Underneath her fingertips, she could feel the heat of the burn. It terrified her, and she was horrified that he wanted her to touch him there. But she wouldn’t say a damn thing, not if it brought him some comfort.
Only trouble was, as she sat there, his face in her trembling hands, the heat started raging through her palm.
His eyes were closed, so she forgave him for not seeing the pain on her face, but when the fire in her hands started to grow exponentially, she couldn’t contain the cry of agony that rushed from her lips.
His eyes immediately opened. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and she realized then that his throat was raspy from smoke inhalation.
“You need to go to the clinic,” she told him breathily.
“No. I’ll be okay in the morning. We’re fast healers. Especially after a night’s sleep.”
The pain carried on rushing through her veins, overtaking each fingertip until she felt like it would be less painful to have her hands chopped off at the wrist.
She couldn’t help it, she had to pull her hands from his face. He fought their escape, but she shook her head, desperation making tears flood her eyes as she gasped out, “Please. My hands are hurting!”
He frowned but immediately released the gentle but firm hold he’d had on the backs of her hands. She let out a sigh of instant relief as the second contact was broken, the pain dispelled, but then, when she saw his face, wooziness hit her square between the eyes.
She gulped. Then gasped. Her bottom lip began to tremble as words tried to spill from her mouth but she couldn’t seem to form the words.
“Y-your…” She shook her head, disbelief striking her at the sight of him.
“What? What’s wrong, Pip?” he asked, his tone a little short. “The wounds will heal. I won’t scar. I promise.”
“I-It’s not…” She gulped again. “There’s nothing left to heal,” she finally managed to whisper.
“What?”
“Your face is… the burn has gone.” Where ragged skin had been red raw with the touch of flame to flesh, now, it was a healthy blush. Smooth and silky. Soft once more. She was staring at a miracle.
A miracle she’d somehow perpetrated.
“I don’t understand,” he told her and carefully moved her off his lap onto the bed.
She watched as he got to his feet and rushed off to the bathroom. She guessed he was looking in the mirror, and when silence filled the room for the next few moments, she figured he understood what she’d been talking about.
When he came out of the room, he looked as stunned as she was. “You’re a healer,” he told her, eyes wide.
It was almost amusing to see the usually self-assured and competent Major so out of his depths and lost. His eyes looked like they were bugging out, and throw in the black and soot-stained features, he looked as though he belonged in a cartoon with Tom and Jerry. “That’s your talent,” he breathed out.
“My what?”
“I should have told you more about it before, but it skipped my mind really. We had so much other shit to discuss first.” He ran a hand through his hair, further disheveling the mop of cropped locks atop his head. “When we bond, the humans who take to us get a gift from the Goddesses. It makes them stronger. Gives them an advantage in a world where they’re surrounded by supernatural beings. We don’t really tell other people what a mate’s talent it. It sticks within the close unit. But sometimes, it manifests itself in a way that other people find out without having to share it.
“Christie, for example. She’s got super smell now. It’s why she found the first trimester hard.”
“Oh, jeez,” Pip breathed, commiseration in her voice. “That must have sucked. Her morning sickness must have been insane.”
“It was, yeah. It was funny at first, but then, when she’d smell even the tiniest scent that even we Bears with our enhanced smells weren’t affected by, and she’d start puking her guts out, we realized how serious her talent was. I think Annette can talk to Mars telepathically. But Mischa and Toni, I’m not sure what their gifts are.” He scraped a hand along his jaw then grimaced, stared down at his fingers and whispered, “I should be in agony now. If I’d done that just a few minutes ago, I’d have been suffering like crazy.”
“I know.” She raised her hands to cover her face. “It hurt, Major. It really hurt.”
She heard his boots tap against the floor and knew without looking that he’d swept down into a kneeling position. He rested his weight against her then wrapped his arms around her waist. Leaning into her, he hugged her. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault,” she whispered, lowering her hands because she knew he couldn’t see her face now. Instead, she pressed her nose into his hair, uncaring that the stench of the fire filled her senses, just needing him. Needing this closeness.
“We have to tell the others. I can help the brothers who were injured.”
“No!” he burst out, rearing back to stare at her in horror. “We can’t do that. We don’t know how you’ll be affected by healing so many people and so quickly.”
“We won’t know if we don’t try,” she chided him softly, even though the thought of doing what she’d just inadvertently done filled her with terror.
The pain in her hands had been like nothing she’d ever experienced before. To suffer that, repeatedly, as she healed people?
Could she do it?
Was she strong enough to endure it?
Her bottom lip quivered at the thought. “We can’t be…” She shook her head. “I can’t be selfish. Maybe it only works on you because you’re my mate. We have to try, Major. This could really help the MC. Especially if what you’re saying was true. If the war is about to come knock on our doors…?”
He closed his eyes. “The Goddesses can be real bitches sometimes.” He sucked in a shaky breath. “That’s why they made me wait for you. They knew this war was coming, and they waited until the timing was right for you to present yourself to me so we’d have access to your talent.”
