The Hierophant (Book 1 in The Arcana Series) by Madeline Claire Franklin Page A

raw throat is completely shredded. My lungs feel like they’re clenched between fists, but I keep dragging in quick, shallow breaths, one after another, until I can do so without coughing uncontrollably at least fifty percent of the time. I wipe the spit and the snot from my face on the drenched sleeve of my shirt, and immediately cough up more water.
    At some point, someone must have put their arms around my waist. They are the only thing actually holding me up while I gag and choke on my own breath, sagging, exhausted. My own hands are clutching at my chest, as if I might be able to tear the chains away from my lungs, grabbing fistfuls of shirt and squeezing so hard that my hands and arms are shake. My hand burns from the cut, fingers ache from their sprains. My head throbs. My ankle is raw.
    All of me is shaking. Every muscle in my body is fatigued beyond comprehension, battered and bruised and clenching against the cold—and the cold is incredible, like a blade of ice across every inch of my body, cutting down to the bone. I’m certain I’m going to shake myself dead from it.
    “Ana?”
    The sound sends a probing tremor straight through me. It’s a man’s voice, an unmistakable one, even in the state I’m in. Trebor turns me around, holds me seated upright on the ground, still encircled by his arms. His face is other-worldly in the moonlight.
    “You’re going to be okay,” he tells me, pushing the wet hair away from my face. He is so warm—his hands, his arms, his body. He doesn’t have a drop of water on him. How in the world did he pull me from the middle of the creek without getting wet?
    “I don’t want to freak you out,” he says, looking me in the eyes. “but I need you to take off your shirt and your jeans. We need to stop you from going hypothermic—you can have my shirt, and my coat, okay? I’ll keep you warm, and covered up.”
    I stare at him, not certain if I should be horrified or amused—my brain is a fog of adrenaline, pain, disbelief. There are, after all, worse things that can happen in this moment besides stripping down to my soaked underclothes in front of an almost-stranger. But the part of me that insists—for my mental health, maybe?—on pretending that I was not just drowned by a water-demon, and that I was not just resuscitated , also insists on feeling embarrassed by his request.
    But I nod anyway, partially because I know he’s right, and partially because I’m shaking so badly I can’t verbalize my response. My wet clothes are holding the cold against my skin, and I do not want to survive what I’ve just been through only to die from metabolic shut-down. I start to peel off my shirt, glad that I wore a modest bra and plain black underwear tonight, but my arms and hands are so stiff and unreliable that Trebor has to pull my shirt over my head for me, which is the part where my brain really gets worked up and tries to convince me this is improper .
    But I’m not given time to feel embarrassed. Trebor immediately takes off his own tee-shirt and pulls it over my head. I wriggle out of my sopping wet bra before slipping my arms through the sleeves. The warm cotton, relative to the cold I’m escaping, feels hot as an oven as it surrounds my body.
    Trebor has to help pull off my soaked jeans which are clinging to me with more force than I can overcome at this moment. My shoes are lost—socks vanished. I see my feet curling uncontrollably in on themselves, twisting to keep warm.
    Trebor stands me up with my feet on top of his, leans me against him, and drapes his jacket around me. It’s that same hooded, black jacket I’ve seen him in before—on him, it goes down to his mid-thigh. On me, it’s not much longer, but it’s warmer than my damp clothes, now abandoned on the forest floor.
    Trebor zips the coat up for me, pulls the hood up around my wet hair, and when he stands back to look at my face, to make sure I’m still all here, I notice, for the first time, that his