What the hell, indeed. The ground, the trees, the air itself reflected a brilliant radiance. Heat waves shimmered throughout the open space. I shook my head, blinked, and rubbed my eyes. Vivid dreams I had learned to accept, but hallucinations worried me. Only crazy people hallucinated, people whose grasp on sanity had slackened. But it wasn’t a hallucination if Skyla could see it too, right?

Skyla’s question indicated the vision was real.

The light and the heat were true—and they were radiating from me. On top of injury and blood loss, whatever this was, this illumination, this force, it guzzled my strength like a thirsty desert gulps the rain. Shock sapped my responsiveness. A fog settled around the periphery of my awareness and thickened into impenetrable darkness. The light and heat faded away, and a cold blackness took its place.

In my waning consciousness I imagined the sound of horse hooves. Death coming for me on a pale horse? I giggled.

A beam of light flashed and sliced through the haze. Another growl, deeper and louder than the wolf’s, roared into the trees. Voices. Yelling. I let the darkness lull me away, finding it preferable to the mind-blurring pain in my shoulder and neck.

Someone shouted. I knew that voice, and hearing it brought me to the surface of consciousness again. Hands grasping. Arms lifting. “Solina?” I forced my eyes open. Skyla’s flashlight highlighted the planes and angles of a familiar and totally unexpected face. Aleksander Thorin? Here? Now? Impossible. I shut my eyes again. “You’re safe, Solina,” Thorin said. “I got you.”

“What are you doing here?” Skyla asked.

“Search and rescue,” Thorin said. “What does it look like?”

“There’s an awful lot of blood. The bastard came out of nowhere.”

“Where did he go?”

“Little Miss Sunshine here went off like a flare. Air traffic in Anchorage was taking off and landing in her glow. I only saw the wolf for a second after that, and he was bugging out. Full tactical retrograde.”

“You say that light came from her?” Thorin jiggled me until I opened my eyes again. “Solina, can you explain?”

“Snirrreee,” I said. It made perfect sense in the moment.

“What?”

“She’s losing it,” Skyla said. “We’ve got to get her somewhere safe and stop the bleeding.”

“What about you?” Thorin asked. “You’re not in the best shape, either.”

“I’ve got a first aid kit and some basic field medic training,” she said. “It’ll be enough to hold me together for now.”

“If you can make it through the night, I’ll send Joe and Hugh out to collect your group first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll be all right,” Skyla said. “Just take care of her.”

I must have groaned or something because they both fell silent. Someone squeezed my good arm. “Hang in there, chick,” Skyla said. “You got guts, remember? And girls with guts survive.”

Chapter Fourteen

“Wake up, Miss Mundy.”

“Unghh,” I said as an agonizing pain stabbed into my awareness. I clawed through a thick, cloying darkness and pried apart my eyelids. My blurry vision sharpened to reveal one solitary figure, haloed by soft lamplight. He looked like a holy figure in a renaissance painting. Or he would have, if not for his dishevelment.

Thorin leaned over me, and worry shone in his dark eyes and in the lines around his mouth. “I know you’re hurting, and I’m going to give you something that will help, but it will knock you out again. I have some questions I would like to ask you first.”

I swallowed a few times, trying to moisten the dry sock lodged in my throat. A glass appeared at my lips, and I gulped until water dribbled down my chin. When I blinked, the room came into focus—not a hospital, but a bedroom.

“You’re in the apartment over my store,” Thorin said, reading my thoughts. “Your wounds are cleaned, stitched, and bandaged.”

Reflexively, my hand went to my shoulder, but Thorin caught my fingers and pushed them away. “What about infection?” I said, envisioning Old Yeller foaming at the mouth.

Thorin sat beside the bed in a straight-backed chair. His hair hung around his face, unkempt from his trek through the rain. Mud and blood, my blood, stained his T-shirt. “I’m a competent medic,” he said. “And if what Skyla told me was true, you have little to fear when it comes to germs.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because the things that cause infections have no chance of withstanding the type of radiation you emanated.”

“Radiation?” I squeaked. I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to stick my fingers in my ear and sing la la la at the top of my lungs. Either that, or accept this was one of my dramatic, vivid dreams.

“Can you tell me what happened?” Thorin asked.

I coughed, and it felt like wolf claws raking into me again. I gasped and gritted my teeth until the pain subsided. Thorin waited for me to answer his question, but I delayed, not wanting to think about the horrors that had recently occurred. “What were you doing there?” I asked. “How did you know we were in trouble? How did you get me here?”

Thorin narrowed his eyes. His nostrils flared, and he exhaled an angry rush of breath like a bull preparing to charge. “Give and take, Miss Mundy,” he said. “Give me information, and I’ll return the favor.”

“How should I know what happened? One minute we were running for cover in the middle of a storm and the next a crazy wolf was trying to eat me.”

“I told you that you were making yourself vulnerable by going on this trip.”

“I am way too tired and in entirely too much pain to argue with you.”

A slim smile tugged at Thorin’s lips. “That’s the smartest decision you’ve made since coming to Alaska.”

I would have flipped him off, but lifting my hand required too much effort. My head throbbed, and the acid in my stomach churned in time to the beat, threatening to evacuate the remnants of my rehydrated dinner. “Either you’re going to have to give over those pain meds, or you’re going to end up interrogating a very sick interviewee. If you need me to demonstrate with graphic details, I’ll be glad to.”

Thorin sniffed and reached into a drawer in the nightstand beside my bed. He pulled out a hypodermic syringe and uncapped it. Needles didn’t bother me, not after wolf claws and fangs. Thorin waved the syringe at me like a carrot before a donkey. “There’s nothing more you can tell me? Any detail could help. It’s important I understand what we’re up against.”

“Please, Thorin.” My voice gave away, and if I said anything more, I would break into tears.

Thorin’s resolve crumpled. He uncapped the needle and sank it into my arm, bringing instant relief. “Miss Mundy, it would be wise to give your full cooperation.”

“Or what? Torture?”

Thorin set aside the empty needle and pushed his hair off his face. “There are things going on you know little about. I admit I know only modestly more than you. With your cooperation, we all might find some kind of understanding.”

“Who is ‘we’?’” I asked, sinking into a fuzzy place in my head.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out soon enough. For now, you just need to rest.”

I closed my eyes. Heavy sand filled my arms and legs and rendered me immobile. Not that I wanted to go anywhere. I only wanted the pain to stop. And I wanted to sleep. Sleep would solve all my problems. “I glowed,” I mumbled.

“Yes. I’d like to know how you did it.”

“I’m crazy.”

Thorin chuckled, and the sound of it gave me an even warmer and tinglier feeling than the medicine. In the last, hazy moments before my lights blinked out, Thorin said, “If you are crazy, Miss Mundy, then the rest of us are completely insane.”