45. Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Five
Halley
Heat slams through us. The blast throws Viper and me into the hard rocky cliff wall, and air crushes out of my lungs. Sound vanishes under a brutal ringing, and my exposed flesh tears.
I don't know which way is up. I only know Viper’s weight over me, and there is a terrible tremor in his body.
I blink against the grit in my eyes, and nothing comes back into focus. Sound is muffled, and my whole body throbs in strange, distant pulses.
Then Viper makes a noise above me that is full of pain.
My hands shove weakly at his chest. He is so heavy, and my arms shake with the effort, but he shifts enough for me to twist free and roll him onto his back beside me.
I look at him and forget how to breathe.
The right side of his body is burned black and red through his ruined armor. Flesh hangs open at his ribs. Blood pours out of him, and I stare in shock.
"No," I whisper, and then cough as dust and smoke flood my mouth, choking me.
I lunge for him, both hands pressing uselessly against the worst of it, trying to hold him together while my thoughts skid, crash, and refuse to make sense.
Even for an Alpha, this is too much damage.
I hear Everlyn in my head, "Alphas can bleed out like the rest of us, just gotta overwhelm the body with wounds."
Frack. Half of Viper is a wound.
"Viper. Viper, stay with me."
His face is gray under the blood and dust. His teeth are bared in a snarl of pain. He tries to move, and a strangled sound tears out of him.
My stomach heaves and saliva fills my dry mouth.
My big, soft Alpha.
He took the blast for me.
His blood surges hot between my fingers and I can't get my thoughts to line up. What do I do? What am I supposed to do?
Training, pressure, airway, wound packing is in my head somewhere. Viper himself taught me basic battlefield triage, but it's not coming back to me because this isn't some stranger. It's Viper, my mate, who is burned open because he took the full force of an explosion for me.
"Hey, big guy." My voice comes out ragged, and I realize that I'm sobbing. "Please stay with me."
His back bows and he screams.
Why him? Why am I always close to losing him? First Blood Lust, and now this.
I press harder. He flinches violently, and I know I am hurting him, but if I let up, he is going to bleed out right here in the dirt.
The battle hasn't stopped, and distantly I can hear gunfire still cracking overhead, and men nearby are screaming.
None of it matters as much as Viper's lifeblood pouring through my hands.
"I’ve got you," I tell him, even though I don't know if that's true. "Omega is here. I’ve got you."
His lips are turning white and his trembling body convulses.
Terror rips straight through me.
I can't hold him together.
I'm going to lose him just like I lost Blaze.
"No. No, no, no," I chant to myself through gasping sobs.
Another sound catches in my chest on my next exhale.
It's a low, rough rumble that ramps up quickly.
My purr.
It rolls through me without permission, vibrating against my ribs, pouring into the hands I have pressed over Viper’s ruined side.
It's my Omega. She's guiding me just like that day so long ago in the hospital when I was faced with Viper in Blood Lust. She knew a purr would save him then, and I can't do anything but choose to trust her now.
I press harder, purring louder.
At first nothing changes. I can barely see through the tears spilling from my stinging eyes, but after a moment, the torn flesh on the outskirts of his wounds starts to drag inward.
Then the bleeding slows to a seep. His burned skin is still angry and raw, but it is closing, healing under my hands.
This is the power of our love at work.
Viper sucks in a ragged breath as if he is being dragged back from somewhere awful, his whole body shaking with pain, but his eyes clear of their hazy sheen.
Relief floods through me, and I sob harder.
"There you go," I gasp, tears streaming as I wipe soot and blood off his face. "There you go. Stay with me."
His eyes focus on my face, the green glow flickering back to life. He looks wrecked, disoriented, but he's alive.
In the next instant, he's sitting upright.
I slip backward, falling on my butt, staring at him in shock.
How is he moving? He was knocking on death's door only a few moments ago.
"Viper, wait."
He ignores me and plants his good hand against the ground. His face twists in agony, but he still forces himself up to one knee, his whole body shaking with the effort, and then pushes himself onto his feet.
He sways, clutching at his side.
I scramble to my feet after him, grabbing at his arm to steady him. "You shouldn't be standing."
His cracked lips pull back from his teeth, and he rasps, "Battle hasn't stopped, pretty girl."
The pet name destroys me. Even at a time like this, he's still my big sweetheart Alpha.
My heart is still somewhere on the ground beside the pooled blood when my brain finally comes back online.
"Knox," I gasp, twisting toward the road. "Oh frack, Shade!"
I look past Viper and find Knox standing among a sea of dead bodies.
I stare at him, stunned.
Humans are coming at him from every side, and he is holding back the flood up the road alone. Behind him, the blast has gouged a crater into the ground. Smoke curls up from blackened stone, and blood and pieces of flesh are scattered across the slope.
His rifle bucks until the magazine runs dry, then he drops it and keeps going with his hands. His red eyes are blazing as he snarls like a beast of Human nightmares.
Everything he does is brutal and exact. One man takes a knife under the jaw, while another gets his knee kicked so hard it bursts.
A third reaches for him and loses the arm for it when Knox rips the weapon free and turns it back on him.
Blood covers his chest, his face, his hands.
I cannot tell if any of it belongs to him.
He should be overwhelmed by their numbers already.
Instead, the enemy keeps breaking against him, and he will not let them pass.
This is why soldiers follow him and why the Prime Alphas listened when he took control of Blackgate Fortress.
They recognize an apex predator. He is faster, stronger, and smarter than any Alpha I have ever seen fight.
Even in training, he never moved with such killing intent.
He's fighting for his life.
What pours down the bond is so violent it almost chokes me.
It's an endless stream of pain, and rage, and fear, and despair.
