by JJ King
I looked closer. His skin was pale, almost translucent, and covered in a fine sheen of sweat. I didn’t know how he could be sweating this far from the fire. I was beginning to shiver, despite the adrenaline pumping through my veins. He was in shock, I realized, scrambling to remember first aid details from my high school class. Not sure if I’d be hurting or helping him, I ran my hands over his body, pressing lightly as I went to see if his body was rigid or if he screamed in pain. He didn’t respond and I felt no rigid areas. I’d had no idea when we’d been forced to take it that I’d need it so much at university. I chewed my cheek and blew out a breath, remembering what needed to be done for shock.
“You need to warm up,” I murmured, keeping my voice low and calm. I figured he was freaking out enough for the both of us. Joining in would accomplish nothing more than his body shutting down and causing more emergencies.
I needed to warm him up but, first, I needed to snap him out of whatever shock state he was in because there was no way I could move him on my own and I didn’t plan on asking Connor for help. Besides, he’d disappeared into the smoke to help someone else.
What was his name? Jerry? Johnny? Jacob? It started with a J, I was almost certain. I searched my memory for a name I’d previously paid no attention to in the least. “Jared?” I said, an inch away from his face.
His eyes stayed wide and wild.
“Joseph?” I shouted, hoping that even if it wasn’t right, he’d at least react.
His gaze darted to me.
“You’ve been in a plane crash,” I shouted again, figuring he’d respond to an authoritative voice more than a mild one. “Your body is in shock. You need to move so we can get you warm again.” I wondered if he’d be able to shift. A thick layer of fur would have to help with shock.
He blinked several times, his breath coming more ragged as panic replaced the terror I’d seen in his eyes. Awareness settled in and he whipped his head up and around, staring at the wreckage around us through the smoke. A coughing fit overtook him a moment later and he lay back down.
“I can’t,” he wheezed.
“You can,” I snapped. “I did and I’m just a girl.” I mentally crossed my fingers that the taunt would work.
It did. His eyes went dark with challenge and his lips set in a determined line. I jerked my head away from the downed plane where the air was clearer and dug my elbows into the ground. A second later, he moved up beside me and, together, we crawled clear of the smoke and debris.
When my hands touched the trunk of a tree, I sat up, using its strength to stay up, and gulped in as much fresh oxygen as I could. Joseph sprawled on his back, staring up at the sky and filled his lungs, too.
“It’s Joaquin,” he said when he could speak again.
“Huh?”
“My name isn’t Joseph.” He turned his head and offered a weak grin. “It’s Joaquin.”
I just nodded and pulled together as much energy as I could scrounge, then pushed to my feet. I needed to find Daniella.
From this vantage point, I could see more clearly than when I’d been inside the smoke. I scanned the wreckage and spotted several prone bodies that I prayed weren’t dead. With a push off the tree, I started towards them then noticed the girl from the plane, sitting, still buckled into her seatbelt, in the middle of the wreckage. Her mouth was open and strangled sounds were coming from her, but they’d lost all power. Her voice was nearly gone.
Her dark eyes were wide and glassy, I noticed, as I hobbled nearer to her. “Adeline,” I called out as I bent before her, taking the weight on my uninjured leg. “Adeline!” I clapped my hands in front of her face and managed to snap her out of the uninterrupted scream. Her terrified gaze shifted from the wreck of the plane to me and focused on my face so intently that a shiver ran up my spine. It was like she could see into me.
“He’s dead,” she whispered, her eyes widening impossibly more. “They’re all dead.” Then she shifted again and stared over my shoulder.
I turned. I knew the moment I started that I shouldn’t, that I didn’t want to see what she’d seen, what she’d been staring at since we’d been torn out of the sky. Still, I turned.
And saw the bodies.
Chapter 14
I saw his eyes first, the nothingness in them. They were flat and unseeing, like a broken doll’s after being shaken too hard, too many times.
