to Bran about on their good date.
If it even had been a date. Because… Jamie had wanted it to be a date, but in retrospect, it really wasn’t clear that it had been.
But despite the fact that whatever-it-was probably hadn’t been a date, Jamie just couldn’t stop thinking about Bran. About the slightly sardonic smile that would flash across his lips. About the flash in his mossy green eyes. About the sharp lines of his jaw and neck and shoulder…
Stop it, Jamie.
Jamie shook his head to clear it.
Then he forced himself to refocus on the page in front of him and the scrawled loops of fifteenth-century handwriting that was stained and faded and barely legible in places. He was trying to get enough of it down that he might be able to cobble together what the fuck this page was for. He was guessing from one of the drawings that this was supposed to contain bog myrtle, which made him think it was probably tied to fevers. There was also a spiky little thing that might be a thistle and might be burdock, and a flower he thought might be dandelion. Or maybe that was a thistle?
With a sigh, Jamie did his best to copy down the lines of the crude sketches, but drawing was definitely not his strong suit, and he grimaced at the flora monstrosities he created—that were so much worse than the originals, and therefore even less likely to help him identify the actual plants.
Agitated, he fidgeted, his knee bouncing under the table and the fingers holding his pencil see-sawing the implement back and forth. He was polite enough to the other people in the reading room not to tap the pencil on the table, but he was getting glares from the student at the next reading table anyway—probably because he wasn’t sitting still and the rustle of fabric and creak of the wooden chair were irritating her.
He needed to concentrate on this stupid page.
And he couldn’t.
His mind kept going back to Bran. His knee kept bouncing. His pencil wiggling.
His skin was starting to feel tight and itchy, a kind of odd fog wrapping his mind so that it felt like he could barely make out the loops of brownish ink.
Clearly, this was an exercise in futility.
He hadn’t gone for a run that morning. That must be what was making him so restless he wanted to crawl out of his own skin.
He’d all but decided to pack up, but then guilt hit him. He had to at least finish transcribing this page over. Had to. He’d been making little enough progress over the past few weeks, so he needed to at least get this done so that he’d have something to work on for the next few days.
He should have gotten at least five pages down, and he’d barely made it halfway through one. There was no way he could leave yet.
So he forced himself to stay, increasingly restless and anxious, his stomach churning and energy buzzing through him like electricity.
The woman at the next table gave up with a huff a few hours later, shooting glares at him as he painstakingly forced himself to try to copy out the last few letters—or what he guessed they were, anyway. He was probably writing the whole thing down horribly wrong, because the damn scrawl might as well have been made by a mad chicken running around on the page for all he was able to actually focus on the shapes of the letters.
It was nearly seven when he finally managed to get the whole page done, and he noted where in the volume he’d stopped so that he could come back to it next week. On a day when he’d gone for a good long run and had the ability to actually concentrate.
As he left the library, his phone buzzed.
Curry and beer? Trixie sent to both him and Rob.
Normally, Jamie would have been all about curry and beer.
But he hesitated before replying with a smiley face or a thumb’s up. He wasn’t good company for anyone right now, not just fellow scholars trying to work through manuscripts. And he’d been out of sorts for a while—Trixie and Rob were far more likely to actually be able to enjoy themselves if his irritable ass wasn’t there dragging the whole social outing down.
So he didn’t reply, putting his phone back in his pocket and shrugging his shoulder up to keep the strap of his satchel in place.
Home was a better idea.
No, a run was a better idea, he decided, as his legs felt twitchy and his palms itched, causing him to flex his fingers. He needed to burn off whatever this toxic energy was that was keeping him from being able to concentrate on anything—work, cooking, even macramé and murder mysteries hadn’t been able to hold his attention for the past few nights.
He walked home quickly and changed into running gear, then headed out into the early twilight. He had time for a decent run before it got dark, and he brought a headlamp—tucked into his running shorts pocket—just in case it got dark more quickly than he was expecting.
The running helped.
It didn’t fix the increasing sense that something was off, but it at least got his mind off its endless cycles of what-ifs about Bran, about his research, and about whether or not Trixie was going to be pissed that he didn’t respond to any of her texts.
Rob had been in for curry, but Jamie hadn’t said a thing, even when Trixie asked him, specifically. They were probably at the curry place right now, Jamie thought as his legs carried him up the slope of Salisbury Crag.
