I'm already pulling supplies. Bandages, gauze, the clotting powder from the second shelf, the surgical kit she reorganized last night while I held the lantern. Colt and Dawson stand back, dripping water onto the floor, wearing the same lost expression big men get when there's nothing left to hit.
"Hold him." Jess nods at me. "Both hands on his shoulders. He's going to buck when I set the ribs."
I pin Jax flat. The kid's eyes flutter open and fix on me—unfocused, scared, younger than his years.
"VP?"
"Right here, Jax. Hold still."
Jess's hands press into his left side and Jax screams. His body heaves under my grip, the wolf in him surging, his muscles contracting with shifter strength that nearly rips him off the table. I hold. Lean my weight forward, my palms flat against his shoulders, keeping him pinned while she works. The kid's blood soaks warm through my flannel and across my knuckles.
She stabilizes two ribs with tape and packing, moves to the lacerations, sutures the deepest one while I hold a clamp on the bleeder feeding it. Her hands don't shake. Her breathing stays even. She works like the storm outside doesn't exist, like the monitor beeping beside us is the only sound in the universe.
I've watched combat medics on documentaries Knox plays late at night. Jess makes them look clumsy.
Then she pulls back, checks the monitor, and the color drains from her face.
"He's losing too much blood. I need O-negative for a transfusion." She looks at Colt. "What's your type?"
"A-positive."
"Dawson?"
"B-neg."
Her mouth presses into a line. She reaches for the phone and then stops, because who is she going to call? The hospital evacuated. The blood bank probably sits underwater. Every road between here and the next clinic runs under six feet of storm surge.
I roll up my sleeve.
"O-negative. Take whatever you need."
Her head snaps toward me. "How do you—"
"Orc blood. Universal donor—works for shifters, humans, any species." I drag a chair beside the table and sit, holding my arm out, inner elbow up. "Hook me up, Kitten."
She grabs the transfusion kit from the emergency cabinet and swabs my arm with iodine. The needle slides in clean, a sharp pinch followed by the slow pull as my blood drains into the collection bag. I watch the line fill—dark green-red, the color of orc blood, richer and thicker than human plasma.
The bag fills. Jess connects it to Jax's IV line and the transfer begins, my blood running into Jax's veins while his shifter healing fights to close the wounds she's packed and sutured.
The pull deepens. My fingers tingle. The edges of my vision soften and the room sways, a subtle tilt that reminds me of riding in rough seas. I lock my fingers around the armrest and focus on Jess.
She moves between Jax and the monitor, adjusting flow rates, checking his pressure, her voice steady and low as she talks the kid through it. "Stay with me, Jax. Your body's accepting the transfusion. Your heart rate's climbing back."
"You're doing great," I tell her. Not Jax. Her. She looks at me, startled, and holds my gaze a beat longer than she needs to before she turns back to her patient.
Jax's monitor stutters.
The steady beep warps into an uneven skip, then flattens into a single sustained tone that fills the trauma bay like a scream.
"He's coding." Jess locks her hands over Jax's sternum, elbows straight, and starts compressions."Colt, hold pressure on that laceration. Dawson, keep his legs still." Both men move without arguing.One, two, three—I count with her in my head, watching her shoulders drive downward with each push, watching his ribcage cave under her palms and spring back, cave and spring, cave and spring.
I'm still connected to the line. The needle in my arm, the tube running into a bag that feeds into a boy whose heart stopped beating under our hands. Lightheadedness wraps around my skull and squeezes, and I grip the chair arm and stay seated because if I pull this needle, Jax loses his blood supply and the extra seconds might be the ones that kill him.
"Come on, kid." The words scrape out of me, rough and thin. My blood pressure drops. The room tilts. I blink and force it level.
Jess doesn't stop. Thirty compressions, two breaths, thirty compressions, two breaths. Her mouth pulls tight, her focus narrowing to the body under her hands—a ferocity that strips everything else from the room, a refusal to let this boy die. Her arms tremble with exertion but she doesn't slow. Her voice counts steady and clear, and the monitor screams its flat tone into the dark.Colt braces Jax's legs against the table. Dawson holds the IV bag overhead. Nobody speaks.
I want to tear apart whatever collapsed that building. I want to rip the storm out of the sky with my bare hands and feed it to the ocean. I channel every scrap of that fury into staying still, staying conscious, bleeding into a bag while the woman I love fights death to a standstill on a folding gurney in a clinic held together with plywood and nails.