His face was almost entirely obscured with blood that dripped slowly from the wound in his chest, like melted wax down a candle. A shard of metal, part of the plane I supposed, protruded from his chest, cutting him straight down the middle. I took a slow gulp of air, tasted his death on the wind, and turned to vomit.
The front of the plane hung, like a piece of discarded waste, from a thick group of broken trees. The metal siding was crumpled, like a child’s toy, too fragile a thing to have held us up in the sky in the first place. I heaved until there was nothing left in me but roiling fear and bile.
His torn and bloodied uniform identified him as the pilot, which meant we were down one person who’d have any idea of what to do. We’d been flying for several hours, heading towards Quebec and Alpha Wolf Academy, which meant I had no idea where we were. I hoped the co-pilot or flight attendant would know more.
Speaking of… I scanned the wreckage, looking for any sign of uniform and spotted an arm sticking out from under a pile of metal. “Holy shit!” I gasped and ran to him, falling to the ground without a thought for my bleeding thigh.
I pulled his sleeve back and pressed my half-frozen fingertips to his wrist, desperately hoping to find a pulse even though somewhere, at the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be worth it to survive something this bad. His body was mangled from what I could see.
It didn’t matter, I understood a moment later. He was gone, too.
A soft buzzing filled my ears, blocking out the sounds of death and dying. I stared at the wrist I held and wondered who he’d been, who loved him and wished him a safe flight that morning. Did he have a family? A little girl who made him pictures and waited for his kisses at night?
“I don’t know what to do.” The words slipped from my lips in a whisper, like a prayer. My arms wrapped around my chest and squeezed as I began to rock back and forth. The motion, so childlike and simple, calmed me, wrapping me safe inside a world of simplicity and safety. I never wanted to leave.
The cold seeped through into my safe space, chilling me from the inside out. I tried to ignore it, to keep the terrifying sounds locked out, but they kept pressing in on me, tugging at my mind, until the whisper of urgency telling me I needed to move became a scream.
I wrenched myself out of my head and struggled to my feet, using the metal deathtrap to help me up. There were others here who were still alive, I remembered. Others who needed help, others like Daniella.
Her name floated on the tip of my tongue as a picture of her formed behind my eyelids. Tall, beautiful, dark, eyes like emeralds, she was Bash’s twin, his other half. I needed to find her but she kept slipping away, like everything else.
I pressed my palms against my forehead, trying to lock it in, and felt my fingers slip through a sticky substance. Knowing what I’d see before I looked, I brought my hand to my face and saw my blood, thick and dark red.
A concussion, I thought with a wry smile that faded quickly. I’d gotten one the day I’d met Bash, when I’d literally crashed into him and smashed my head off the marble floor. I’d seen stars that day and wondered briefly if Bash was a figment of my imagination, but he’d been real, and solid, and the best thing to happen in my entire life.
This concussion wouldn’t bring love. It brought death. But I would live where others hadn’t, again. A twinge of guilt resurfaced, tugging at my heart, and I pushed it away. This was no time for self-pity, I needed to suck it up and get my ass moving. I had to find Daniella.
I glanced over at Adeline, still sitting in the seat in the middle of a plane crash. She wasn’t screaming anymore, I
thanked the Old Ones for that small mercy, but it was probably only because her voice was gone. Her eyes looked glassy and tears ran down her face as she stared past me to the pilot’s broken form.
“Get up!” I snapped, using the same tactic I’d used with Joaquin with her, hoping it would work. “We need to find the others and help them. Can you stand up?” I reached for her arm to pull her up and realized she was still seat belted in. With a shocked laugh, I unclicked the belt, muttering, “seatbelts apparently do save lives.” The laughter dissolved when I remembered the fate of the pilot and co-pilot. Surely, they’d been wearing their belts, too, but it hadn’t mattered.
Adeline stood on quivering legs when I pulled her up and didn’t make a peep as I turned and walked away. She just followed like a baby duck. I sighed but figured it was better than nothing.
