The antitoxin worked. Slowly, painfully, but it worked. The dark veins on his shoulder began to recede, the necrotic bruising fading from black-green to an ugly yellow-purple. His breathing, unnecessary, habitual, comforting, steadied.

He closed his eyes. Within minutes, the rigid, meditative stillness of elven trance settled over his features, and his body went quiet.

You sat on the other side of the log and wrapped your arms around your knees.

He was asleep. Or whatever this was — not sleep exactly, but something deep and still, a rest so complete that his chest barely moved. His face, smoothed of pain and sarcasm and the constant, exhausting performance of whatever he was performing, looked younger. Softer. Almost peaceful, if you didn't look at the fangs just visible behind his slightly parted lips.

The forest was dark around you. Cold. The kind of cold that seeped into your bones and settled there like a tenant that refused to leave. Your pajama dress was torn in three places, damp with dew and sweat, and the strip you'd ripped for his bandage had left your left leg exposed from mid-thigh to ankle.

You were not going to sleep.

You were not going to close your eyes in a dark forest next to a man — a vampire, your brain supplied helpfully, because apparently that was a thing that existed — who had chased you through the woods and pinned you against a rock less than an hour ago. The fact that he'd also killed a swarm of nightmare spiders didn't erase the first part. It complicated it, but it didn't erase it.

So you sat. And shivered. And watched the shadows.

The minutes crawled. An owl hooted somewhere in the canopy, and you flinched so hard your spine hit the log. A fox screamed in the distance — a sound like a woman dying — and you clamped your hand over your mouth to keep from screaming back.

Every rustle was spiders. Every shadow was legs. Every shift in the wind was the static-crackle of the Ethereal Plane tearing open to deposit another cluster of clicking, dripping, multi-eyed horrors.

None of them came. The forest stayed quiet. But your body didn't believe it, and the adrenaline that had kept you running for the last hour was curdling into a bone-deep exhaustion that pressed against the backs of your eyes like thumbs.

You pulled your knees tighter to your chest. You watched the pale, still face of the vampire on the other side of the log.

You stayed awake.