Remington Denier wasn’t most people. He wasn’t even most alphas; he’d spent five years of his life working on race cars before he decided he didn’t want to roam alone anymore, his hunger to set up a pack of his own a bone-deep pulse in his body. He’d set it up all right, but now he had to hold it together. Today, however, his days testing how cars handled on the track, combined with his night vision and heightened hand-eye coordination, kept them from going over cliffs or slamming into trees.
“Cat.” A faint sound from the back.
“What?”
“Zaira—internal bleeding. Gunshot wound. Abdomen.”
“Got it,” Remi said, knowing the pack’s healer would need every detail he could give him. “What else?”
“Small implants. Embedded in our brains,” Aden ground out between short, rough breaths. “We got them out, but there could be damage.”
Fuck, that did not sound good.
“Zaira’s laser seal needs to be broken, the internal repairs checked.”
“I’ll tell Finn,” Remi said, but when he asked Aden to explain further and received only silence in return, he realized the Arrow leader had lost his battle with consciousness. Just as well—at least Remi didn’t have to worry about revealing the location of RainFire’s central base. He’d taken his cue from the DarkRiver leopards and set up a public HQ, while ensuring the pack’s heart remained protected and off the grid.
However, unlike with DarkRiver, RainFire cats weren’t spread out across their territory. Such closeness could’ve been a source of primal tension since leopards weren’t natural pack animals. It was the human side of changeling felines that made them want to create large extended families; in ordinary circumstances, the cat’s need for space was accommodated by having plenty of land area between packmates.
That wouldn’t work for RainFire. They just didn’t have enough people and resources to function as a united pack while scattered over the territory. One day, that would happen, but for now, their struggle for survival as a pack had trumped the need for space. Not that packmates didn’t go off on their own now and then—he’d convinced a number of loners to join him in setting up RainFire, after all. But they always returned because RainFire was now home, their loyalty sworn and unbreakable.
Screeching to a stop beneath the sprawling network of aeries built in the massive trees in the heart of their territory, permanent bridges connecting aeries and retractable rope ladders going down trunks, he hit the horn in the emergency pulse. Senior packmates boiled out into the rain-lashed dark a heartbeat later, including their healer, Finn.
RainFire had lucked out snagging Finn—at a couple of years past forty in age, he was highly skilled and had full medical qualifications as well as a powerful gift. His birth pack had been sorry to see him go when he joined RainFire as one of the founding members, but had understood his choice; the healer who’d trained Finn had decades more life left in him, as well as another apprentice, and Finn was too strong to be anything but the senior healer in a pack.
As it was, he’d spent his adult life volunteering to assist packs who’d lost their healers and who didn’t have a trainee old enough to step into the position. It had given him an incredible breadth of experience—he’d been to even more places in the world than Remi, mentored countless young healers who needed time to come into their own—but he’d been desperately lonely. Healers needed their own packs to nurture, needed family around them. Remi had never met a healer who was also a loner. It appeared to be an impossible combination.
Having hauled open the back door, Finn went to check Aden.
“No,” Remi said. “He was clear she was the more critical. Internal bleeding, abdomen.”
Finn went clawed and just tore a hole through the woman’s clothing to check her stomach. Swearing hard and low seconds later, he grabbed her in his arms. “Get the male inside!” he said as he began to turn to run to the infirmary. “He’s losing blood from somewhere!”
“Shit.” Remi had thought the scent was all from the woman, that Aden had simply surrendered to exhaustion and cold.
Throwing the Arrow leader over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, as the other man didn’t appear to have gut wounds, he followed Finn to the infirmary—a large open room in a ground-level cabin—and placed Aden on a bed next to the one where Finn was already working on Zaira. Finn’s shirt was plastered to his body and his light brown hair dark from the rain, but Zaira had his unflinching attention.
Finn’s nurse, Hugo, and another member of the pack who had some medical training took over the instant Remi had Aden on the bed, stripping the Arrow leader of his camouflage green jacket and cutting through his sweater in their search for his injuries.