Redemption
an excerpt

Deafening coughing woke her up. It took a couple moments to realize, it was her. Evelyn’s chest felt like it had been jumped up and down on several times, by a really large bear.
“Anyone get the license plate of that truck?” she moaned, her brain swimming as she sat up.
“Evie, Evie,” Arbor’s voice sounded like she was under water. “Stay down.” A rough hand pushed her back down. “You are not well, yet.”
Too weak to fight, Evie collapsed back down, only to shoot back up a second later. “Babi?” Arbor pushed her back down with even more force, and more than a little annoyance.
“Help is here. He will be fine. Rest.” Evelyn could only take the Tree spirit’s word for it. Looking around, they were back on shore, but it was only the two of them. No sign of Babi or any help she had gotten for them.
“What is going on, Arbor?” Arbor fiddled with her bag, refusing to look at Evelyn. “Where is Babi?”
Arbor inclined her head out to the lake, but all Evie could see was an endless expanse of ripples. “They are too far away for your eyes to see, but they are there. He is being healed. Again. It seems even now, you make life more interesting for him.” There was enough humor in her last remark, for Evelyn to take that as a compliment.
Thinking back to her last memories, Evelyn began to realize something was off about what happened. “Arbor, I could not hold him up anymore. One minute everything was fine, the next… did I pass out?” Once again, Arbor busied herself elsewhere. “Arbor,” Evie was surprised to hear a growl in the voice. “What happened in the lake?”
Arbor sighed, the lines on her face stretched even longer. She plopped next to Evie and crossed her legs. “When I returned with Greedo,” the familiar spike of fear drove down Evelyn’s spine. “You and he had fallen beneath the surface. It could not have been too long, but you had stopped breathing. I brought you to shore to breathe for you and Greedo took Babi to heal.”
“So why the long face?”
“In all the worrying about Ito’s injuries, we had not noticed yours,” she said.
Evelyn tried to remember the fight earlier. Any injury she had was only minor. They would have noticed. Right? “What injuries?”
Arbor leaned over and pulled back the sleeve on Evie’s right arm. Several ugly gashes marred her whole arm. From the thorns, Evie thought. Then the bottom fell out of her stomach. The scratches would have probably been pretty nasty on their own, but these had grown black and green. She did not need to pass biology to know they were infected. Badly infected. “Entirely possible she could loose the arm” infected.
Arbor carefully picked up the arm, Evie could feel the rough bark against her forearm. The woman placed her hand in Evie’s. “Squeeze my hand.”
Evelyn knew she told her hand to move. She knew what it felt like to squeeze her fingers together, could remember it from decades of her body doing what she told it. She would not have believed it, if she had not seen her hand just sit there, limp in Arbor’s grip.
A wave of nausea threatened to swallow her, but Evie fought it back.
“What,” her voice cracked. “What does this mean?”
“The Walker was using Gatsuda Vines. They are annoying to us, but lethal to humans,” Arbor glanced down. “Already it is worse than when I first saw it.”
“How long?”
“You have six maybe seven hours,"...