She hushed him then, reaching forward to tame strands of hair he’d disturbed earlier. “You don’t know that. If we’d mated earlier, I’d still have this talent then or now. The timing doesn’t matter.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he immediately denied. “The timing is always what matters. They deal with fate, sweetheart. It always comes knocking at the door sooner or later. Whether it’s the war or meeting our mates… Something deeper is going on.”
Concerned, she ran her fingers over his furrowed forehead. “Calm down, Major,” she whispered, then gasped as she felt heat pour through her fingertips again. It was natural reaction to pull away, but somehow the heat was like a magnet. It was attracted to pain, and she couldn’t pull free until the majority of it was gone.
She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but her instincts spoke loud and clear.
Major let out a breath and whispered, “Thank you.”
“What was wrong?” she asked, her voice shaky.
“I had a migraine starting up.” He shot her a look. “You don’t take on my pain, do you?”
“No.” He looked at her suspiciously, as though he wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. She held up both hands in surrender. “Honestly. I’d tell you if I did. Instead, it just hurts when I’m doing whatever the hell it is I’m doing.”
“I don’t like this, Pip. I don’t like it at all.”
She knew exactly what he meant because she didn’t like it either.
“Was anyone else badly injured in the fire?” she asked quietly.
He must have sensed her resolve because his lips tightened with irritation as he said, “Nothing that won’t heal by morning.”
“Don’t try to protect me, Major. Tell me the truth.”
“There are a few guys who’ll be sore for a couple of days,” he finally admitted after a handful of moments of utter silence, moments where they’d stared at each in a dead heat, each fighting for their own particular sta
nce.
“I don’t want to do this, Major. But I have to. You understand the difference, don’t you?”
“Of course, I do,” he immediately snarled. “It doesn’t mean I have to like it. I don’t want you to be in pain, dammit. Is that so fucking crazy?”
“No, of course it isn’t. But I have to see if this will work on anyone else.” She swallowed thickly then stared down at her palms. They looked so normal, no pinker than usual because of the heat she’d experienced there. It seemed insane to think these fingers, fingers that had scrubbed floors until they’d blistered, that had been scaled and burned during cooking, could be capable of something like this.
That she could be capable of something like this was even more astonishing.
She’d never been destined for very much. At least, it had felt that way.
She’d been born into a family that made white trash look wealthy. Her father had beaten her. She’d had to fend off more of her mother’s boyfriends than she’d like to think about. She’d been homeless too many nights to count, and she’d gone to sleep starving so often, Pip knew she’d never forget that gnawing ache in her belly.
Itinerant jobs were all she was qualified for thanks to a home-schooled education that made spotty look complete.
And yet now, she could heal.
Even if it was only her mate, it was something—something more than she could do before.
And if she could heal others, then Jesus Christ… Mating Major had led her down a path she’d never even imagined existed for someone like her.
Without even meaning to, he’d given her purpose.
Tears welled in her eyes at the thought.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, his voice hoarse as he cupped her cheek.
“Because I want this to work.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It hurts, I’m not going to lie. If what just happened with you happens with everything, then it really isn’t comfortable. But I don’t care. I’ve never been anything more than the dishwasher or the wait staff. This is… so much more than that.”
A worried cast overtook his features. “But you don’t have to do this.”
The urging in his voice had her shaking her head. “That’s exactly why I do. I have to try. Can’t you see that?”
He let out a sigh, rolled upward in a smooth motion to his feet, and then reached for her hand. “I know Troy got some bad burns. His will take a while to calm down.”
“How long’s a while?” she asked, curiosity brimming in her tone.
He shrugged as he led her to the door and guided her out into the hall. She followed in his wake as he maneuvered about the clubhouse.
“That burn on my face, would you consider it bad?”
She blinked. “Yeah. It looked very bad to me. You had some major tissue damage, at least it seemed that way to me.”
He turned back to look at her. “That really would have healed by morning.”
“I don’t even understand how that’s possible.”
“How is the shift possible?” he asked rhetorically, jerking a shoulder as he stated it. “How is any of this possible? It just is. Maybe it’s magic, or maybe it simply is Goddess-granted. Whichever way you look at it, the crazy shit around here is pretty basic for us. Why shouldn’t we heal quicker when we can turn into an animal?”
“I-I guess,” she agreed uncertainly.
“Anyway. Troy’s wounds would probably take three days or so to heal.”
She bit her lip, wondering how badly Troy had to be if they’d take that long to heal.
He cast her another look. “We don’t have to do this.”
“We do,” she told him firmly.
“Well, do you want to start with a smaller wound?”
“No, you were right to suggest Troy. He needs healing the most, so that makes the most sense.”
“His burns are far more intense than mine were,” he murmured, and she heard the warning in his voice. It wasn’t a warning to trigger fear. If anything, it was to help her prepare herself for the sight of him.
Even though he had, she still had to bite back a gasp when they made it to one of the bedrooms.
As far as she could tell, the injured had been gathered together. There were four in a room that would ordinarily sleep two, but they all looked relatively comfortable.
