Three men descended on Luke--two of whom hadn’t been injured, and the other three attacked Ryan. Ignoring the ache in his thigh, Luke rose to a stand. He did a sideways kick to one of men’s gut and immediately punched another in the face. Both men grunted but kept fighting back. The third man who hadn’t been shot, ran to Luke’s backside and put him in a chokehold while the other two pummeled Luke’s face and stomach.
He kicked when he could, but his air was being cut off, draining him of energy. The next punch to his face made his world turn black.
***
“Malia. Two gurneys incoming,” the dispatcher announced. “Both patients have multiple gunshots to their extremities and were severely beaten.”
She looked around to see if anyone was free to help them since her shift was about to end, but everyone was dealing with their own situation. Oh, well. One more case wouldn’t kill her.
“I’ll get ready.” This sounded bad. Her heart rate elevated, Malia Granger rushed to her emergency room station to prepare for them.
She was gathering some equipment when the injured men were rolled into her area. She stilled, her senses rocketing to high alert.Wolves?What the hell were they doing in a human hospital? Their ability to heal abnormally fast would draw the attention of the human nurses and doctors who had no idea her kind even existed.
Before she would decide what to do, Malia wanted to see what condition they were in. She highly doubted they came here voluntarily. When she turned around to assess their injuries, conflicting emotions bombarded her. One was a strong ache from seeing their swollen and bruised faces, along with the gunshot wounds to their extremities. The other was lust. Streaks of pleasure were coursing through her veins, which was totally unwarranted and certainly inappropriate.
The only logical explanation was that Malia must be exhausted after working back-to-back shifts. She obviously confused that erotic emotion with another.
“Malia?” the paramedic said.
“Oh, yes. What are their vital signs?” Spacing out was the worst thing an Emergency Room nurse could do.
One rattled off the men’s blood pressure stats and respiration rate. The other stated that the man in the tattered green jacket had two gunshot wounds, one to his upper left bicep and another to his right thigh. The man wearing the beige jacket had three injuries--one to his right wrist, one to his lower abdomen, and the third bullet pierced his left calf. “No vital organs were hit.”
“That’s good.” Though only if they’d been hit in the heart would there be permanent damage--as in death.
“Who called it in?” Not a werewolf, that much she could guess.
“I did,” said a voice she new quite well.
Midvale’s Sheriff Hanson strutted in. Malia ran into him quite often since she worked at Midvale Hospital. She put him a bit shy of fifty. While he was former military, the sheriff could stand to work out a bit more.
“Sheriff. Do you know who they are?”
“Luke and Ryan Lattimore. They’re twins. Aged twenty-nine, and the owners of the Circle L Ranch. I was driving down the highway when I spotted their two horses close to the road. Those men only have one other horse, so I figure something might have happened to them. I pulled off the road and found them about two hundred feet down the hill in a tall field of grass. Both were unconscious. That’s when I called the ambulance.”
“That was good.” Actually, it was quite bad, since the sheriff was a human. “Did you see who did this?”
“No, but shouldn’t you be tending to their wounds instead of trying to solve this crime? Last I heard, that was my job.”
Ouch.She was just trying to be helpful. Sheriff Harmon must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today--or maybe he hadn’t even been to bed yet. Law enforcement often worked long hours. She knew. Her uncle was the sheriff of the nearby town of Wildwood.
“Of course. If you’ll excuse me.”
He touched his index finger to his hat, spun around, and left. Dr. David Weston, one of her cousins, rushed in. He was in charge of the Emergency Room and must have sensed the presence of werewolves.
“What’s going on?” he asked quietly, nodding to the two bloody men.
“Your guess is as good as mine.” The paramedics, together with the men’s inner werewolves, had stopped the bleeding, so there wasn’t much she could do at the moment, other than get them out of there. “Harmon called it in.”
“That’s not good. Does he know who they are?”
“Ryan and Luke Lattimore, owners of the Circle L Ranch.”
Her cousin checked their wounds. “They’ll need surgery. When do you get off work?”
“My shift was about to end when these two came in.”
“I’ll ask Hayden and Wyatt to take them to Dad’s. Make them comfortable, and I’ll be there shortly.”