Chapter 8
Bonnie hurried outside to a whole host of worried faces spread across her back yard. “Findley, could you go check on Gwen’s babies?”
“Of course,” Findley said.
“I’m coming,” Brinnley said and jumped up, following right behind her sister.
“Kassidy, Alison, please help the males inside if they need anything while they’re taking care of Gwen.”
“Of course,” they said, and hurried to get inside.
“Vance, can you and Three stay visible out here,” Bonnie asked quietly as they stepped back out side of the house right behind her.
“Yep. Don’t worry about a thing,” Vance said quietly.
“As I’m sure you all saw, Gwen has weakened and fainted.
Luckily for us, some of our friends are highly talented and trained in medical procedures and assessing illnesses and injuries in the field.
She’s in very good hands and they’re tending to her now,” Bonnie said, standing at the edge of the patio as she looked out at everyone whose attention was focused on her.
She kept her hands together in front of her and unconsciously clasped and unclasped her fingers as she spoke — a sign that she was worried.
“Gwen mentioned to me when she arrived that she’d received a slight injury while getting to safety, but that it was wrapped and was really nothing.
Does anyone happen to have any more insight into her injury? ”
A male that Bonnie knew only as Dean had been on the outskirts of the group, obviously quietly watching over the females and children whose safety he’d been charged with by Alpha Grail.
“Some of the females and kids were confronted on the way to safety in the forest. Our Reigna fought those who thought to attack her females. We came upon the end of the fight, one was already dead, another close to it. Reigna Gwen delivered the final blow as we quickly approached. There was blood everywhere. She assured us most of it was not hers. She had Steve help wrap her ribs in torn pieces of her clothing and one of our females who’d thought to pull on two sweatshirts before evacuating, gave her one of her shirts.
She didn’t complain about it while we made the trek here, but I scented blood the whole way.
I trusted our Reigna when she said she was fine.
I attributed the blood scent to the stained clothing she wore wrapped around her injuries. ”
“I helped her re-wrap her body on the way here. We rinsed the torn shirt in a small pond we happened on. She only let me see her side and back while helping her wrap herself, it was a fresh cut, but already showing signs of healing and pink, healthy skin at its edges,” one of the females added.
“You didn’t see her front?”
“No, she kept her front facing away from me. Was she injured worse in the front?” the female asked.
“I don’t know. She declined help both times I offered. But she’s being tended to now. I’ll let you know as soon as we have any information.”
“What can we do?” Maeve asked, standing in the pool beside her son.
“Let’s make sure that everyone keeps having fun and is enjoying this beautiful day,” Bonnie said.
She knew her voice was more animated than it would be normally, and she intended it to be so.
She was trying to ask the adults to keep the children distracted and to counteract any fear seeing Gwen go down might have caused without saying exactly that.
A sure fire way to keep a kid focused on something you didn’t want them focused on was to tell them to change their focus.
Maeve seemed to understand. “You’re right! I think somebody was just squirting me with a water gun!” she said, turning to her son and splashing him.
He immediately started squirting her with the water gun again.
Some of the other moms and kids followed suit, until there was a semi-normal feeling among them as they realized there was less chance of upsetting the kids if they pretended everything was alright.
Which meant they inadvertently calmed themselves as they maintained control of their fears for their children.
~~~
Findley hurried inside the house and just barely glanced at the group of males huddled around the formal dining room table as two of them worked feverishly to get Gwen’s blood pressure steady while the others helped here and there waiting to carry out any request they might need them to do.
“She’s lost a lot of blood. She’s dehydrated, hard to get a line started,” Feral said.
“I’m gonna get it! Watch me!” Frenzy growled as he withdrew the needle he prodded at her vein with, then extended her arm and slapped the bend of her elbow, then up and down the inside of the forearm, looking for anything at all in the form of a vein to stand up enough for him to slip the IV needle into it.
He dropped to his knees beside the table, leaning toward her arm as he gripped the IV line with his lips, letting the needle dangle as he searched frantically for a viable vein.
He slapped her arm again, in a manner that some would call too hard, but then he angled his head, his gaze so close to her arm that his breath blew across her skin.
He held his breath and took the needle in between his thumb and his forefinger.
He laid his head almost on her arm to see the barely visible vein and slid the needle where he thought it needed to go.
“Check it,” he said.
Storm opened the valve on the IV line and she got blood. “Got it!” she shouted triumphantly.
