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Basic first aid. Check for a pulse.
Gingerly, she pressed her fore and middle fingers to his neck. His skin was hot, but a faint flutter beat beneath her fingers. Relief washed over her. “Okay, so not dead.”
The hounds watched her.
“Fix him.” Yesterday stuck his mug in hers. “You need to fix him.”
“I’m not a doctor.” Eddie pressed him back. “He needs a doctor.”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Yesterday shook his head. “No doctors. Not ever. Never.”
“He’s hurt.” He was so battered; Eddie didn’t know where to touch him. Her heart squeezed. “Badly.”
“Yes.” Yesterday’s face folded into a frown. He pointed to a twelve-inch gash pumping blood from Shade’s side. “He has a mortal wound, and you must fix it.”
Mortal wounds sounded bad, like they needed a hospital bad. “We have to take him to a doctor. I don’t know anything about serious injuries or how to heal them.”
“I said, no,” Yesterday yelled, his voice going a deep, reverberating bass that transfixed Eddie for a moment. She wanted to ask where he kept that sound tucked in his little body. “You must fix him.” Yesterday paced the room, his arms circling again. “There must always be seven princes. Seven princes, seven archangels, seven guardians. Balance.” He glowered at Eddie as if his words should mean something. “Must always be balance or the whole thing goes bang.”
“What whole thing?” She was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Everything.” Yesterday quickened his pacing. “Heaven, earth, hell, all of it goes up in smoke if we don’t have balance.” He leaned closer to her. “I do not want to cease to be, so you must fix him.”
Eddie didn’t want Shade to cease to be either. When he wasn’t bleeding to death in her basement, she would think about why. For now though, he needed more help than she could give him, and she eyed the half a meter between Shade’s prone form and the hell gate. “What if we shove him back? There must be someone or something in hell that can help him?”
Both hell hounds moved as much of themselves as they could wedge between Shade and the hell gate. One lowered his head and bared his teeth at her. Eddie was going to go ahead and take that as a no on the tossing this big fish back.
“You can’t shove him back.” Yesterday gaped at her. “First, he’s a hell prince, and nobody shoves him anywhere. And second, he has a mortal wound.”
She was missing something. Like the part about how she was going to be of any use in the situation. “And?”
“And only another hell prince wielding an obsidian blade can give him that. Or an archangel with a heaven wrought blade, but that is neither here nor there.” Yesterday let the full weight of his scorn for her intelligence show. “Whoever gave him the mortal wound is waiting for him to go back. In fact”—Yesterday winced—“if we don’t move him away from the hell gate, they might be able to track him here.”
Way to bury the lede about another hell prince. “Right.” Eddie forced her mind to start working in a useful direction. She had an injured man…person…prince lying on the floor of her basement. Doctors and hospitals were out; sending him back was out. First aid. It was the best she could come up with. “Wait here,” she told Yesterday.
“Where are you going?” Yesterday scrambled after her.
“To get the first aid box.” She gestured to Shade. “I can try and patch him up a bit.” Not that a slap of Polysporin and a Band-Aid held much hope against his multiple injuries. This was so fucking out of her wheelhouse.
A hound blocked the door, red eyes looking redder than usual, filling the doorway with his sheer size.
It didn’t seem right to yell at it. “You need to move?”
The hound tilted his head.
“I need to get the first aid box.” She pointed to the area beyond its hairy shoulder. “It’s in the greenroom. Actually, there’s one in the rehearsal hall as well.”
“He’s nearly dead over here,” Yesterday yelled. “Command it to move.”
Yesterday was getting entirely too comfortable with the idea of her commanding things. She’d like to command his ass right out of here. “You wanna come over here and give that a try?”
There was definite intelligence in the hound’s gaze, like it was trying to understand her and convey meaning.
“I’m trying to help him,” she said to the hound. She then tried sending inner pictures of her tending Shade, but as that wasn’t exactly her thing, it could account for some of the confusion currently playing across the hound’s face.
A low groan sounded from Shade’s general direction. Eddie had once heard a cop say it was always the quiet ones at an accident scene you had to worry about. She was taking the groan as a positive sign. She was also reaching for any sliver of hope and mentally babbling. “I will help him,” she said.
On a grumble that sounded vaguely threatening, the hound eased out of the way.
