Lost (12 page)

I screamed in
pain as his claws sank even more deeply into my flesh. My timing was
perfect. It took a very loud sound to mask the roar of an engine
under hard acceleration, but I managed it.

Nicolas didn't
hear Celeste's Pathfinder until the very last second.

She hit doing
somewhere in excess of thirty miles per hour and I heard massive
hybrid bones crunch.

He was between
me and the vehicle, but a significant amount of the force of the
impact was transmitted through his body and into me. We were both
thrown across the parking lot, a cartwheeling maelstrom of claws and
talons.

We came to rest
separated by a distance of more than twenty feet and for nearly a
second I couldn't get my body to move. I would have worried that I'd
been paralyzed except for the fact that I could still feel my legs
and they hurt too bad for the nerves between my head and toes to be
anything other than still working normally.

I managed to
pull myself up onto my feet and took an unsteady step towards
Nicolas, but Celeste pulled me up short with a yell.

"No! There
isn't time to finish him off; we have to get out of here before the
rest of them get here."

I looked over
to where she was pointing and saw four more hybrids headed our way.
It was like something out of a nightmare. Under other circumstances
nobody would have dared to let a fight escalate like this. The
Coun'hij would have had all of our heads for this, but I was already
a marked man. Apparently Nicolas and the others figured that killing
me would buy them some leniency with Puppeteer and the rest.

Either way, the
containment teams were going to have their work cut out for them this
time. If the Coun'hij expected to keep this particular incident off
of the national stage they were going to have to leave Oblivion down
here for the next week or two.

I itched to
cover the rest of the distance over to Nicolas and end him once and
for all, but Celeste was right, the other four hybrids were just too
close. Not only that, Nicolas was starting to stir.

I staggered
over to Ash, picked him up, and carried him over to Celeste's
Pathfinder. Three seconds later we were tearing out of the parking
lot. I looked back and saw the other hybrids gathering around Nicolas
just before we rounded a corner that hid them all from view.

As much as I
might wish otherwise, I knew that we hadn't managed to kill Nicolas.
It was too bad. I was pretty sure that I'd eventually end up fighting
him again at some point and the odds were very good that I wouldn't
survive our next meeting.

Isaac Nazir
Highway 310
Eastern Louisiana

Once
I was satisfied that the hybrids from the New Orleans pack weren't
going to run us down and force me into another fight that I was
nearly guaranteed to lose, I turned back to Ash. He still had a pulse
and he was still breathing, but he was fading fast.

I
tore open the bags we'd smuggled out of the hospital and swore when I
found the first-aid kit. Neither Ash nor I had thought to pre thread
the second needle after our adventure earlier that night.

"What's
going on back there? He's still alive, right?"

The
terror I'd heard in Celeste's voice hadn't ever really disappeared,
its cause had just morphed as we'd narrowly avoided one catastrophe
and plunged towards another.

"He's
still alive right now, but he won't be for much longer unless I can
get the bleeding under control."

I
finally managed to get the needle threaded as Celeste flipped on the
dome light. Then, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours,
I stuck my hands inside one of my friends hoping that I'd be able to
stop them from bleeding to death.

"Where
are we headed?"

"Shouldn't
you be concentrating on Ashley?"

I'd
opened Ash up thinking that Nicolas couldn't have hit any major
arteries, but I'd been wrong. Given the placement of the wound it
would have been a small miracle for that to have been the case, but
that hadn't stopped me from hoping.

"Yeah,
I'll be plenty focused on sewing Ash up in about three seconds, but I
haven't made it to the tricky part yet. Where are you taking us? They
know what we're driving, what's your plan for slipping through
whatever net they're trying to set up?"

The
kidneys are a bad place to be stabbed or cut. There are a lot of
blood vessels there and the main renal artery was capable of bleeding
an average person out in something like a minute, with
unconsciousness occurring in a quarter of that time.

Ash's
right renal artery hadn't been severed or he would have already been
dead, but it had been nicked. I went to start my first stitch, but
then paused.

"Are
we on a straightaway or are you about to throw us into a turn?"

"What?
No, we'll be going straight for another minute or two, I'll warn you
before that changes."

I
slid the needle into Ash's renal artery and angled it so that the
needle would come back out just above the tear.

Celeste
sounded like she was shaking, but she kept the SUV steady. "I've
got a boat about ten minutes from here. We can ditch the car and take
the boat. That should give us a chance at losing Onyx's people."

I
pulled the first stitch tight while she was talking and started on
the second one. The first one had gone in about right, but I was
worried about the second one. If I didn't pull it tight enough then
Ash would bleed to death. If I pulled it too tight then the tear
might not match up correctly and he'd still bleed to death.

"We
can't stay on a boat forever. What do we do when it's time to return
to dry land?"

"I'm
still working on that part of the plan. If nothing else I can arrange
to have a different car waiting for us somewhere else when it's time
to come out of the swamp."

"So
you're making this up as you go then?"

"Do
you have a problem with that?"

The
second stitch was done and the third one seemed to have the right
amount of tension on it. I shook my head without looking up from Ash.

"No,
surprisingly enough, I don't seem to have any kind of problem at all
with that. I guess my beast sees the family resemblance too."

I
could feel her staring daggers at me in the rearview mirror, but that
was okay. She'd busted Ash's chops for not having a better plan for
getting us out of the hospital, but she was apparently cut from the
same cloth. As long as all she did was stare then I didn't care how
pissed off she might be.

"Turning
now."

Ash
didn't have a lot of time to waste by that point. He'd lost a lot of
blood already. I'd managed to slow the bleeding from the renal artery
to something that was barely more than a trickle, but I was still
worried about him.

Despite
my concerns, I waited to start the second-to-last stitch until we
were through the turn. I didn't want to risk tearing the artery open
if we hit a bump—what I was doing was already dangerous enough.

