It was a cold, grey morning, like many such autumn mornings on the outskirts of London, and something felt off. It’d felt off since he’d opened his eyes at precisely eight am, one hour ago. Whatever it was, it wasn’t wrong -- just a subtle, back-of-the-mind nagging that he wrote off as forgetfulness. Rather like an itch, he supposed. Perhaps he’d neglected to buy bread the previous day, or some other thing that wasn’t always included in his routine.

He could have failed to realize that his laptop, placed upon the coffee table in the living room where the windows overlooked mist-cloaked hills and a semi-near, semi-distant city skyline, had drained its battery overnight.

And so, there he stood, still huddled in lavender fleece pajamas as he rested against the kitchen island, awaiting the kettle to whistle. Fingers brushing the softness of sleeve hems, he listened, and he counted minutes. The squeal from escaping hot air alerted him. Three.

He crossed the space between himself and the cabinets, which he opened to reveal stacks on stacks of tea tins, and jars of loose leaf, and clipped-closed brown bags of sugar. Foregoing the breakfast blends, kept to the left hand corner of the middle shelf, he instead cupped one such jar into his hand; upon removal of its lid, it released the heady scents of lavender and clove in a swirl that drifted, lingered, and dissipated.

By the time he clasped his mug, its warmth just barely on the edge of too hot in his hands, the bothersome sensation had grown from an itch to a burn. He continued to ignore it. Comparative Botany took priority over anxiety, and he had less than half an hour before the class began. His fellow students would have already begun filling the chatroom that replaced a lecture hall and typing their messages that replaced beginning-of-class chatter -- Oh my God, did you hear Nathan dropped a whole cake out the window? What a legend! Or maybe, Did you see the latest Brexit meme? No, show me... Haha, is that a Union Jack on Pepe the Frog?

He rolled his eyes, imagining how inane it would all be, and from the table, slid his laptop. It greeted him with a blank, black screen; he experienced a momentary irritation before plucking the charging cable from the floor and pushing it into place. The tea he placed just out of toppling range from the cable, atop a coaster reserved only ever for tea.

Once the screen awakened, he logged into the chat in a flustered hurry. Ten out of fifteen students were online -- meaning that he was not the last one there. He exhaled relief in a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and almost in the same moment, a ping accompanied a private message.

thomas.winston: Hey mate, where were you last night? Everything okay?

william.whiteswift: Last night?

thomas.winston: Yeah, we were gonna call

William again felt a rush of relief, but for a different reason. The anxious itch vanished: he had worried over nothing but a forgotten Skype call with Thomas, who seemingly held the title of his one friend in the whole country. Maybe in the whole union. People... unnerved him. They annoyed him, even. Something about large crowds of them screamed Too many too much too many too much! and as such, his education was left to the safety of the Internet.

william.whiteswift: Sorry about that. Must’ve been exhausted and gone to sleep early.

thomas.winston: It’s no big deal. I’ll remind you tonight

william.whiteswift: Alright. And, so a one-word reply wouldn’t sound brittle, he added, Cheers.

That was the end of it, thanks to Thomas’ careful respect of William’s quirks, which included a tendency toward brief conversations: no more words than were needed, and no fewer.

His attention shifted to the upcoming discussion, guided by sips of tea, as the professor logged into the room. The class would soon engage in debate as though rivals in competition; much as face to face discourse made him long for some tear to rip through the space-time continuum and whisk him away into oblivion, he often enjoyed it online.

Unless it were about something boring, like the scientific names of fungi, which it was.

William decided to not pay attention, and were any questions thrown his way, to Google the answers. For the first merciful portion of class, his method worked. He could not have pinpointed how long it took, but at some time into the session, awareness of that feeling flickered back to life. It was not clear to him whether the nagging sensation had just now returned, or if he’d just now tuned in to its presence; either way, it released an urge that wriggled into his focus.

Go outside.

Why? William had his impulses, and even the occasional intrusive thought, both reaching from simple to bizarre, but this one was bizarre in its simplicity. Go outside -- that’s all it was.

His gaze flitted from the screen to the window, and his mind whispered, Yes yes yes yes yes!

Not yet. Not while class was still in progress.

No no no no no!

Just a glance couldn’t hurt. Placing his laptop on the table, also well out of cup-spilling range, he stood, and on sock-muffled footsteps, wandered to peer into the mist. He first looked straight outward, wondering if something was different about the London skyline; next, he looked down, his eyes settling upon the front lawn, below the window. Again, there was nothing out of place. He wasn’t entirely sure what he felt: satisfaction? Confusion? Disappointment?

The laptop spit out another ping, and he stepped back to see that the professor herself had messaged him. His stomach dropped to his feet -- sinking.

Prof.rose.blanchard: William, you’ll work with Johnny, Nathan, and Abby N. in next week’s report.

His breath came out in another relieved huff, absent the reprimand he’d expected.

william.whiteswift: Okay, thank you.

And moments later, with no second consideration and quick as instinct, he fired off another message: Is it okay if I don’t say anything more this class?

Prof.rose.blanchard: That’s fine. You’ve only had one other absence. It won’t hurt your participation grade.

william.whiteswift: Thank you, again. Family business.

