Jasper Dallow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Silas hadn't left. He stood dripping in the doorway of the veranda, watching the beast buck against the crate slats. Blood pooled under the splint. Jasper pressed both hands to the shoulder and felt the animal jerk him forward like a hooked line. He couldn't hold it and stitch it at the same time. Nobody could. "It's going to tear through the crate," Silas said. "Then it's going to tear through you." "I know." Jasper's fingers were slick. "If I sedate it wrong, its heart stops. I don't have a dose for whatever it is." Silas glanced at the yard. The water had dropped to knee-deep, brown and slow. "The tea woman. Next door. She keeps a shelf of things nobody buys." Jasper had thought of her already and dismissed it. She sold fever tea, not sleep for a beast no book named. But he had nothing else. He shoved a wad of gauze into Silas's palm. "Press here. Hard. Don't move until I'm back." He waded across the yard. His neighbor, the small woman in the yellow headscarf, was already on her step, a clay cup steaming in her hand as if she'd heard him coming. She held it out. He shook his head. "Not for me. The beast on my porch. It's bleeding and it won't hold still. I need something to slow it. Not kill it." She studied him. "How big?" "Bigger than the fox. Warm-blooded. Breathes fast." She set the cup on the rail and went inside. She came back with a small brown jar. "Valerian root. Skullcap. A pinch of poppy. Half a spoon in warm water. No more. If its tongue goes blue, you dose it wrong." "How do you have this?" "I make what people might need." She closed his hand around the jar. "Go." He ran back through the water. Silas was leaning his weight on the gauze, arms shaking. Jasper mixed the powder in a tin cup with rainwater from the barrel. He worked it into a strip of soaked bread and pushed it past the beast's teeth. The animal swallowed on instinct. They waited. Silas kept pressure. Jasper counted breaths. After four minutes, the thrashing softened. After seven, the beast's head lowered to the crate floor. Its eye stayed open, watching him. Jasper threaded the curved needle and stitched. Twenty-two stitches, close and even, the way he'd practiced on cloth as a boy. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. He packed the shoulder with clean linen and sat back on his heels. Silas wiped his hands on his apron. "It's breathing shallow." "I know." Jasper watched the ribs rise. Too slow. "The dose was close to the edge." The beast was alive. But it wouldn't wake for hours, maybe a day, and something in a nearby crate had begun to cough — the fledgling, wet-lunged, the sound of a sickness that spreads.