Alpha (Shifters #6)(31)

I crouched to jump back into the action, but Keller grabbed a hunk of skin at the back of my neck, holding me still as no other creature on the face of the planet would have dared. But Keller had little to fear from werecats. He could easily take on several toms at once—I’d seen him do it.
I growled and tugged against him, not willing to actually hurt him, for both of our sakes.
“Hold up there, little girl. This’s gotta stop.” He stood, and I noticed several things at once as he dragged a gigantic breath into his titanic lungs.
My father threw a bone-crunching punch at one of the toms who’d come to arrest us—he’d reclaimed a gun from somewhere. The tom brought his pistol up. My father knocked it away with a more nimble kick than I’d seen from him in years.
Movement on the left drew my gaze. Colin Dean stepped out of the woods holding his gun, flanked by two unarmed toms in human form.
Elias Keller roared, a deep bellow that sang in every cell in my body. I could practically see the shockwave flow over the crowd as his sound reached us.
Everyone froze, midblow. Heads swiveled his way. Obviously we weren’t the only ones who could Shift one part at a time—if that sound had come from a human throat, I was a werewolf bitch in heat.
“I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doin’, but this is my land. My home. Now you retract your claws and back down, or I’m gonna start a cat graveyard on the side of my mountain.”
Jaws dropped. Fists lowered slowly. Heads—both human and feline—turned, searching out Alphas who had the authority to make the final call on a cease-fire.
Something clicked on my left, as loud as thunder against the new silence. I turned toward the sound to see Dean staring across the paused chaos, his weapon raised. I followed his line of sight to see my father standing over the tom he’d taken down, holding the repossessed gun.I screeched.
Keller roared.
Dean’s gun flashed in the dark.
I tore free from Keller’s grasp and shot across the grass, leaping over prone bodies, dodging those still in motion.
I was too late.
My father lurched to one side. He staggered backward. A dark red bloom unfurled across his white shirt. My dad hit the ground. I screamed as I leaped, a horrible yowling that echoed in the shocked silence. My paws hit the grass and I collapsed next to him, nudging his head with my muzzle.
He was breathing, but the sound was wet. Labored.
Toms dropped to the ground at my side, nudging him with cat noses or asking questions he seemed unable to answer. No one seemed to know what to do.
Finally someone pushed me out of the way to tear my father’s shirt open, and I looked up to find Keller holding Dean’s gun. Dean lay on the ground at his feet, unmoving. When everyone not gathered around my dad warily watched the bruin instead of dispersing from the fight, he roared again. Cats scattered in all directions. As they fled, Keller stomped toward us. His huge fist clenched around the pistol and it shattered like plastic. Bits of gun fell on the grass behind him like a bread-crumb trail.
“Oh…Greg, can you talk?” Bert Di Carlo asked, leaning over my father. His hands hovered over the blood rose still blooming, and suddenly I wished I couldn’t see quite so well in the dark.
Uncle Rick shook his head. “Don’t make him talk.”
“We have to get him inside,” Jace said, while Marc rubbed his cheek along my flank, his feline gaze glued to my father. He whined in harmony with me, sharing my distress the only way he could in cat form.
“What the hell happened?” Aaron Taylor demanded. He’d been fighting on the fringes when I’d last seen him.
“That flaxen-haired pip-squeak over there shot him.” Keller pointed to where Dean lay motionless on the edge of the tree line, surrounded by several of his own men. I hoped he was dead. I hoped Keller had popped his skull like a rotten pumpkin. If my father weren’t bleeding and struggling to breathe, I’d have gone over to desecrate Dean’s body myself, laughing hysterically at the thought of the Nordic giant being called a pip-squeak. No one but Keller could possibly consider him small.
“Let’s get him inside.” Keller wedged his way into the huddle and picked my father up like a baby, then followed as Di Carlo led the way to our cabin.
Marc and Jace flanked me all the way. If they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known where I was going. I couldn’t stop the whine leaking from my throat or the ache deep in my chest, as if I shared some echo of my father’s pain, eclipsing all of my own wounds.
My father was the single most powerful person in my life. Seeing him helpless was wrong. So fundamentally, earthshakingly wrong that I couldn’t even properly process the sight. 
