by Leia Stone
‘Open the blinds of the window behind you. I can’t tell which one is yours,’ I instructed her as Pearl flew low to the ground between the building and the thirty-foot-high security wall. We were trapped here if they got the protection back up. We needed out of here.
Stat.
The blinds of the window to my left ripped open then and Sage and my wolf peered at us from inside. Relief exploded in my chest at the sight of my bestie.
‘Now get back away from the window! We’re going to smash it open!’ I told her. She moved back and Sawyer looked at me with fascination as he sat behind me, hands gripped tightly on my hips.
“Are you communicating with her?” he asked suddenly as she and my wolf backed away from the window.
“They’re pack,” was all I said, and then I gave Marmal a curt nod. When I looked back at Sawyer, his face was frozen in shock. Mouth open, eyes wide, I knew the fact that I’d made Sage my pack would hit him hard. She was his cousin after all.
Pack. He mouthed the word in confusion. Sage was his, Marmal was a troll, but I didn’t have time for this conversation right now.
Pearl set herself onto the ground and then retracted her wings so that she could inch closer to the window on foot. Her tail flicked once and then everyone on her back flinched as the window shattered. Talon and Walsh sat side by side, legs tucked under them as they gripped horns like handles. Luka and Bennett did the same behind them. There wasn’t much more room, especially for a long flight home, but we’d make it work.
Back in the room with my wolf, she and Sage huddled together as the shattered glass blew out everywhere. Shards littered the linoleum floor as Sage charged forward to escape. I didn’t need to tell her that time was of the essence. She felt it.
On Pearl, Walsh shifted away from us, and his booted foot extended onto the windowsill to brace himself as he reached out a hand for Sage. My attention snapped back to my body, making sure that with Walsh’s shifting weight I wasn’t going to be thrown off of the giant dragon we all somehow teetered on. Sage leap onto the windowsill, and then Walsh gripped her by the waist and pulled her into him. She embraced him fully, wrapping her arms and legs around him as his hands came up to wind in her hair and I smiled.
We did it.
Looking over at my wolf who stood deep inside of the room, I patted my chest. “Come on! Jump!”
Why was she so far back?
Oh, the glass! It was everywhere and would tear up her paws. I could sense her figuring out what to do when the door behind her burst off its hinges and then red-hot pain sliced through my wolf’s ribcage. The mother of all electric shocks rocked her body and she fell to the ground shaking as I stood on top of Pearl and screamed.
“NO!”
There, standing just behind my incapacitated wolf, was the fucking vampire queen. She held some kind of Taser device, and when she turned a dial, my body and wolf simultaneously felt like it was consumed by fire. Every nerve ending frayed and the world spun and sweat broke out onto my body. My wolf shook, her teeth chattering as the electricity rocked her small form. My human self lunged forward, placing one foot on the windowsill, and was reaching over with my left arm to remove my right cuff when one of the tall fey guards from the gym room, who was clearly no longer unconscious, burst into the room, gun raised.
It all happened so fast, too fast. The muzzle of the gun flickered with light and then something sharp pinched my stomach. Fresh, hot warmth trickled down into my underwear, and I swayed. I flew backward into someone’s arms and then Sawyer screamed. It was gut-wrenching and inhumane as it turned into a howl.
It took a moment for me to realize he was screaming for me.
“No! You idiot! I need her alive.” The queen’s voice sounded warbled and my body shook. “Cuff the wolf and bring up the protection field,” the queen snapped.
Then Sawyer said the three most horrible words I’d ever heard. “Go! Leave her!”
Without even considering another option, Pearl kicked off the ground and her wings snapped out as she pumped us high into the air. My wolf lay on the ground inside of the room shaking and whimpering from the high-voltage electric current pulsing nonstop into her body.
Everything felt so light, and cold … I was so cold. My teeth chattered as we flew further and further away from my wolf, my other half of my soul, my savior.
“Sawyer don’t … make me … I can’t,” I rasped. There was pressure on my stomach, and I looked down to see a panicked and wide-eyed Walsh trying to plug all of the holes there.
