Chapter 30: Her Parents

Hazel's POV

"No," I said. "Ask me in a week. That was the deal."

"Hazel..."

"Marla, the kit. Now."

Marla slid across the stone on her knees with the canvas medical bag and dumped it open beside me.

I tore his shirt away from the ribs and found the hole, black and welling, with the edges already puckering the way silver burns a wolf's flesh.

"Two rounds," I said. "Left shoulder, right lower ribs. The ribs are the one I'm afraid of."

"Doc, there's a Mackay medic coming."

"Then he can hold the light."

The medic arrived with a headlamp and a gray face.

I worked on the cathedral floor with my knees in broken glass.

I got the shoulder round out in a minute, with forceps and a lot of swearing.

The one in the ribs had slid off a rib and lodged short of the lung, and it came out with a wet sound that made Marla turn her head.

I packed it, taped it, and put my hand flat on his chest.

His heart was going.

His gray eyes had closed, and his hand was still locked around my wrist.

"He's out," the medic said.

"Good. Take him down to the lab. Cold saline and wolfsbane antagonist, in that order, and nobody touches him but me."

They lifted him onto a door someone had pulled off a side room, four guards on the corners.

I watched him go, and I did not follow.

There was something I had to do first.

The whole territory was filing out of the cathedral into the great lobby of the tower, because the elders had ordered it.

They stood in a silent mass under the high glass, two thousand people with their coats on and their phones lowered.

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