Page 34 of Pack Witch
“She won’t hurt me.” I hoped it was true. I’d never healed a mountain lion, but I’d crossed paths with the one who’d made this part of the mountain range her home. If she had cubs to protect, I wasn’t sure how much good the small pool of magic I had inside me would be to convince her to let me pass.
But I had to try. “All right, Leroy will take me to him. Bo, you go to my cabin and get my medical kit—the basket just inside the door. Fetch it for me. Run as fast as you can. Follow that command there and then come back to me, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he called back, already vanishing down the trail.
Leroy ran almost as fast toward the sound of the screaming lion ahead, but when the sound of fighting was replaced with a yowl and the click of rocks striking together as something heavy fell from the mountainside, he slowed.
Not ten seconds later, a streak of golden-yellow shot up the steep cliff and vanished behind a stand of pines, followed by two lighter gold cubs.
“Take me down to him,” I rasped, knowing what had happened. “Be careful.”
Leroy was sobbing as he took the lower fork in the path and continued on, both of us scanning the area for any sign of Julian. Finally, I found him, caught on a rocky crag halfway between us and the river below. His clothing was red with blood, and his limbs… I shuddered at the unnatural angles I could make out over Leroy’s shoulder.
He was broken. The body I’d just started to learn was shattered, though his clothing hid some of the damage.
I pressed a hand to my heart. “Julian.” The sounds of the tumbling water covered up my sobs as Leroy picked his way carefully over the last few boulders to him and set me down.
“Alpha,” he cried out. “Sergeant!”
Years before,not two hundred yards from this very spot, I’d seen a female shifter being chased by a group of males. I hadn’t known who it was until later, but I’d watched her battle the pack of rogues, never giving up. She’d been forced over the cliff’s edge and fallen to her death in the winding river far below. I’d been across the valley, far too distant to use my magic to soften her fall, or protect her, and I’d wept bitter tears for many years afterward, wishing I’d been able to save her.
She’d been the Alpha’s true mate, after all, the mother of Brand, and her loss had gutted the Mountain pack. I would have given every bit of my magic to save her, to keep the old Alpha from having to experience the pain I’d lived with for so long.
Now, though, it was my true mate who had fallen. As we got close enough to see what had happened to Julian, I knew I might need to make that sacrifice to save him.
He hadn’t fallen all the way to the bottom, but been caught by a long, jagged lip of stone that jutted out into the sky before the final steep descent of the cliff wall. He lay on his back, eyes closed, arms splayed wide, his legs… Like his arms, they were broken so severely, he looked more like a discarded ragdoll than a male. Blood dripped from the compound fractures inside his sweatpants and from his shattered arms.
I forced myself to think as a healer, not as a lover. The familiar pattern of triage was all that would keep me from crumbling beneath the weight of my anguish at seeing Julian like this.
He was still breathing, though the sound that emerged from his bloody lips with each exhalation made it clear one of his lungs was injured, perhaps collapsed. His tanned skin had an unhealthy gray tinge, and I knew bleeding was one of the most pressing concerns. His head… Blood poured from a wound behind one ear, but his skull was intact, from what I could see.
“By the moon,” Leroy whispered. “How’s he alive?”
“By the moon, is how,” I replied, shocked that I could speak. I peeked up to the sky, seeing the moon rising in the east, barely visible above the sharp peaks there. I hadn’t been able to feel more than the barest whisper of her power since my wolf… went to sleep. But I could sense the energy that flowed from the moon to Julian now, keeping his chest rising for one more breath, then another, though each was shallower than the next.
He was dying. The moon gave shifters the power to heal, but he’d already been weakened by his tattoos, and the physical injuries he had now were enough to kill all but the very strongest shifters.
“Set me down next to him. I need to be able to touch him.”
Leroy obeyed, moving me carefully from his back to sit beside Julian’s broken body. The sweet boy didn’t move far away, though, hovering with his hands outstretched as if he was worried I might fall.
He wasn’t wrong. But I had a greater fear.
“Leroy, I need you to promise to stay back.” I settled close to Julian’s side and laid a hand on his chest, on the place where I’d healed him. His skin was cooling already. There wasn’t time to wrap his wounds to stop the bleeding, or set the bones, or move him so he could heal.
He didn’t need medicine; he needed a miracle, and there was only one place I could access that kind of power. “I’m going to ask the earth to lend me strength to save him. I need to focus, okay?”
“O-okay. When Bo gets here with the medicine basket, what do I do?”
“Just wait,” I whispered under the sound of the cold breeze that rushed past. “Stay with me.”
I felt his nod, though I didn’t look away from my lover’s face, wondering if I could do what I needed here. I’d only ever pulled from the soft dirt of the earth and the living things that grew in it. Trees and grasses, bushes and smaller plants were easy to coax earth magic from. The soft soil gave it up with joy, small pulses of warmth that felt comfortable as they filled me. I’d never been able to coax power from a hard, cold slab of stone, and I wasn’t sure it was even possible.
There was no time to doubt myself, though. The wind whistling around us, I pressed my hand to Julian’s chest more firmly, and my other hand to the hard granite beneath us. Closing my eyes, I sent my request into the stone.
It hurt at first, pulling the traces of magic I had out of my own veins and extending them, seeking a way in, a path to the heart of the earth. The power felt immovable, unshakeable, like themountain itself. At first, there was no response, and no matter how much of myself I poured into the stone, seeking a reply, there was no answer.
I kept seeking, my eyes closed, my breathing slowing, my blood itself pulsing sluggishly as I gave up the little stored magic I had in search of a greater, deeper well. There was a subtle vibration, deep below, like an invisible river of stone, moving so slowly only the sun and moon might notice it.