Joaquin joined us a moment later, his face set now in determined lines. I supposed he’d had time to pull himself together, like me.
“Did you see them?” he asked quietly, his voice rough from smoke and shock.
I nodded, knowing he meant the pilots. “Yeah.”
“Have you seen anyone else?” He reached for Adeline’s arm and helped her over a fallen branch.
“Connor’s around here somewhere,” I said, searching the area I could see through the dark smoke.
“Who’s that?” Joaquin asked.
I opened my mouth to tell him that Connor was one of my guards and stopped dead. Almost no one knew who I really was. Why would I have guards? I licked my dry lips and just went with, “The tall guy sitting at the front with dark hair and pale blue eyes.”
Joaquin nodded. “That’s good, then. He looked like he could take care of himself.”
You have no idea, I thought.
“Hey!” A shout echoed through the air, seeming to come from everywhere. I turned in a circle, staring into the smoke.
“Where are you?” I yelled, feeling a wave of frantic pressure attempt to rise up in my chest. I ruthlessly pushed it down.
We followed the shouts around a thick copse of trees that had been blocking us from seeing the rest of the plane, which had been sheared off in the crash and lay about two hundred feet away from the cockpit and the dead pilots. Debris spread out from the fuselage, covering the snow with pieces of metal, bits of broken seats, and dead bodies. I held my breath and searched the dead for Daniella.
And found her leaning up against the plane with her head in her hands.
“Dani!” I shouted, using the name Bash and only Bash used for his sister.
Her head popped up and she stared at me across the graveyard of their peers with eyes wide with grief, shock, and utter relief. She pushed to her feet as I sprinted towards her.
We stumbled together and just held on, gasping in air as our hearts raced wildly. I could feel hers as it pressed up against me.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, pulling back to look her over. She’d been hurt before and had gotten too close to death for comfort, but she looked whole this time.
“I’m fine. Old Ones, Elena,” Daniella scolded, lifting a hand to my head. “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.” She looked me up and down and frowned at my leg. “That looks bad.”
I shook my head then stopped because it made me feel woozy. “It’s nothing a shift won’t fix. Who else made it?” I looked to the living, knowing it was too late for the dead.
Daniella turned to the group of students sitting on the ground and pointed out, “Jared, Rachelle, Benson.” She gestured to a guy lying pale and shaking, “and Grey. He’s not doing so well.” Then, she slowly turned to look at the fallen. “Madison, Taylor, Jonas, and Hannah didn’t make it.” She said their names softly, as if not to awaken them.
“Joaquin and Adeline are with me,” I pointed out, “which means we’re only missing Robert and the flight attendant.”
“And Ms. Morgan,” Daniella said with a frown. “She was sitting in the back with us.” She looked around the site again and let her head droop. “She’s not here.”
“We’ll find her and the others.” I touched her arm and squeezed it reassuringly. It felt completely natural to touch her. I guess feuds were put on hold when tragedy struck.
For the second time in four months.
I ignored that thought and stepped back, looking at the motley crew of students we were left with. Adeline had made her way to the group and was slumped against the plane next to Madison, who I vaguely recognized from one of my classes. Joaquin, at least, stood next to me and Daniella, alert and responsive.
“We need to find the others. They could be hurt,” he said, blowing out a breath as he looked over the survivors. “Is anyone here able to help?”
“They’re fine,” Daniella said with an annoyed edge to her voice that was so familiar it almost made me smile. She waved a hand at her friends and snapped, “Come on, get up. There are three more people unaccounted for and we need to find them then figure out how to get help.”
Nobody moved. They just looked at her as if she were speaking Greek, which, I’m sure some of them knew.
Frustration flooded my veins, heating my chilled body from the inside out. I glared at the group of them, sitting in various postures of self-defeat, and growled. “Up,” I said through gritted teeth. “Now.”
