The wolf growled, baring his teeth, and eased back into the shadows.
Skyla shifted closer to me. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The light of a nearby glow stick revealed bloodstains, thick and dark, saturating my shirt. I brushed my fingers over my shoulder and found shredded flesh and bone and more warm blood. “Shit, shit, shit,” I whimpered. The assessment of my wounds revived my pain. I sucked in a breath, gritted my teeth, and fought the urge to black out, or vomit, or both.
“Hold it together,” Skyla said. “We’re going to get through this.”
Each heartbeat drained blood from the gashes in my neck and shoulder. The little I remembered about anatomy from high school biology classes suggested the wolf’s attack had missed the major arteries. Or else I’d be dead by now. Still, the adrenaline dump and blood loss had devoured my energy stores. A dizzying sickness stirred my stomach, and black spots sprinkled across my vision.
Skyla drew her gun and antagonized the wolf again, which seemed like the wrong thing to do. “Come on out, you mutt son of a whore. Why the hesitation? Afraid to finish what you started?”
As if he understood, the wolf darted in from the shadows, fast and snapping its teeth at Skyla. She fired, but he moved too fast—unnaturally fast. He dodged aside. Skyla fired at him again. The wolf screamed an ear-splitting, gut-wrenching issue of canine pain and dashed away into the darkness. Skyla pumped her fist. “Got the bastard!”
“Hang in there, girlfriend,” she said to me. I barely heard her—keeping my eyes open required all of my concentration. “If he comes back, I’ll finish him off.”
“Keedokee,” I said, intoxicated by exhaustion and pain. I pulled my knees into my chest, closed my eyes, and sank into my thoughts, retreating to the comfort of old memories: Mani and me, playing on the beach together as children. An imaginary hot sun warmed my skin. I clung to that sensation like a lifeline. The vividness of the memory transported me away from the grove of trees and into a paradise of blessed heat and bright daylight, but then Skyla called my name, and the desperation in her voice brought me to the present. I opened my eyes but then clenched them shut again, blocking out the blinding glare of… sunlight?
“Mundy.” Skyla’s voice was dulled by the rain, but I heard her surprise. “What the hell are you doing?”
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.”
