“I am.” Donal did a quick internal assessment and felt his eyes widen. “In fact, I’m full up.”
Margery snickered. “Healer, that sounds more like a car than a shifter.” Rising, she looked around the tent, eyes narrowed. Assessing. Triaging.
She filled his heart to overflowing.
As Tynan pulled him to his feet, Donal exchanged smiles with him. Their mate was back where she belonged.
Hours later, Tynan and his crew carried the last of the wounded to the dining tent on the festival grounds.
The battle was over. Was won—but at such a cost. His chest ached where bonds to several pack members had been severed by violent death. Dread lingered inside him because he didn’t know who’d survived…and who hadn’t.
It wasn’t only wolves. The cats. The bears. They’d died fighting for their people. Their clans.
With a sigh, he bent, eased the groggy panther off his shoulders and onto a blanket. He stroked the cat’s fur and murmured, “I’ll get someone over here to see you.”
Looking around, he spotted one of the injured, and his heart lifted. “Warren.”
“Uh. Hey, Beta.” The young male was curled up on a blanket. Bandages around his chest were bloodstained, and he winced when he tried to sit up. “You made it.”
“As did you. I went back for you, but Donal said Ben found you first.” Tynan looked away until the stinging in his eyes diminished. “You looked pretty bad when I left you.”
Warren gave him a rueful smile. “You told me to hide and hold out. Figured you’d bite me if I fucked that up.”
“You figured right.” The words came out a growl Tynan hadn’t intended.
Warren’s gaze dropped. “I wasn’t watching close enough. I almost stepped on that human.”
“What happened was simply the way things go sometimes in a fight.” Tynan shook his head. “What no one ever tells you is how fucking exhausting a battle is. We ran for miles. Stalked, fought, killed—for hours. That kind of fear, the intensity of fighting for your life—it’s draining.”
“Oh.” Warren rubbed his face. “I guess, yeah, I was dragging. Still…”
“Pup, we took out six well-armed, experienced soldiers. If you hadn’t been doing an excellent job, the first one would have killed us.”
“Six?” Warren’s mouth dropped open. “I…after the first couple, the rest are kind of a blur.”
“You did good; You can be my battle-mate anytime.”
The worry cleared from Warren’s expression. After helping the lad lie back down, Tynan started across the tent, looking for Donal.
Instead, he spotted Patrin and Fell who were teasing Joe Thorson for being wounded.
Tynan almost smiled. When the two shifter-soldiers had blundered badly upon first arriving in Cold Creek, Joe was assigned to teach them. It seemed they’d learned the werecat’s gruffness covered a caring heart.
“Tynan,” Patrin greeted, and Fell nodded. The two looked tired but…satisfied. How much anger had the shifter-soldiers stored up for the Scythe in a decade of captivity?
“Road blocks gone?” Tynan asked.
“Yeah.” Patrin shrugged. “It got a bit dicey, but we got it done. No one escaped.”
“We wondered…” Fell frowned. “Are we sure we got all the mercs in the forest?”
“Calum asked the bears to spiral outward and around the area,” Tynan said. Bears had better noses than other shifters. “They’ll sniff out any human still in the forest—and ensure we have no wounded left out there.”
Patrin smiled. “Perfect.”
Tilting his head at the white dressing on the old werecat’s side, Tynan asked, “You all right, Joe?”
“Caught a bullet. Donal repaired where it’d nicked the intestines, and Margery slapped a dressing over the hole. They’re a good team,” Joe said.
Tynan looked around.
Meggie was teaching a younger shifter how to elevate a leg and apply groin pressure to control leg bleeding until Donal could get there. A young shifter stood at the wounded female’s feet. Doing…nothing.
To Tynan’s surprise, he spotted Donal on the other side of the tent. The cant of his head showed he was healing someone. “He’s still moving? Even with Meggie’s help, I thought he’d be flat out by now.”
“I saw him reeling, but the banfasa hugged him, and he was all right again,” Patrin said.
“She’s done that a few times,” Thorson agreed. “And she got this tent organized faster than a brownie on cleaning day. When the treeway cubs came in, she nabbed them for assistants and—see the one at the foot of the bed? In the red shirt?”
“Yeah, just standing there.”
“He’s the flag-pup. Shows Donal which shifter to heal next. Got a red one and a yellow, and Margery rearranges them so the healer never wastes his time figuring out who’s the worst off. She has it covered.”
“That’s brilliant.” Tynan smiled. “Knowing her, she’s also keeping everyone calm, too.”
“I thought that was my imagination.” The werecat’s eyes narrowed. “When she sat next to me to patch me up, it was like I knew everything would be all right.”
“She has a gift.”
“That’s why the younglings stick so close to her, isn’t it?” Patrin said.
Donal joined the red-shirted cub, said something that made him laugh, then knelt and started healing the female’s leg wound.
Meanwhile, Meggie rearranged her red and yellow-shirted cubs.
When the yellow-shirted one said something, Meggie grinned and hugged him.
The cub’s face lit.
Thorson nodded. “Aye, she has a gift, and the clan is the stronger for it.”
They were. So was Tynan.
Silently, they watched her tending the injured, dispensing peace and help in equal measures.
Tynan smiled. Because the three of them had made it through another battle alive and soon, they’d be together.
As Meggie moved toward the other end of the tent, Thorson gave Tynan a hard stare from under grizzled brows. “You serious about our banfasa?”
“Joe, you have no idea.”
Margery woke, stiffened, and lifted her muzzle slightly to sniff the air, catching the stale scents of blood and sweat. No fresh smell of fear. Her ears flicked forward. There was soft breathing all around her, a few whines. Farther away, someone was talking in a low voice. She relaxed. Throbbing all over her body told of battles fought
With a soft sigh, she let herself sink down into the warmth of the shifters surrounding her. Last night, as the younglings grew exhausted, the adults had tossed blankets into a corner and sent them to sleep there in a puppy pile.
As the adults in the tent wore out, they’d shifted to animal and joined the pile of sleeping furballs.
Eventually, she and Donal ended up there, somewhere close to dawn, and later, she vaguely remembered Tynan squirming his way in to join them.
In fact, the big panther paw resting on her ribs was Donal’s. Contentment filled her at the sight of him, lying on his side in front of her, his hind legs tangled with hers. Tynan was curled around her from behind, his muzzle resting on her nape.