Chapter 41

Danae

Sweat beaded her brow as she finished with one patient and moved to the next. Danae found a dark-skinned man lying on a cot with his hands gripped around the hilt of a dagger embedded in his stomach. At least he knew not to pull it out, but she could tell the urge was there. The female soldier who’d helped carry him into the bunker talked to him in a low, soothing voice as he moaned in pain.

“Shh, shh. It’s going to be okay. They’re going to help you.”

“She’s right,” Danae said, crouching beside him to examine the wound. “I can heal this in no time, and you’ll be fine with only a little scar to show for it.”

Under different circumstances, there would be no sign of the wound when she finished, but these conditions weren’t ideal. Unfortunately, her power was finite. She did what she could to save people and nothing extra. Nothing was worse than having patients come in later in the night when she was drained and couldn’t help them with magic. Already, she ran low.

“Really?” he asked, eyes bright with pain.

“Yes.”

His female friend looked at Danae. She was a large-boned woman in her late twenties with straight brown hair and a look in her hazel eyes that said she probably gave the Kandoran hell on the battlefield. “How can I help?”

“Hold him down while I pull this out.”

She leaned over the man and gripped his arms. Danae didn’t hesitate, pulling the blade and setting it aside on a small table. Blood immediately gushed from the wound. She went to work locating the source of the bleeding and repairing it. Thankfully, her patient only had damage to his stomach but no other major organs.

She fixed his internal injuries and sealed his skin enough to keep it from getting infected. He’d have to heal the rest of the way on his own. Probably in two days, he’d be back out fighting again. They couldn’t afford to lose any soldiers if they could help it.

“He’s good,” she said, giving them a wan smile.

It was barely midnight, and they’d already received half a dozen severe cases plus a handful of moderate injuries. If they bled a lot, she intervened, but the rest she left to the human medics. The attack at sunset had started intense and brutal, with far more enemy forces than they usually saw.

They simply didn’t have enough shifters, slayers, and soldiers to handle such a surge. Perhaps before some of them had been pulled to other ends of the front line, but not now. Something told her the Kandoran had been aware of that and reacted accordingly.

That was the trouble with war. All the leaders could do was estimate the best use of their resources and hope they chose right. With the Kandoran changing locations regularly on where they hit the hardest, they couldn’t predict it or react fast enough.

Danae moved to a basin on the back table to wash her hands. A volunteer ensured it was always full of clean water and restocked medical supplies from a storage area in the tunnel below. Another helper kept the cots and floors clean. These people didn’t want to fight and had no medical skills, but they offered to assist wherever possible. Whether they realized it or not, it made a significant difference to her.

As she dried her hands, Aidan shouted for her from the entrance. He held Bailey in his arms. The slayer was holding a bloody rag to her neck with a pained expression on her face. The fact she remained awake was a good sign, but it must have been deep.

A volunteer pointed to a freshly cleaned cot. “Put her there.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Danae said, forcing a calm expression onto her face. How many times had she said that tonight to patients? Now she was saying it to one of her closest friends, and it was almost mechanical.

Bailey tried to talk, but only blood gurgled out of her mouth. It had to be deep then. She looked at Aidan as he gently set her down. “What happened?”

“She was fighting a dragon and already had her sword buried in his chest when a Kandoran human came from behind and slashed a scimitar at her neck.” A strained expression crossed his face. “I sensed her pain and came for her immediately.”

Good grief, a scimitar? The Kandoran humans never ceased to amaze her with the types of weapons they used. Their army was so large that they took whatever they could find. Some even had firearms, but after more than six years since the dragon’s arrival, ammunition was difficult to acquire.

Danae gave him a weak smile. “She’s lucky she has you.”

He caressed Bailey’s face, tenderness in his gaze. “I don’t know about that, but she’s certainly lucky we have you here.”

Danae lifted the soaked rag and winced at the wound. Half of the slayer’s throat had been sliced through right below her jaw. She’d have been dead already if she’d been any other race.