Oh. Oh no, he's not fighting for himself.
It's grief.
He's fighting for the Pack he thinks lies dead behind him.
My chest caves in around that realization. I shove everything I have through the bond in one frantic pulse, aiming it straight at him.
'Alive,' I push through our mental link, fighting through the noise and chaos choking our internal communications. 'We are alive, Knox.'
I don't think he hears me, but he must feel something because his head jerks in our direction and the painful waves lessen through the bond. His shoulders heave as he chokes on a sob of relief, and he shifts from attacking like a man with nothing left to lose, to defending.
Shade. I need to find our Beta.
My eyes sweep over the explosion site until I find a familiar body a few yards uphill, leaning upright against a twisted section of steel, drenched in blood and not moving.
My stomach drops out.
"Shade!"
I am moving before Viper can get his hands on me to pull me back. I stumble over a dismembered leg, catch myself, and lunge toward him with my hands already reaching, searching for wounds from the blast.
There is so much blood. He's a Beta, no matter how tough and capable he is, he's not an Alpha and if anyone is going to die on this battlefield, it will be him.
Thankfully the tourniquet on his upper thigh is still in place and his thigh wound is sluggishly bleeding.
There is also a nasty split high on his scalp where he must have hit his head on a stone, and blood is still creeping down from it in heavy lines.
He catches my wrists before I can start tearing at his armor.
"Halley," he says, and the word comes out slurred.
Ice floods my chest.
"What hurts?" My voice sounds thin and wrecked, even to me. "Shade, where?"
His brown eyes, beautiful even now, try to focus on my face, but they swim. He looks dazed, pale, and wrong. The bright spark of his formidable intelligence is dulled.
"Most of it," he says slowly, like it costs him to line the words up, "isn’t mine."
I stare at him, breathing hard and trying to force my brain to work.
Then I see the Human body beside him, blasted nearly apart.
Shade’s gaze drifts toward it, then back to me. "Pulled him in front of me," he mutters thickly. "When Knox yelled."
The words take me a moment to process.
Not his blood.
My clever Beta used a Human as a meat shield. My mate is alive.
He tries to push himself up, and the second he shifts, he sways badly. His free hand slips on the rock beneath him. I catch him under the arm before he can pitch sideways back into the dirt.
"No." I drop beside him properly, one hand braced at his back, the other going to his face. "Don't stand."
He blinks at me with strained concentration, like thinking is taking everything he has.
My pulse is still hammering, but the panic is lessening. He is alive. Viper and Knox are also alive.
I push myself to purr again, letting him feel the rumbling through my hands, and hope that it helps ease his pain.
Except we don't have time for me to hold my mate and purr.
The Humans surge again with a raw, ugly roar, filling the gap Knox carved through them. He accelerates his movements, but there are too many now for him to hold back on his own.
"Knox, to me!" Shade shouts, his hoarse voice cracking to be heard over the din.
Knox tries.
I see him fight for every step, but the road is packed shoulder to shoulder with enemy soldiers pushing to get past him. He drops one, then another, then takes a hit from the side that would have folded a lesser soldier.
Viper limps to Shade and me, his pinkened, tender skin exposed. With his good arm, he hauls Shade out of my arms, and props our Beta up. He's shaking from the effort.
"Baby girl," Shade says, voice rough and slurring with dawning horror. "Think this might be the end."
Between the barricade and us, enemy soldiers are already trying to breach our defensive line.
Then there is us, stranded in the blasted-out section of road where the explosion hit.
Below us, Knox is still holding back the main horde by himself, fighting to keep them from crashing into our position.
We're trapped in the middle.
The retreat happened without us. While we were in the blast zone, the rest of our forces fell back to the next barricade and sealed themselves into the new defense. Now enemy soldiers are closing in from uphill, and the larger wave is still coming from below.
This isn't the same as before, when we crossed behind enemy lines on purpose. We had gone in fresh, without bodies failing from injuries, and hope still burning in our bellies.
I look at my Pack and my heart clenches at the sight.
Viper is shaking where he stands, preparing to fight despite his body not being ready. Half his armor is melted into the healed flesh, and every breath he takes looks dragged out of him by brute force.
Shade is standing upright, but blood oozes from his ears, and I know the blast did more damage than he will admit.
Knox is still moving, killing, placing himself between us and the incoming horde, but he is slowing from exhaustion.
And Blaze is not here.
The empty space where he should be makes the pain in my body from all of the healed gunshots and burns feel like nothing by comparison to the pain in my heart.
There is no path uphill. Enemy soldiers choke the ground between us and the next barricade.
There is no path down. Knox is the only thing keeping the horde from swallowing us whole, and he cannot do that forever.
There is no miracle left waiting for us, no hidden plan, no last reserve of strength about to reveal itself.
A bullet hits Knox, and instead of fighting through the pain like he has been, he halts, his hand flying to his throat. He staggers backward into us, and Shade barely catches him with his failing strength.
Blood pours between Knox's fingers. He's choking, trying to breathe through a wound that is already dragging itself closed but is not healing fast enough to stop him from drowning in his own blood.
"Knox!" I scream, reaching to place my hands on his throat so I can purr for him, but it's too late.
The gap in his defense opens.
Shade was right. This is where the road ends.
This is where we die.
A heat inside me surges, and I straighten my spine.
No.
Before I can think better of it, I step in front of my Pack.
Knox makes a broken sound behind me, choking on too much blood to form my name, but I don't look back.
My mates are hurt, cornered, and out of time. I did not survive everything this world did to me to watch these Humans butcher what is mine.
I plant my boots on the road.
The first Human lunges.
I lift my chin and let my Omega rise.