So I blocked it out. I busied the front of my mind with a running list of things that would need to be done—first aid, call my mom, eviscerate Colin Dean or desecrate his corpse, whichever proved necessary—while the back of my mind chanted a mantra over and over. He’ll be fine. He’s not gonna die. He’ll be fine. He’s not gonna die. He’llbefinehe’snotgonnadie…
He couldn’t die, because my world wouldn’t make sense without him. I was literally a part of my father. He’d shaped my entire life, even down to my rebellious youth, by giving me options. Challenges. Expectations. Standards. Honor. Respect. And I wasn’t done with that. He had more to give, and I was ready to receive it.
He couldn’t die. I wouldn’t let him.
In the cabin, Keller laid him on the couch in the midst of an agonizing, respectful silence. I checked to make sure he was still breathing, then Shifted right there in the living room, while Uncle Rick carefully cut my father’s shirt the rest of the way off, jaw clenched against his own pain and rage.
When I stood two minutes later, Marc was still Shifting, but Jace was there with my robe. He wrapped it around me and I tied the waist, barely noticing I was covered in goose bumps. Not to mention gashes, puncture wounds, and scratches.
“Someone call Dr. Carver.” I dropped onto my knees and applied pressure to the cloth over the hole in my father’s chest, taking over for my uncle, who moved to make room for me. Panic loomed within me, demanding attention, but I shoved it back and focused on the job at hand: fixing my father. Nothing else mattered.
My dad blinked up at me, and though his face was lined in agony, his eyes were dry. Mine were not.
“The doc’s plane won’t land for another hour.” Di Carlo ran one hand through thick gray hair—no doubt what Vic’s would look like in a few years.
“Okay.” I blinked to clear more tears. “What can we do, then? Clean the wound? Give him something for the pain? There has to be something.” My dad’s breathing sounded funny. Wet, like he was sucking in each breath through a leaky straw. We had to fix that.
A hand wrapped around my arm and pulled me gently to my feet. When I turned I found myself in my uncle’s arms. He held me so tight I could hardly breathe, and I fought sobs with every bit of will I had left, to keep my father from hearing me cry. Uncle Rick led me into the kitchen, but I refused to leave the doorway. Whatever he wanted to say could be said within sight of my father. I would not leave him.
“Faythe, hon, there’s nothing we can do.”
“I know. But Dr. Carver will know what to do, and we need to have everything ready for him.” I scrubbed my face with my hands, trying desperately to get my thoughts together. “We brought a first aid kit. It’s not massive, but it has the basics. We can…we can at least stop the bleeding, right?”
My uncle closed his eyes, and when his gaze met mine again, I shook my head in denial of the inevitability I saw in his. Of the grief and the growing acceptance. “We can’t stop the internal bleeding. And it sounds like he has a punctured lung, Faythe, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”
“No…”
“Yes.” He put his hands on my shoulders and made me look at him. “Faythe, your father is dying. He only has a few minutes left. So you need to decide what you want those minutes to be like. If there’s anything you want him to know, you need to say it now. We’ll deal with everything else later.”
Tears came again. They poured down my face, and I nearly choked on sobs. I couldn’t stand it. The fear burning inside me consumed all logic, devoured all hope. This black terror threatened my faith in the very concept of justice—the idea that it was even possible. There wasn’t enough pain in all of existence to make Dean pay for what he’d done.Uncle Rick handed me a dish towel and I scrubbed my face with it. My dad couldn’t be dying. He was only fifty-seven. That was too young to die. That was too young to do anything but nag his daughter for grandchildren.
But my uncle was right, and in spite of intense, insistent denial, I knew that. I felt it.
I dropped the towel on the table and took a deep breath. Then made myself take another. And another. Then I steeled my spine and walked back into the living room, suddenly aware of the murmuring and the stares. Marc knelt next to my father, talking to him quietly. My father gripped his hand and whispered something I couldn’t hear, and Marc nodded. “I swear,” he said, and I could see the cracks in his composed veneer. This was breaking him, like it was breaking me, and our anguish had no equal.
Jace stood near Marc, watching me. He touched Marc’s shoulder, and they both moved aside.