Chapter 5 #2
No one had to get hurt? One of them was already hurt, the coppery scent strong enough that even I could smell it, his aura growing weaker by the second.
He needed help.
Now.
I took a deep breath and drew a bit of magic out of the well inside me.
I’d prefer not to use it because I would need it for the injured wolf, but I was only one person, and I wasn’t operating at full strength.
If the attackers felt threatened, they might escalate before the pack could get here.
And if that happened, those injured wolves and I would die.
Weaving a shield tightly around my cloak, I forced it to project what was behind me, rendering me invisible.
I slowly crept closer, desperately trying to be quiet so as not to give myself away, but the injured wolf’s soft cries and pants covered the snow crunching beneath my feet.
My chest constricted as I got a good look at him, my heart stopping for a moment. Big, haunted eyes in a young face. A fucking kid. A teenager. His features soft in a way that told me maturity had not yet hit.
“Come on and get out before you make it worse by getting another pack involved,” the other wolf said, voice cold and cruel. He was fully grown. “Let’s keep it in the pack.”
Fury chilled me to the bone, more than the cold ever could. A grown wolf was hunting literal kids.
“We’re not pack anymore,” the injured wolf shouted, his voice laboured. “We left. Why can’t you just let us go?”
The wolf outside the barrier laughed, and the others snarled.
“Because you’re the Alpha’s kid brother. Did you really think he’d let you abandon him?”
“He doesn’t want me.”
Just a few feet to go…
The young wolf next to the injured one froze, his head whipping around, staring straight at me, hands balling into fists at his side.
Fuck.
I lowered the shield, my eyes darting to the wolves outside the barrier, but they hadn’t noticed me yet. Good. I didn’t want them to escalate. Slowly, I raised a finger to my lips, signalling the young wolves to stay quiet.
Fear spiked, the aura of the uninjured, or rather less injured wolf pulsing, eyes widening. He took a step in my direction, attempting to shield his friend from me.
“I’m here to help,” I whispered as low as I could.
Suspicion clouded his eyes, but he didn’t attack me. My eyes darted back to the barrier. The wolves out there were a far bigger threat than these two.
“He wants his brother by his side. He wants you to fucking man up,” the wolf shouted, his voice echoing in the forest.
“You mean he wants me to turn straight?” The injured wolf’s laugh turned into a pained cough. Colour drained from his face, and his energy rapidly vanished.
“He wants you to be normal. A real wolf. Someone he can be proud of.”
The hair on the back of my neck rose as I listened to them shouting, anger boiling low in my gut as the picture of what was going on got clearer and clearer.
I knew packs like theirs. Had stayed with them often enough to know it wasn’t out of the ordinary for packs to be as assholishly backwards as many humans were.
“Keep them talking,” I whispered. The injured wolf’s head snapped to me, eyes going wide as he took me in. “Help’s coming.” I didn’t know a lot about the pack, but there was no doubt in my mind that they were on the way. After all, they always chased after my stalkers.
They both looked at me wearily, but the exhaustion was taking over fast.
“Trust me,” I whispered and took another step in their direction, and then another one until I went to my knees next to the injured teen. He was bleeding heavily from a harsh wound on his lower leg that looked like… “Did someone bite you?”
“He got my leg when we crossed the border,” the teen whispered, his voice hoarse and weak, filled with an anguish no one his age should know.
“I can help,” I explained, hoping to hell I was telling the truth. My magic was hanging on by a thread. Healing someone right now was a stupid idea, but… this was an injured kid. It didn’t matter that he was also a shifter; he was a kid. “But I’ll have to touch you.”
I really hoped I could help him. Bites could be tricky, and with my magic so low, I wasn’t sure how much I could do, but…
The wolf gave a short, barely visible nod.
I immediately reached out and pressed my bare hand right to the wound. He howled in pain, and I winced in sympathy. It hurt. I knew it did. If I were stronger and not in a time crunch with extremely volatile shifters hovering outside the barrier, I’d have tried numbing him first.
