In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

REVENGE OF THE NERD
The timbers of the ancient building shook. From the other
room came a deafening crash, a howl, the sounds of a dragon gone
amuck.
Maia and Penny rushed in to find Ng land on both boots after a
flurry of kick-boxing Alessandro. Blood spurting out his nose,
Alessandro pulled himself up from the floor, fists clenched, but Ng's
right heel smacked into the side of his face and he fell back into the
door and crumpled out cold on the floor. Ng grabbed Ula by her third
sleeve, kicked Alessandro aside to open the door, and pulled her out to
the landing and down the stairs. The whole thing had taken less than
twenty seconds.
Maia threw herself on Alessandro's limp body and slammed her
head against his heart. Penny knelt to the side and checked his carotid.
Yes, it pulsed against her fingers. Maia sat up and stared at him, dazed.
Blood gushed out his nose in bubbly spurts, spilled from gashes on his
cheek and brow, through his hair, spreading into a dark shiny pool on
the floor beneath his head.
He opened his eyes, started to get up, gasped, and lay back on
the floor. Maia ran into the kitchen.
"Pudain, I dry do zdop him," he told Max, who was clearing the
hair from his face.
Maia came back from the kitchen with wet towels and began to
gingerly wipe the blood from his face, but soon dashed to the
bathroom. She had seen the white of his crushed cheekbone. Max
calmly replaced the flap of skin over it and got up to examine the door.
"The lock is foutu!" he growled. He smashed it closed, but it
just bounced goofily back, so he kicked it furiously, the seventeenth
century carpentry giving up in long splinters.
He was still at it as Alessandro crawled onto the futon holding a
wad of Maia's tissues over his nose.
"Can you see okay?" Penny asked. He blinked an affirmative,
his eyes going off in different directions.
"Will somebody please call an ambulance? We need to get him
to the emergency room, I think he has a concussion," Penny said, but
Maia, back from the toilet, was freaked out, and Max had disappeared.
87