Burning Bright

by A. Catherine Noon

  Sasha managed to get his mobile phone open, hands shaking, and hit the speed dial for Neal. If he’d had to dial more numbers, he wouldn’t have been able to, his hands refused to obey him.

  “Hey, babe. What’s—”

  “They shot Steve. Felipe’s here, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t have a gun.”

  “What? Where are you?”

  “I’m…um…” Where were they? “At the park…Montrose, I think…I don’t know.”

  “Where at the park? Where’s Steve?”

  Petya and Felipe rolled over, and then Petya let out a piercing scream. It cut off in the middle and Sasha watched in horror as Felipe bit down on his throat, then tore it out with a spray of thick crimson.

  “Oh, Gods…” He fell to his knees and threw up everything he’d ever planned to eat, ever. He kept retching long after anything came up, his eyes on the mess that used to be a man.

  “Sasha.” Neal’s voice came out of the phone still clutched in his hand.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here.”

  “What the fuck is going on?” The sound of his engine revved and the tires squealed. “Where in the park are you?”

  Felipe walked up, his clothes shredded. “Is that Neal?” he asked Sasha.

  Sasha nodded, shivering.

  The Latino held his hand out for the phone. “¿Jefe?”

  Sasha frowned. Felipe called Neal “boss”. He couldn’t focus on that, though. The blood on the grass fascinated him. He listened to a modulating whine for several moments without comprehension. “The police.” Sasha managed to stand, though dizziness swam through him. “Felipe. The police!”

  “Calm down. It’s an ambulance; I called them. They’re my guys. Go sit down, Tigre. I’ll handle this.” He listened to the phone. “Yeah, I know that.” He turned away, still talking to Neal on Sasha’s phone.

  Sasha wanted to argue with him, but his body had other plans. He sank to the grass against a tree, tremors running up and down his body. He couldn’t have moved if his life depended on it.

  The ambulance drove up, its siren loud enough that it hurt his ears. The Charger shot into the parking lot behind it, and Neal leaped out. He put out a hand and vaulted the waist-high fence even before the paramedics could park. He came on at a run and fell to his knees by the big, pale shape on the grass.

  “Steve-O. Jesus, man.”

  The paramedics zoomed up and pushed Neal out of the way so they could examine the prone form on the grass. Neal watched them a moment and looked up. His eyes met Sasha’s, but Sasha couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “Doc?”

  Sasha wanted to talk, but his voice didn’t want to work. Neal hesitated, watching the paramedics work, and then rose.

  He slowed as he came closer to Sasha, then crouched in front of him. His big hand warmed Sasha’s cheek. “You in there, babe?”

  Was he “in there”? An ugly laugh came out of him, and Neal recoiled. Sasha managed to quiet his voice and stared at the big man.

  “Can you stand?” Neal asked.

  Sasha nodded, still not able to speak. If he opened his mouth, he’d start screaming and never stop.

  Neal led him over to the ambulance. The huge, limp body of the tiger looked odd on the narrow gurney. Iosef disappeared with his car.

  The paramedics debating dosage of pain meds broke through Sasha’s fog.

  “I don’t know, a tiger’s bigger than one of us,” the younger one said.

  “Just double it,” the other ordered.

  The medics were guessing.

  “No!” Sasha shouted.

  “Doc?” Neal sounded startled.

  “They’ll hurt him.” He pushed Neal away, but the big man misunderstood and tried to catch him. “Let me go. Gods damn, Neal, let me go.”

  “All right, all right. Calm down, I’m on your side, remember?”

  Sasha rushed to the gurney. “It’s calculated by weight, not by human body mass,” he snapped, grabbing the IV lead from the startled EMT. “Siberian tiger mass isn’t like jaguar.”

  “I—”

  Felipe interrupted in angry-sounding Spanish and the EMT fell silent, face white and offended. But he didn’t argue, so Sasha didn’t really care about his attitude. He slid the IV home in Steve’s body, working quickly.

  “Doc?” Neal hovered nearby.

  “I need a surgery,” Sasha growled. “Where can we take him?”

  “The Factory?”

