Curiously, the idea his work was done was deflating.
He just had that one up on Deer Mountain left to deal with.
And then he was finished ahvenging his kin.
In the split second before he dematerialized, he detonated his chain of explosives—and courtesy of his boom-booms, he was escorted out by a violent push of air and a toxic chemical stink.
He rather felt like his life’s work was ending.
And couldn’t decide how he felt about that.
ELEVEN
IT WAS ALL a blur.
As Xhex ran down the training center’s corridor, the gray cement walls, ceiling, and floor were like the interior of a gun’s muzzle, and her body was the bullet. And like any slug of lead, she felt nothing of the experience of propulsion, neither the acceleration nor its origins in her legs nor the slamming of her heart or burning in her lungs.
But she was aware of one thing.
She smelled the blood of her mate.
With panic her fuel and dread her tailwind, she followed the scent of disaster to the clinic’s operating room—and when she arrived at the closed door, she tripped and fell, scattering her limbs on the hard floor. Before anyone could help her up, she dragged herself back to her feet and pushed her way into the—
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
Just as she entered, the unforgettable sound rang out, and her eyes flipped to the monitor behind John Matthew, who lay on the operating table covered with blood. The flat line was inching across the black rectangle at the bottom, taking over from the uneven peaks and valleys that represented his cardiac rhythm—
“Code!”
Xhex reached forward, as if she could do anything, but somebody held her back as Doc Jane jumped up on the table, straddled John’s hips, and began chest compressions. At his head, Ehlena slapped a mask on his face and started bagging him.
“Pushing epinephrine,” Manny announced at the IV site.
“What happened,” Xhex mumbled. “What’s happening…”
Without warning, her knees went loose under her and she went down onto the tile—and that was when everything came into heartbreaking focus. All of John’s clothes had been cut off, and there appeared to be nothing wrong on the bottom half of him. But what did that matter when he’d been shot in the heart.
“Thirty,” Ehlena said briskly.
“John?” Xhex called out as she watched his blood stain Doc Jane’s knees. “John, stay here. Don’t go…”
She looked at the monitor again. The numbers that represented his blood pressure were shockingly low, and that line remained flat.
“Sixty,” Ehlena announced.
Is time passing? Xhex thought dimly as she clasped her hands together and brought them up to the front of her throat.
Sweat beaded Doc Jane’s forehead as she continued with the chest compressions, her straight-arm, palm-over-palm pumping, replacing by force that which should have run by electrical impulse—
“Let’s go outside.”
The male voice was familiar and close by Xhex, but the recognition didn’t come and she didn’t glance at whoever it was. As another time stamp was called out, she was convinced that if she looked away, the resuscitation attempt would stop… as if her presence, her love for the powerful fighter who lay motionless in the center of all the effort, was the engine for the lifesaving attempt.
“One thirty,” Ehlena called out as she kept bagging.
“Xhex, leave them to work—we need to wait in the corridor.”
Who was talking, she thought numbly as she focused on Ehlena’s hand as it fisted… fisted… fisted… in the same kind of reliable rhythm as the pump, pump, pump up on John’s sternum.
Abruptly, her hearing sharpened and everything got too loud: Doc Jane had on a necklace with a charm that was sliding back and forth on the links, a chiming, metal-on-metal shift releasing as it swung. The bag had a strangely dry blow-and-suck rhythm. Blood was dripping off the far end of the table, from the pool that had formed under his ribs. And then there was the alarm from the monitor, and Manny’s heavy breathing as if he were joining Doc Jane’s effort in spirit.
Likewise, someone was gasping right behind her—
“Two minutes.”
At Ehlena’s announcement, everything stopped. The chest compressions. The bagging. The movement in the whole world.
Xhex’s eyes locked on the monitor, on that flat line. On those very bad numbers.
“Come on, we need to go—”
It was that male voice again, in her ear, and then strong hands gathered her from the floor and removed her from the room even though she pushed at them, fought against them.
Manny called out, “Pushing epi—”
As the door shut on its own, she knew that that antiseptic, tiled room, with its stainless steel instruments and medical equipment, was the last place John needed to die. He should be in her arms; she should be holding him.
Rehv’s face got right into hers. “Look at me—”
“What happened?” She gripped the front of his fine silk suit. “How was he injured!”
But like the details mattered anymore? Details only counted when you could do something with them to change the outcome.
She looked around at the faces that surrounded her, ones she knew so well, ones who had brought her here from the club, who had come for her in person, a lineup she knew she never, ever wanted to see.
“How did it happen—”
“He took a bullet for me.”
The anguished intrusion brought everyone’s head around. Tohr was leaning out of the exam room next door, blood running down his face and coating his bare chest with a red sheen.
“We were in the field,” he said hoarsely. “Chasing two shadows…”
Behind him, Xhex’s mahmen, Autumn, appeared, her pale hand resting on her mate’s bloody forearm. As her terrified eyes lifted, all Xhex could think of was…
Motherfucker. They were both going to lose the love of their life tonight if John died.
Tohr was never going to get over this, especially given how much he had already been through.
The Brother wiped his face with a trembling hand. “We ran right into a drug deal going wrong. The three humans were shooting at each other—and the second they saw us, we became their targets. I was hit twice, and then John jumped in front of me. He… he took the bullet that would have gone right into my head. He just leapt up and…”
As the words were choked off, the look of anguish that came over the male’s face galvanized Xhex. Before she knew she was going to move, she shoved Rehv out of the way and launched herself at the Brother, bringing him down to her level by the shoulders as she reached for her mahmen as well.
“Tohr—”
“Oh, God,” he moaned. “He took it to save me. The bullet…”
As the fighter dropped his head onto her shoulder, Xhex dragged her mahmen in close and had a strange moment of release—not from her terror, but certainly from her sense that, however much the Brotherhood and other fighters were hurting, the magnitude of her emotions separated her from everyone else: Now there was one other person who felt this tragedy as deeply as she did—
Autumn returned her embrace, the female’s arms reaching around as much as she could of her mate and her young.