The infirmary door flew open.
Kai was first across the threshold, dressed in his dark gear with swords sheathed at his hip. Right behind him came Ezra—and in his arms was a body wrapped in someone’s coat, slim legs in bloodstained jeans hanging limply. Sin’s teal hair spilled over the dark jacket.
Aaron yanked me aside. Ezra went straight for the nearest bed—mine—and as he laid Sin on the mattress, the two healers crowded in. A third came running, rolling a medical cart in front of her.
Healer Austin pulled the jacket away and scissors flashed as she cut off Sin’s clothes.
“Check her breathing and put her on oxygen,” she barked at the male healer. “Kallie, elevate her legs then insert two large-bore IVs. Quickly now!”
As the man bent over Sin’s face, the youngest healer pushed the cart beside the bed, then snapped the curtains shut, blocking our view.
I inhaled unsteadily. “She’s alive?”
Kai and Ezra turned, noticing me for the first time. Next thing I knew, Kai was crushing me against his protective vest, then he passed me to Ezra and I was engulfed in his arms instead. They must have left for the search without knowing how bad my condition was.
“Sin is alive,” Kai confirmed. “Barely. I don’t know if …”
He glanced at the curtain, his face tight and eyes tormented. My hands closed around fistfuls of Ezra’s shirt—and it squished wetly. I looked down and saw red oozing between my fingers.
I jerked back. “You’re bleeding? Where are you hurt?”
He withdrew swiftly. “Oh shit. Did I get blood on you? It’s not mine. Shifter blood.”
Voices rose from behind the curtain. Healer Austin was shooting off instructions about binding wounds and starting a thaumaturgy frame. Electronic beeping now narrated Sin’s rapid heartbeat.
“Where did you find her?” Aaron demanded. “What happened? Tell me everything.”
Kai began an explanation but I didn’t hear him. My attention was on the dozen mythics crowded in the doorway, all geared for battle. I recognized them as alumni. Some gazed toward the sounds of the ongoing healing with concern, but others watched Aaron—observing his distress with haughty judgment.
I opened my mouth, not sure what I was about to say but absolutely certain it would be rude, when Ezra stepped in front of me. Taking my arm, he caught Aaron’s elbow with his other hand and led us to the far end of the infirmary. Kai exchanged a few brief words with the alumni, and they filed out the door.
Guiding me to the farthest hospital bed, Ezra nudged me onto it. The moment my weight was off my leg, I realized how badly it ached.
Ezra pushed Aaron down too, then took the spot on my other side. We sat in a row on the bed, waiting silently. Kai returned and handed me a sanitizing wipe, which I used to clean the shifter blood off my hands, then he shook out a soft blanket and swung it around my shoulders.
“Where did you find the shifter pack?” Aaron asked as though there’d been no interruption in his conversation with Kai.
“They weren’t far from where they ambushed you,” he replied, perching on the foot of the bed. “They were fighting among themselves—whether over Sin or something else, I don’t know.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Injured a few, but they scattered and we didn’t give chase. Our priority was Sin.”
“How many?”
“We saw five. There might’ve been more.”
Aaron cursed. “Five shifters on the property. How the hell did this happen?”
I pulled my legs up and wrapped the blanket around my bare feet. “What exactly is a shifter?”
“Superficially, they resemble the werewolves of human myth,” Aaron explained. “A person gets infected and turns into an animal on their first full moon. After that, they can transform at almost any time, and the full moon strengthens them. But what makes a shifter into a shifter isn’t what humans think.”
His fingers dug into his knees. I slid a hand out of my blanket and rubbed his arm.
“There’s a type of fae.” He exhaled harshly. “They don’t have corporeal bodies. They’re parasitic spirits, and humans are their hosts. The two most common kinds create shifters and vampires. When a shifter bites a human, its saliva primes them for possession. If there’s a parasitic fae nearby, it’ll try to possess the person.”
I shuddered, feeling horribly unclean. “You’re sure I’m not infected?”
“You’ll be susceptible for a few more days, which is why we’ll test you again. If you were infected, we’d call in a witch to exorcise the fae spirit from your body. You’ll be fine. Lily tested negative too. Mythics almost never get turned.”
“But I’m not a mythic!” I blurted in a panic.
“Mythics don’t get turned because we know about shifters and how to deal with infections. That applies to you too.”
“Oh,” I said weakly. “Right.”
Ezra ran his fingers into his tangled hair. “Aaron, when you fought the shifters earlier, were they … deformed?”
“They had strange wounds, but …”
“Wounds that didn’t bleed, effluvium emanating from them, milky eyes,” Kai listed. “And they were too strong.”
“Shifters are always strong,” Aaron countered.
“We’ve fought shifters before. These were bigger and stronger than I’ve ever seen.” He rubbed his hands together, almost nervously. “I hit one with a current strong enough to kill a bull and the werewolf barely stumbled.”
“Whatever they are, we’ll deal with it.” Aaron’s voice was hoarse again, but not with grief or despair. It was growling fury and the promise of retribution. “We’ll find every one of those beasts and exterminate them.”
Silence fell between the four of us. The healers’ voices rumbled through the infirmary, the words unintelligible. Or maybe I couldn’t understand because my head was slowly spinning, fatigue washing through my limbs like lazy ocean waves.
My brain fizzled. I realized I was slumped against a warm body and vibrations were shivering into my chest. The body was speaking in a low voice.
“This is all my goddamn fault. If Sin doesn’t make it …”
Aaron. I was slumped against Aaron, his arm draped around my waist.
“You always turn into a complete idiot when you come back here,” Kai said with a shocking lack of sympathy.
My eyelids fluttered but refused to open properly. I wanted to tell Kai not to be a jerk but I couldn’t find my way through the haze of exhaustion.
“And you’re a shining example of a perfect son,” Aaron fired back in a hiss. “You couldn’t handle your family at all so you ditched them for mine.”
“And you were delighted to have a buffer between you and your dad,” Kai growled. “But I never led anyone into danger just to prove how—”
“Kai.”
Ezra’s quiet voice silenced the electramage, and my eyelids fluttered again. That was a tone I rarely heard from Ezra—not a quiet, silk-smooth murmur but an unyielding snap of steel.
“Aaron knows he screwed up,” Ezra continued. “He’s not fishing for sympathy and he doesn’t need a lecture. Our job is to help him fix this.”