“Aaron, can you tell me how this happened?”
“Bear.”
Her heart seemed to flip over inside her. He should be dead. Unless they were more unkillable than she knew. Sturdy against injuries, Quinn had said. But the kitchen floor had held blood in smears, in a trail, in a small puddle. Too much blood. Before she could respond, the passenger door was wrenched open, and the alpha leaned into the truck cab.
“Aaron,” he said, and his tone was hard to read when every word came out like ground glass, but this sounded like alarm.
Aaron grasped his arm. “Had to come. Sorry.”
The alpha slid both arms under Aaron and lifted him from the seat. As his leg shifted, Aaron let out a keening whine, the sound of a dog in pain. Ember’s chest throbbed. The alpha shouldered the door shut and moved quickly, smoothly around the front of the truck, and Ember swung open her door but stayed in the cab.
“Malachi,” she said.
For all she knew, addressing him by name was off-limits, butAlphafelt no less potentially wrong, coming from a human. He turned to look over his shoulder. The amber eyes met hers, and she could not hold in her shudder.
“Please,” she said. “Please don’t make me stay out here if I can help.”
He spared less than a second to consider, then said, “Bring his kit.”
He turned his back on her and strode up to the cabin with Aaron in his arms. Ember grabbed the medical box and plastic roll, scrambled out of the truck, and hurried after him. Their several-inch height difference didn’t fully account for the ease with which the alpha carried his friend. His physical power was more than a little terrifying. She repeated Aaron’s description of him as she followed him over the threshold into his home. Preserver of lives. Preserver of lives.
She shut the door behind them and stood watching, waiting for instructions. In the dining room, he hesitated before the table. It held a pale linen runner and sprigs of lavender in a plain glass vase.
“Stand for a minute?” he said to Aaron. “Otherwise your blood’s about to add character to my table.”
“I’ve got it.” Ember rushed in, setting the vase beneath the table and yanking the runner to the floor beside it. She unrolled the plastic over the table and tore off the needed length.
“One more layer,” Aaron said.
The alpha growled.
“Please do it right.”
Ember added a second sheet of plastic, and then the alpha lay Aaron on the table. His face was gray and sweating, but he kept himself half-upright with his elbows braced behind him.
“Let’s get me on my side. Better angle for direct pressure.”
In seconds it was done, Aaron’s outer thigh facing upward. The alpha had done the work, supported and turned him, faster than Ember could keep up. Again too fast to track, he opened the medical box, fetched a pair of scissors, and cut the leg of Aaron’s jeans from the hem upward. She wasn’t distracted, wasn’t confused. No, the alpha was moving faster than any human could, and in his worry for a friend he was letting Ember see him do it. Maybe this ability wasn’t a secret, but she felt as though she were being given access to something private, watching him be more than human, watching these two friends so at ease with one another.
The alpha peeled the bloody fabric away from the equally bloody leg, and Aaron gripped the edge of the table with one hand and hissed through his teeth. A deep slash ran down the outside of his thigh, almost to the knee. Blood ran off his leg and pattered softly onto the plastic. Ember stood at his side opposite the alpha, feeling as helpless as the day she learned Quinn had been taken away. She could do nothing to ease Aaron’s pain, nothing to repair the damage to his body. She couldn’t understand why her presence was allowed here.
“What did this to you?” The alpha ripped open a sterile pack of gauze.
“Bear. Knew it was there. Thought it would stay away.”
“It attacked you?”
“Yeah.” Aaron kept himself propped on an elbow and watched the alpha work. “I think it was sick. The way it came at me.”
“Could be.”
The alpha lay the gauze pads over the wound, but the laceration was too long for one person to apply pressure. Ember hurried around the table. “Second pair of hands?”
After a moment, the alpha nodded.
Standing with mere inches between them left her mouth dry, but that didn’t matter. Aaron mattered. As together they applied pressure to the wound, Aaron jerked on the table but kept himself propped up, alert.
“I couldn’t kill it. The bear. My leg kept buckling.”
