Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
If I found peace, it didn’t let me stay long.
A swirl of harsh voices, nausea, pain, and confusion jarred me awake.
Time, space, and even my thoughts didn’t feel tangible.
Everything was abstract and confusing. I felt my lids flutter.
Fire burned across my torso, and I heard a guttural scream crash against the walls.
“Hold her down! I have to clean it,” a sensual, clear voice commanded.
“I’m trying.” A deep gravelly voice raked over me, followed by a pressure on my arms that instantly calmed me. But I could hear him suck in as if he were in pain now.
There was a pause.
“What?” The husky voice helped my muscles unwind, even dulled the fire raging across my torso.
“Nothing,” the other guy responded, skepticism floating over the two syllables. “She is going to react violently to this.”
“I don’t give a shit! Just fucking heal her now, Ash.”
“Az istenit, Warwick. I’m doing my best with what I have here. This girl has multiple fatal wounds. Stabbed, shot. Her lungs are full of blood. Her kidneys resemble shredded cheese, and her pulse is barely there. I’m trying my best.”
“Try harder.” A low growl sounded. A threat. I could taste it like the bitterness of adrenaline. “Fucking fix her.”
The other guy made a noise but didn’t respond. I heard the sound of movement, glass and metal clanging, then felt compression on my stomach. I could feel my body twitch, but the pain never fully reached me.
I heard a long, deep grunt, fingers digging into my arms, a snorted, choked breath.
“What the hell?” the first man asked. “Warwick?”
“It’s nothing. Keep going,” he seethed through his teeth, his tone filled with torture.
“It’s not nothing. What is going on? Why are you acting like the one getting a bullet dug out of your kidney while she lays here calmly?”
“I. Said. It’s. Nothing.” He breathed heavily, close to my ear. “Keep going.”
“She probably won’t live. I want you to be prepared. Her system will most likely shut down with shock.”
“Just do it!”
There was a beat . . .
Flames burst inside me, my spine jackknifing. But it was his deep roar that shook the room, tearing through me and filling me with excruciating agony.
It was too much.
I slipped back into endless blackness.
The murmur of voices, though soothing, tugged me from the blackness. My lashes fluttered, trying to open. Bile clung to the walls of my esophagus, and though I couldn’t pinpoint the pain, nausea rolled through me as though I was on a stormy ocean.
Weakly, my lids cracked open to an old wood ceiling made of tree branches.
The room was dark and dim, the only light coming from a fire crackling across the room, but I still flinched at the brightness.
Peering at my outstretched body, a soft blanket lay over me, a pillow under my head, and I looked to be lying on a wooden dining table.
“I’ve known you a long time. Fought at your side.” The smooth, seductive voice drifted sensually to me, coming from near the large fireplace. “Janos and I were the ones to find you on the field . . .”
A chair creaked. My head dropped to look over. In two homemade-looking wood chairs in front of the fire, Warwick and a man I didn’t know sat drinking.
Warwick’s shirt was still caked with dried blood, a bandage on his arm, his pants stained with grease, dirt, and more blood.
The other guy wore dark green, loose cotton pants and a lighter green shirt, his feet bare.
From what I could see of the unknown guy’s profile, he was seriously gorgeous: chiseled jaw, full lips, stubble, and wavy, dark blond hair tumbling to his shoulders.
Pretty compared to Warwick. Shorter and less broad.
But almost all men were slight compared to the Wolf.
Warwick had a way of making everyone else appear small.
Insignificant. Though sitting, I could tell this man still was tall and fit, looking to be in his late twenties to humans.
“I’m putting a lot on the line having you here. If Killian or any of his men found you . . . I’m still tied to him. A debt I have to work through.” The guy frowned.
Warwick rubbed his face, staring back at the fire.
“You really have issues trusting people. Even me . . . after all we’ve been through.” The pretty man took a drink of whatever was in his wooden cup. “At least tell me what she is to you.”
“She’s nothing.” Warwick’s voice came out low.
“Yeah, that’s why you brought her here, knowing the risk, and threatened my life multiple times if she didn’t live.
” The guy snorted, refilling his glass from a bottle on a side table.
“You are a lot of things . . . The one thing you are not, my friend, is a good liar. Nor do you take risks for people who are nothing to you.”
Warwick’s eyebrows furrowed.
“You don’t care enough to lie. You are a tsunami—brutal, overwhelming, devastating, harsh, but never false.”
Warwick slunk back farther in his chair, scouring his face. He dropped his head back for a moment, taking a breath. “I don’t know what she is . . .”