Oh my God. There were so many holes in my body. How was I still conscious?
It that moment, the shock wore off and the woozy heaviness of sleep pressed down on me along with a pain so horrifying I nearly passed out.
This was how I died. I knew it. Felt it deep inside of my soul.
I reached up with bloody fingers and trailed them down Sawyer’s cheek. “I want you to know…” I rasped, as breathing became too hard. “That you were loved. Not for your money, or because of some stupid mating year. I…” Why was breathing so hard? Sawyer’s eyes filled with tears as he shook his head in complete denial of the situation. “I loved you so madly and wildly. I want you to … know … that. Tell Creek that … I loved him too. Unlike any other.” Once the last word slipped from my lips, a deep, heavy blackness, unlike any I’d ever felt before, washed over me and pulled me under, like a tsunami dragging a victim to their grave.
SAWYER
She went limp in my arms and every rational thought left me. This wasn’t happening. Not like this. “Demi!” I shook her lightly, but her head just lolled onto my lap.
No, no, no. Fuck no. Not her, not the love of my life…
“Take off the cuffs!” Sage half sobbed as those of us who knew her best lost our collective minds. Walsh ripped her cuffs off and I once again cursed myself for making them. These things hurt her more times than they helped her.
“With the cuffs off, will she heal?” I asked my best friend. My voice sounded hollow, and even I knew that there was no healing from this, not without a trauma team and top-notch hospital, which we didn’t have anymore. It had been bombed by the fucking vampires.
My heart thundered in my chest as I gripped my dying wife’s blood-soaked t-shirt.
Think. Breathe. Fucking hell.
“Astra.” Walsh’s voice was barely a whisper. We were flying on a fucking dragon over the entire city of Light Fey and no one looked at us, which made me think the dragon had some type of cloaking ability.
“What?” I couldn’t concentrate. All of my medical schooling was trying to take up residence in my brain at the same time as my grief and it was short-circuiting my brain. Demi wasn’t someone I could fathom living without. I tried in prison and almost committed suicide. I’d never loved a creature so much as I adored and worshiped this woman in my arms. She couldn’t die. Not like this. Not after everything we’d been through.
“Astra! Is that chick still alive?” Walsh screamed at Sage.
Sage’s face brightened, which gave me hope as I remembered the story of the Paladin priestess healing Walsh when he was injured … near death.
I looked up at the troll girl who seemed to be in charge of the dragon. “Take us to Astra.”
She looked confused. Fuck. Why did she look confused?
“Paladin Village, in the Wild Lands, I’ll show you the way,” Sage barked. The troll nodded and her named popped into my mind. Marmal. This must be Marmal from Demi’s time stuck in the Magic Lands.
There was so much blood. Even with Walsh and I plugging holes, they bled through to her back. My gaze flicked up to Luka, whose eyes were practically glowing with hunger. Her blood, it would be nearly impossible to resist for him, especially since they half-starved him in prison. “You good, bro?” I asked.
He swallowed hard and nodded, looking away from Demi. I trusted him with my life, we knew everything about each other, the last year had brought us closer than brothers. If he felt himself losing control,
he’d jump off this dragon before harming my wife. He knew what she meant to me.
If I had a surgical kit and operating room, I might be able to do something. Right now I was utterly fucking useless … about to put all of my faith in a teenage girl with supposed healing powers…
My mind calculated any other option. We could fly into downtown Light Fey City and take Demi to their hospital, but odds are they wouldn’t treat her once they found out she was responsible for the prison break. We were already over Dark Fey Territory, coming up on Troll Village. There was no turning back now.
My fingers plugged holes inside of the tiny stomach that once held my son I’d never met. I had an out-of-body experience then. How was this real? Everything was going fine. Demi was in my arms. We’d almost had her wolf. How was this happening?
Walsh ripped his shirt into strips as he tried in vain to stop the bleeding. How could someone so small bleed so much?
