“—Kane!” She waved a hand in his face. “We need you to find some medical supplies.”
All at once, his hearing came back to him, and he nodded. Of course. Medical supplies. He’d go find—
“I think I know where we can go.”
He turned to Apex. “Tell me.”
“The garage, at the base of the mountain. It had a stretcher, it had other stuff. It’s our only chance, assuming some wolven doesn’t show up in an ambulance. Here. You take these.”
Weapons were pressed into his hands, and then the male took a step back. “I’ll go get the supplies. I know how to get into the place.”
There was a split second of suspended animation, as if both were waiting for the other to say something; then Apex was gone, and Kane was running up to his female and making a report.
“He’s going for what you need. He knows where to find…”
He stopped talking as he looked down at Lucan. The male was dying, and everyone knew it. He could tell by the way Mayhem was desperately trying to stop the bleeding, his two huge hands pressed into the male’s groin, his face a stark mask of pain, even though he was not physically injured. Meanwhile, up at Lucan’s head, Rio was at her mate’s ear, talking to him, urging him not to go.
As if the choice was his.
And in the center, Nadya was probing the male’s abdomen, like she was looking for more injuries.
Giving Apex the job of getting supplies had been the right thing to do.
Kane wanted to be here when his female lost her patient—and Rio lost her love. And as he stood over the sad tableau, he felt himself getting sucked back into his past… picturing Cordelhia in her bedchamber, all her blood out of her veins and staining the fine silk covers and woven blankets that her family had included with her mating payment.
When a wave of dizziness came over him, he threw out a hand and caught his balance with the help of a tree branch—
Something moved about fifteen yards away into the tree line.
Narrowing his eyes, he subtly turned his head. “I’ll be right back.”
With a quick shift, he ducked down and jogged in the direction of the disturbance. He’d thought it was down near the ground, only appearing to be higher up because of a rise in the earth. He was right.
It was a guard who had sustained a gunshot wound to the head. The neat little entry wound at the temple was very no-muss-no-fuss that was nonetheless very lethal—just taking its time to kill the male. The bastard was still moving, his hands making circles at his sides as if he were trying to paddle himself out of the Grim Reaper’s reach.
Kane knelt and thought about the fact that someone he knew very well and cared about a great deal was dying on a similar countdown.
Capturing one of those rotating hands, he yanked up the sleeve of the uniform, lowered his head, and bared his fangs—
At the same time he struck the flesh he had revealed, he reached up and slapped a palm over the guard’s mouth so the howl of pain didn’t travel far. And then he retracted his bite and watched.
As the flesh began to be consumed by some invisible, hungry force, Kane shook his head and wondered why he needed the confirmation.
Then he thought of Lucan’s cousin staring at him with wide eyes, telling him he didn’t have to worry about weapons.
Glancing through the trees at Nadya as she did what she could for a dying male, he focused on her hair.
The patches were disappearing because new growth was overtaking them, the baldness filling in before his very eyes. And her face was even smoother than it had been when she’d first appeared to step through a slit in the fabric of time and space.
As he fell back on his ass and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, he stared at the guard’s arm as white bone began to show through the red meat of the muscle and sinew. And then it was all bone, nothing else.
With the infection or whatever it was continuing to spread, Kane counted the passing minutes by how the back of the hand turned to a skeleton’s, and the nail beds were consumed, and finally the bones fell loose to the weave of pine needles in the same orientation they had just been connected in.
A deadly mystery.
He once again looked at Nadya.
That may well be a saving grace.