Page 22 of Starting a New Life

Suspicion clouded his eyes, but he didn’t attack me. My eyes darted back to the barrier. The wolves out there were a far bigger threat than these two.

“He wants his brother by his side. He wants you to fucking man up,” the wolf shouted, his voice echoing in the forest.

“You mean he wants me to turn straight?” The injured wolf’s laugh turned into a pained cough. Colour drained from his face, and his energy rapidly vanished.

“He wants you to be normal. A real wolf. Someone he can be proud of.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose as I listened to them shouting, anger boiling low in my gut as the picture of what was going on got clearer and clearer. I knew packs like theirs. Had stayed with them often enough to know it wasn’t out of the ordinary for packs to be as assholishly backwards as many humans were.

“Keep them talking,” I whispered. The injured wolf’s head snapped to me, eyes going wide as he took me in. “Help’s coming.” I didn’t know a lot about the pack, but there was no doubt in my mind that they were on the way. After all, they always chased after my stalkers.

They both looked at me wearily, but the exhaustion was taking over fast.

“Trust me,” I whispered and took another step in their direction, and then another one until I went to my knees next to the injured teen. He was bleeding heavily from a harsh wound on his lower leg that looked like… “Did someone bite you?”

“He got my leg when we crossed the border,” the teen whispered, his voice hoarse and weak, filled with an anguish no one his age should know.

“I can help,” I explained, hoping to hell I was telling the truth. My magic was hanging on by a thread. Healing someone right now was a stupid idea, but… this was an injured kid. It didn’t matter that he was also a shifter; he was a kid. “But I’ll have to touch you.”

I really hoped I could help him. Bites could be tricky, and with my magic so low, I wasn’t sure how much I could do, but…

The wolf gave a short, barely visible nod.

I immediately reached out and pressed my bare hand right to the wound. He howled in pain, and I winced in sympathy. It hurt. I knew it did. If I were stronger and not in a time crunch with extremely volatile shifters hovering outside the barrier, I’d have tried numbing him first.

The wolf on the other side made taunting remarks, but I ignored him.

The kid’s wound was nasty, and he was too drained for his advanced healing to kick in. The bone was broken, flesh shredded, veins torn. It was a mess. What if I made it worse? What if the pack found me and thought I was trying to kill him instead of trying to help him? What if…

His laboured breaths brought me back to the present, and I started pushing magic into him. It followed the path of destruction, mixing with his own energy’s futile attempts to heal him. I closed my eyes and carefully tried to find the worst damage to focus on first. Where was all the blood coming from? Exhaling, I followed the bloodstream until I found the artery responsible for all the blood and clamped it shut.

My forehead was wet from sweat, my hand trembling, still tightly clutching the wound.

The wolf was panting, his eyes blinking lazily.

The other one was doing what I’d told him, keeping the assholes busy by shouting obscenities at them.

I focused back on my patient, ignoring my body’s screams that I was taking too much. The well of magic inside me had already been dangerously low and was rapidly nearing empty, but I couldn’t stop now. My patient was losing consciousness. I needed to at least stop the blee—

A metallic click ripped through the night, stopping time itself dead in its tracks.

I saw the other kid’s eyes widen, but it was too late. A loud bang shredded the momentary silence, and the kid stumbled back, eyes wide with shock, hands grasping at his chest, blood rapidly leaking out from between his fingers.

A gun?

Those fucking wolves had guns?

My chest constricted as the kid stumbled, his mouth wide open but with no words coming out as he collapsed, crumpling to the ground.

My patient screamed, his aura swirling in utter terror as he shoved me towards his friend with more force than I’d thought possible.

“Help him! Oh, please, do something!”

Another shot ripped through the night, the bullet going nowhere at all.

Cruel laughter reached my ringing ears as I knee-walked to the other wolf and pressed my hands to his chest, desperately sending bursts of magic into him without assessing the situation first. I didn’t need to; I knew it was bad.

Really bad—and my fault. I’d told him to distract them. To keep them talking. Fuck. I hadn’t expected them to have guns. If I’d known… my vision swam, tears running down my face as more and more blood leaked from between my fingers.