  “No. I need a sterile environment if I’m going to get these bullets out. He was shot multiple times. If we had a clinic…” He broke off. Clinic.

  Dr. Salisbury offered him lab space… He looked over to Felipe. “You have my phone?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Sasha grabbed the mobile out of his hand, ignoring the smear of blood on it and hit the button for Salisbury’s office. He picked up on the second ring. “Doctor Salis—”

  “Charles? Sasha Soskoff.”

  “Sasha. It’s nice to—”

  “Charles. I can’t explain, but I need your help.”

  “Certainly. What can I do for you?”

  “I need a surgery.”

  “Are you okay?” the older man demanded sharply.

  “I’m fine. But I have an injured tiger and I need a surgery suite.”

  There was a short silence. “Come to my office. I have a lab down the hall you can use.”

  “We’ll be there in…” he trailed off. “Felipe. How long does it take to get from here to Northwestern?”

  “If we hit the cherry the whole way, thirty minutes tops,” one of the other jaguars answered.

  Sasha got back on the phone. “Thirty minutes or less.”

  “I hear a siren. Is everything all right?”

  Sasha’s tears threatened and he stroked Steve’s unconscious muzzle. “Yes. I’ll be there.”

  “Very well.”

  He snapped the phone shut and looked at Neal. “Follow us.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “With him,” Sasha told him. He looked at Felipe. “Let’s go.”

  “You heard the doc,” Felipe snapped. He added something in Spanish and the other jaguars moved with practiced efficiency.

  Neal turned and loped to his car, and Sasha got in behind Steve.

  “Hang on, big guy,” Sasha whispered, stroking Steve’s head.

  Sasha gave directions as needed and they arrived after what seemed like an eternity. Dr. Salisbury actually stood outside and pointed to a narrow delivery driveway. As soon as the ambulance stopped, Sasha jumped down.

  “It’s a tiger, you said?” Dr. Salisbury asked. He gasped as the doors opened and the four jaguars maneuvered the gurney with Steve out of the back. “My goodness, what a specimen.”

  Sasha clamped his mouth shut on the retort “It’s not a specimen,” and directed the men to follow the older doctor inside. The lab turned out to be just inside and Dr. Salisbury had a heavy lab table all prepped and ready with task lighting and even an x-ray machine.

  “I need the films as soon as possible,” Sasha ordered. “You, what’s your name?”

  The jaguar looked at Felipe, who motioned impatiently for him to answer. “I’m Paco.” He sounded young, maybe twenty.

  “What’s your training, Paco?”

  “EMT One.”

  “Any of you radiology techs?”

  They shook their heads.

  “I’ll do it,” Dr. Salisbury cut in. He moved to the machine and started prepping.

  Neal jogged in and stopped, eyes wide. “Wow.”

  “Stay back, please, Neal. Over there,” Sasha pointed. “I need all other non-medical people out of my operating room, please. Now, people.”

  They moved. Paco and a buddy stayed.

  “You. What’s your name?”

  “Guillermo, sir.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Guillermo swallowed. “I’m in nursing school, sir.”

  “Good. Stand there and do exactly what
I tell you. Paco, you ever run a crash cart?”

  Paco nodded, eyes wide.

  “These monitors are very similar. Keep an eye on them and tell me if this needle gets below here,” he pointed.

  Then he turned to Steve. His patient. He had to stay objective. The tiger lay on its right side, the blood still welling from several bullet holes.

  “Are those bullet holes?” Dr. Salisbury asked.

  Sasha nodded, anxious to begin but hobbled by the x-ray machine.

  “Clear,” Dr. Salisbury told him.

  He jumped forward and started his examination.

  His mind kept trying to jibber at him that this was Steve, but he fell into a kind of zone that happened with some of his worst trauma patients. He found five bullet wounds, one all the way through the thick meat of Steve’s chest but the other four lodged in his chest cavity and abdomen. Dr. Salisbury got the films and slapped them up on the light display, confirming Sasha’s examination.

