by Lucia Ashta
The animals bellowed and yipped as if they enjoyed inflicting pain.
My eyelids rested for a while before I remembered with a sudden urgency that I couldn’t allow it. I’d fade away and never wake up again.
And there. There! The power of the angels. That’s what I’d been trying to come back around to. I might’ve fucked up royally in how I’d used it so far. But there was still a chance I could make it work for me now. At the very least, maybe I could find a way out for Why through the magic of the pendant.
When I tried to think of how, my thoughts were overcome by pain that pulsed everywhere at once, too overwhelmed by a resounding sense of loss settling in the depths of my soul.
I wish, I think, I wish … and then I couldn’t think of what the hell to wish for.
I wasn’t even certain this was how the pendant worked in the first place. But before I’d been injured, I’d been starting to put together that all the weird stuff that had been happening around me lately had come about immediately after I’d wished for something.
I had to wish for help, but what kind?
My eyelids drooped.
I put out one final thought, the only one I could piece together.
I wish for someone to care.
No! That wasn’t of much help.
I wish for help, help for Why and me.
I lay atop my pendant, my chest pressed heavily against it, and I thought it might have heated as I wished. I couldn’t be sure. I closed my eyes. If this was how my life was going to finish, then there was nothing I could do to change that. I’d disappointed the chubby pandacorn, who was more innocent than anyone or anything I’d ever known before. He was pure, and I was leaving him exposed to cruelty and iniquity.
A thick lump of regret and sadness crawling up my throat, I allowed myself to fade away.
No, wait. My eyes popped open. That lump was a gush of vomit pushing up my esophagus.
I threw up all over Blondie’s outstretched legs, puked what I’d digested of the pygmy trolls’ brew, splashing a purplish magenta all over the dick’s pant legs.
He screeched like a princess, hurting my ears, and I finally allowed the darkness to claim me, a final smile ghosting my bloody lips.
24
I woke at the sound of Ky’s voice.
“Jas,” he yelled, with panic and desperation. “Jas!”
But I couldn’t get myself to open my eyes, let alone move my body. He sounded far away. He could just be in my head. Or maybe this was the afterlife, and dreams really did come true, and I was being set up with a fantasy night with the guy I’d been crushing on since I first set eyes on him.
I moved a fraction of an inch. Nope. This was no afterlife, no dream, not unless fate was one cruel fucker. Every single part of me hurt, even the parts that hadn’t actually been injured.
In a rush, every detail came back to me and I was suddenly back in the here and now.
Why was still atop my back. His weight, though far too heavy for my current weak state, was nevertheless comforting reassurance. If he was still lying on my back, that meant the bastard shifters hadn’t touched him.
“She looks like she’s hurt really badly,” Rina lamented from as far away as Ky. “We have to get her out of here fast.”
I expected more discussion as they came up with a plan. But there was no more talking, just a heavy, electric silence during which I couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening.
Then the growls, snarls, and grumbles arrived. They were different from Blondie’s crew.
My friends were shifting so they could defend Why and me.
My heart clenched at the thought of all they were risking to help me. I hadn’t wanted this. I’d wished for help, but not at the cost of my friends’ lives.
Dammit. I should have thought things all the way through.
I flicked my eyes open, and though I could take in my surroundings once more, I still felt like I was wading through a dream—more like a nightmare.
Linda, the ugly beast of a woman, reared up onto the hind legs of her majestic grizzly bear. She opened her maw as wide as it would go and let loose a growl intended to scare the shit out of everyone present.
With me at least she succeeded.
A pair of roars echoed back—mountain lions, I was almost certain, which meant Ky and Rina had already shifted. A deep, rumbled snarl followed, and I thought that must be Boone, though I couldn’t see any of my friends without moving my head, and moving anything more than my eyelids simply wasn’t happening.