Placing her hands on the wound, she went to work repairing the arteries first. Though her energy already flagged from too many back-to-back healings, it didn’t take long to stop the severe bleeding. After that, she focused on repairing the skin and linking the smaller veins, which was far more intricate. Exhaustion dragged at her as she worked, and her magic fell to a trickle.

“Where was Bailey’s slaying partner?” she asked, taking a breath before closing the wound.

He pointed across the room to the corner cot. “Over there.”

Oh, right. That had been her second patient of the evening. He’d taken a blade to the face that had cut through his nose, cheekbone, and forehead into his skull. Like Bailey, he’d been busy fighting a dragon when it occurred, and it was an injury that would have killed a human. The damage had been extensive enough that he was hardly recognizable even after she healed him due to swelling. That would go down after he had some rest.

They didn’t have enough troops to keep the Kandoran humans off the slayers while they fought dragons, and the coalition had run out of cluster bombs to help reduce the number of attackers. In fact, many things hurt them as they lost fighters and equipment and couldn’t acquire any more ammunition.

It had been a perfect storm. Of course, several points along the central line were getting hit just as hard. The radio in the supply room squawked constantly with updates that she no longer wanted to hear, and she’d asked the workers in there to turn it down.

Her hands shook as she pulled them back from Bailey. “She needs to rest for at least two to three hours before she goes back out.”

A full day would have been ideal, but they couldn’t afford to lose her for that long. Anyone who could stand and hold a weapon had to be on the line. They’d labeled it an “all-hands-on-deck” night.

“But…” Bailey’s hoarse voice came out strangled as she started to rise.

Aidan pressed down on his mate’s shoulder. “Take the rest, drink, and eat. After two hours, you can fight again, misanna. You won’t be any good to us if you go now.”

“Yes. When your voice returns to normal, I’ll release you.” Danae gestured at a crate under the nearby table. “We keep shackles in there for unruly patients who try to escape.”

It was actually full of bandages, but the slayer didn’t know that.

Bailey glared at them. “Fine.”

“Drink a lot of water. That will also help since you lost considerable blood,” Danae advised. Slayers could regenerate it incredibly fast, but they needed to drink plenty of fluids to help their systems along.

Justin stumbled into the bunker, covered in blood, and holding a large, limp form. “Danae, need your help. I’m so sorry.”

Her heart leaped into her throat. “What…?”

She took in the sight of the injured man he held. A broken spear was protruding through his chest, and there were gaping wounds on his arms and cheek. It was Miles, her husband, in his arms. She barely recognized him. It took her a moment to process it as she stood there frozen in shock.

Then it hit her.

“Noooo!” She raced through the room, forcing herself to think and calculate what to do as she guided Justin to the nearest cot. “Put him down.”

Danae had to remember Miles needed her help, not her panic.

She took in all the injuries and the blood soaking her husband’s body. Too much blood, and he was no slayer. She went for the severed femoral artery in his left leg, knowing she needed to stop the flow there first.

“I’m sorry,” Justin said, voice shaky. “The Kandoran are everywhere, and we can’t keep up. His squad was ahead of mine when I saw him go down. I broke rank and grabbed him as fast as I could.”

They were best friends, so of course he would.

Danae moved from Miles’ leg as soon as she’d repaired enough to contain the damage. Next, she stared at the spear in his chest and probed it mentally. Tears ran down her face as she found it had grazed his heart and pierced his lung. If she were at full strength, she had a slim chance of fixing the damage before it was too late, but she’d already expended so much on others in a short amount of time.

“I…oh, God,” she sobbed, bowing her head as tears blurred her vision. “It’s…the wounds are…it’s very bad.”

Justin put a hand on her shoulder. “What do you mean? Can you fix him?”

Her body shook. “I don’t have enough magic left.”

“I’ll help,” Aidan said, crouching next to her. “Maybe with both of us.”

