Chapter 25 #3
I’m about to walk her into the kitchen when something flickers at the edge of my vision.
A tiny point of light, just outside the dining room window, pinprick small and instantly wrong.
The pieces don’t connect in any order I can name.
My body moves before my brain catches up to it.
The little red dot tracks the movement of my chin, then steadies on me.
“Grayson,” I whisper his name, confused and a little scared.
He looks up.
His name has barely cleared my mouth when the world cracks open.
Glass blows inward in a single bright spray, a sound tears across the room, and as I move, a hot, fast sting rips through my left shoulder, spinning me a quarter turn.
I’m already falling sideways into the cabinet with the boy clamped to my chest.
“MIRANDA!” Ethan’s scream tears against my ear, high and terrified.
Grayson’s across the room before I hit the floor.
His arm locks around me. He goes down with us, his body curling over Ethan and me, his shoulder angled toward the window to take a second shot that doesn’t come.
The candle on the table topples and gutters out.
Linda’s gone to the floor a foot away, both hands clamped over her mouth, her eyes blown wide.
“Where are you hit? Miranda!”
“Shoulder,” I gasp. “Bullet went straight through, I think. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
His hand moves down my arm, my side, checking. When he reaches my shoulder, his fingers come away wet.
“Through and through.” His voice has dropped into the register that belongs to his wolf. The amber’s gone out of his eyes entirely. “Stay down. Both of you. Linda, with them.”
“Grayson—”
“Down.”
He’s on his feet before I can grab his hand. The back door bangs open, and the body that goes through it isn’t fully his any longer, his outline blurring before he even reaches the grass. A streak of dark fur, and then he’s gone into the trees. Ethan is sobbing into my collarbone.
“Hey.” My voice scrapes raw. “Hey, buddy, I’m here. Look at me.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“I know, baby. It’s not bad. Look at me, I’m talking, I’m sitting up, I’m right here. Your dad’s gone to find the bad person, and we are going to be just fine, the both of us.”
He lifts his face. It’s wrecked, his small chest heaving, his fists knotted in my shirt and refusing to let go.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I promise him, and I rock him against me, my functioning hand stroking his hair while my own pulse roars so loudly I can barely hear myself. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
My shoulder is burning, but I’ve lived through worse pain. I breathe through it, all my focus on the child in my arms.
Linda crawls over to us, her hands shaking, her voice somehow steady. “I should call a healer.”
“No. The bullet went clean through; we can handle it ourselves.” I keep my arm tight around Ethan and reel off instructions because giving them is the only thing keeping me from coming apart.
“My kit’s in the upstairs bathroom, the blue case.
Bring that, then towels, then a pair of pants from Grayson’s closet.
Leave them by the back door. He’s going to come through it half shifted. ”
She stares at me for one second. Then she’s up and moving, gone toward the stairs.
Ethan burrows deeper. I keep talking him down, low and constant, while fear pushes up behind my teeth.
When Linda returns with the kit, I walk her through it one step at a time, my uninjured hand never leaving Ethan’s back.
I talk her through the gauze, the pressure, the saline that flushes the entry wound.
The exit’s messier than the entry but cleaner than I feared.
“Press harder. Now lay the gauze down. Wrap it tighter, Linda. It has to be tight, that’s it. Tape it down.”
“Miranda, you’re bleeding through it already.”
“That’s normal. The pressure will hold.”
The back door opens. I don’t lift my head because Ethan’s finally gone quiet against my chest, but I hear Grayson’s bare feet on the floorboards, then the rasp of a zipper, denim dragged up over damp skin.
He’s at my side before I look up, shirtless, jeans low on his hips, his chest heaving and his hair wild.
The gold hasn’t drained back out of his eyes yet.
His hand cups the back of my head and Ethan’s both at once, gathering the three of us into one knot.
“Nothing,” he rasps. “Lost him at the second ridge. Scent’s all jumbled up again, same as last time we tried to track him.”
“Scent neutralizer.”
“Yes.”
His fingers find the edge of my bandage, his thumb tracing just outside it, his jaw locked tight. “How bad?”
“It’s fine. I moved just in time, or he would have gotten my heart.”
He stands and pulls his phone from his back pocket. I watch him scroll, tap, lift it to his ear.
“Derek.” His voice has gone colder than I’ve ever heard it. “I need you at the house. Now.”
Whatever Derek answers, it doesn’t slow him down. “No. Someone took a shot at her.”
I shift Ethan in my lap and look up at him once he ends the call. “Grayson?”
He crouches back down in front of me, brushing the hair off my face. The wolf is still right at the surface of him, and his voice is low. “Derek and Linda will stay here with you. I’m going to go have a word with Vanessa.”