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But I couldn’t when the vampire and shifters in my escort were more than capable of catching up to me. Besides, I was far back enough from the line that it wasn’t like I was in danger of being engaged.
I was most certainly “doing my thing”, as Darla would've said. I found the person who was calling my name: a shifter impaled with a spear through her middle, the blade dug into the ground.
“Can you break this off as close to their wound as possible?” I asked without looking at them. Thankfully, the leader of my escort didn’t seem to take any offense to this. Instead, a pale, parchment-colored hand reached past me and gripped the spear handle about a foot away from the shifter’s chest. Then she squeezed, and the area shattered.
The wounded shifter let out a howl, blood spraying from her mouth in the process. I felt bad for her, but it would be better soon.
“Hey, it’s gonna be okay. I got you, all right? I just need you to bear this out a few more minutes.”
To the shifter’s credit, she just gritted her red teeth and nodded.
“Here, help me lift her off it,” I said, rolling up the sleeves that'd fallen back down with the last person I’d helped.
“Are you sure?” one of my escorts asked. I'd have to learn his name later, but at that moment, he was just another person wasting time by questioning my healing expertise.
“Shut up and do what she says,” the vampire said, her voice as smooth as honey but utterly, inescapably demanding.
“Yes, ma’am!”
Two of the shifters took a hold of the wounded’s arms and pulled them up while the vampire supported her middle. I'd never do such a thing to other cryptids, but shifters were a whole different matter. Their accelerated healing could be just as much of a curse as it was a gift. If I’d given her a potion or tried to staunch the bleeding while she was impaled, her skin, muscle, and possibly even one of her organs would’ve fused to the spear, and I'd have had to essentially rip her open to free her from the wound.
Unsurprisingly, the woman let out a horrid scream as she was completely lifted off the spear. It wasn’t pleasant, but I’d heard worse. I was definitely going to give her commanding officer a glowing report of how she’d held up during the process.
First, it was finally time to actually treat her.
“Set her down,” I said sharply, kneeling beside her and supporting her head with my hand. “Here, drink this.”
She fluttered her eyelids in what I assumed was the best version of a nod she could muster, her lips sealing around the head of the vial. I watched as she chugged it, and while she was no Darla, I was impressed.
But a regeneration position wasn’t a magical panacea that would fix everything. It needed guidance. I’d read horror stories when I was first learning their complicated anatomy aboutregeneration potions working a littletoowell with their healing abilities, causing them to grow extra limbs, double up on their organs, or even force a shift. None of those were desirable, even if they did sound like the origin of a superhero comic, so I pressed my free hand to her forehead and sent my magic out into her.
It wasn’t the most difficult work, plucking the threads of her body’s response and guiding them in the appropriate direction. It was almost like sewing in a morbid way: weaving the threads of health, reconstructing them into the appropriate pattern.
If she were my actual patient and we were in the infirmary, I'd spend the next half hour seeing through the entire process, making sure the wound closed properly from the inside out. Too many times, I’d seen shifters heal the opposite way, trapping disease and infection within themselves, forcing us to cut them back open and drain out the massive amount of pus their bodies could generate all at once.
Well,wecould regenerate it all at once. It was easy for me to detach myself from my own shifter nature as a healer, as I largely relied on my witch abilities and knowledge over my wolf side.
Granted, my sense of smell was an asset when picking out other wounded. There was a certain richness, a heady importance to too much blood spilling from one person. I liked to think of it as a built-in warning system to my senses, letting me pick out who needed the most help and where.
“There,” I said, taking my hand away from the woman and standing up. Already her color looked better, and she was able to hold herself up in a sitting position. “Get her to the infirmary.”
Maybe I was a little too casual about how easily I ordered my escort around. After all, they all outranked me, but something always came over me in such dire situations. I felt stern but cool, willing to do whatever was needed to make sure I was doing my job to the best of my ability.
Thankfully, the vampire seemed to get it. She nodded to another shifter in my escort, and they helped my patient to her feet, guiding her back in the direction of the main fort walls. I was relieved to see that they were no longer being barraged with fire missile after fire missile, but I was less enthused knowing that those same munitions were being used against our people.
I couldn’t just stand there and pout about it, though, so I moved on. I went from area to area, healing the wounded as quickly as I possibly could. Not everyone was as straight forward as the impaled shifter. I found a vampire who was barely alive, a suffocation spell thick around their throat. They wouldn’t die, but they'd be locked in stasis until their blood was able to circulate through them again. Thankfully, I had a potion on me to subvert it, and a few magical pulses to their heart and a sprig of mint in their mouth had them righting themselves and rejoining the battle. Another harpy was grounded, her eyes unseeing, one of her wings coated in a thick, acidic glue that was slowly eating through it.
The blindness was easy enough to absolve. All I needed to do was throw moon water at her face, mutter a cleansing smell, then spit in the mud and smear that across her eyelids, rinsing it with more moon water. Was it gross? Yes. But it worked.
The goo, however, was much trickier, and it took several curse-nullifying potions with different focuses before I finally found something that made it melt away. There was a retardant potion to slow down her entire body’s systems, and a regeneration potion to help her gain more blood and skin back before her body sped back up again.
It all began to blend together, though, as I slogged through the hurt and the dead. My vision practically adjusted itself to pick up the different shades of red that so often signaled an injury. There was so much sulfur and blood in the air that I could no longer rely on my sense of smell alone.
I even lost track of how many people I was healing, or even where I was on the battlefield. It was just me and the next patient, then stabilizing them so they could get to safety. It probably wasn’t the best strategy, but it was also a protection measure. If I actually scanned my home turned battlefield, and if I took the time to actually comprehend the immensity of my work, I'd be far too overwhelmed to be of any use. I could feel my healing abilities flagging as it was, pushed to extremes they weren’t used to.
I’d always been a workhorse, and I’d long since found that my secret shifter nature gave me more energy to call on than my fellow witches, while also allowing myself to heal from magical overstrain that much faster. But even with all that, I could feel the tell-tale warnings that I was pushing myself too hard, too far.
So, I did what any healer in wartime would do and promptly ignored it.