God, please don’t take her. I reached out to the universe. I was a man of science, not one of spirituality, but I could be persuaded to believe in anything right now.
Anything for Demi.
Reaching up with my free hand, I did something I’d been scared to do since she lost consciousness. I felt for a pulse at her neck.
‘Hold on, my love.’ I tried to find her through our bond, like maybe there I could save her, hold her somehow … but she was all dark, gone. It left me feeling empty, and the desperation I’d initially felt when I first landed in prison fell over me like a thick fog.
Thumps lightly beat against my finger. Thump. Thump. I froze. It was faint, but she had a pulse.
“Please go faster!” I growled at the female troll. She peered back at Demi limp in my arms and soaked in blood and all the color drained from her face. Tears lined her eyes, rolling down her cheeks, and she nodded.
I had yet to meet a person who truly knew Demi and didn’t absolutely love her. Even the troll woman did, you could see it in her eyes. If Demi died, the devastation that it would leave behind would be felt by every single person who knew her.
I can’t think like that right now.
Sage was fumbling with a cell phone. Why, I didn’t know. There was no one to call. We had no hospital and I was assuming the medical ward in Paladin Village wasn’t equipped for this.
“Eugene, Demi’s been shot. Tell Astra to prepare to heal her,” Sage said quickly into the phone, and a flicker of hope surged inside of me.
If Astra really could heal someone near death, if she was waiting and ready when we landed … maybe Demi would make it…
As we flew over the tall gothic buildings of Vampire City, my face turned into a scowl. The vampires were responsible for nearly every recent problem in my life. Looking back, I glanced at Luka, the only decent bloodsucker I knew. He wore a mask of pain; it danced across his face before slipping away into a cold hard stare. After what Luka had been through, what it must be like right now to look down on his old home … I couldn’t imagine it. He met my gaze and I nodded once.
He returned it.
That was that. An unspoken bond. I would take his story to the grave with me, but he knew I knew, and that meant he wasn’t alone. Sometimes grief needed to be shared or it would suffocate you under the weight of it. Luka had shared his grief with me, and now I carried a little bit of it so that he could breathe. Hypothetically, since vampires didn’t actually breathe.
Demi’s pulse fluttered under my index finger and I whimpered, my focus back on her. She had to make it, she just had to.
The dragon started to descend over the Wild Lands as Sage barked directions from her place behind me. I’d never been to Paladin Village. I’d grown up hating their people, and when I’d finally wanted to go there, to be with Demi and support her, I’d had that damn ankle monitor on.
“Come on!” I shouted, knowing that yelling wouldn’t help anything, but it made me feel slightly better anyway.
If the medical ward there had an IV kit, I could at the very least transfer some of my blood to Demi. My mind raced with medical knowledge and procedures I could try if only I had the right tools. Next year I would have started medical school, but I did enough in my training that I knew how to suture and do an intravenous vein puncture.
I wondered if Dr. Pearson had survived the past year and if he was in the village right now. He was the top surgeon we had, but without the right tools or a proper operating room…
“There!” Sage pointed to a thicket of trees, and I looked just past them at what I assumed was Paladin Village.
Pearl descended and I gleaned a closer look.
Whoa. Shock ripped through me as my gaze fell on the wooden fence, tips sharpened to points. Inside was not the rough and tumble encampment I assumed it would be. I mean, it clearly had taken a beating, with some buildings looking like they were shelled out by bombs, but most of them were intact, and made fully of brick. Thousands of tents and makeshift huts dotted the roadways and open areas, and my heart swelled with hope that some of those people were my pack.
I looked down at Demi.
Our pack.
There was no them or us anymore. It was we. Paladin, city wolf, we needed to unite if we wanted to end this war, and that started right here with Demi and I. Together. I looked back up at the farmlands in the distance and was surprised to see the rolling green hills dotted with row upon row of food. It looked like corn and lettuce and other edible things. I realized then that the Paladins had something that the city wolves didn’t: a knowledge they could teach us so that we might just survive the next few months.
