Page 69 of Iced Out Mate

“They’ll be here in a few minutes.” Dylan’s voice cracked.

“I’m so sorry. Oh no. Let me try and make this better.” Macie had a large shard of broken glass in her hand. She pressed it against her wrist. “I might know a spell. It just needs a small sacrifice. It can have me. It can have me.”

“Macie, drop the glass right fucking now.” I couldn’t even feel anger toward her. Just a cold and empty bewilderment as to how the hell we even got here.

She shook her head. Her eyes were frantic. She pushed the glass down against her wrist. Crimson red beaded around the vicious edge. She started to speak but I couldn’t understand the words. Black veins crept into the whites of her eyes.

I had half a mind to let her do it. If it meant saving Emmy, then so fucking be it. Reach to the pits of hell, if the answer were tucked away underneath fire and brimstone.

She didn’t have the chance to do anything. Two jailers burst into the room, followed by two healers close behind them. The jailers immediately spotted Macie, recognized what she was about to do, and sent out two bolts of verdant green energy directed at her. They smacked into her chest and launched her backward. She hit the wall and the green energy spread outward, like ivy, attaching her to the wall so she couldn’t move or speak.

I moved aside so the healers could work to stabilize Emmy. One of them removed the blood-soaked shirt and hovered his hand over the wound, which now only spurted out blood whenever his pulse would beat.

I stood up and gave them some space. Dylan was speechless although he didn’t need any words to express how terrified he was. I took him in my arms and hugged him, holding him tight. “He’s going to be all right,” I reassured him, although I wasn’t entirely sure if it was more for him or for myself.

The jailers removed Macie from the wall, vines remaining around her wrists like handcuffs. She didn’t struggle. It seemed like she’d given up any kind of fight she had in her. Just kept apologizing, even as they took her outside. She didn’t plead or fight. She didn’t even look at me, her head down and her hair covering her face. Meanwhile, the druidic healers were moving Emmy onto a stretcher. The man continued to hold his hand over Emmy’s wound. It appeared as if his skin was being stitched together by the roots of an invisible plant, except it didn’t seem to hold. The bullet hole wouldn’t close.

“We’ll take him to the Ivory Clinic, over on Brentwood. You can follow us there,” he said, stopping his work at his chest to go and grab one end of the stretcher. Emmy’s chest rose and fell but at an unsettlingly slow rate.

I didn’t waste a second. Dylan and I left after the healers, running past the ambulance they loaded Emmy into and toward my parked car. I threw myself in, not giving a fuck that I was getting blood on the steering wheel.

“Holy shit, holy shit,” Dylan was saying, low but still audible. “Fuck.”

The ambulance turned on its siren and lights and hurried down the street. I tailed them, running the same red lights, blowing past the same stop signs. “We have to tell the pack,” I said.

“I’ll call Chris. He’ll tell the rest.”

Dylan didn’t waste any time. He called and told Chris everything. His voice shook when he got to the news about Emmy, but he held it together.

I don’t know how. I don’t know how I was holding it together.

This felt like my fault. I had texted him to come over, that I needed to talk to him and his sister. That things were getting scary. He came because I asked him to. He’d gotten shot because I brought him there.

My bloody grip tightened around the steering wheel. I took a deep breath to try and control my racing heart. The roads began to widen, the homes of my neighborhood being replaced by shops and businesses, all of them closed at this time of night. The ambulance slowed and pulled into a large garage next to a two-story building with blocky red letters reading “Medical Center” as the only descriptor. It was also one of the only buildings on the block with all of its lights on.

There was a small parking lot in front of the building’s main entrance, still in sight of the emergency dock. I parked and watched as the two healers were joined by two older-looking druids wearing the same white coats that traditionally trained medical doctors wore, their scrubs underneath a dark green.

“He’s there because of me.” Saying the words out loud hurt. Each one felt like a silver bullet. “I feel so guilty.”

Dylan was quiet for a moment. He watched them push Emmy’s stretcher into the hospital. “You can’t blame yourself for this, Miles. You weren’t the one who pulled that trigger. You went there with the best intentions. You were trying to save his sister, I could see how desperate you were to try and save her, even after everything she’d done. That speaks to your character, and it also speaks to your purpose tonight.”

I dropped my head back on the headrest and snapped my eyes shut. This all felt so surreal in a nightmarish sort of way. Like I was about to wake up and decide I had to stay up in order to avoid falling back into the same horrible dream.

“I should have listened to Hunter, and turned her in to the council.” So many what-ifs rang in my head. Like a hyperactive storm cell had planted itself inside the folds of my brain, giving off constant bolts of lightning and claps of thunder. I could hear what Dylan was telling me, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out my own self-hate in that moment.

All through my life, I carried guilt. It had become a constant, persistent weight on my back. Since birth I’d been carrying it. Adding Emmy into the equation felt unbearable. How much more guilt could I tolerate before I broke?

I dropped my head forward. Looked down at the bloody hands in my lap, bloodstains on my jeans. “If he dies…” I gulped down a rogue cry.

Dylan rubbed my arm, gently massaging before he slid his fingers through mine. He squeezed his clean hand through my bloodied one. It felt like I’d tainted him somehow. I had dragged even Dylan into this situation. Yes, fate had tied us together, but he didn’t ask for any of this when he met me, when he fell for me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The guilt forming into a volcano of emotion seconds from erupting.

“For what?”

“For getting you involved with this.”

“Miles, all you got me involved in was a new appreciation for flowers, a new subscription to a movie app that I keep forgetting to cancel, and a man who I started loving from the second I met him.” He squeezed my hand. He didn’t seem bothered by the blood. He didn’t seem to be hollowed out by persistent guilt, either. I needed to let it go, I just didn’t know how. “You don’t need to apologize for anything.”