A flash of speckled gray fur whizzed by me before it leapt up to scratch at Linda’s throat. A gasp slipped out of me. That was Dave! Was he out of his fucking mind? He was an average-size bobcat. He couldn’t take on a damn bear, especially not one with the Hulk mentality of Linda.
My sluggish pulse sped up slightly as I watched Linda twist in the air and swat a massive, heavy paw at my friend.
She missed.
Dave was already circling around in the dark shadows, tracking her movements, preparing to attack again.
An odd, soft, feathery popping circled the dark chamber. At first, I had no idea what it might signal. Then a wolf yipped and Leander flew overhead, clutching the regular-sized wolf in his blade-like talons. I got a good look at him for a few seconds before he headed back into the shadows with his prize. He’d shifted into his full animal: a magnificent silver eagle as big as either of the bears.
He flapped his wings, beating them heavily against the burden of the weight he carried, before clenching his talons through the wolf’s midsection and flinging him against the wall.
The wolf crashed into it with a dull thud. With a pained yelp, it slid down, bleeding freely, before slumping to the ground. He didn’t move afterward.
Based on the sharp slapping, pounding, and grunting that originated behind me, my other friends were engaging the rest of the shifters.
“Get them!” King of the Obvious barked at his underlings while he remained close to me, cupping what was left of his junk. “Take them down!”
I heartily wished I had the energy to bitch slap him for being a raging idiot.
Just like that, I began to feel a bit more alert. The pain didn’t abate in the least, but I no longer felt like I was about to sleep like Rip Van Winkle.
Ah. I’d made a wish. Was it really that simple?
Before I could decide what to wish for that would put an end to this conflict, I heard Adalia.
“This is for hurting my roomie, you prick.” A second later, she popped up behind Blondie and zapped him with what looked like … fairy dust leaking from her fingers? Sparkling pink dust rained down over him, landing on his hair to drift down the rest of his body like joyful snowflakes.
What?
Maybe I was still dreaming. Or maybe the pain and whatever lingering effect remained of the trolls’ brew were causing me to see things.
But no. Blondie’s face morphed from enraged self-absorbed asswipe to happy-go-lucky. He looked like Adalia—if she had the misfortune to turn into a raging dickwad. His smile was so big it stretched across his face, plumping up his cheeks like proverbial rosy apples. His eyes grew glassy, as if he no longer saw what was directly in front of him but was somewhere else very far away.
Adalia clapped her hands together, a cloud of pink chalk-looking dust erupting into the air around her. “That ought to do it.” With a brisk flick, she swept her long brown hair behind her and shot me a satisfied grin.
A heartbeat later, her grin fell. The face I saw most every day grew pale and stricken. “Jas,” she whispered and ran to my side, ignoring the fighting that surrounded us.
She slid next to me and plopped down beside Asshole, making sure not to land in the puddle of puke, blood, flesh, and fur.
My eyes widened a sliver in alarm, but it was all I could manage.
“No, don’t worry. He won’t hurt me. He won’t hurt you anymore either. Or Why.”
For the first time, her gaze swept above me. Her
hand disappeared and Why started moaning.
“It’s okay, boy,” she said. “Everything will be okay now. We’ll get Jas out of here just as soon as the others finish kicking ass.”
Like the smack of a whip, a loud creak rent through the chaos of battle. I startled, jumping slightly, and then immediately clenched against the pain that such a small movement delivered.
Adalia noticed. “Don’t worry. It’s just Wren.”
But Wren transformed into a bloody willow tree! What could she possibly do to help here? A concerted effort from the bears would be enough to send her toppling over, and I still hadn’t forgotten how horrible it had been to watch her recover from the last time that had happened. I’d been in the infirmary bed next to her recuperating from my own injuries, but it made it no less awful to observe her suffering.
Panic swept through me again, punctuated by the flapping of wings, lethal snarls and snaps of fast jaws. One of the bears roared again, making my heart skip a beat, and someone hit one of the walls so hard that the impact made the ground tremble beneath me. Whoever it was slid down the wall and didn’t seem to make another sound after.
