Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Funnily enough, his own plummet from the sky after being shot in DarkRiver territory had barely made an impact on his psyche. Likely because his shooters—deluded though they’d been—had been fighting a kind of war. They’d been on the wrong side of it, but they hadn’t known that. Their actions hadn’t been done with any sense of malice toward him; he’d just been collateral damage.
His parents’ murder, in contrast, had been all about malice.
Adam shut down the unraveling past with a single grim command. Because his parents were gone; the best friend who’d run whooping through the Canyon with him after they escaped the crèche might yet make it.
“Fuck, Jacques,” he said as he took in the other man’s body.
One arm was a crumpled and broken wing, the other a human arm with the palm flat on the ground. Part of his body was feathered, while his right leg had been truncated at midthigh but wasn’t bleeding. Not torn off. Just not there.
One side of his face was falcon, the other human.
Like all changelings, Adam had heard horror stories of changelings frozen mid-shift, but he’d never seen anything like this. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the gaping holes in Jacques’s body. The edges bore the telltale burns of high-impact lasers, and when Adam turned his friend over with care, he saw that the main injury went from one side of Jacques’s body to the other in a sideways angle.
Adam sucked in a sharp breath.
Had whoever shot Jacques hit his heart?
He couldn’t tell, not with the carnage, but the blood bond hadn’t snapped, so Jacques was holding on. Adam did the only thing he could and, taking his best friend’s hand, poured the clan’s energy into the other man, giving him the raw fuel to cling to life. “I’ve got you, J.”
Naia landed next to him with none of her usual grace and dropped the locator beacon to the side before she shifted. Though she was as calm and competent as always while she worked to heal Jacques, he could feel the depth of her pain. Healers were tough and stubborn enough to keep on going until they literally dropped where they stood, but they also had the softest hearts in the clan.
“Something’s wrong,” she said while their clanmates continued to keep watch in the air.
“Talk to me.”
“The physical injuries are bad enough, but I think the worst blow caught him mid-shift.” Naia’s fingers were gentle on Jacques’s twisted body, the heat of her healing energy a pulse Adam could feel through the blood bond.
“We’ve discussed this among the healer network”—her tone was absent, tight, her focus on Jacques—“and while there have been cases over the years of a changeling being hurt mid-shift, the results have either been fatal at once, or a misforming that was immediately rectified by another shift. I’ve never heard of a case where a changeling ended up locked in a partial shift.”
Sweat beaded along Adam’s spine and it had nothing to do with the climate. “His brain,” he said, “did it shift either way?” Either falcon or human and Jacques might come out of it okay—as long as he had a functioning brain that Adam or Naia could reach, they could nudge him to complete the shift one way or the other.
But Naia pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I can’t reach him with my healer senses, can’t tell if he’s there at all.” A look at him out of eyes gone falcon, the deep brown ringed by yellow. “Adam, he’s breathing but I can’t tell if he’s in there.”
Adam had prepared for anything—a broken back, a pierced heart, collapsed lungs, even worse injuries—but he’d never even allowed himself to consider that Jacques’s brain, that intelligent, surly, and unique organ, might be permanently damaged.
“Wake the hell up, you asshole,” he gritted out as he lifted Jacques into his arms after Naia gave him the go-ahead.
The other man didn’t weigh anywhere near what he should have; the shift did weird things to mass, with their human bodies far heavier than their falcon forms. Jacques’s lightness when he was at least seventy-five percent human right now was another indication that things had gone wrong on the cellular level.
The emergency medical vehicle screeched to a halt near them just then. Dust coated its olive green paint job, the ambulance a converted and extended four-wheel drive that could deal with their environment, especially the more challenging unpaved roads.
Adam carried his badly wounded—dying—friend to it, placed him gently inside. Naia climbed in afterward, and Adam shut the door.
As the vehicle raced off, he ordered those who remained to search the area. “All indications are that he was shot while at low altitude—he wouldn’t have gone that low without reason.” Jacques far preferred to stay high, ride the air currents. “We need to find out what attracted his attention.”