Chapter 17 Zinnia
Zinnia
“Miss Zinnia!” Leroy’s shout woke me before I was anywhere near rested, but the alarm in his voice cut through the fog of sleep like a blade. “Miss Zinnia, I keep hearing Bo’s wolf, and he’s up the mountain!”
I sat up, slightly dizzy. Leroy stood at the garden gate, holding a stringer of trout, his face unusually pale. “What do you mean? Where’s Julian?”
“I don’t know. I was at the stream, fishin’ with Bo—we was givin’ you two some alone time, see? But then he said he thought he heard Sergeant. He went to check on him, but never came back.” He rubbed at his chest. “Something’s real wrong. I can feel it inside.”
“Wrong with Bo?” I moved my finger in a circle so he’d turn around, then slid my clothes back on. I nearly fell three times in those few seconds. I was wobbly as a pup, and had to sit back down before I passed out.
He shrugged. “I dunno. Bo or Sergeant, or both of ‘em. I heard ‘em fightin’, before they ran off. Sergeant said some really mean shit, excuse my language.”
“I’m going to have a talk with him about that. You two boys are delightful, and if he can’t see it, well… I’ll make him see.” A distant howl, carried on the breeze, had us both holding our breath. “Go to him, Leroy. Maybe you can help.” I knew I wouldn’t be any use; my legs couldn’t hold me up.
“I can’t.” Leroy kneeled at my side. “Miss Zinnia, I hate to ask it of ya, but Sergeant… he gave me an Alpha command. I ain’t to leave your side until he comes back.
But I feel it in here.” He rubbed his chest again.
“I need to go help Bo. Can I carry ya to him? He might need magic healin’, anyway.
Or just… you always say the right things, to make me feel better.
Bo’s been out there trainin’ with Sergeant, and his heart’s kinda wrecked.
Maybe you can help him feel better, just by bein’ kinda mom-like. ”
“Pick me up.” My own heart told me we were running out of time. “Run as fast as you can.” In seconds, he had me on his back, racing toward the treacherous path along the mountainside. “Don’t fall,” I muttered.
“I never do,” Leroy huffed. “I never would drop you, Miss Zinnia. Ya don’t need to worry—I’m gonna protect you and the rest of my family.” He stopped talking as he leaped over some small boulders. My stomach flipped, though whether from the jump or the word, I wasn’t sure.
Family. My parents had died so long ago. The only family I could remember was my older sister Aster, and she’d been days away from death the last time I saw her.
To hear Leroy so casually call me his soothed a part of me that had been aching since I was no more than his age. He’d vowed to protect his family, including me. I would do the same for him.
I closed my eyes, taking stock of my magic. I was still almost totally depleted, and I wasn’t certain I even had the physical strength to stand once Leroy put me down. But I could hold on, and I did, as he raced toward the sound of—
“Leroy!” Bo’s voice cracked as he scrambled over a pile of boulders, dragging one leg behind him, his foot or ankle obviously damaged. “Leroy, Miss Zinnia, help!”
“What do ya need?” Leroy demanded. “Where’s Sergeant?”
Bo’s panicked babbling was almost impossible to understand.
“He’s fightin’ a mountain lion, Miss Zinnia.
She may be one of your babies, and I didn’t mean to scare her, but she had little cubs and I got stuck and—” He ran out of breath, panting, tears streaking down his face, his lips still twitching oddly, like he was trying not to cry.
“I think Sergeant’s in trouble.” He hiccupped on a sob as he kept dragging himself down the path.
“He Alpha commanded me to run. Crap on a cracker, I can’t stop, I gotta keep goin’—”
“He’s hurt?” I grabbed Leroy’s neck tighter when Bo nodded.
“He’s all cut up, but the lion’s still there. And her cubs.”
“She won’t hurt me.” I hoped it was true.
I’d never healed a mountain lion, but I’d crossed paths with the one who’d made this part of the mountain range her home.
If she had cubs to protect, I wasn’t sure how much good the small pool of magic I had inside me would be to convince her to let me pass.