A mewl reached straight through to my heart. Dave? Was the bobcat all right?
Fuck me, I couldn’t take much more of this. A veritable cacophony of pain and punishment filled the air, saturating it. Was it too much to hope that none of it would belong to my friends?
Ah, yes! Shit, I’d almost forgotten.
I wish for my friends to survive this unharmed.
There. That should help.
But a few seconds passed and a deep unease settled in the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t my usual self. My shift hadn’t gone down like it was supposed to. Was something wrong with my magic? With the pendant?
“Come on, Why,” Adalia cooed to the cub, pulling me back to the devastating circumstances of the present. “Come with me.”
His weight didn’t so much as shift on my back.
“Don’t be stubborn,” she said. “I know you can understand me. I can talk to all the creatures of the fae. The pandacorns are part of the fae.”
Seriously? She could talk to him all this time and didn’t tell me? And she had dangerous pink fairy dust stashed up her ass? Some roomie she was with all her secrets.
“She’s really hurt, Why,” Adalia continued, oblivious to my decision to pinch her till she cried as soon as I recovered.
“It will be really good to get your weight off her. You don’t want to hurt her any more than she’s already hurting, do you?”
Why snuffed, then whined. No, he didn’t whine, he squeaked in undulating patterns. He was talking to her!
“I understand you don’t want to leave her because she’s your person, but we want her to survive this, don’t we? Any strain to her body right now could be really bad. She might lose that leg for good.”
Why squeaked some more, but I could no longer pay attention to what the fairy and pandacorn were talking about. The injury to my leg was bad, but to lose it? I couldn’t bear the thought…
As if fate really were a thing, and she was a right mean bitch, an animal slammed into me from behind, colliding with my back leg and ripping it further apart.
Without warning, darkness enveloped me.
I woke cradled in Ky’s strong arms, pressed against his bare chest. Even with my eyes closed, there was no mistaking his scent, the way even half dead my body wanted to respond to his.
The sun shone brightly somewhere overhead, warming my fur and seeping into my chilled body. We weren’t in the caves anymore.
I wanted desperately to open my eyes, to scan my friends for injuries, to make sure every one of them was well and intact—and accounted for. But for the life of me I couldn’t manage more than a rapid flicker that didn’t allow me to make out anything.
Ky was walking. Now that I was awake, each footfall spiked a surge of pain. I could no longer make a sound. I’d never felt weaker in my life, not even when Wren’s willow had fallen on top of me and crushed my leg. At least this time the injury was to my right leg. It had taken long enough to get my left leg to heal that I wasn’t sure how it’d react to another severe injury.
My right leg hung limply, cradled between my body and Ky’s forearm. The bone and ligaments were severed. Without looking, I suspected the only thing that kept the lower and upper parts of my leg connected was the sheath of torn flesh.
I was too exhausted to even work up anguish over my current state. I was numb, too empty when I was used to housing a mess of emotions inside.
“We need to move faster,” Rina was saying from somewhere close by. “She needs to get to Melinda right away.”
“I can’t move any faster without risking hurting her more, squirt,” Ky said. “Every movement jars her leg.”
“Yeah, well, it looks like it’s already about as bad as it can get, so is it better to get it looked at and risk a little more tearing or risk her bleeding out on this bloody road?”
“She has a point, Ky,” Boone said. “It looks bad. She won’t be able to hold out much longer.”
“Why isn’t her body healing itself?” Dave asked. “I don’t understand. She’s a shifter. Her healing should have kicked in by now.”
“We know she has the ability,” Wren added. “When I fell on her—well, when I landed on her and hurt her like I did—she would’ve lost her leg if not for her superior healing.”
“Could the pendant be affecting her somehow?” Adalia asked.
“Why would it?” Dave said.
“I don’t know, I guess no reason.”
“But that siren Selene did say that she’d grown weaker,” Leander said, trailing off as if he were suddenly deep in thought.
