She gave a harsh, bitter laugh. It took only a moment, however for her to be gasping for breath she didn't need as her body searched for the thing it was missing. Oh, how the human body was not made for this disease.
"You're not gonna find anything that's gonna fix this," she muttered, but didn't bother even attempting to resist him putting her down. She'd just look pathetic if she did.
In her muddled mind, she tried to find an antidote to her current state of weakness and agitation. Her heart was beating, thu-thump, thu-thump, a steadily hastening rhythm she feared would crack her ribs, which would suck. It was hard to heal without blood.
Transfusions were a real thing here, were there bloodbanks? Why hadn't she asked before? Fucking moron, that's what she was.
James didn't know what Kate meant by that, but once he sat her on the ground he got to work. He'd only made it out of there with the clothes on his back, so he tore off the bottom hem of his shirt and worked to wrap it snugly around his neck. He held pressure against the cut and waited for the blood to stop flowing so much before he finished wrapping and tied it off.
It only took a minute or two before he knelt back down by Kate's side.
"Okay. What do I need to get you? Are there things you can't eat?"
"I'm a bloody corpse," she said, not bothering with so much as a final wave to subtly as she tossed it to the wind, "I'm dead, so I can't produce my own blood. Ergo, I fucking need blood."
Her head was swimming, swirling, swishing, swaying...sinking.....
He gave her a once-over. Her body didn't look like it was decomposing, and she certainly didn't smell like it. But upon closer, more critical observance he noted her near-colorless skin. The idea that she didn't produce her own blood actually seemed believable.
But if she wasn't someone possessing a corpse, how was her body being sustained? It only took a second for him to put pieces together. She'd told him herself. She needed blood. That must've been how she kept herself from dying. He didn't know how on earth that meant her body actually functioned, and he didn't think science could explain it.
This had to be another strange magic from another world. That, or Kate was the first of her kind and something very different was happening in the magic of Nye.
All that to say, he was still processing the implications of Kate being a corpse.
Why did he keep running into living corpses?
He took in a deep breath. Kate was still a person, and a person who'd helped him nonetheless. With his bridges with Rita and the gang burned, Kate was the only person out in this forest who seemed even mildly interested in helping him, and he had to help her in return.
He could always hunt for something, and she could drink the blood of the animal, right? He thought that would be sufficient, but then he had a different thought.
James took in a slow breath and decided to think about this logically. Critically. Panicking would not be helpful for either of them at the moment, but especially her. She had just saved him and helped him escape. He could hear her out. She deserved that.
If she'd been this starving for blood, she'd had plenty of opportunities back at the cabin, when they were surrounded by humans. She could've found a way to get some before she'd lost all of her strength. She could've acted out in desperation, but she didn't. And even now - she'd told him to stop bleeding. She hadn't laid a finger on him besides to use him as a support for her weak and exhausted body. She'd shown a self-control a lot of people in her position might not use.
James looked around, letting out the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. No one had come to look for them yet.
Yet.
"How much do you need?" he asked quietly.
If he was right about her, she wasn't a killer. But if she was as spent as she was, he didn't know how much human blood she'd need to recover.
She did the math in her head, slowly, over and over to make sure she got it right. A little over a gallon was what one person had in their body, and she'd used up most of that. Almost all of that.
"...a gallon, or so," she said slowly, "A lot. A lot of blood."
"Oh..." he said, looking down at the ground. He lifted a hand over his eyes. Taking that much blood from a person would easily kill them. That, and he didn't even have the resources or tools to extract that much blood from someone.
"Uh." He pinched his eyes shut for a moment and sighed. He was going to figure this out. He was going to figure this out. He would try to.
James pulled his hand away from his face and looked back at her.
"How do you... have your blood? I can't offer that much, but I can offer a little... to start. But I don't even know how exactly you - you know. Ingest it. And I don't even know how to do all of this safely. I'm far from a doctor."
She blinked and rubbed her eyes under her glasses, leaving them crooked when she lowered her hands. There was a stick digging into her back. The fact that she could still feel it was a good sign.
"There are usually doners for this kind of thing," she said, mostly to herself, "In an emergency, it's possible to cut a vein, drain about three pints from a single person if you want them to have a chance at living, and patch them up as securely as possible..." she trailed off, distracted by a dark floating dot in her vision as it swirled around between the trees. She shook her head. "They'll lose more blood into the bandages before the bleeding fully stops, so...careful..."
James's face was creased with worry. Trying to measure that much blood with nothing in the forest seemed like an impossible task that he wasn't sure he could make work. Good gods, of all the ways to go, did he really want it to be giving blood to a corpse in the middle of the forest?
He sighed, looking down at his arm. Spotting a vein.
In an emergency, huh.
That was when he heard the distant sound of leaves and trees shuffling in the forest. Someone was headed for them.
"Shit," he muttered, reaching down to help Kate back up. "I'm so sorry, but I'm going to have to do this later. Can you walk or do I need to carry you? I don't know if that's Hoss or whoever, but I would really rather not find out."
Kate gave a nod, only half-certain she was interpreting anything he said even remotely correctly. There was...someone there. Someone else. Yes. Was that why she was nodding?
She tried to pull herself up again, but the treebark bit into her hand and she slipped, or maybe she slipped first? Either way, she stumbled and ended up grabbing onto James.
James stumbled a little but straightened up and scooped one arm under Kate's back and one under her legs. Kate didn't seem responsive at the moment, and the nod was enough of an agreement for him to pick her up. They had to go.
He lifted her off the ground and glanced back in the forest. He could see a few people - blurry, and coming closer. He didn't stay still long enough to catch any details.
He ran off into the forest with Kate in his arms, dodging and weaving through the trees and being careful not to trip on anything, at risk of dropping Kate and having them both tumble painfully to the ground.
Being a hero doesn't mean you're invincible. It just means that you're brave enough to stand up and do what's needed. — Rick Riordan, The Mark of Athena