Frenzy sat back on his ass and shook his head. “Woman! You got to learn to cooperate,” he said jokingly.
“Frenzy,” Feral said from the other side of the table.
Frenzy hopped up to see what Feral was showing him.
Feral was holding up the edge of a thick towel that had been tied around her ribs and her upper abdomen on her left side. There was a gash just beneath her rib cage and a flood of blood pumped through the wound every time her heart beat.
“Son of a bitch!” Frenzy said, then turned to Rance. “Did you know this? Did anybody know this!”
“Bonnie said Gwen told her she’d been injured but it was minor and would be fine. This ain’t fine!” Jack said angrily.
“How long has she been here?” Savage asked.
“Since about two this morning,” Jack said.
“She’d have died by now if she was bleeding like this the whole time,” Feral said. He carefully prodded her wound. “Looks like it’s healing around the edges.”
“Thoughts,” Frenzy said.
Hail spoke up. “Had something in there knicked. She turned the wrong way, picked up a kid, bent over or something just the right way and it tore just enough to start bleeding freely instead of seeping a bit here and there.”
“Makes sense,” Frenzy said.
“Where’s the chloroform?” Feral asked.
“You think you can fix it?” Savage asked.
“I’m going to see what it looks like in there. I don’t want her waking up while I’m doing it,” Feral said.
Hail opened a foil pouch and shook out a dampened prepackaged cloth, then walked around to the head of the table. She started to reach toward Gwen’s face to hold it over her nose and mouth, but Frenzy held up a hand.
“Blood type?!” Frenzy asked, looking at Rance.
“O positive,” Rance said.
“Hop your ass up here on the table and hold still while I get a transfusion line started on you. If necessary, we’ll be ready to give her some blood.”
“Isn’t your blood stronger? What if you gave her blood instead of me?” Rance asked.
“Want your mate to be Variant?” Frenzy asked. “Besides, I’m not O positive. I can’t transfuse everybody, you can.”
“If she’s alive, I don’t give a damn if she’s a penguin!” Rance said.
“It’s not always a good thing,” Feral said. “It could change her to the point that she may no longer be your mate. Her entire DNA makeup will be scrambled. She may not even want her kids. Might not remember them or anybody else.”
“She wouldn’t want to live like that,” Steve said from just inside the back door.
Jack looked over at Steve. “I don’t know her well enough to make that call.”
“I do. She wouldn’t want that,” Steve said.
“Hold your arm out,” Harsh said. He swabbed Rance’s arm, then hit the vein on the first try.
“Are all your people medics?” Rance asked.
“Yeah. But some more than others. You take a hit or get sliced open on mission, you hope that Feral or Frenzy is with you, though,” Harsh said.
“Or you,” Feral said as he motioned for Hail to hold the chloroform cloth to Gwen’s face.
“Not if you’re me. I can’t work on myself,” Harsh said.
“Lucky for you,” Frenzy said, grinning at Rance, “you got all three of us.”
“That’s enough for now,” Feral said to Hail as he started working on cleaning the blood from Gwen’s wound so he could try to find the damage.
“Steve! You know what happened?” Jack asked.
“It was the battle I told you about as she was leading more females and children to the shelter in the forest. We came in on the end of it. Claws, not a knife. Should be jagged, not a clean slice.”
Feral started prodding the wound.
“Did she win?” Frenzy asked, as he worked to get another line in Gwen’s other arm to transfuse some of Rance’s blood to her.
“Oh, yeah. Two males down, both dead,” Steve said.
“Whaaat? Your girl’s a badass, Rance!” Frenzy said, keeping up banter the entire time they kept working, just as he had when he worked on Findley.
“Reigna Gwen could easily take on any of the males in our Pride. Her Lion is big and strong. She moves with the same grace as her Lion that she does in her human skin,” Steve said.
“We got anything to cauterize a wound with?” Feral asked.
“You got it?” Frenzy asked.
“Think so. If I can cauterize the wound, I think it’ll heal. The flesh around it is healthy. It’s just a jagged tear, multiple bleeders, but it’s not an artery,” Feral said.
They all kind of looked at each other, they didn’t routinely carry cauterizing tools with them.
“I know it’s not medical, but what about the soldering irons we used to burn patterns into the leather on the purses and belts?” Alison asked.
Everybody looked her way.
“Fucking brilliant. Go get one!” Jack said.