“In general or to you?” His friend’s question stirred him in his seat.
“Fuck, I don’t miss this.” Warwick motioned to him. “This insightful shit.”
“Comes with my nature.” The guy chuckled. “It’s why I am so good at healing people.”
“If there’s a wound, you want to fix it.”
The guy snorted. “Some wounds are not on the outside.”
Warwick grunted in annoyance, making his friend shake his head.
“She has no aura. I can sense nothing there.” The guy tapped his hand on his knee. “Like you.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? I’m simply stating facts. Seems odd neither of you have auras . . .”
“What are you getting at, Ash?” Warwick leaned forward on his knees. “The one thing you are not, my friend, is subtle.”
“You’re going to tell me when you held her down earlier . . . you weren’t taking on her pain?” The man, Ash, tilted his head. “It will be very awkward to watch you lie again, so why don’t you get straight to the truth?”
Warwick got up, his large boots hitting the creaky floor, his head almost touching the ceiling. Exhaustion started to tug at me, but my curiosity forced my lids to stay up.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
Warwick rumbled, resembling a wild beast.
“What the fuck this is!” His arm waved off in my direction. “The moment she walked into Halálház . . . I’ve felt . . . It’s like . . .” He huffed, giving up.
“Jesus, you are even worse at admitting any emotion.”
“That’s not who I am.”
“No, you’re right. But I think you need to tell me about this.”
Warwick pinched his nose.
“We are connected.” He breathed heavily. “Like I can fucking be in the same room as her and be across town at the same time.”
“What?” Ash bolted up. “Like a dream? There’s no way you could dreamscape or dream walk. You’re not fairy. And neither is she.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s not a dream. We aren’t sleeping . . . it’s real. I can touch her, smell her, see everything happening around her, and she can with me. It’s as if we’re both really there. Wide awake. But no one else can see the other.”
“That’s not possible.”
Warwick let out a strained laugh.
“Well, tell the universe that.”
“So, you guys can visit each other and also take each other’s pain away?”
“Not totally away, but some of it. Like a painkiller. It happened at Halálház, but the first time I really acknowledged it, I was digging a bullet out of the back of her leg. My calf burned as if I were cutting into mine, while she seemed to ease. I think she did it to me when I was shot helping her escape from Killian’s. ”
“How many times have you both been shot?”
“Counting today?” He snorted sardonically. “A lot.”
There was a pause.
“I had been hurt, really bad. I should have died. Instead, I healed. Fast. Quicker than I should have. Even for me.”
“Just like she shouldn’t be alive right now. Healing,” Ash said numbly. “Szent szar. I knew something was happening. I could feel it, but I didn’t expect this.”
“Neither did I.”
After a moment of quiet, my lids shut on their own, oblivion clawing and tugging on me, dragging me down. I wanted to listen, fighting tooth and nail to stay conscious.
“This is unbelievable. I mean, I’ve heard of some crazy shit. Intense bonds between mates, dream-sharing, soul touching . . .”
“We’re not fucking bonded. She’s not my mate, and I’m certainly not hers. I’m not anybody’s.”
“Then what the fuck do you call this?”
“Something that needs to end.” Warwick’s words reached deep inside, making me flinch. “I told you because I hoped you might be able to help me.”
“Help you?”
“Help me break it. You are a powerful tree fairy. Who better than you?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Ash . . .”
“Look at her, Warwick. You’d be a lucky fuckin’ bastard to be linked to her.”
“No.” His words started to break apart, drifting away from me. “I’m not capable of that. She deserves somebody better. Someone who wants her.”
Ouch.
I began to slip away, but I swore I heard Ash laugh.
“The only person you’re lying to is yourself.”
“I don’t know if you should eat that . . .”
Chirp.
“I know I’m not your mother, but you can’t just put anything into your mouth.”
Chirp!
“Hey! Leave me out of it. Plus, that was also a total misunderstanding.”
Murmurings dragged me out the delicious depths of nonbeing, where nothing could touch me. An irritation tickled my nose, made my head wiggle.
Chirp.
“No, she doesn’t seem to like it any better.”
Chirp.
“I don’t know. People are weird.”
The familiar voices dropped me roughly back into my body. Awareness and understanding seeped slowly back into my mind, along with shooting pain and memories.
Attack.
Escape.
Shot.
Agony.
After that was all a blurry mess of clips, nothing fitting together.
A groan started in my raw throat, but the soreness forced me to swallow it back; my esophagus felt like it had been shredded with razor blades.