For a moment it looked like they’d ignore me, too, but then, one by one, they stood up and looked at Daniella, Joaquin, and me with scared eyes.
I nodded, glad they’d managed that much. It was a start, at least. “Okay,” I said, looking at Daniella. “I guess we split up and search.”
Daniella and Joaquin separated them into two groups and made a simple plan to split the crash site down the middle and meet back in no more than fifteen minutes. I joined Daniella’s group because I didn’t want to let her out of my sight again and felt her physically relax when I stepped up beside her.
A light breeze ruffled my hair, sending a sharp chill down my spine. It was getting colder, I realized, looking up at the clear blue sky. If it was this cold now, during the day, then we’d be in real trouble when night fell. We needed shelter and fire, just in case rescue didn’t arrive in time. Thank the Old Ones we had our fur to rely on.
The wind had one advantage, it had lifted a lot of the thick smoke that made breathing hard. It would be a lot easier to search the wreckage without it blocking the view, as well.
I spotted the top of Connor’s head over a piece of folded metal and started to call out when he turned and caught my gaze. His icy eyes, so serious these days, were heavy with grief and responsibility and I knew he’d found someone else. Steeling myself, I walked around the piece of plane and saw Robert’s body laid out on the frozen snow.
He looked like he was asleep. His face was pale and slack, like a child’s as they dream. His arms and legs were stretched out like he was about to pull them in and push them out in an imitation of an angel in the snow. The white around him was pristine, with not even a single drop of blood to hint at his fate.
“I didn’t know him,” I whispered, staring down at the empty shell.
“He was a good man,” Connor said quietly, closing his eyes. His lips moved silently in prayer for the man’s soul.
I wondered if a soul mate knew when the other half of them died.
I’d heard stories of soul mates taking their own lives just days after losing their mate or deep depression and endless grieving that never faded for those who managed to go on. I wondered if Robert had a mate and if she was keeling over now with his loss. Despair rocked through me as I recalled the broken bodies of those lost in the crash, the pilot and the co-pilot. Did they have mates whose lives were in tatters now, as well?
Could Bash feel my fear?
I blew out a slow breath and focused on the moment, afraid I’d slip back into that safe and silent place in my mind if I went soft for even a moment. “We’re still missing the flight attendant and Ms. Morgan,” I said to Connor.
His gaze darted up to me, confused for a split seco
nd before clearing. He nodded and turned away from his fallen comrade then stopped. “The flight attendant…” he looked towards the trees and shook his head. “She didn’t make it.”
My heart broke a tiny bit more.
“Then, we only have Ms. Morgan to find.” Alive, I prayed.
We picked through pieces of the plane, searching for any sign of life. I lifted a water-logged copy of The Mortal Instruments and wondered who on the flight had good taste in books. I let it slip out of my fingers and moved on because it didn’t matter.
A shout split the air and I spun towards it, limping again because the numbness of shock or adrenaline had faded and the pain was like a monster, tearing at my flesh. I fell behind the others and emerged from behind a tree to find Joaquin and Jared holding a piece of wing up while Rachelle and Grey lifted Ms. Morgan free.
She looked like death. Her skin had a grayish cast and blood covered almost every inch of her face, which was almost unrecognizable. My breath caught as I looked at her and searched for any sign of life.
Rachelle and Grey laid her down on top of the wing that had crushed her then moved to kneel by her side. Rachelle lowered her ear to Ms. Morgan’s chest and listened as we held our breaths. A moment later, her eyes closed, and a tear ran down her cheek.
“She was really sweet,” Rachelle whispered, laying her head on the teacher’s chest. “She brought in treats for us before Christmas break.” She moved to stand then stopped and frowned, then lifted a single finger into the air. “Shhh,” she murmured and closed her eyes.
Then shot them open and shouted, “She’s alive!”
Chapter 15
I adjusted the pillow we’d found among the scattered debris under Ms. Morgan’s head and gently pressed my wrist to her forehead again.