The wolf on the other side made taunting remarks, but I ignored him.
The kid’s wound was nasty, and he was too drained for his advanced healing to kick in. The bone was broken, flesh shredded, veins torn. It was a mess. What if I made it worse? What if the pack found me and thought I was trying to kill him instead of trying to help him? What if…
His laboured breaths brought me back to the present, and I started pushing magic into him.
It followed the path of destruction, mixing with his own energy’s futile attempts to heal him.
I closed my eyes and carefully tried to find the worst damage to focus on first. Where was all the blood coming from?
Exhaling, I followed the bloodstream until I found the artery responsible for all the blood and clamped it shut.
My forehead was wet from sweat, my hand trembling, still tightly clutching the wound.
The wolf was panting, his eyes blinking lazily.
The other one was doing what I’d told him, keeping the assholes busy by shouting obscenities at them.
I focused back on my patient, ignoring my body’s screams that I was taking too much. The well of magic inside me had already been dangerously low and was rapidly nearing empty, but I couldn’t stop now. My patient was losing consciousness. I needed to at least stop the blee—
A metallic click ripped through the night, stopping time itself dead in its tracks.
I saw the other kid’s eyes widen, but it was too late. A loud bang shredded the momentary silence, and the kid stumbled back, eyes wide with shock, hands grasping at his chest, blood rapidly leaking out from between his fingers.
A gun?
Those fucking wolves had guns?
My chest constricted as the kid stumbled, his mouth wide open but with no words coming out as he collapsed, crumpling to the ground.
My patient screamed, his aura swirling in utter terror as he shoved me towards his friend with more force than I’d thought possible.
“Help him! Oh, please, do something!”
Another shot ripped through the night, the bullet going nowhere at all.
Cruel laughter reached my ringing ears as I knee-walked to the other wolf and pressed my hands to his chest, desperately sending bursts of magic into him without assessing the situation first. I didn’t need to; I knew it was bad.
Really bad—and my fault. I’d told him to distract them. To keep them talking. Fuck. I hadn’t expected them to have guns. If I’d known… my vision swam, tears running down my face as more and more blood leaked from between my fingers.
The world around me was a cacophony of screams, laughter, and shots, but I had to drown it all out, had to stop listening to anything but the fluttering heartbeat of my patient.
My mind screamed as I kept sending magic into his body. More and more and more. My vision swam, sounds mingling.
Laughter, cries, snarls, panting…
The panting got louder and louder, paws hitting the ground in a crescendo of doom.
“Guns!” I screamed at them, my hands still pressed to the teen’s chest, but my voice wasn’t as loud as I wanted, nothing more than a voiceless cry. “They have guns!”
The wolf under me coughed, and blood leaked from his mouth.
Fuck.
He couldn’t die.
I couldn’t let him die.
He didn’t deserve this.
He was a kid. A fucking kid.
I focused back on the task at hand as chaos erupted all around me. Snarls and shots, shouting and squelching noises. Someone growled at me, but I kept going. If I let go now, he’d die.
I couldn’t let him die.
It’d all be my fault…
I reached for every bit of the remaining magic inside me. It wasn’t much, but I grasped it all and shoved it into the kid, aiming for his punctured lungs. I needed to… needed…
My magic snapped, latching onto someone else. An aura so bright that it blinded me. An aura that called out to me.
No, no, no, no, no.
This couldn’t be happening.
Not now.
Not ever.
Not a wolf.
My energy drained as the last bit of my magic left my body, following my orders to repair and to heal as I heard the bright aura shout in fury. Dark eyes met mine, hot rage lighting up behind his eyes as one word managed to reach my ears through the thick fog of the battle around us.
“Cell.”
The world around me turned dark, my body nothing without my magic, and I got pulled into the black nothingness that was calling for me.
Please don’t let him die…