“Won’t do any good if only Jude can see it,” Angel told him. “Even if it’s still there now that the garage is across too, you’d have people accidentally tripping into the path of a couple of trolls.”
Hardy sighed. “I’ll notify everyone that the area is off limits for the moment. Go get treatment.”
I dragged Angel to a nearby ambulance, not willing to take no for an answer. Just looking at his hand made me sick. Not that I hadn’t seen worse, but with the knowledge that I’d done that. We’d barely started a relationship and already I was becoming his worst nightmare—some sort of crazy necromancer with the ability to use him like a puppet.
The ambulance doors slammed shut, sealing us in sterile white light that made Angel’s burned hand look even worse. The EMT worked quickly, wrapping the wound in cooling gauze, but every hiss of pain from Angel felt like a knife to my ribs. I reached for him, to help and to apologize, but he shifted away, cradling his injured hand against his chest.
The EMTs worked on cleaning the wound to prep it for arrival at the hospital while my stomach churned, threatening to upchuck. Angel sat in stoic silence, half hugging himself, gaze focused over all our heads. It took every ounce of my strength not to let the tears stinging my eyes fall.
Outside, the Veil barrier pulsed like a slow heartbeat, its eerie glow casting long shadows across the ambulance floor. I stared at my own hands that had traced that rune and burned him. The outline of the rune glared at me in silent accusation.
Xavier had been right. Necromancers were bad for shifters. Angel didn’t deserve this pain or being bound to a piece of useless shit like me. I sank back into the corner, out of the way of the EMT as the vehicle launched into motion, choking back tears and doing my best to become invisible.
22
The closest hospitalto our location had a triage area set aside for variants, and they got Angel in right away. No one protested me following him into treatment, not even Angel, which I was grateful for. But the nurse examining the wound and making faces added an intense wave of nausea to my gut that I had to hide.
“Is it really bad?” I asked.
She glanced my way, then back to Angel. “We can put you under,” she offered him. “But it never lasts long, and this will take a little while to clean.”
“Can he get a painkiller or something?” I asked, feeling sick at Angel’s obvious agony.
“They don’t really work on shifters,” the nurse said. “We can put him under, but it usually lasts less than a half hour and may prevent him from shifting for a few hours.”
They were going to scrape off the dead flesh while he could feel it all? The air seemed to leave the room, and I clung to the metal bar of Angel’s bed.
“It’s fine,” Angel said through gritted teeth. “Just do it.”
The nurse nodded, prepping her tools. Angel’s body was rigid, every muscle locked, but he was trying to hide it. His jawclenched, his breath sharp and controlled, as if he were counting through the pain before she’d even touched him. The wound looked bad: blackened skin, seared muscles, the hint of bone beneath. I had to look away before the guilt choked me.
“Do you want to wait outside?” the nurse asked me. “It’s not usually pretty.”
“No,” I snapped, refusing to leave him to suffer alone for something I’d done. Tears blurred my vision as Angel fixed his gaze straight ahead, away from his ruined hand or me. “I’m sorry, Angel. You know I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He said nothing, but his body tensed as tight as a bowstring, braced for the worst. I wrapped my fingers around his uninjured hand, swallowing bile when he flinched. After a long moment, his fist relaxed, and he let me lace our fingers together.
Angel closed his eyes as the nurse began cleaning the wound with alcohol. His grip tightened in mine, near bone-crushing, but I said nothing, sucking in air and shutting my eyes. The hospital noise faded as I focused on Angel. The sound of his breath, the hammering of his pulse beneath my grip, which steadied me.
After a few long minutes of hearing the nurse open packages and Angel’s breathing a backdrop to the beep of distant machines, I sank into the pain, imagining Angel’s tightened grip reflected his agony and willing to take whatever he gave me. The focus gave me clarity, and beneath all the pain, I could sense a thread, luminous and frayed, tangled in the ruin of his burned flesh. Our bond, or something else?
I didn’t mean to touch it. But when the nurse’s scalpel bit into dead tissue, Angel’s pain flared through our bond like a lightning strike, and I reached for that thread on instinct, as if taking hold of it could heal his pain if I were willing.
Our connection roared to life through me. I swallowed my cry, heart racing at the brutal intensity. Was this helping? I feltthe connection’s fragile vibration, the echo of his shifter energy resisting the damage. My magic slid over the threads, weaving the frayed edges, knotting them back together like a braid, delicate, strong, and instinctual.
Angel’s grip eased in mine. His breathing steadied. The nurse kept working, but the tension in his shoulders bled away as I siphoned the worst of the pain into myself, my teeth grinding against the fire building in my nerves.
I didn’t understand what I was doing. Only that if I stopped, his pain would return.
For a few stolen minutes, there was just the hum of machines, the scrape of the scalpel, the pull of the thread between my fingers, and us. No matter how bad it hurt, all that mattered was Angel.
“Are you okay?” The nurse’s voice shattered the silence.
I blinked, disoriented. Angel’s gaze locked onto mine, his eyes widening.
The nurse thrust gauze at me. Only then did I feel the hot drip of liquid on my upper lip. Blood oozed from my nose, splattering the sheets between us.
“Oh,” I muttered, pinching my nose. The metallic tang flooded my mouth. “Shit. Sorry.”
