Shards of Hope(27)

“He said they had some kind of an implant in their heads,” Remi told Finn. “They got it out—fuck knows how—but there could be damage.”

“Jesus.” Having turned Aden onto his side, Hugo hissed out a breath, the long braid in which he wore his black hair falling over his shoulder. “No wonder the back of his sweater is soaked in blood.” A pause as Hugo peeled away a bloody bandage. “Oh, hell, he’s got what looks like an unsealed wound at the back of his head.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Finn muttered, his eyes focused on the woman; her abdomen didn’t look right even to Remi’s untrained eyes, the jagged tear of the bullet that had violently exited her body a further insult.

Finn ran a scanner over her stomach. “This is bad. She should be dead, would be if someone hadn’t sealed the major bleeds.”

“Fix her first,” Remi said, knowing in his gut the Arrow leader would’ve made the same call. He hadn’t missed the fact that Aden had focused totally on her injuries when he’d been losing blood from what, to Remi’s eyes, looked like a seriously bad head wound.

“Finn,” Hugo said, having slit Aden’s pant leg along one side, “he’s got a bullet wound to his upper thigh. Bullet’s still in there, I think.”

As Finn barked out orders, Remi stared at the Arrow who’d walked who knew how long a distance through storm-lashed terrain with a bullet in his thigh and a bleeding head wound, all while supporting his wounded squadmate. The man was a serious threat, but Remi would have a difficult time killing him now. He was starting to like the stubborn Arrow.

Leaving Finn and his people to their work, he walked out into the wide corridor outside the infirmary to find his sentinels gathered around. Lark, Angel, and Theo all had damp hair, had no doubt made sure the all-wheel drive was safely parked and RainFire’s perimeter clear of threats. “Are we on generators?” He’d caught the telltale flicker of the lights a minute before.

“Just switched,” Lark said, her ebony skin flushed from within, as if she’d been running. “Comm lines went down fifteen minutes before the electricity. Best guess is that a lightning strike fried the conduit.”

“Damn.” RainFire was now effectively isolated from the rest of the world. The pack’s territory was in a dead zone as far as current satellites were concerned, which meant that if RainFire wanted satellite comms, they’d have to pay for a satellite of their own. The pack was too young to have that kind of money.

“How long can we run the generators?” Changelings were more resistant to cold than humans or Psy, but RainFire had cubs who wouldn’t last long if the heating went out. Should that be a risk, Remi would find a way to get them to civilization.

“Days,” Theo said, his tanned skin belying the current weather. “That’s why Lark and I blew the budget. We got the green version that we can run with fucking vegetable scraps if that’s all we have.”

“Sometimes,” Remi said, “I remember why I asked you degenerates to join the pack.”

The cousins bumped fists. They’d been roaming alone when Remi first met them, having been on their own since they were teenagers after their tiny pack imploded as a result of a frankly selfish power struggle that had savaged pack bonds, but he’d never met any two who were less suited to being loners.

Big, quiet Theo had a marshmallow heart when it came to the cubs, while competent and outwardly hard-assed Lark was never as happy as when she was poking her nose into packmates’ lives and doing everything she could to smooth over any flare-ups or personality clashes.

Beside them, Angel, much more self-contained and solitary by nature, folded his arms. His “straight-from-a-marble-statue” bone structure, as described by Lark, combined with eyes of deep ultramarine and flawless brown skin, made him a magnet for both men and women—only Angel seemed to prefer to walk alone in every way.

Of all the people who had agreed to help Remi set up RainFire, it was Angel’s agreement that had most surprised him.

“We’ve got plenty of supplies,” the other man said. “We can wait this out, though it might take a few days. Last comm transmission I caught before lines went down said the meteorologists were calling this a once-in-two-hundred-years storm.”

“Yeah.” Lark’s elfin face twisted into a scowl. “Damn mountains seem to have forgotten it’s spring.”

Weather was always changeable in the Smokies during this part of the year, but the sentinels were right: it was never usually this bad. While RainFire had only been in the area approximately two and a half years, Remi had kept a sharp eye on the region over the past five years, ever since he’d targeted the land for the pack he wanted to build, and not once had the mountains turned this dark and wet and cold in spring.