Toni was there, washing a wound on Derick’s chest. Pip hadn’t known Derick all that long. He’d appeared at the MC shortly before she’d left, but know him or not, she still grimaced at the sight of the burn.
Toni’s head snapped up when she caught them in the corner of her eye. “What are you doing here? I thought we agreed you could take over later?”
Pip blinked. They had? As far as she could remember, the mated females had been swept off in their males’ arms. Any kind of conversation had been put off until later.
Major must have understood her confusion because he said, “Kiko and I arranged it.”
Because that made sense, she nodded her understanding.
“We’ve just discovered what Pip’s talent is.”
His words had the low hum of conversation in the room falling to silence. She blushed as all eyes turned to her, and she knew it was because, like Major had said, talents weren’t shared among the majority.
The four patients weren’t the only occupants of the room. Jarvis was in here talking to Frey, and Mars was crouched beside a bed. He was so fucking huge she couldn’t make out the man on the mattress, but at Major’s words, he turned around to face them and she caught a glimpse of the injured party—Troy.
Fuck.
She bit off her gasp, bit off her panic at the sight of him. His throat was a raw, bloody mass that had been washed and lightly dressed. Only trouble was, blood was already seeping through the bandages. He looked like his throat had been ripped apart in some slasher or werewolf movie.
His chest was equally as burned, and he had some kind of wrappings around his hands as though they’d been caught in the flames too.
Major squeezed her hand and, in a low tone murmured, “We can still go back.”
Though Troy’s wounds petrified her, not only just to look at but at the prospect of trying to heal them, she couldn’t do that. Not when she might be able to take away some of his pain.
How could she let him suffer when there was a potential cure?
She shook her head. “I need to try.”
He let out another sigh, and she got the feeling it was a sound she’d get used to. “I had a bad burn on my face, and Pip just healed it.”
Toni’s shoulders dropped in astonishment as she got to her feet.
“That’s your gift?”
Pip nodded. “I think it is. I don’t really know. I didn’t do anything. Just touched his cheek and it started to burn me, so badly, and it really hurt, but when I pulled my hand away, the burn was gone.”
Mars’s voice was equally as stunned when he said, “She’s right. I saw you, Major, before we went after our women. You had a shitty burn on your cheek and jawline.”
Her mate nodded. “I know. It’s all better now. Pip wants to see if it’s just me she can help, or if she can help other people too.”
Toni cleared her throat. “Is that wise? Pip, you’ve already expended a lot of energy today. The mating ceremony is damn intense, then we’ve just had to go through the terror of the explosion, and now this? Do you really want to try to heal someone at this minute?”
“How can I let someone suffer if I can help them?” She bit her lip. “Major said Troy was the most badly injured. If I can help, I want to.”
It was Troy who spoke, his voice surprisingly clear considering the severity of his wounds.
She realized then that the Shifters’ pain threshold must be limitless in comparison to a human’s. She couldn’t imagine just sitting there, with no pain meds, taking part in a conversation with those burns.
It beggared belief if truth were told.
“You should try on
someone else, Pip. You don’t want to have a go on me. It will take too much effort.”
“I can always stop. Maybe even a little time with me will just speed up healing.” She stepped nearer the bed. He was on a proper one, whereas Derick and Max, the other injured brother and final occupant of the room, were on Z-beds.
As she approached, Mars shifted to the side and shuffled out of the way to make space for her. When she perched on the edge of the mattress, she shot Troy a shaky smile.
His bandaged hands patted her knee, and the smell of antiseptic was suddenly so strong, it overwhelmed her senses until she felt dizzy with it.
Troy must have noticed because he shook his head. “You’re not strong enough for this. It’s a new talent, Pip. It takes time to get used to your gift.”
She’d known him for a couple of years, and he’d always been kind to her. Like Mundo, he’d encouraged her with her tinkering on the bikes and had helped her learn the ins and outs of the engine.
How could she let him suffer when he’d always been so kind to her?
He’d also been a great kisser and kind in bed. He’d never let her leave his side without her orgasming at least twice, and if he’d ever seen Moses eying her up, Troy had always come and swept her away, claiming her for the night to save her from his brother’s clutches.
How could she repay that by skulking off when he was in pain?
“I’m fine,” she said, her tone vehement. Lifting a hand, she let it hover over him. “With Major, I cupped his cheek and he pressed his hand over mine. Maybe we should try that again?”
When he frowned at her, she feared he’d argue, then he nodded. “Okay. If you’re sure.”
“It was quite painful,” she whispered, hoarseness entering her voice. “I-I’ll tell you when to help me pull away,” she continued, remembering how her hand had felt like it was glued to Major’s wounds, almost like she’d been a magnet and he’d had metal embedded in the torn flesh.
“Do you think it needs to be skin to skin?” Toni asked, with none of the hesitance of before. The other woman respected her decision, but also, Pip sensed the doctor and scientist in her was curious as hell about how this would all turn out.
MAJOR (MC Bear Mates Book 5) Page 8
