I’m not a religious man, but as I race for the house, I pray to all the demons in hell she’ll make it out of this alive. Slowly, she begins to shift in my arms, first a leg, then her head, as if she doesn’t even have the strength to turn fully human. But finally, as I reach the house, she’s back in her human form. Her skin holds a ghostly gray pallor, like the edges of the swamp after a storm, and I’m sure I’m too fucking late.
The second I get within earshot of our house, I start to yell, screaming at the top of my lungs. “Callan, goddamn it! Get something for Luna. She’s
dying in my arms!”
When I burst into sight of our cabin, my brothers are already in action, racing toward me. Callan’s got the medical bag in hand. A medic he ain’t, but he knows enough to deal with all our injuries. Ethan’s got a stack of towels and rags. As soon as he sees me, he spreads a large towel on the sparse grass in front of our house. “Lay her here. Quick! I’ll get whatever Callan needs.”
I practically skid onto the ground, scraping the skin off my knees as I gently lie Luna on the towels. She rolls like dead weight onto the ground, and her crimson lifeblood blooms across the cotton fabric.
“What the fuck happened?” Ethan snarls.
“Wolf attack. That motherfucker’s gone to his maker in pieces,” I growl back.
“Give me your hand, Warrick,” Callan commands. “Press here to staunch the flow.”
I do as he says, pressing my hand against the artery out of which her blood spurts.
“Harder. Stop the flow,” Callan says. “Ethan, go get alcohol and peroxide from the bathroom. I’m going to try to stitch up this artery, then put her neck back together.” He gently picks up the flap of skin that was
once attached to her neck and now hangs by a mere half-inch of skin. I’m in no fucking way squeamish, but I about hurl at the sight.
Ethan races into the house, flinging open the screen door so hard it thwaps against the wall before it bangs shut.
“You’re doing great, Warrick,” Callan mutters, pulling out one of his kits from the medical bag. He can say that, but my heart is thundering inside my ribcage, ready to explode if she dies. One night with her wasn’t near enough. A couple months was nothing. I want a whole fucking life of time with her.
“I’m going to wad a clean towel around your hand to staunch the peripheral blood loss,” Callan says. He picks out a needle, threading it with whatever he uses to stitch us all up.
He’s had plenty of opportunities to sew our wounds closed through the years. He’s got the needle threaded by the time Ethan bounds out of the house.
“Pour the alcohol all over this needle,” Callan says. Ethan unscrews the bottle and sloshes it onto the needle.
“Gonna try and work around your fat fingers, brother,” Callan says to me. “Move a millimeter to the right.”
I do as he commands, since Callan is the king of this arena. He pierces the artery and makes his first stitch. “Do you remember how to check her blood pressure, Ethan?”
“Sure,” Ethan says, already rummaging through the kit. He lifts the cuff and stethoscope from the bag and moves around to the other side of Luna. He affixes it to her arms, fits the earpieces inside his ears, and puffs up the cuff.
I tune him out, focused on keeping pressure on Luna’s artery, until Ethan calls, “Seventy over fifty.”
“Shit,” Callan says, “She’s shocking.” His fingers move sure and steady as he stitches the blood vessel closed. Finally, he says, “Okay, we got that to stop. Now, the neck flap. Hold this towel in place, Warrick. Ethan, gauze.”
With finesse, he places the skin back in position and starts to stitch. “Run and get some water-room temperature would be good.”
“On it,” Ethan says, already in motion.
I’ve lived through hurricanes, vamp attacks, and more bar fights than most men have under their belt in a lifetime. I can handle pain with the calm of a Zen master. But witnessing the damage done to my darling baby girl by that fucking wolf makes me about lose my head. I want to rip that wolf to shreds ten times over, but he’s already dead. I can’t do a damn thing now except hold a fucking towel.
Ethan rushes back as Callan ties off the last stitch in her neck. As Ethan pours water, Callan twists off the top of the peroxide. When the water is
gone, my middle brother empties the peroxide bottle on Luna’s neck. “Open a couple of those four by fours and dig for the medical tape in the bottom of my bag.”
“Got it,” I say, relieved to have a task.
Callan tapes gauze onto the wound before taking a deep breath and sitting back on his haunches. Then, the action finished, we just sit there, staring at each other over Luna’s little body.
“She’s still breathing,” Ethan offers.
“What now?” I ask, irritated at being in a subordinate position to my brother.
“We get her into the house where she’ll be warm and dry.” Callan glances at the sky with its dark looming clouds. “Then we wait. She’ll either make it or she won’t, depending on the strength of her wolf.”
I burst into the clearing just in time to see some asshole wolf ripping out the flesh in Luna’s throat. Rage floods through my limbs, and I lunge for the wolf. He’s bigger than me, and when I leap at him, he flings me clear across the swamp. I’ve never known a wolf so strong-not naturally. He must be hopped up on goblin blood or some other artificial enhancement. And he attacked our sweet, gentle, little Luna. In a rage, I fly back at him, fueled by desperation and a fury so deep even his superior size and strength can’t stop me. In a blur of fang and claw, I slash and rip until I tear his throat out and then rip his body limb from bloody limb.
Before he’s even stopped twitching, I shift back to human and scoop up Luna in my arms. Her body hangs like dead weight, everything drooping toward the earth. I spring into action, setting my legs to sprinting as the life force drains from her body.