All the world was smeared over with a viscous haze, and all she could sense as she struggled out of three days’ sleep was pain. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat, a long throb from somewhere low on her body. For a single moment that stuttered and dragged, she didn’t remember where the pain came from, and then she did -- her ankle.

It told her two things: that she wasn’t dead, and that someone must have healed her, at least somewhat.

She mulled over these bits of information, rolling them around and poking and prodding them, looking for holes. The fact that she had lived was absolutely certain. Everything ached way too much for her to have died, and she smelled lavender. Nobody had ever told her that being dead had a smell.

As for the healing, she didn’t feel anything wet where the hounds had caught her. An image of a dog-shaped shadow flickered across the stage of her eyelids, growling, springing, vanishing. Though she struggled with her half-sleeping brain, she could not determine how long it’d been since the attack. But from the dryness of the wound, and the feeling of something soft packed in around it, she estimated perhaps a day.

Wakefulness fell into place one piece at a time. That soft surface was everywhere, filling the space around her body like clouds. From it, the floral scent drifted. There was light coming from somewhere beside her, not enough to sting her closed eyes, but enough that they fluttered open to find its source.

The window to her left had its slitted blinds at an angle to let the sun shine through. It cast slats of pale yellow across the blankets draped over her form, making them looked ribbed in brightness and shadow. The more she allowed her vision to adjust, the more outlines, then shapes, then objects materialized: bed posts, bookshelves, curtains, chairs. There was one by the bed, and another by the desk tucked into the far left corner, between herself and the window.

She prepared for another wave of pain and propped herself up on bent elbows to look in the opposite direction. In a snap of a second, she wished she hadn’t.

From the ceiling to the floor stretched a flag. That flag. A sapphire backdrop, a red x, a white x, a great scarlet cross slashed across the foreground. She cringed, tasting bitterness and sickly breath. How had she landed in England? Why had that been the first place to which her thoughts had gone when she’d grasped the portal? Gods, had that memory dredged up from the nebulous swamps beneath every bit of rationality she’d ever scraped together? If this really was England, then whether it was chance or the fate goddess Morrigan toying with her, she couldn’t think about it.

So, she steeled herself against it, giving the thing a mental smack into the sludge of other Things She Could Not Think About, and was done with it. Vast scores of countries bore that mark. Wherever she’d landed, all she had to do was recover, leave, and find some place to adequately blend in.

If the hunters and their hounds were a threat, then the people from whom they hid were lethal.

There came a creak from outside the room. The door handle turned. Her heart slammed against her chest, fear searing away dullness.

She wasn’t sure that she could even walk, but she was sure that she wouldn’t lie down and surrender. Her hands clenched into fists, lacking any weapon but knuckles and curses.

They fell slack when the door opened.

He was sunlight, the young man who stepped inside -- shoulder-length honey hair, skin warm and fair, as he laid upon her a heather gaze, grey-green as the sea in autumn. His clothing was plain, but a peaceful sort of plain, pale denim and a cable-knit sweater that spilled down to his thighs, and bunched at his wrists, letting his fingers emerge clasping a white box between them. It was plastic, hooked closed, and large enough to contain perhaps a book. But the box was nowhere near as enthralling as his expression.

He hadn’t expected her to be awake, had he?

The two were locked at a standstill. It was like what people said of empaths and psychics: they didn’t look at you. They looked into you.

Instead of what she was sure he’d say -- Who are you? What are you? What happened? -- he asked only one question.

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“Do you feel alright?”

His voice held none of the lilt she heard in Belfast or Dublin or home, only a velveteen calm, sweets for the ears. Her precarious hope toppled. Never had she heard a voice more undeniably English.

Her own would not come. The air began coursing with electricity, as though this one room in this one home in this one inescapable country was poised on the edge of a lightning strike to end all lightning strikes. She remembered how it’d felt when Soiléireacht had broken. Right before the break, the air was just like this. And she was going to feel it again unless she answered. Why that was so certain, she couldn’t say.

“Yes,” she managed at last. The single word rasped, hoarse in her throat.