  “All right. This one first.” Sasha pointed with a blood-smeared glove at the one lodged to the left of the heart. “That’s the one that’s causing the most damage. Agreed?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Salisbury said absently. His voice came muffled from bending over Steve’s body and examining his chest. “There’s older scarring here, but no new injury. Just the ones you already found.”

  “Guillermo, hand me the instrument tray. Hold it here.” He pointed. “Can you identify the instruments?”

  Guillermo’s face fell. “No, sir.”

  “Not a problem, Guillermo. Give me things as I ask for them, handle first. And be very careful of those blades, they’ll take your fingers off if you’re not careful.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir, Guillermo.”

  “Thank you, s…um. My nickname is Gio.”

  Sasha looked up at that. “Mine’s Sasha. You ready?”

  Gio nodded, swallowing bravely. “Yes.”

  “That one,” Sasha pointed.

  It took nearly an hour to get all four bullets out and dress the wounds. The scalpels, while perfectly sharp, didn’t seem to work with the lycanthrope’s natural metabolism.

  “Dammit,” he snapped as the wound he worked on closed at the edges again. “These wounds are closing faster than I can get them sutured. I don’t want them to heal crooked, the change will—”

  “Doc,” Neal interrupted.

  Sasha glanced over at him and Neal shot him a warning look. “Um. Yeah. Nevermind.”

  He finished finally and had Paco switch off the anesthesia. “Good job, gentlemen. He’s going to come out of it relatively soon.”

  “I’ll stay with him,” Neal said. “You go clean up.”

  “Bathroom?” Sasha asked Dr. Salisbury.

  “I’ll take you.”

  The older man said nothing, just held the door for Sasha. He led the way to the bathroom and ushered Sasha inside, then checked up and down the hall before closing and locking the door.

  “Doctor Soskoff, I’d like an explanation.”

  Sasha sighed and leaned against the sink, the blood spattering his arms and face starkly red in the harsh lighting. He really didn’t want to have this conversation, but…

  “Sasha?”

  Great. He would have to go and use his intimate name. He sighed. “Steve is a lycanthrope. A weretiger.”

  “I take it he’s not a hereditary tiger.”

  Sasha frowned. “How could you tell?”

  “You didn’t use any extra precautions against lycanthropy. After seeing you in surgery, I think the Board of Directors has made a grave error in not hiring you. I’ve seldom seen such competence in the surgical theater.”

  Sasha’s eyebrows disappeared toward the top of his head. “Thank you, sir.”

  The older man smiled. “You called me Charles when you called.”

  He flushed. “Sorry about that, I was distracted.”

  “It’s not a problem. I’d say we have broken the social barriers to being on a first-name basis.” He hesitated. “How did you come to be involved with weretigers? And such a magnificent tiger. Siberians are enormous, I’ve never seen such an amazing animal up close. The zoo cannot get animals of that size.”

  Sasha had a sudden image of Steve in a zoo cage and had to keep himself from laughing. “There’s some political trouble, and we were attacked.”

  “You seem to make a habit of that,” Dr. Salisbury, Charles, noted wryly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who is that? The tiger, I mean?”

  “He’s…well, he’s my boyfriend.”

  “Oh, I thought the large man who came in after you arrived was your lover.”

  Sasha blushed. “They both are, actually.”

  Charles gaped at him. “Such prosperity.”

  He laughed outright. “I wish everyone was as understanding.”

  “Son, I was gay before it was the new black. Believe me, I can relate.”

  The man could have knocked Sasha over with a feather after that. “Um.”

  Charles laughed softly. “Come. We should check on your patient. Can you keep him from shifting back while on university grounds?”

  Sasha nodded. “Yes. We can take him back, actually. He’ll heal very fast.”

  “I think you will have a clinic of your own very shortly, son,” Charles noted. “I heard Felipe talking on the phone with someone he called ‘Jefe.’”

  “Spanish for boss,” Sasha said absently. A clinic? What in Hades?

  Charles led the way back to the lab. Steve had woken but looked groggy with pain medication. Paco measured another dosage into a syringe as they walked in and administered it with a white face but steady hands.