The
last two stitches went in without any problem and then I used what
was left of his shirt to soak up the blood that had puddled inside of
him so I could see where I had additional problems. There were a few,
but none of them were as bad as I expected them to be.

We
drove in silence for a couple more minutes as I tried to take care of
all of the other places where blood was leaking out of his body. The
fight seemed to have taken even more out of me than I'd realized, my
vision was going blurry.

I
did some quick math while I closed up a vein and came to a total
number of hours since I'd last slept that was only just this side of
dangerous. No wonder I was dragging. In the last thirty-six hours I'd
been in two major fights, performed two emergency surgeries, hacked
two separate systems inside the hospital and done it all without
getting any sleep.

"Ash
told you about the lamias?"

"Some.
He seemed to think that they might be able to tell us where the
Coun'hij was based, but he swore me to secrecy. He said the lamias
were like the ultimate trump card, something that needed to stay a
secret for when you'd played every other card you had."

"Yeah,
I think I might be to that point now. A lot has changed since Ashley
was here last. Onyx is a fast learner and he's not afraid to play
dirty. Are you up to a challenge match if it comes to that? I'd do it
myself, but their queens don't fight and this whole thing is one
colossal bluff that all depends on them believing that I'm a queen,
just like their queen, and therefore due the same rights and
privileges."

"Do
I have any choice?"

"Not
if we want to survive."

"Then
I guess I'd better be ready for a fight to the death against
something capable of bringing down a werewolf all by itself."

"It
won't be as bad as that—don't get me wrong, it will still be
bad—but they like their fights more evenly matched than that.
They have an incredibly powerful venom that they inject via the tips
of their claws that is the primary reason they are able to bring down
werewolves. They wouldn't use that on you unless they viewed you as
being as big a threat as a werewolf. If you were to survive enough
challenge matches you might eventually be classified as an opponent
worthy of using venom on, but you'll be safe for a while."

I
tied off the last stitch on another blood vessel—this one had
been cut all of the way through—and tried to remember how many
of them I'd sewn up so far. I'd lost count somewhere around five; I
was pretty sure that we'd been driving for more than ten minutes.

"How
many fights are we talking?"

"I'm
not sure. It depends on how long we're there, but there are other
factors. They'll challenge you at irregular intervals throughout our
time with them. There is always a challenge when a new queen first
shows up, but I don't know what triggers subsequent challenges after
that."

As
the SUV coasted to a stop I used Ash's shirt again to soak up the
blood that had continued to pool while I'd been working. Looking at
the bloody material jogged something in the back of my mind and I
suddenly realized that I was naked.

My
face heated up instantly. Our pack hadn't ever practiced the kind of
casual nudity common in most other packs. It made things go much more
smoothly when you didn't have the dominants inside of the pack
worrying about who was getting an eyeful of whose girlfriend or
boyfriend each time someone changed back to human form.

Normally
I would have put a new ha'bit on as soon as I changed out of the
ruined one, but I'd been so worried about Kristin on the way to the
car that it hadn't even crossed my mind. I decided that Ash was
stabilized enough to move and unobtrusively reached for the change of
clothes in my bag.

Celeste
chuckled as she put her Pathfinder into park. "I was wondering
how long it was going to take for you to realize that. Grab your
clothes and put them on if you have to, but work fast. There's no
telling how long we have before Nicolas' guys show up. There are only
so many places we could have been headed."

She slipped out
of the vehicle and headed towards the dock and the two dozen boats
moored to it. I pulled on my last undamaged ha'bit and then covered
it up with jeans and a t-shirt so that I wouldn't stand out any more
than necessary.

The daggers I'd
felt her staring at me during the drive had suddenly taken on a
different significance altogether. I was pretty sure if the shoe had
been on the other foot and I'd been checking her out while she hadn't
even realized she wasn't wearing clothes that there would have been
hell to pay.

Part of me
wanted to challenge her right then and there, but the situation was
more complex than that. The question of dominance needed to be
established between us, but I was already hurt so I'd be starting out
at a disadvantage.

Even if I did
win, the price might very well be our lives. Even if Onyx's people
didn't happen on us before the fight was over, it would just make it
that much harder to beat the lamias in an hour or two.

Now wasn't the
time, but the time would eventually come, and when it did I was going
to hit her so hard her head would spin.

I gently picked
Ash up and carried him down to the aluminum boat, realizing in the
process that it probably didn't matter much what I looked like while
I was carrying a limp body in my arms. So much for being unobtrusive.

"Go get
Kristin and the bags while I finish up with Ash."

Celeste turned
towards me with fire in her eyes. "You don't tell me what to
do."

"Consider
it a down payment on the show you got earlier. Unless you want to try
your hand at a little vascular surgery while I fetch our things."

Her mouth
tightened and she picked up a fine tremble in her arms like she was
having a hard time keeping her beast in check enough to maintain her
shape. I looked down at Ash, turning my back on her the way you would
do with an enemy who wasn't worth worrying about. I knew it would
piss her off, which was part of why I'd done it, but I was also still
worried about Ash.

I'd had him all
sewn up by the time we'd stopped, but there was a possibility that
moving him had ripped some of his stitches. I started carefully
probing the long gashes in his back while I waited to see what
Celeste was going to do.

"This
isn't over. Damn Sanctuary prima donna. We're going to have a
knock-down drag-out once we get somewhere safe."

"I look
forward to it; now hurry up before we have company."

Less than five
minutes later Kristin and all three bags had been moved to the boat
and we'd pushed off from the dock. The boat was one of the
shallow-bottomed fan boats that were primarily used in swamps and
bayous, which hadn't been a surprise, but I was shocked at just how
loud the prop turned out to be.