Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

However, unlike with DarkRiver, RainFire cats weren’t spread out across their territory. Such closeness could’ve been a source of primal tension since leopards weren’t natural pack animals. It was the human side of changeling felines that made them want to create large extended families; in ordinary circumstances, the cat’s need for space was accommodated by having plenty of land area between packmates.

That wouldn’t work for RainFire. They just didn’t have enough people and resources to function as a united pack while scattered over the territory. One day, that would happen, but for now, their struggle for survival as a pack had trumped the need for space. Not that packmates didn’t go off on their own now and then—he’d convinced a number of loners to join him in setting up RainFire, after all. But they always returned because RainFire was now home, their loyalty sworn and unbreakable.

Screeching to a stop beneath the sprawling network of aeries built in the massive trees in the heart of their territory, permanent bridges connecting aeries and retractable rope ladders going down trunks, he hit the horn in the emergency pulse. Senior packmates boiled out into the rain-lashed dark a heartbeat later, including their healer, Finn.

RainFire had lucked out snagging Finn—at a couple of years past forty in age, he was highly skilled and had full medical qualifications as well as a powerful gift. His birth pack had been sorry to see him go when he joined RainFire as one of the founding members, but had understood his choice; the healer who’d trained Finn had decades more life left in him, as well as another apprentice, and Finn was too strong to be anything but the senior healer in a pack.

As it was, he’d spent his adult life volunteering to assist packs who’d lost their healers and who didn’t have a trainee old enough to step into the position. It had given him an incredible breadth of experience—he’d been to even more places in the world than Remi, mentored countless young healers who needed time to come into their own—but he’d been desperately lonely. Healers needed their own packs to nurture, needed family around them. Remi had never met a healer who was also a loner. It appeared to be an impossible combination.

Having hauled open the back door, Finn went to check Aden.

“No,” Remi said. “He was clear she was the more critical. Internal bleeding, abdomen.”

Finn went clawed and just tore a hole through the woman’s clothing to check her stomach. Swearing hard and low seconds later, he grabbed her in his arms. “Get the male inside!” he said as he began to turn to run to the infirmary. “He’s losing blood from somewhere!”

“Shit.” Remi had thought the scent was all from the woman, that Aden had simply surrendered to exhaustion and cold.

Throwing the Arrow leader over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, as the other man didn’t appear to have gut wounds, he followed Finn to the infirmary—a large open room in a ground-level cabin—and placed Aden on a bed next to the one where Finn was already working on Zaira. Finn’s shirt was plastered to his body and his light brown hair dark from the rain, but Zaira had his unflinching attention.

Finn’s nurse, Hugo, and another member of the pack who had some medical training took over the instant Remi had Aden on the bed, stripping the Arrow leader of his camouflage green jacket and cutting through his sweater in their search for his injuries.

“He said they had some kind of an implant in their heads,” Remi told Finn. “They got it out—fuck knows how—but there could be damage.”

“Jesus.” Having turned Aden onto his side, Hugo hissed out a breath, the long braid in which he wore his black hair falling over his shoulder. “No wonder the back of his sweater is soaked in blood.” A pause as Hugo peeled away a bloody bandage. “Oh, hell, he’s got what looks like an unsealed wound at the back of his head.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Finn muttered, his eyes focused on the woman; her abdomen didn’t look right even to Remi’s untrained eyes, the jagged tear of the bullet that had violently exited her body a further insult.

Finn ran a scanner over her stomach. “This is bad. She should be dead, would be if someone hadn’t sealed the major bleeds.”

“Fix her first,” Remi said, knowing in his gut the Arrow leader would’ve made the same call. He hadn’t missed the fact that Aden had focused totally on her injuries when he’d been losing blood from what, to Remi’s eyes, looked like a seriously bad head wound.

“Finn,” Hugo said, having slit Aden’s pant leg along one side, “he’s got a bullet wound to his upper thigh. Bullet’s still in there, I think.”

As Finn barked out orders, Remi stared at the Arrow who’d walked who knew how long a distance through storm-lashed terrain with a bullet in his thigh and a bleeding head wound, all while supporting his wounded squadmate. The man was a serious threat, but Remi would have a difficult time killing him now. He was starting to like the stubborn Arrow.

Leaving Finn and his people to their work, he walked out into the wide corridor outside the infirmary to find his sentinels gathered around. Lark, Angel, and Theo all had damp hair, had no doubt made sure the all-wheel drive was safely parked and RainFire’s perimeter clear of threats. “Are we on generators?” He’d caught the telltale flicker of the lights a minute before.

“Just switched,” Lark said, her ebony skin flushed from within, as if she’d been running. “Comm lines went down fifteen minutes before the electricity. Best guess is that a lightning strike fried the conduit.”