The dragon tried to find a spot to land, but there were people everywhere. Children running and playing. Tents and backpacks littered the roads.
Demi’s heartbeat suddenly stopped and panic surged so quickly inside of me that my wolf nearly lurched out of my body.
“She’s crashing!” I shouted, as alpha power slapped out of me and pressed in on everyone riding the dragon.
Sage pointed to an open spot where the small girl with mousy brown hair waved us over. I remembered her from the one time we met, but somehow she looked even smaller now, younger too. She wore some kind of feathered headdress and bone-carved necklace, but she looked like a kid trying to play chief.
This was her? The great healer?
My head snapped to Walsh: “The second we hit the ground, I need you to find Dr. Pearson … if he’s still alive. If not, any of the city wolf surgeons will do.”
Walsh nodded, and then the dragon’s talons hit the earth.
It was like time had stopped or slowed down; the next few moments felt so long. I felt out of my body trying to understand what to do and how I could help Demi. Luka assisted me in carrying her to the ground, but that just made Demi lose more blood, and I wasn’t even sure she was still alive at this point.
No pulse … why can’t I feel a pulse?
So much blood.
Astra, all of maybe seventeen, walked over to Demi and her eyes flashed a glowing blue.
“Heal her please. I beg of you.” I looked up at the girl, my fingers still plugging holes in my lifeless wife as tears lined my eyes, and I nearly lost my shit in front of all these people. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest, like someone had reached in and squeezed it so hard it might pop like a balloon at any moment.
Astra looked over at me with such strength and confidence then, I wondered if I had underestimated her.
With a simple nod, she fell to her knees and clasped her hands in prayer.
“Father, we need a miracle. Use me, make me your vessel of light and healing.” The girl raised her clasped hands to the sky.
Demi said that the Paladins were super spiritual, but I hadn’t experienced it firsthand. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t here to judge, and if it saved my wife I would pray to the fucking Father every night for the rest of my life.
A scream rang out from behind me, raising the hairs on my arms and I spun. Demi’s mom stood directly behind me, face stricken as she
stared down at her unconscious daughter. A small baby boy with dark hair and blue eyes was in her arms, and my heart shattered. I swallowed down a sob as I reached for my son with my free hand. A crowd of people had started to gather around, and Eugene was pushing them back, but I didn’t care about any of that. Nothing mattered to me in that moment except holding this beautiful boy that Demi and I made. Demi’s mom reached out and deposited Creek in my arms before she fell into a puddle of tears, her husband pulling her into a tight hug.
Her grief killed me, but all my pain washed away the moment I looked down at my son. His round, wide eyes looked up at me with an innocence that I clung to and hoped he would always have. Knowing that Demi carried him and birthed him all on her own out in the wild, it made me love and respect her ten times more than I had before she left for her alpha trial. Demi was the strongest woman I knew. I’d seen the fire and strength of an alpha that first day I’d met her at Delphi. To be honest, it scared me sometimes, because I wasn’t sure in what world two alphas could co-exist, but now I knew. This world. If anyone could come back from death, it was her. We would remake the world together with our son. Born of both tribes and cultures. A symbol of our love and unification. I could smell his wolf inside of him, still young but strong, and I was grateful for that.
Holding his tiny body to my chest, I turned back around just in time to see a blue mist fall from the sky, coating Astra like a magical rain.
The crowd gasped in awe, but all I could do was hope. Hope that this young girl was powerful enough to save the love of my life.
Reaching out, I grabbed Demi’s cold, limp hand, and tucked Creek up against my chest between his mother and me.
“He needs you. I need you,” I begged her, as if she had a choice, as if my words could somehow bring her back from wherever her spirit had wandered. The blue sparkle raining down on Astra became so bright then that I had to close my eyes and shield Creek’s face with my chest.
As I held my wife’s hand, our newborn son cradled between us, I prayed to every god imaginable that she would heal and wake up so that we could be a family again, because no woman compared to her.