But I had to try. “All right, Leroy will take me to him. Bo, you go to my cabin and get my medical kit—the basket just inside the door. Fetch it for me. Run as fast as you can. Follow that command there and then come back to me, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he called back, already vanishing down the trail.
Leroy ran almost as fast toward the sound of the screaming lion ahead, but when the sound of fighting was replaced with a yowl and the click of rocks striking together as something heavy fell from the mountainside, he slowed.
Not ten seconds later, a streak of golden-yellow shot up the steep cliff and vanished behind a stand of pines, followed by two lighter gold cubs.
“Take me down to him,” I rasped, knowing what had happened. “Be careful.”
Leroy was sobbing as he took the lower fork in the path and continued on, both of us scanning the area for any sign of Julian.
Finally, I found him, caught on a rocky crag halfway between us and the river below.
His clothing was red with blood, and his limbs…
I shuddered at the unnatural angles I could make out over Leroy’s shoulder.
He was broken. The body I’d just started to learn was shattered, though his clothing hid some of the damage.
I pressed a hand to my heart. “Julian.” The sounds of the tumbling water covered up my sobs as Leroy picked his way carefully over the last few boulders to him and set me down.
“Alpha,” he cried out. “Sergeant!”
Years before, not two hundred yards from this very spot, I’d seen a female shifter being chased by a group of males.
I hadn’t known who it was until later, but I’d watched her battle the pack of rogues, never giving up.
She’d been forced over the cliff’s edge and fallen to her death in the winding river far below.
I’d been across the valley, far too distant to use my magic to soften her fall, or protect her, and I’d wept bitter tears for many years afterward, wishing I’d been able to save her.
She’d been the Alpha’s true mate, after all, the mother of Brand, and her loss had gutted the Mountain pack. I would have given every bit of my magic to save her, to keep the old Alpha from having to experience the pain I’d lived with for so long.
Now, though, it was my true mate who had fallen. As we got close enough to see what had happened to Julian, I knew I might need to make that sacrifice to save him.
He hadn’t fallen all the way to the bottom, but been caught by a long, jagged lip of stone that jutted out into the sky before the final steep descent of the cliff wall.
He lay on his back, eyes closed, arms splayed wide, his legs…
Like his arms, they were broken so severely, he looked more like a discarded ragdoll than a male.
Blood dripped from the compound fractures inside his sweatpants and from his shattered arms.
I forced myself to think as a healer, not as a lover. The familiar pattern of triage was all that would keep me from crumbling beneath the weight of my anguish at seeing Julian like this.
He was still breathing, though the sound that emerged from his bloody lips with each exhalation made it clear one of his lungs was injured, perhaps collapsed.
His tanned skin had an unhealthy gray tinge, and I knew bleeding was one of the most pressing concerns.
His head… Blood poured from a wound behind one ear, but his skull was intact, from what I could see.
“By the moon,” Leroy whispered. “How’s he alive?”
“By the moon, is how,” I replied, shocked that I could speak.
I peeked up to the sky, seeing the moon rising in the east, barely visible above the sharp peaks there.
I hadn’t been able to feel more than the barest whisper of her power since my wolf…
went to sleep. But I could sense the energy that flowed from the moon to Julian now, keeping his chest rising for one more breath, then another, though each was shallower than the next.
He was dying. The moon gave shifters the power to heal, but he’d already been weakened by his tattoos, and the physical injuries he had now were enough to kill all but the very strongest shifters.
“Set me down next to him. I need to be able to touch him.”
Leroy obeyed, moving me carefully from his back to sit beside Julian’s broken body. The sweet boy didn’t move far away, though, hovering with his hands outstretched as if he was worried I might fall.
He wasn’t wrong. But I had a greater fear.
“Leroy, I need you to promise to stay back.” I settled close to Julian’s side and laid a hand on his chest, on the place where I’d healed him. His skin was cooling already. There wasn’t time to wrap his wounds to stop the bleeding, or set the bones, or move him so he could heal.
He didn’t need medicine; he needed a miracle, and there was only one place I could access that kind of power. “I’m going to ask the earth to lend me strength to save him. I need to focus, okay?”
“O-okay. When Bo gets here with the medicine basket, what do I do?”