He snapped his laptop closed, and he nearly forgot to exchange his pajamas for a sweater and jeans. A mere two minutes elapsed before he ducked out of his room, flung the back door open, and darted down the steps that lead from the porch to the yard.

If only he’d counted again, and known how long two minutes could really be.

❦❦❦

The first thing that seared itself into William’s memory was not the girl sprawled across his flowerbed, crushing his hydrangeas. It wasn’t the great, black layer of clouds that rolled in along the horizon, their bellies swollen with rain as if to prophecy her demise. It was her blood.

He wanted to lurch into the bushes and vomit. There was so much, a veritable tide, the source of which he could not quite tell, what with the sickness that rose in his throat. It’d always sounded so clichéd when people said the world spun, and now, he understood what they were trying to say.

There was no world -- only him and the dying girl and his phone left stupidly on his nightstand. His feet remained planted on the ground, but through his eyes, it spun this way and that, warping and dipping until he hadn’t a clue which direction was up, down, left, right. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t have called an ambulance even if his phone had been in his pocket.

And because of his stillness, he really was going to watch someone die.

With a gentleness that nauseated him even more than the blood -- moments like these should plummet from the sky and crash and explode -- the ground stabilized. Little by little, each spin came slower than the last, and he was able to shuffle forward.

His breath caught, scratching like swallowed leaves.

The steps toward her became bearable, one at a time, when he counted them.

Five steps. That was all.

He had never seen an injury quite like this.

The sea of scarlet was coming from her ankle, and he could describe the skin there only as lacelike, for the layers did indeed fall upon one another like the weaving of lace, slashed thin. It glistened, half flesh and half membrane, some of her skin cut into larger swaths, and much more into claw-fine strips, fraying in a way that wasn’t merely wrong, but unnatural. Perhaps the cause had been some kind of machine, but then, her bones would have been shattered. The joint did not bend to any angle at which it shouldn’t be, leading him to realize, contrary to the carnage he saw, that it was fine. How could it not be broken? What had done this in the first place? Had she been -- he tensed against another wave of nausea -- bitten?

Would she ever wake to tell him?

Her chest rose and fell, the movement so slight that it was almost beyond perception. Bracing for how slick the blood would feel, and how warm, he placed his fingers upon the pale inner plane of her wrist. The moment before he found a pulse fractured, his own heart fluttered, and he felt himself drowning, maybe in water and maybe in ice, and then it was there. Thready, inconsistent, like grasping for something small in the dark and getting only brushes of its surface -- but there.

He had no room for urges or anxieties, but for a single imperative: Get her inside. Before he could, he would have to wrap the wound, lest it spill out the very last of her blood. With no other option in immediate reach, he yanked off his sweater in a tangle of sleeves and arms, and knelt. He did not let himself think of how the fabric would burn against exposed muscle if she were conscious. Instead, he wrapped, cinching the ends of the sleeves together as a tourniquet.

William had carried people before. His frame hid a strength that belied its size, and even so, when he lifted her, with her head slumped onto his collarbone, he almost stumbled. She was lean, and couldn’t have been much taller than William himself, but he struggled, weighed down by more than this girl. He could swear it, yet could not say what.

The stairs would be a challenge. He took a breath, stepped forward, and climbed, at each stair envisioning safe passage to the next. He did not count anything now, but fixed split energy on her and on the door.

Mercifully, as he crossed the threshold, the rain began to pour in earnest, a rolling, rhythmic beat, dripping over the eaves and pattering onto the brambles below. It lashed its way into the living room after him, soaking the mud mat and floor.

His cup still sat on the corner of the table, half full and abandoned, opposite his closed laptop. He felt disquiet squirming like a worm. These objects were so ordinary, and this girl was so not, and as he laid her on the couch, she shivered. It was a good sign, meaning that she was responding to the change in temperature -- thus, there was hope for her yet.

He took no more than forty seconds to rush to the bathroom, heft over his shoulder the duffel kept beside the sink, and rush back. There, he heaved it atop the table, letting the cup roll onto its side and spill a brief, miniature tea waterfall into the carpet. Unzipped, the duffel revealed medical supplies piled between twin lines of zipper teeth: gauze in rolls, bottled peroxide held in Ziploc bags, boxes and boxes of tiny metal instruments. He dug through them, pushing them aside to unveil, like rock settling into striations across millennia, another layer underneath.

There were leather pouches tied with twine, yellowed boxes holding matches, vials of greenish liquids that sluiced back and forth within their bounds, tomes shedding flakes of leather dried from age. Stuffed among their parallel spines, more glass jars glinted, and these were filled not with tea, but with stones. All carved flat, into a uniform oblong shape, each one bore the same engraving: a trio of spirals, arranged to sit at the points of an invisible triangle, some facing left and others right.

The Celtic triskele.

William grabbed the nearest jar, with no regard to which he picked up, for they served a shared purpose. His hands had touched her skin, but in his state of hyperfocus, his brain had not registered what they felt: a buzz, a hum, a pulse beneath her pulse, fading more the longer she lay wounded. Modern tools could quell her blood loss, but only the triskele could restore that fervent, sharp, ancient energy.

He knew now. He knew what she was.

So, he set to work. The hours passed in a blur of ointments and gauze, spiral-stones on her forehead and sternum, bitter oils and herb smoke and words whispered from his lips as a mantra: Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me...