Up until that night, I had fancied myself a sensible sort of woman. If someone had pitched to me the hypothetical scenario of stumbling upon the mugging of my favourite singer, in which he was stabbed but refused to go to the hospital, I would have laughed and said, “Yeah, nah, I’d ring an ambulance anyway.”.

Then again, there would have been a variable missing from that hypothetical scenario.

A variable of changing eye colours and a taste for raw rat.

Between the two mountains of stress and strangeness towering over the whole event, I had found myself tumbling into a valley of bizarre calmness.

I was not calm in any traditional sense, of course, huffing like an asthmatic rhino and no doubt staggering along with all the grace of one as I somehow dragged Magnus to my hotel and into the lift without raising any alarms. I was decidedly uncalm about the literal situation—I had no idea how I was going to help a stabbed man, and the thought of him dying on me because he didn’t want to go to a hospital weighed on my every breath.

But, in some strange way, I was emotionally tranquil regarding Magnus’ peculiar behaviour and appearance changes.

Well. In truth, I was simply ignoring those surreal elements to focus on the normal.

A man being stabbed was suddenly a normal, comprehendible event in my life.

“We need—to call—urgh—someone!” I dragged Magnus over to my bed as the door to my room snapped shut behind me with a reassuring click. There was one blessing to him being half-conscious, as this meant he would not be able to see the numerous open sketchpads and screwed up papers all over the boring cream carpet and standard-issue lightwood furniture. I’d had hours to kill before the gig, and I had spent it as I spent most of my time: drawing.

I succeeded in something of a stumble and half-threw the rockstar onto the irritatingly ivory-hued bed, the overly-sprung mattress bouncing enthusiastically and threatening to catapult the wounded man onto the floor. “I mean…fuck, Jesus, you’ve been stabbed! No right, fuck it, ambulance!”

“Don’t!” Magnus grunted, rolling up onto his side and fixing me with a steely glare. Whatever edge he had hoped to sting me with under his stormy look was lost in the memory of the cinderblaze stare I had witnessed not ten minutes prior. “Please…don’t. I’ll be fine.”

He rolled back, defeated, his eyelids flickering shut. Even as the seconds ticked by, the colour in his face seemed to weep out as sweat, his flesh turning ashen as moisture clung to his skin. Still, his lips fluttered around a mantra of promises: “I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine…”

“Oh, God…!” I fretted as ran into the bathroom to grab one of the neatly folded and unfortunately pristine towels housekeeping had swapped out for me. I quickly ruined their meticulous folding and bundled it into an inelegant ball, darting back into the bedroom and shoving it over Magnus’ bloody hand. He took the hint and let go of the wound long enough to take the towel from me and press it against the weeping injury.

“I’ll be fine…” he breathed again, doing me the courtesy of offering a ghost of a smile across pale lips. In truth, despite the mania of the evening’s events, the Cheshire grin had never quite left Magnus’ face, perpetually tugging at the corners of his lips even when he had been shocked and worried about our first encounter.

The smile faltered slightly as I pulled my phone out again, but I held my hand up to stop his complaints.

“Not an ambulance,” I assured him, tapping through the contacts on my phone. “Plan B.”

The best thing about being a university student was the eclectic array of people I encountered. The worst thing about being a university student was the eclectic array of people I encountered. Still, there were a handful of people I considered myself blessed to have befriended. My best friend, Killian Rose, was one such blessing.

My thumb hovered over Killian’s name, faltering only to check the time.

02:42 am. Also known as breakfast time for any self-respecting medical student pulling yet another all-nighter.

Hardly a single ring sounded in my ear before Killian answered. I could almost picture him from his frantic greeting—black hair a tousled mess, glasses skewwhiff, no doubt a thread of drool sticking a paper to his face from an impromptu desk-nap.

“St-Stella?” Killian stammered, a grogginess in his tone betraying the fact I’d woken him up. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, sorry to wake you, kind of got an emergency here,” I quickly cut down his fretting with my own worrying. “How…how do I treat a stab wound, Killian?”

The other end of the line went deathly quiet, though I knew Killian would rather throw his phone out of the window than hang up on me.

“Stella, what the hell’s happened?”

“Nothing, I’m honestly fine, just…a friend here, he broke a glass pretty badly and a shard got stuck in his…arm.”

In front of me, Magnus huffed a hollow laugh, nostrils flaring. I sent him a silent reminder via a frown that I had wanted to call an ambulance and not lie to my best friend.

“Right.” Killian didn’t sound sure, but to whatever end, he conceded to play a role in my lie. “Is your friend sitting down or lying down?”

“He’s lying down, Doc,” I reported back truthfully, and I crouched down by the side of the bed, both knees clicking.

“Alright, and is the shard of glass still in the wound?”

“No. Just got a towel pressing over the wound.”

“Crap…” Killian muttered, and the phone line became overwhelmed with shuffling papers and movement. “Have you called an ambulance?”

“It’s on the way,” I said, but my chest had started to grow tight and uncomfortable as I continued to lie to Killian. “But it’s ages away.”

“Keep pressure on the wound,” instructed Killian. “The main thing is to stem the bleeding. And to prevent shock setting in.”

Shit, fuck, shitty fuck, fuckity-fuck, shit, fuck.