The air still held some warmth from the day, but there was no denying those storm clouds. Rain was coming. We needed dry firewood.
The door creaked and Ace stomped into the cabin with an armful of wood. He hadn’t wasted time hunting down the stash hidden somewhere outside.
I hadn’t moved since he left. Instead, I stood here and hugged a folded sheet.
Jolted into action, I grabbed a few more blankets, settled them under my arm and climbed the ladder slowly, my bare feet silent on the wooden rungs. Every muscle ached from the hard pace, dried sweat clung to my skin, and deep weariness dragged my limbs down. When I reached the loft, the cramped space hit me all at once—narrow beams hung low overhead and dust motes swirled in the weak light filtering in from the windows below.
There was only one bed, with a thin, lumpy mattress and a faded quilt pulled tight across it.
“Are you phaaning kidding me?” I muttered. I ran a tired hand along the edge of the mattress and swallowed hard.
Below me, Ace’s voice came back, calm but tired. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s only one bed,” I said, the words sharp even through the exhaustion.
The sound of wood hitting wood punctuated the silence as he dropped an armful of dry logs by the fire before kneeling to stack them with practiced ease.
“I’m taking the couch,” he said.
I glanced toward the small couch, too short and narrow for his broad frame. A flicker of irritation sparked inside me. Why was he so stubborn? Clearly, I should take the couch.
As if hearing my thoughts, Nala hopped onto the couch and curled up. She let out a long, exaggerated sigh.
I narrowed my eyes at my conniving familiar. We didn’t speak into each other’s minds, but it certainly felt like she read mine sometimes.
As if to prove my point, Nala lifted her head and yawned at me.
Ace paused, his gaze flicking to my familiar. He pressed his lips together but didn’t say anything.
“Looks like your spot is taken.” I shifted the blankets in my arms, my throat dry, my limbs aching, my body longing to flop face-first into the bed. “We can share.”
Ace paused his wood stacking but didn’t turn to face me. “I think that’s a bad idea.”
“I think it’s a worse idea for one of us to lay down on that poor excuse of a couch and not get any sleep at all.” I swallowed, forcing myself to climb onto the edge of the bed, the thin mattress dipping under my weight.
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he stood stiffly and left the cabin again, presumably to get more wood. While he worked on that, I attempted to make the loft bed more comfortable with additional sheets.
It didn’t take long for Ace to stack a healthy pile of logs and get the hearth roaring. When he finished, he called up from the bottom of the ladder. “Mouse?”
“Yeah?”
“We should clean and bandage your wound.”
That sounded like a terrible idea. “It’s fine.”
“It was still bleeding when we arrived.”
I pulled the sheet over the thin mattress and glanced down in my arm. The poison may not have affected me like the last time I came into contact with it, but my wound wasn’t healing as quickly as similar injuries from the past.
“It will be fine,” I amended.
“As much as I like to fight with you over every little thing, could we not do this? You have a wound that needs tending. I have wounds that need tending, and I’m too phaaning exhausted to squabble.”
Well, now I felt like an asshole.
I was an asshole.
I had forgotten about Ace’s burns.
