AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Pain began to overwhelm my senses, hot and sharp, and I imagined I'd died and managed to escape to a paradise beyond. But this didn’t feel serene. What I’d felt was… was… well…
Ouch.
The more I woke up, the more pain I was in, leaving me to wonder if I'd indeed died in battle.
I was surprisingly unpanicked if that were the case, so I decided to just lie there and wait patiently for the world to start making sense again.
It did in small leaps—leaps accompanied by bouts of sharp agony. By the time I was conscious enough to recognize the infirmary, I almost wished I was knocked out again.
“Hey, medic! He’s awake!”
Medic? Had… had Everton found me and saved me just like she had Darka?
“So soon?”
That definitely wasn’t Ayla’s voice. It was much older, and for that matter, seemingly male.
“He shouldn’t be up yet. We gave him a very powerful sedative to aid in his own healing process.”
Forcing my eyelids open, I saw both Oren and an older man leaning over me. I realized I’d been pretty grievously injured, and someone must have hauled me to the infirmary and onto one of their cots.
“Where is she?” I said.
“Where is who?”
“My fated mate?” Anger started to rise within me, a sharp spike of rage to go along with my confusion. “I’m pretty sure it’s neither ofyou.”
I didn’t care about other people’s sexual orientations, but I was pretty sure that my fated mate was a woman, considering I was solely attracted to the feminine form. My mate was also neither my adopted brother nor a random old man on the healing team.
But it wasn’t the first time I’d felt this, either. I'd been barely hanging on, sure, suspended somewhere between life and death, but I knew that it was the same presence that I'd felt three years earlier. The one I'd been searching for with no recourse.
“What are you talking about?” Oren murmured in genuine concern.
I shook my head, which turned out to be a shit idea. I groaned, my body going limp in pain. My head felt like the room was spinning in every angle.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” the older man said. “But you suffered serious injuries out there. While your kind does tend to heal much quicker than other cryptids, you were hit by a lot of magic and awholelot of silver in the battle.”
Thankfully, after thousands of years of evolution, shifters are no longer deathly allergic to iron or silver, or at least notgenerally. But it’s always trickier when it gets directly into the bloodstream, and magic users have developed curses to call up those ancient weaknesses.
“I was hit with silver?”
“Yes, there was a considerable amount of silver oxide in your lungs.”
That was nearly enough to make me forget about feeling my fated mate again, but it didn’t quite make the cut. I knew this was a concern, but all I really wanted to do was find the missing part of my soul.
“You should be dead,” Oren remarked, his stony face bringing me back to reality. “Mikhailov here says someone must have triaged you in the field for you to last long enough to make it here. Do you remember anything about that?”
“No,” I said with another shake of my head, then winced hard. Apparently I didn’t learn. “But I know my fated mate was there.”
“Ah, yes. Your fated mate. Do you remember anythingbesidesthat?”
I could tell he was patronizing me, and I summoned the best glare I could muster. “You don’t believe me.”
“I believe that you believe it’s true,” Oren said before looking to the medic. “How much pain medicine do you have him on? I know we shifters burn through that stuff superfast, but it’s important not to overdose us.”
“He seems lucid enough to me.” The medic bent forward, uncomfortably close as he looked in one eye and then the other. “Actually, Captain, you look piqued. How are your pain levels?”
“I’m not gonna lie, I wouldn’t mind something to take the edge off.” I was definitely still in pain, but I also wanted to clear my head so I could remember more details.
