His head lolled again. His fingers were shaking underneath mine now. “Has it stopped bleeding?”
“No.”
“Fuck.”
Yeah, that about summed it up.
It couldn’t have been longer than fifteen minutes before I heard the sound of the bike again, but every one of them felt as long as a century. Will was flagging, the tea towel soaked in blood, and I was barely staving off panic when Dominic and Red Joe arrived. Red Joe had his big first aid kit with him.
“Shit,” he said when he took a look at Will’s hand. “That’s deep.”
“Yeah.” Will managed to crack a smile. “Got myself good.”
“Chopper’s on the way,” Red Joe said.
“Chopper? Joe!”
“It’s deep, Will,” Red Joe said, and then set about binding the wound tightly. “It’s going to need stitches, at least.”
“The Adeline can’t be down a hand,” Will said, and cut a sharp look at me. “Don’t you say a word, Natty. You’re not going out in my place.”
Typical. Will would rather lose a day fishing than give me a chance to work on his boat.
I drew a breath. “But?—”
“I’ll go out,” Red Joe said gruffly, and my protest died in my throat. “I still know my way around a boat. Eddie can do my rounds for a few days.”
Will let out a shaky breath. “Thanks, Joe.”
Fuck them both.
I stomped out of the kitchen into the back yard, only to run into Mavis Coldwell, who was stepping over the side fence. She was wearing her nightie, her gum boots, and clutching a torch.
“I heard his bike,” she said, nodding her head at Dominic’s house. “Saw him heading up to the lighthouse driving like the devil was after him, then coming back down again with Red Joe on the back. What’s going on?”
“Will got hurt,” I said. “Chopper’s coming from the mainland.”
“Righto,” Mavis said. “I’ll get more torches.”
The thing I loved most about Dauntless, even when I hated it, wasn’t just that everyone knew everyone’s business—it was that everyone thought that because they knew your business it must have been their business as well, and they dived right in. But on nights like this it was a good thing. Because Mavis turned up, and so did Fisher Harry Finch and his sons, and Julie Dinsmore, and Big Johnny and Aunt Susan and Addy. Which was more than enough of them to head out of the village with a bunch of lamps and flares, and make sure there were no goats on the landing site so the chopper could come in.
When the chopper was coming in low over the island, Dominic and Red Joe walked Will to the landing site. Will swayed like a drunk, but he was still on his feet when the chopper landed. The paramedics got him loaded in, and then they were gone again, swooping west towards the mainland.
“He’ll be fine,” Big Johnny said, and slapped me on the back.
I nodded, and looked around for Dominic. He was over by one the burning flares, talking with Red Joe. I jammed my hands in my pockets and walked home, listening to the fading sounds of the chopper.
The kitchen was a mess. I put Red Joe’s first aid kit aside—lighter a few bandages now—and picked up the plastic wrappers from the floor. Then I dumped the bloody tea towels in cold water in the laundry sink. I didn’t know if all that blood would come out or not. I wiped down the kitchen table with bleach, and then mopped the floor.
“You okay?”
I almost jumped out of my skin. “Dominic.”
He leaned in the outside doorway. “Hey.”
“I’m okay,” I said, but I didn’t think I was. I should have been, because Will was with the paramedics on his way to hospital now, and he’d be fine. I knew that, but somehow my body didn’t. It felt weird and shaky, as though it was trying to alert me that something was horribly wrong and my conscious mind just wasn’t getting the message. I mean, most of the time I didn’t like Will, but he was still my brother. I didn’t hate him enough to want him to die or anything. But I was still angry at him too, because he didn’t trust me to go out on the Adeline. It was bullshit how he was still treating me like a little kid after all this time.
“No, you’re not,” he said. He folded his arms over his chest and raised his eyebrows.
