Mated Girl (Wolf Girl #4)(31)

My mind calculated any other option. We could fly into downtown Light Fey City and take Demi to their hospital, but odds are they wouldn’t treat her once they found out she was responsible for the prison break. We were already over Dark Fey Territory, coming up on Troll Village. There was no turning back now.
My fingers plugged holes inside of the tiny stomach that once held my son I’d never met. I had an out-of-body experience then. How was this real? Everything was going fine. Demi was in my arms. We’d almost had her wolf. How was this happening?
Walsh ripped his shirt into strips as he tried in vain to stop the bleeding. How could someone so small bleed so much?
God, please don’t take her. I reached out to the universe. I was a man of science, not one of spirituality, but I could be persuaded to believe in anything right now.
Anything for Demi.
Reaching up with my free hand, I did something I’d been scared to do since she lost consciousness. I felt for a pulse at her neck.
‘Hold on, my love.’ I tried to find her through our bond, like maybe there I could save her, hold her somehow … but she was all dark, gone. It left me feeling empty, and the desperation I’d initially felt when I first landed in prison fell over me like a thick fog.
Thumps lightly beat against my finger. Thump. Thump. I froze. It was faint, but she had a pulse.
“Please go faster!” I growled at the female troll. She peered back at Demi limp in my arms and soaked in blood and all the color drained from her face. Tears lined her eyes, rolling down her cheeks, and she nodded.
I had yet to meet a person who truly knew Demi and didn’t absolutely love her. Even the troll woman did, you could see it in her eyes. If Demi died, the devastation that it would leave behind would be felt by every single person who knew her.
I can’t think like that right now.
Sage was fumbling with a cell phone. Why, I didn’t know. There was no one to call. We had no hospital and I was assuming the medical ward in Paladin Village wasn’t equipped for this.
“Eugene, Demi’s been shot. Tell Astra to prepare to heal her,” Sage said quickly into the phone, and a flicker of hope surged inside of me.
If Astra really could heal someone near death, if she was waiting and ready when we landed … maybe Demi would make it…
As we flew over the tall gothic buildings of Vampire City, my face turned into a scowl. The vampires were responsible for nearly every recent problem in my life. Looking back, I glanced at Luka, the only decent bloodsucker I knew. He wore a mask of pain; it danced across his face before slipping away into a cold hard stare. After what Luka had been through, what it must be like right now to look down on his old home … I couldn’t imagine it. He met my gaze and I nodded once.
He returned it.
That was that. An unspoken bond. I would take his story to the grave with me, but he knew I knew, and that meant he wasn’t alone. Sometimes grief needed to be shared or it would suffocate you under the weight of it. Luka had shared his grief with me, and now I carried a little bit of it so that he could breathe. Hypothetically, since vampires didn’t actually breathe.
Demi’s pulse fluttered under my index finger and I whimpered, my focus back on her. She had to make it, she just had to.
The dragon started to descend over the Wild Lands as Sage barked directions from her place behind me. I’d never been to Paladin Village. I’d grown up hating their people, and when I’d finally wanted to go there, to be with Demi and support her, I’d had that damn ankle monitor on.
“Come on!” I shouted, knowing that yelling wouldn’t help anything, but it made me feel slightly better anyway.
If the medical ward there had an IV kit, I could at the very least transfer some of my blood to Demi. My mind raced with medical knowledge and procedures I could try if only I had the right tools. Next year I would have started medical school, but I did enough in my training that I knew how to suture and do an intravenous vein puncture.
I wondered if Dr. Pearson had survived the past year and if he was in the village right now. He was the top surgeon we had, but without the right tools or a proper operating room…
“There!” Sage pointed to a thicket of trees, and I looked just past them at what I assumed was Paladin Village.
Pearl descended and I gleaned a closer look.
Whoa. Shock ripped through me as my gaze fell on the wooden fence, tips sharpened to points. Inside was not the rough and tumble encampment I assumed it would be. I mean, it clearly had taken a beating, with some buildings looking like they were shelled out by bombs, but most of them were intact, and made fully of brick. Thousands of tents and makeshift huts dotted the roadways and open areas, and my heart swelled with hope that some of those people were my pack.
I looked down at Demi.
Our pack.
There was no them or us anymore. It was we. Paladin, city wolf, we needed to unite if we wanted to end this war, and that started right here with Demi and I. Together. I looked back up at the farmlands in the distance and was surprised to see the rolling green hills dotted with row upon row of food. It looked like corn and lettuce and other edible things. I realized then that the Paladins had something that the city wolves didn’t: a knowledge they could teach us so that we might just survive the next few months.
The dragon tried to find a spot to land, but there were people everywhere. Children running and playing. Tents and backpacks littered the roads.
Demi’s heartbeat suddenly stopped and panic surged so quickly inside of me that my wolf nearly lurched out of my body.
“She’s crashing!” I shouted, as alpha power slapped out of me and pressed in on everyone riding the dragon.