Page 33

THIRTY-THREE

Fiona

I barely registered what had happened before I was moving. Not by choice, mind you, but by necessity as Reed jerked me bodily out of harm’s way and, a second later, ordered me to run.

My legs wanted to move, something about that double-weighted command invisibly dragging at my muscles, but I was frozen—part in fear, part in shock—as the green, muscled creatures I’d noticed at the loading docks charged toward us like a locomotive.

Leigh appeared at my side, grabbing my arm and tugging as she pulled me away from the battle.

“Where are we going?” I asked as my brain and my legs finally synced up and I started running at her side.

“Out of the way, but close enough to provide backup if needed.” Her words were short, and I got the sense that she was more angry about being sent away from the battle than anything.

We stopped at the corner, both of us peeking around as our three pack mates faced off against six heavily muscled?—

“What are those things?” I blurted, realizing I had no idea what Reed was currently leaping at.

“Trolls, I think? They’re a pretty quiet species. They keep out of the limelight for the most part. They’re represented under the collective council seat in the Interspecies Governing Council.”

None of that made any sense, except the fact that I was looking at six battle-ready trolls, swinging axes, clubs, and one very shiny dwarven hammer toward our friends.

“We have to do something. They’re outnumbered.” I moved to step around her, and she pulled me back with wolf-fast reflexes.

“Not so fast, speedy. You know how to fire a gun?”

“Not in combat, no, but at a target, sure.” Frustration rose inside me as the fight grew frenzied, so many bodies moving at once, it would have been impossible to get off a shot without hitting one of our friends. The trolls were bigger and bulkier, but the wolves had speed and agility on their side. A troll swung his weapon at a wolf, and by the time it landed, the wolf was gone, darting free.

“Any of them holding still with a bull’s-eye painted on their chests?”

“No, Leigh, but I can’t just sit here and watch them fight!”

The fight had rapidly escalated, Gael and Reed in wolf form, while Elodie stayed in human skin, leaping and slashing with impressive speed.

One of the trolls bellowed and grasped his side as her wicked blade sank in, then she used a dainty bare foot to kick him away and free it again, before spinning toward her next target. It was a troll who was trying to get his hands around Gael’s rib cage, probably to try to crush him.

I winced and felt ill when her blade separated his head from his shoulders.

“Looks to me like they’re holding the line just fine. Trust me, if things get dicey, I’ll shift and go help. But Gael and Reed will both be less distracted if their mates are safely out of the way.”

“I hate being helpless.” I clutched the front of my jacket, unable to peel my eyes away from the fight, noting every bleeding cut and missing chunk of fur on one of our men as the trolls started to deal damage. Our brave, vicious men.

Within minutes, four trolls lay lifeless on the ground; the fifth turned tail and ran, shooting a regretful glance down at the shiny dwarven hammer his fallen comrade still clutched, on his way out of the alley.

Elodie made to follow him, but Gael yipped, and she stopped.

I was relieved—and no small bit horrified—that the fight was over.

“We should get back to the lodgings, get cleaned up—” I turned to Leigh mid-sentence and screamed.

The sixth troll—the one I’d noticed at the dinner table who had strange carvings in his tusks—had Leigh gripped against his chest, a wicked black blade the length of my forearm pressed to her throat.

Running feet couldn’t get there fast enough as he began to back away, the arm he had banded around her chest lifting her off her feet as if she were a rag doll, not a grown woman who was pregnant, to boot.

“Stop right there,” the troll said, his voice so guttural, it was barely intelligible, “or the she-wolf will consecrate this ground with her blood.”

Gael was at my side, his furious snarl making all the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end. His desire to rip the troll’s guts out was plain, even on his lupine face. But he froze anyway, torn in indecision between leaping at the troll who held his pregnant mate’s life in his hands and possibly causing him to hurt her, or freezing and her getting hurt anyway.

The troll was still backing away, the distance between us growing as he used Leigh as a human shield. Desperation clawed at my throat, and in a last ditch effort, I closed my eyes, turning inward, reaching for the power I was so scared of.

Help me!

The power lashed out of my chest in a mighty sweep, elation flooding me as I unleashed it on purpose for the very first time. It flew up and up, disappearing into the shining ceiling of the cavern. For one despairing moment, I thought it was futile.

But when the ceiling overhead began to shake and a mighty thundering boom filled the cavern, I had hope. The troll stopped and looked up, just as a piece of the glittering ceiling sheered off, tumbling toward the cavern floor as dwarves poured out of homes and screamed, running helter-skelter toward the nearest shelter.

Gael and Reed took the moment of distraction to race toward the troll, but they never made contact.

Elodie, brave Elodie, with the elegance of a dancer and the deadly heart of a warrior, leapt over their heads in a graceful tumble, a song in another language spilling from her lips. She was moving so quickly, she blurred, landed for only a split second before she leapt again, using the nearby building and then the troll’s shoulder as stepping stones to propel herself up, up, up—and bring that sword down in a killing blow, splitting the troll’s skull down the middle in a violent spray of blood and gore.

Between one blink and the next, the three of them were falling, the troll’s blood coating everything and everyone as his lifeless body crumpled.

Gael shifted back to skin and, in seconds, was at Leigh’s side, pulling her from the ground and checking her over for injuries.

The troll didn’t get up, but neither did Elodie.

My muscles unfroze all at once, and I ran to kneel at her side.

“El? What happened, what’s wrong?” My voice was shaking as badly as my hands, but with her so covered in the troll’s blood, I couldn’t tell what was wrong with her. She looked fine—pale and gore spattered, but fine .

Her eyes fluttered up at me, her lips curled into a faint smile. “I have served my purpose. Tell the maidens I died with honor.” She coughed raggedly, sang another bar of the haunting tune, and then her eyes fell closed.

“Shit, that was the maiden’s death song. She’s got to be wounded somewhere. We need to find the wound, get her help.” Reed had appeared naked at my side, and he joined me in feeling her over.

I found a great, sodden gash on her inner thigh, sticky blood pumping from it in spurts with alarming regularity as it soaked her pant leg. Arterial wound . In her thigh, that meant femoral artery.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Reed saw the same thing I did, his face grave. “His tusk. She must have been gored during the fight. Their saliva contains an anticoagulant.”

I stripped off my jacket, doing the only thing I could think of and knotting it around the top of her thigh like a tourniquet, then using the excess material to cover the gash and putting my whole weight onto the wound.

“I thought wolves were basically indestructible!” I was crying, tears washing my face as I leaned over my very new friend, who I did not want to lose tonight. Ever, but especially not right now, like this, as I could feel her blood soaking through the material and between my fingers.

“If she bleeds out, there isn’t a way for her body to recover fast enough to heal. It’s like a beheading, or a gutting. If there’s no blood left in the body…” Reed’s voice trailed off, and I closed my eyes, begging the power inside me to do something, anything—but after calling it earlier, it now lay dormant, unresponsive.

“Over here! We need a medic!” I heard Gael bellowing as if from a distance, his call for help muted behind the blood pounding in my ears.

I held pressure on her wound, and for the first time since I was a child, I prayed.