He glanced upward, his eyes scanning the sky for the familiar shadow of the big, black bird that he so often saw when he climbed the crag’s slopes, but the sky was empty even of its frequent dusting of starlings.
For some reason, that made him even more agitated.
The sun was going down by the time he rounded Arthur’s Seat and made it back to Queen’s Drive. Despite the fatigue in his legs and the obvious physical tiredness from poor sleep, he was still jittery and wired, his heart racing faster than it should have been, and his chest tight.
He knew he needed to stop. To rest his muscles and eat something.
But he was too wound up, too agitated.
So he kept running. Following Queen’s around in a half-circle, passing his usual turn-off and continuing past the golf course, past Duddingston Loch, around the curve toward Dunsapie, then past the parking lot—car park—and the smaller loch, toward the entrance to Meadowfield, his heart in his throat the whole time.
The path that led off into the neighborhoods at Meadowfield was shadowed by a smattering of trees, so he almost didn’t see them.
But he heard them.
The unmistakable sounds—to Jamie’s sadly experienced ears—of fist and flesh, boot and bone. The panting of violent breath, muttered curses, grunts, and pain.
He stopped at the top of the pathway.
“Hey!”
The sets of eyes that turned to look at him seemed, for a moment, to gleam and glimmer, reflecting some light source that Jamie couldn’t identify, since he hadn’t yet had to put on his headlamp, although he would have to pretty soon.
“Go on, get the fuck out of here!” he rasped, his own breath coming short into his lungs from running. He took a step onto the path, dirt and gravel crunching under his shoes. Now that he wasn’t running, the sweat on his skin took on a slight edge, clammy in the evening breeze.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom under the trees, his heart beat faster.
Because among the figures in the dappled darkness, he recognized Bran.
Forced down onto his knees, another man’s hand fisted in his dark hair and the other around his throat. Bran’s face was a mess of blood and pain and rage, white-knuckled fingers gripping the arm holding his neck. The other arm hung limply at his side, and Jamie took a step closer, his protective instincts surging.
And then he noticed that Bran—despite being much smaller than all three of his attackers—appeared to have given nearly as good as he’d got. One man’s nose was bleeding profusely, a tall woman held her wrist with one hand and leaned all her weight on a single leg. Even the man holding Bran down had a split lip and blood smeared on the knuckles of the hand holding Bran’s throat.
Jamie was broader than all of them, taller than at least two. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to actually beat them in a fight, but that hadn’t ever stopped him from intervening when Bill Eckel had gone after his mother or one of his half-siblings. He wasn’t about to let it stop him now.
“Let him go,” he ordered, his voice low and angry.
The man holding Bran’s throat bared his teeth. In the weird dappled moonlight, they looked too jagged, like there were too many in his mouth.
Jamie took another step forward, forcing his legs not to shake from the combination of adrenaline and lactic acid. “I said, let him fucking go.”
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, duine,” the man hissed, something odd and deeply unsettling about his voice.
Jamie didn’t know what a duine was, but he didn’t particularly care. He recognized an insult when he heard one, and he had plenty of practice ignoring them.
He took another step closer, feeling Bran’s eyes on him, reading the tension in the smaller man’s body. Bran hadn’t given up—that much was clear. Jamie knew what that looked like, and Bran was ready to run or fight as he needed to.
And that meant that Bran didn’t think the fight was over.
Jamie felt his own shoulders tighten as he took another step deeper under the trees, knowing that this was a bad idea. No, a terrible fucking idea. This was how you got your ass handed to you and ended up in a hospital is what this was.
But he couldn’t walk away and leave Bran to whatever further violence they intended to inflict on him, because it was absolutely clear that they hadn’t accomplished what they’d set out to do, and, with every step, Jamie was becoming increasingly certain that a beating was only the beginning of what they’d intended.
He swallowed around the lump of fear that formed in the back of his throat, all too aware that if these three meant to kill Bran, they probably wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing to him. He really hoped that he somehow managed to get himself out of this before things got that bad, but he was starting to worry that he might not.
The man to his left moved—too fast, Jamie thought as his body reacted without consulting his brain—one long arm swinging around to strike Jamie’s head. Jamie managed somehow to get an arm in the way, wincing as a fist connected with his lower arm, jarring the bones all the way to his shoulder.
He danced backwards, trying to keep himself out of range while also not getting close enough to the woman to open himself up to another attack. Because while Jamie might have gotten decent at defending himself against his usually-drunken stepfather, he wasn’t a fighter and he definitely didn’t have much experience fending off more than one person at a time.