His stare faltered from hers, and his stance shifted, losing the tension that her unexpected consciousness had brought.

“How... how did you get hurt?”

“How did you know what to do?”

“I know what you are.” And, before she had the chance to take fright or offense at his blithely casual tone, he added, “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

For the second time in as many minutes, there was nothing that she could say.

In her silence, he took a step forward, rubbing the corner of the box with his thumbs like a worry stone. Another charge of energy pulsed through the air, from him to her.

“Well,” he said, and stood still, no more than another foot nearer. “I was going to change the dressing, but... you can do it yourself, I suppose.”

It was less of a statement and more of a question, and within it, buried deep, was fear that she’d not noticed moments earlier.

That’s right. You should be afraid.

A trace of... something... flickered through her, though she’d not said anything to intimidate him. It couldn’t be guilt. There was no time for that. She willed it away with a raised brow and a clever line -- or so she intended.

“You really do know what I am, then.”

“Yes, I...”

“Give me no more favors, then. And give me the box.”

He held it out at arm’s length and balanced it in his hands, as if offering a priceless gem on a cushion. Sparks leapt between their fingertips, invisible, when she took it.

“Might I at least ask again what happened?”

As she’d suspected, when she lifted the hooks and flipped the lid, the box was stuffed full of the supplies to clean and dress her wound -- so white, so sterile. She leafed through bandages in individual wrapping, and packets of disinfectant wipes, and vials covered in paper, which were printed with so much medical jargon that she couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.

Under the latter, she uncovered a flat pebble.

“The hounds did it,” she said, and she turned the pebble over. Three etched spirals stared back at her. That was at least a sign that she’d not been captured by some amateur researcher.

“The Wild Hunt?”

“Surprised?”

“Well,” he repeats, in the sort of lost, awkward tone used only for surprises. “I wasn’t aware they still...”

“Exist?”

“I guess so.”

“A lot of things still exist.”

His eyes flicked back to hers, surely searching for an explanation. She gave none, not to be standoffish, but because she was bracing for what she would see under the gauze around her ankle.

“Go away, now,” she prompted, the box set upon her lap.

He bowed his head, retreated, and nudged the door closed behind him. That electric crackling left the air, fizzling to nothing and leaving her body heavy as iron. She exhaled exhaustion, pushed the blankets away, and gingerly peeled back the first strip of gauze. Round and round her hand pulled it, like a snake, until it lay piled on the bed sheets, the inner layers red-brown with congealed blood.

Her stomach clenched. Ice raced down her spine. The skin was raw, red, sliced into oblivion by teeth the likes of which she should not have survived. But what made her mind stammer, unable to rationalize the sight, was how the slices lay flat, edged in crimson and glistening with an oily sheen. It was almost as though they’d been glued. While she hardly dared, she brought her leg closer to her face, grasping by the knee, and took a breath. The odor brimmed with the same pungent sterility of the box; whatever the oil was, it had done just as much as the triskele rune to stop her blood loss.

“Do it myself,” she grumbled, squinting at the type stamped across a disinfectant packet. It did not tell her whether to use the wipe first, or to open the vials, which she presumed held oil. “Real useful.”

She could not have known that he had stayed just outside the door, perched on one of the few areas of hallway floor that did not creak, but she did know that if she didn’t hurry, he’d return. So, she shrugged, sighed, and tore open the packet. At first, she recoiled from the cold, damp square inside and the waft of alcohol smell -- it burned her nose, making her sneeze, which sent yet another lance of pain through her aching body.

But what was she if she couldn’t handle this? Nothing. She dabbed every inch of the wound, stifling a gasp, and with her other hand, wiped her eyes dry when they began to water. If she’d survived the hounds, then she could do this without giving in to weakness.

With each oil trail she trickled onto the new roll of gauze, and each loop around her ankle, she reminded herself of that.

To repay her debt to the young man, she’d refrain from harming him. It was the best he could ask for, really, bringing her into his home.

Tomorrow, she decided. Tomorrow, she’d disappear, keeping one of this world’s precious few kind souls safely in the dark.