She cut his T-shirt off with the scissors she’d found in the kitchen. Then she ripped open the telfa pads and set one against the little gaping mouth on his chest and tried not to think about the hole that ran inside him from his front to his back. He pressed the pad harder than she’d have dared to.
She sorted through the kit, looking for the vet wrap, and found a full dozen rolls on the bottom. Most of them were brown or black, but there were a few others. Because she was angry with him for hurting himself more when he could have just stayed in wolf form for a few days, she grabbed a pair of fluorescent pink rolls.
He laughed when she pulled them out, but it must have hurt-his mouth thinned, and he had to take shallow breaths for a while. “My brother put those in there,” he said when the worst of it was over.
“Did you do something to annoy him, too?” she asked.
He grinned. “He claimed that was all he had in the office when I restocked the kit.”
She was ready to ask a few more questions about his brother, but all desire to tease him died when she looked at his back. In the few minutes she’d spent organizing her bandaging efforts, the blood had pooled in the area between his skin and the top of his jeans. She should have left his shirt alone until she had everything ready.
“Tarditas et procrastinatio odiosa est,” she told herself and cut open a package of telfa pads.
“You speak Latin?” he asked.
“Nope, I just quote it a lot. That was supposed to be Cicero, but your father tells me my pronunciation is off. Do you want a translation?” The slice from the first bullet, the one he’d taken protecting her, burned a puffy red diagonal line above the more serious wound. It was going to hurt for a while, but it wasn’t important.
“I don’t speak Latin,” he said. “But I know a little French and Spanish. Procrastination sucks?”
“That’s what it’s supposed to mean.” She had already made things worse; he ought to have a doctor for this.
“It’s all right,” he said, answering the tension in her voice. “Just get the leak plugged.”
Grimly, she set about doing just that. She gathered his waist-length, sweat-dampened hair and pushed it over his shoulder.
There weren’t any telfa pads big enough for the wound in his back, so she got two of them and held them in place with judicious pressure from her knee while she reached around him with the roll of vet wrap. He took the end for her without her asking and held it to his ribs. She used that anchor to wind the rest of it around him the first time.
She was hurting him. He’d almost quit breathing except in small, shallow pants. Giving first aid to werewolves was fraught with danger. Pain could make a wolf lose control like he’d done this morning. But Charles just held himself very still as she pulled the bandage tight enough to hold the pads where they needed to be.
She used both rolls of the wrap and tried not to notice how good the bright pink looked against his dark skin. When a man is on the verge of passing out from pain, it seemed wrong to notice how beautiful he was. His smooth dark skin stretched over taut muscles and bone…maybe if he hadn’t smelled so good under the blood and sweat, she could have maintained a distance.
Hers. He was hers, whispered that part of her that didn’t worry about human concerns. Whatever fears Anna had about the rapid changes in her life, her wolf half was very happy with the events of the past few days.
She got a dishcloth from the kitchen, wetted it down, and cleaned the blood from his skin while he recovered from her clumsy efforts at first aid.
“There’s blood on your pant leg, too,” she told him. “The jeans have to come off. Can you just magic them off the way they came on?”
He shook his head. “Not now. Not even to show off.”
She weighed the difficulties in getting a pair of jeans off and picked up the scissors she’d used on his T-shirt. They’d been nice and sharp-and they cut through the tough denim as easily as they’d cut through the shirt, leaving him in a pair of dark green boxers.
“I hope you’ve got a good surface on this floor,” she murmured to help distance herself from the wound. “Be a shame to stain it.”
His blood had spread all over the fancy patterning on the floor. Fortunately, the Persian rugs were too far away to be in danger.
The second bullet had gone right through his calf. It looked worse than it had yesterday, puffier and sore.
“Blood won’t bother it,” he answered as if he bled on his floor all the time. “It’s got four coats of polyurethane applied just last year. It’ll be just fine.”
His kit was out of pink, so for his leg she chose the next-most-objectionable color, a chartreuse green. Like the pink, the brilliant shade suited him. She used the whole roll and another pair of telfa pads to keep the bandage from sticking-and he was done, leaving the quilt, his clothes, and the floor covered in blood. Her clothes hadn’t fared too well, either.
“Do you want me to get you to bed before I deal with this mess, or would you rather have a few minutes to collect yourself?”
“I’ll wait,” he said. His black eyes had changed to wolf yellow while she’d worked. Despite the temper tantrum he’d thrown this morning that had scared the Chicago wolves, his control was very, very good to allow him to hold still for her-but there was no reason to push him.
“Where’s your laundry room?” she asked, grabbing a change of clothes from her box.
“Downstairs.”
Downstairs took her a minute to find. At last she opened a door in the short wall between the kitchen and dining room that she’d assumed was a closet and found a stairway. The laundry room she found in one corner of the half-finished basement-the rest of the basement was a weight room equipped with an impressive thoroughness.
She threw the rags of his bandages and clothes into the trash next to the washing machine. He had a sink in the laundry room, and she filled it with cold water and loaded it with everything salvageable. She let them soak a few minutes while she changed into clean clothes, dumping her bloodstained shirt and jeans into the sink, too. She found a five-gallon bucket filled with folded, clean rags sitting next to the dryer, and grabbed a few to clean the floor.
He didn’t react when she came in; his eyes were closed and his face composed. He should have looked silly sitting in bloodstained underwear with stripes of pink and green bandage wound around him, but he just looked like Charles.
The blood on the floor cleaned up as easily as he’d promised. She gave it one last polishing swipe and stood to go back downstairs with her bloodstained rags, but Charles caught her ankle in one big hand and she froze, wondering if he’d lost control at last.
“Thank you,” he said, sounding civilized enough.
“I’d say anytime, but if you make me bandage you very often, I’d have to kill you,” she told him.
He grinned, his eyes still closed. “I’ll try not to bleed more often than necessary,” he promised, releasing her to her tasks.
Once the washer was churning away downstairs, she busied herself nuking frozen burritos from his freezer. If she was hungry, he must be starving.
She didn’t find any coffee, but there was instant hot chocolate and a variety of teas. Deciding sugar was what was needed, she boiled water for cocoa.
When everything was done, she took a plate and a cup of cocoa into the living room and set them on the floor in front of him. He didn’t open his eyes or move, so she left him alone.
She looked through the house until she found his bedroom. It wasn’t difficult. For all the luxuriousness of his furnishings and trimmings, it wasn’t a huge house. There was only one room with a bed.
That gave her an unpleasant little pause.
She pulled back the blankets. At least she didn’t have to deal with sex for a few days yet. He wasn’t in any shape for gymnastics right now. Being a werewolf had taught her- among other things-to ignore the past, live in the present, and not think too much about the future. It worked, too, as long as the present was bearable.
She was tired, tired and completely out of place. She did what she’d learned to do over the past few years and drew on the strength of her wolf. Not enough that another wolf could sense it, and she knew that if she looked in a mirror, it would be her own brown eyes staring out at her. But under her skin she could feel that Other. She’d used the wolf to get through things her human half wouldn’t have survived. For now, it gave her more strength and insulated her from her worries.