“That’s right, My Prince,” Adalia said. “Selene’s lost some of her power.”
“Most of it, from the sound of things,” Wren interjected. “If that’s what’s going on, this is really bad.”
“Don’t lose heart,” Dave said, followed by a slight slapping which made me think he might be patting Wren on the back. “Jas is strong. She’ll pull through.”
He didn’t sound entirely sure of it, and no one uttered another word for a long time.
“Dammit, they should be here by now,” Ky growled.
“You’re right,” Boone said. “They should. Something happened. I’m putting in a call guaranteed to get them here fast.”
“Who’re you calling?” Adalia asked.
“Roberta.”
“Do it,” she said right away, surprising me, because she didn’t like Roberta.
“Good idea, Boone,” Rina added. “Roberta will whip Fianna and Nessa in the ass until the dragons come to pick us up.”
Dragons? I was going to be saved by dragons?
I faded back to black before I could bother getting excited about the rescue I’d never see.
When I finally woke again, I was in a soft bed, under piles of blankets, and I was shivering like I was in the middle of the Arctic.
Groggily, I blinked my eyes open with effort. A lantern emitting a soft glow floated just above my bed. There was no light bulb or flame, meaning it was powered by magic.
I must be back at the academy.
I rested in one of many beds laid out in the large, open space. The healing wing.
Even breathing hurt.
People milled about in the middle of the room, some of them hovering over another of the beds.
Before I could study my surroundings more, Ky called out, “She’s awake!” and Melinda came running.
The badger’s brow was drawn low with concern, her paws bunched in the apron over her floral Little House on the Prairie dress.
“Oh, my dear,” she breathed the moment she skidded to a stop at my bedside. “How … how are you feeling?”
The badger with a gift for healing took even the worst injuries in stride. I’d never seen her lose her cool more than a tiny bit.
Following the movement of her hands while they rung her apron, I aske
d around a parched throat, “How bad is it?”
Before answering, Melinda shot a look at Ky, and then to the rest of my friends, who were moving to surround my bed now that they realized I was awake.
“Boone,” Melinda said instead of answering me, “you’d better fetch Sir Lancelot.”
“Right away.” Boone turned and headed out the door. It banged shut behind him, making my heart leap.
Whatever news they had to tell me was guaranteed to be no good. I opened my mouth to press for an answer, then shut it. I didn’t want to know. I’d hold on to denial for as long as this reality would let me and shut the concerned gazes of my friends right out.
25
Wren hadn’t finished approaching my bed before Why squirmed in her arms so desperately that he broke her hold and half leapt, half fell awkwardly onto me with an oomph, dropping too close to my injured leg.
As a whole, Melinda and my friends gasped. I couldn’t feel my leg at all, so I didn’t even flinch.
“Why!” Wren scolded. “You have to be more careful. Jas is hurt, remember?”
But Why didn’t bother with Wren; he gazed at me all starry-eyed.
“Come here, you big oaf,” I said, reaching a hand for him. When I noticed how weak I felt in that small movement, I was careful to mask my reaction.
Why didn’t need any more encouragement. He lumbered toward me on four paws, tripped over my legs to another chorus of gasps, and speared my blanket with his horn.
“Why,” Wren whisper-screamed. When he continued to ignore her, sitting back down on top of my left foot and taking the entire blanket with him, where it draped over his head, Wren turned to Adalia: “You have to do something. Talk to him. Make him behave.”
Why shook his head, but to us it just looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost with a horn sticking out of the top of his sheet. The cub didn’t dislodge the blanket in the slightest.
Adalia sighed loudly. Surprised, I looked at the fairy. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her sigh that heavily. Her smile was more subdued than usual as she studied the pandacorn. “Remember that he’s like a toddler. I can talk to him, sure, and I know for a fact he understands me. But just like any toddler, he has no problem ignoring me and doing whatever he wants. And I just don’t have it in me to discipline him.”