  Maybe Sasha had his first two techs for this clinic…

  “Gentlemen. You should prepare to leave shortly. I can keep observation to a minimum this afternoon, but any longer and I cannot guarantee privacy,” Charles told Felipe and the others.

  “We can leave now,” Felipe said. “Doc?”

  “Yes,” Sasha agreed. He looked at Neal. “I’ll ride with Steve.”

  “Sounds like a plan. See you at home.” Neal turned and strode out.

  Sasha’s adrenalin started to wane. Please, Gods, let him stay focused for another hour, that was all. Just long enough to get Steve home and settled before he started thinking too much about what happened.

  He kept seeing flashes of Felipe and Petya, the blood everywhere. He reached for the door to the ambulance, to get in behind Steve, but his hand trembled enough he missed the handle. He couldn’t even feel it.

  Felipe, standing behind him, said nothing. The shifter picked him up and deposited him on the bench inside the door and then closed up. Felipe came around and climbed into the passenger seat and they were off.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Afterburn

  Sasha got Steve settled in his bed back at the Factory and gave him another shot of painkiller. Gio agreed to stay and keep an eye on him. Sasha followed Neal upstairs and all but passed out on the big man’s bed.

  Waking slowly, his body ached, his head thick and uncomfortable. He blinked, eyes reacting to the glare of the bedside lamp, and didn’t recognize the room right away.

  “Hey, Doc,” Neal said from nearby. He appeared and leaned over the bed to kill the light, then stretched out next to him. “Welcome back.”

  “What?”

  Neal’s eyes narrowed. “What do you remember?”

  A flash of Petya standing over him hit him. He went cold all at once, like jumping into a tub of ice water. “Petya caught me in the park…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Steve. Oh Gods, Steve.” He tried to get up.

  “Easy.” Neal put a hand on his breastbone, holding him down.

  “No.” He batted the hand away and struggled to rise. “Where is Steve?”

  “Sasha, he’s fine. Gio’s with him, like you told him to. Everything’s fine, you only slept for an hour.” Neal stroked his hair
back from his sweaty forehead.

  “What about Petya?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I saw it happen…” He squeezed his eyes closed. “Felipe tore his throat out…”

  “Yeah…”

  “Iosef?”

  “Felipe saw him take off in the car.”

  “What happens now?”

  Neal didn’t say anything.

  “Neal?”

  “We’re in deep shit, babe. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “When do the other tigers get here?”

  “They’re here already. Paul’s settling them downstairs in the vacant area. They have their cots and shit, it’s a matter of getting them bivouacked.”

  Sasha pulled Neal closer to him, muscles cramping. “This is getting really heavy.”

  “You sure you want to stay?” Neal’s voice came out calm, devoid of emotion, but Sasha could feel the tension in his muscles.

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  Neal relaxed a little. “I’d understand if you want to go back to Madison for a few weeks.”

  “Fuck you. I’ve never run from a fight in my life!”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Do you want me to ask some Guardians to come down?”

  Neal froze, eyes staring off into space. “Um…”

  “I could have them here in a few hours.”

  “We don’t really need them.” He met Sasha’s gaze from inches away. “But thank you. This is going to turn into a shifter challenge. I don’t think we can avoid it now.” Neal paused and gave him a long look. “Are you going to call your aunt? Tell her what’s going on?”

  Sasha shook his head. “No, she’ll worry. Or try to come and take over.”

  Neal grunted but didn’t argue out loud. His attention sharpened and he focused on Sasha’s mouth. Sasha slipped his tongue out to the edge of his lip, teasing the big man. Neal came forward and they kissed, driving into each other’s mouths. Neal groaned and slipped a hand into his hair, burying big fingers in the loops and whorls. It sent tingles all down Sasha’s back and he grinned against Neal’s mouth.

  A knock disturbed them and Neal growled into his mouth. He pulled away and looked over at the door. “This better be important.”

  Mitch poked his head in. “Felipe’s waiting. He brought five guys, all fuckin’ thugs from the looks of it and more medical supplies than you could use in a month. Says they’re for Doc.” He looked at Sasha and winked. “Hey. You sure you don’t want some post-fight sex?”