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Just as I ripped her away from the window, I spotted someone in the woods. In the distance, Gaian was limping back to the pack house with one arm wrapped around his bare and bloody abdomen. He stumbled to his knees and spit up blood in the backyard, a low and feral growl escaping his lips.
His body was growing more rigid by the second, his cheeks paler than I had ever seen them. He looked worse than any silver bullet would’ve made him. He looked like he was about to double over and die.
“Gaian,” Sina whispered, eyes growing even wider. “He’s been shot.”
25
the cleanup
gaian
Find medical supplies now,my wolf growled throughout my head.
If we didn’t pull this silver bullet out of me within the next few moments, it would severely damage my nervous system. This wasn’t a regular bullet, but one that had been laced with poison. From the moment it had left the barrel, I could smell the stench of wolfsbane coating the edges of it.
I hurried toward the pack house, stumbling to my knees every so often and praying to the gods that I could stand back up and make it the rest of the way without problem. But my knees landed on the dirt again, the howls from Thayer and Calder filling my ears.
This was bad.
Really bad.
Before, Sina’s father’s goons had never used guns, especially not guns with silver bullets that had been laced with wolfsbane. They had been strong as fuck and so fucking annoying before, but now, it was worse.
They must’ve known that we had Sina. We hadn’t really been hiding it anyway.
I stared at the earth and used the last of my strength to push myself to my feet. My entire body ached, pains shooting through every single one of my muscles until they trembled once more. Another gunshot, and no response from either Calder and Thayer.
Someone grabbed my arm from behind, and I shoved them hard off me. I refused to let Sina’s father win this time. She was ours, and I would do anything to protect her. So, I used the last of my energy to shift and turn around, a menacing growl exiting my throat.
Sina stumbled back onto her ass, staring at me through wide eyes. “Gaian,” she said, my name rolling off her lips as a mere whisper. She scurried back against a tree. “I just want to help you. Please, don’t hurt me.”
When I heard those last few words escape her lips—they sounded like she had spoken those words with fear so many times—I shifted immediately and collapsed onto my hands and knees. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was you.”
Darius stood a few feet behind her, between her and the battle happening less than five minutes from the pack house. He hiked his thumb back toward where Thayer and Calder lurked in the woods. “I’ll go help them finish off the last of them. Heal him, Sina.”
“Darius,” I growled, wanting to fight alongside my packmates too.
This wasn’t just an empty, meaningless war anymore. We had to protect Sina.
Darius shifted into his dark brown wolf and looked back at me.“What?”he asked through the mind link.
“Be careful. They’re strong, and they have weapons.”
Once he left, I stumbled into the pack house. Sina pushed me down onto the couch. I held a large hand over my abdomen to hold the bleeding wound closed, my chest rising and falling quickly. As Sina scrambled through the house to find the medical supplies, I took a deep breath, bit my tongue, and slipped my fingers down into the gash. I felt around my insides to try to find the bullet, but it was lodged too deep.
When Sina came back over to me, she stared at me in horror. “What are you doing?!” she exclaimed, pushing my hands out of the way and using a utensil to slide into my wound. “You have to be careful! You can’t just poke around inside there.”
Within a few moments, Sina clamped down on the bullet with the utensil, winced, and slowly pulled the bullet out of me. She dropped it into a small dish, then cleaned the wound with some alcohol and some potion that we had bought from witches who lived down in Durnbone.
“What did they lace this bullet with?” Sina asked, picking the piece of metal up with the utensil once more and examining it. Suddenly, her cheeks paled, and she dropped the bullet and utensil into the dish. “No. No, no, no, no, no.”
“It’s wolfsbane, Sina,” I said.
“No,” she whispered, standing to her feet. “It’s not. You’re lying to me.”
“What?”
“My father experiments with this stuff.” She shook her head. When she tore her gaze away from mine, a wave of guilt washed over me. “You knew that this was my father’s men and didn’t want to say anything to me, didn’t you?”