“But…you’re not a healer. I don’t see how…”

“My powers have increased recently. I haven’t tried them on a human, and I’ve already exhausted a lot tonight, but I’ll help however I can.”

Bailey stood behind him with tears in her eyes.

“Okay,” Danae said, taking a steadying breath. “Be ready as soon as I pull this out because it’s going to cause even more damage when I do.”

Aidan held his hands out. “Go ahead.”

The odds of them fixing Miles in time with magic alone and no emergency room equipment were next to zero, but he was the love of her life, the father of her child. She would do everything possible to save him. It would have to be enough.

She grasped the broken spear, focusing her mind inward to guide it out while causing the least damage. “Now.”

A sickening sound filled the air as it slipped out, and blood spurted from the open wound. His heart was pumping it straight out. Aidan focused on the organ as Danae worked on the left lung, which was severely lacerated. She poured power into trying to repair it as Miles choked and coughed.

Tears trailed down her face, listening to him struggle to breathe. His hand reached out to touch her arm. Danae glanced up and saw sorrow and pain in his features. She sealed the last part of his lung.

“Love…you,” he managed to say through coughs.

She swallowed. “I love you, too.”

“Danae,” Aidan said, gaze focused on the center of Miles’ chest. “His heart is…I don’t think we can fix this quickly enough.”

She shook her head. “No, we can do this.”

Taking another mental dive, she checked Aidan’s work. He’d begun to seal the hole, but the spear had left gaping lacerations on both sides, and his work was unskilled. There was hardly any blood flowing anymore. Danae pulled every scrap of power she had to regrow the lost tissue.

“Tell…Alyssa…I love…” Miles stuttered before his face slackened and lost color.

Beneath her hands, his heart stopped. “Noooo!”

She kept pushing power, thinking she could fix him first and do CPR afterward to restart, though it was a long shot even with magic. She kept working as Aidan, Bailey, and Justin begged her to stop, but she couldn’t. This was one patient she would not lose. How many had died in the past four weeks because they didn’t get to her fast enough, or she didn’t have enough power to heal everyone? It couldn’t happen with Miles—not him!

Danae pulled every scrap of magic she had but only got one side of the heart repaired before she was fully drained. Her limbs fell uselessly to her sides as she sobbed. She was empty, and the one person she wanted to save the most was lying dead, skin turned ashen.

“Please, Aidan,” she begged, sinking back to where Bailey was already holding her. “Can you finish? Just try?”

He shook his head. “It is far beyond my expertise. I did attempt it, but the heart is a delicate organ, and the shape is not quite the same as a shifter’s. If there were any way I could, I wouldn’t hesitate.”

She shook. “I don’t understand. For the last four weeks, he barely got a scratch, no matter how bad it got out there. Miles and his fighters were doing everything right, and now…”

“I’m so sorry,” Bailey said, pulling her tighter against her, voice still raspy.

Danae began to tremble, and she could hardly breathe. What would she tell Alyssa? How could she explain that she’d never see her daddy again? They’d only made it over to Trish’s house once since the war began to visit. That was a week and a half ago. Her daughter wasn’t old enough to understand. She was going to miss Miles so much, and Danae didn’t know how she would go on without him.

“Justin, get on the radio and have them pull Verena off the line. Get her here to take over for Danae,” Aidan ordered. He rose to stand, deep regret in his features. “I wish I could stay, but the fighting is getting worse out there, and I need to help stop it.”

In fact, the clash of weapons and cries of the wounded sounded closer than ever. So many Kandoran were passing their front line that she could hear constant zapping as they hit the shield. At any other time, it would have alarmed her, but she was numb to anything except her own pain. Miles was gone—really and truly gone.

She laid her head on his shoulder, needing to touch him. How could she let him go?

“I’ll pass the word along and be out in a few minutes, too,” Justin said.

Danae didn’t acknowledge them, too deep in her grief. Bailey picked her up and carried her to the back room, where they kept an extra cot. The slayer held her tightly as she sobbed her heart out, not knowing how she would survive. Her world had just crashed around her.