“Just wait,” I whispered under the sound of the cold breeze that rushed past. “Stay with me.”
I felt his nod, though I didn’t look away from my lover’s face, wondering if I could do what I needed here.
I’d only ever pulled from the soft dirt of the earth and the living things that grew in it.
Trees and grasses, bushes and smaller plants were easy to coax earth magic from.
The soft soil gave it up with joy, small pulses of warmth that felt comfortable as they filled me.
I’d never been able to coax power from a hard, cold slab of stone, and I wasn’t sure it was even possible.
There was no time to doubt myself, though. The wind whistling around us, I pressed my hand to Julian’s chest more firmly, and my other hand to the hard granite beneath us. Closing my eyes, I sent my request into the stone.
It hurt at first, pulling the traces of magic I had out of my own veins and extending them, seeking a way in, a path to the heart of the earth.
The power felt immovable, unshakeable, like the mountain itself.
At first, there was no response, and no matter how much of myself I poured into the stone, seeking a reply, there was no answer.
I kept seeking, my eyes closed, my breathing slowing, my blood itself pulsing sluggishly as I gave up the little stored magic I had in search of a greater, deeper well.
There was a subtle vibration, deep below, like an invisible river of stone, moving so slowly only the sun and moon might notice it.
There. Touching it with my mind hurt, like I was pressing myself into a small fissure of the granite, my body breaking, being crushed, as I went deeper.
The earth’s magic there was vast as an ocean, but I reached into it, ignoring the pain of it, doing all I could to keep from being consumed by it. My purpose gave me strength.
Please. Please let me save the one I love.
The pain sharpened, like a jagged sliver of stone being forced under my skin.
I let it happen, picturing what I asked for.
I would suffer whatever pain I needed to save him.
He was solid, like the earth. A father to the fatherless, a pillar of strength to his pack, to his family.
To me. Please give me the strength to save him.
My answer came slowly, then all at once. Energy filled me in a way that felt both familiar and foreign, soothing and agonizing. Not the quick, soft move of soil and plant, the sturdy strength of the pines and aspen that slid like sap through me, but something far deeper.
The promise of permanence. Stone, bonding me to her, binding me. Demanding a sacrifice. I thought of Leroy and Bo and the love in their eyes as they gazed at him. Of his strength and integrity, and how much he gave of himself to the world.
Whatever I have is yours. Just let me save him.
For a moment, I felt another presence. The moon’s light fell on me as it rose, tugging at the last filament of connection I had to my wolf’s spirit.
My chest burned again, more painfully than it had when I’d stood on the mountain alone.
That fire I’d felt, my heart seizing—that had been her, waking up. Or trying to.
She’d been asleep until he had come close enough to feel. But now… I saw her eyes, like twin harvest moons in the darkness of our shared consciousness. Those dark pools lifted to the moon above, her home.
Wolves didn’t belong to the earth, couldn’t survive, even asleep, in the depths.
I had to let her go. There was only space in my spirit for one type of magic, for one river to flow.
Whatever I have is yours, I whispered again, feeling the power of the deep earth sliding into my cells. I wasn’t certain if I was speaking to Julian, the earth, or the moon.
My eyes closed, I crooned a low note, the sound somewhere between a hum and a groan of anguish.
The power overtook me, changing me, carving canyons in my innermost being.
My wolf’s faint light grew even more diffuse as the scrap of her that had remained inside me all these years strained to go to the sky.
She longed to run with the moon. A sob worked its way out of my throat, a sound that might have been a howl once. The part of me that had been tied however tenuously to the moon sputtered like a candle.
I knew in my bones that I wouldn’t die with her.
When that faint light went out, when that wisp of spirit that had slept inside me for so long finally drifted to the moon, I would be the earth’s, completely, down to the last fiber of my being.
That was the only way I could truly tap into the power I needed to save Julian.
I hummed louder, the darker power beneath me promising healing. Goodbye, I hummed. Thank you for all you did to keep me alive. Rest now.
Julian’s groan forced my eyes to open. His amber eyes met mine, and I saw something in his gaze that might have been fear. “What have you done?”