He had less luck with the second and third blows, managing only to deflect a hit so that it struck the side of his head instead of his face, then taking another to the ribs.
Fuck.
That one hurt. More than he expected.
He lashed out with a long leg, catching the other man on the shin and making him stagger, then stepping close enough to land a hit to the guy’s jaw as he straightened up.
In his peripheral vision, Jamie caught sight of sudden movement, which distracted him enough that he took another hit to the cheekbone and a follow-up punch to the stomach, although he saw that one coming soon enough to brace his abdomen against the strike.
Still hurt like a bitch, though.
The sound of grunting, the grating sound of scrabbling over gravel, and the sound of a fist striking flesh was followed by a gurgling sound that drew Jamie’s attention, even though he knew he should keep an eye on the guy he was fighting.
Bran had somehow freed himself, and was backing toward Jamie, the one arm still hanging down, the other holding his side, and the man who’d been holding him staggering away, his hands at his throat—he was the source of the gurgling sound. The woman looked between Jamie, Bran, and her companion, as though uncertain what to do.
The man who had attacked Jamie lunged toward Bran, and Jamie took advantage of his opponent’s shifted focus to tackle him, keeping him away from Bran.
Straddling the man’s hips, Jamie leaned his weight into an arm pressing down on the man’s throat. “If I let you up, are you going to get the fuck out of here?” he demanded, his heart thudding in his ears, shocked at his own capacity for violence.
The man hissed at him, but since his two companions were heading away from the trail and back into the neighborhoods, Jamie decided that he’d take that as a yes, pushing himself up and backing away, letting the man shove himself to his feet and follow the other two into the darkness.
Then Jamie turned to Bran, who was staring up at him with an expression that Jamie couldn’t read.
“Are—Are you okay?” he panted, reaching out a hand toward Bran.
The smaller man’s eyes were wide, the whites clearly visible around his dark green irises. Jamie watched him swallow a few times, then stagger a step.
Jamie lurched forward, grabbing Bran as he started to fall.
“Shit!”
Gravel dug into his bare knees as he knelt next to Bran on the pathway, noticing that the hand he’d put on Bran’s side was stained dark with blood. Jamie frowned, trying to figure out where Bran was bleeding from—seeing blood against his black shirt in the dark was all but impossible, so Jamie gently peeled back the fabric to see the gash against Bran’s pale skin. Then he pushed his palm against the wound, applying pressure to slow the bleeding.
Bran grimaced, and his eyelids blinked slowly, which Jamie knew wasn’t a good sign.
“Bran, you have to stay awake.”
He watched as the smaller man forced his eyes open again, the green black in the encroaching darkness. Bran swallowed, then groaned softly.
“Hey, no, no. Stay with me. Look at me.”
Dark eyes focused on his face, then slid away.
Jamie tapped Bran’s cheek gently. “No, no. Right here. Bran. Look at me, please.”
“Jame—Jamie.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Bran’s bloody fingers settled on Jamie’s arm, sticky and weirdly cool. That probably wasn’t good. “Sor—Sorry.”
Jamie frowned. “What are you sorry for?” he asked. “You didn’t pay them to beat you, did you?”
“N—No.”
“Then you don’t have to be sorry.”
“Y—You…” Bran winced, then swallowed.
“We need to get you help,” Jamie said softly, a frown pulling at his brow.
He wished he had his phone, but he didn’t bring his phone with him when he went for a run—he liked hearing the sounds of things around him, the percussion of his feet against the ground, the sounds of birds and wind. And he hated the feeling of his phone bouncing against his leg.
“No. M’all right.”
At least Bran was small enough that Jamie thought he could carry him.
“Like hell you are,” Jamie retorted. Then he took Bran’s hand and pressed it against the wound in his side. “Keep this here.”
Bran stirred, as though trying to resist, but at least he kept his hand where Jamie had placed it.
“Hold still,” Jamie warned him, then scooped the smaller man up in his arms.
“Dinna—”
“Yes, you do,” Jamie interrupted.
“Dinna want—”
“You need a hospital,” Jamie argued. “Whether you want one or not.”
Bran genuinely struggled at that, and Jamie couldn’t hold onto him, cursing as Bran squirmed out of his arms and hit the path barely a foot away from the paved bike and running lane on Queen’s Drive.
