and she could smell the rich, metallic scent of his blood mixing with the earth as he lay still on the cold ground. Damn it! She needed to get him to shelter and see how bad the injury was. That meant going into the shack, which meant potentially exposing them to more gunfire.
Honor didn’t have a choice.
She wasted a precious few seconds doing another aural and visual sweep of the surrounding woods. That plus several intense inhalations yielded nothing. If the shooter still lurked out there in the darkness, Honor couldn’t tell. Time to move Logan inside.
Planning every move in her head beforehand let Honor follow through on her thoughts with maximum efficiency. She rolled off his body in the direction of the woods so that when she moved into a crouch, she kept her body between her mate and any lingering danger. It took every ounce of her considerably enhanced Lupine strength to lift the two-hundred-odd pounds of dead weight and maneuver him across the short distance to the shack. She did it at a dead run—well, a dead stagger, really—half laying and half dropping him onto the bed with a grunt. Her ears rang a little from the strain, but she knew she hadn’t heard any further shots from the woods.
Maybe that was a good sign.
It took a second to light the hurricane lamp she kept on the cabinet, and one more to catch her breath, but she did that while she peered down at Logan’s gunshot wound.
The bullet had pierced his chest just below his collarbone, tearing a hole in his shoulder, but missing his heart. Honor almost wept in relief when she realized he was still breathing, but she could see that he’d lost a lot of blood.
The shot had come from behind Honor, meaning the bullet had entered Logan from the front and left a gaping hole, but she’d watched enough television to know that exit wounds were generally more serious than entry wounds. She needed to roll him over and look at his back.
The bullet had left his shoulder almost directly across from where it had entered. She had no idea what that meant forensically with regard to the shooter, but she did know that at least there had been no vital organs, like the heart or lungs, directly in its path. That meant she needed to be most worried about blood vessels and blood loss.
Hands trembling, she pulled the sheet off the mattress and tore it into sections. She immediately folded one section into a thick pad and pressed it to the exit wound. She knelt next to him and used her body weight to apply pressure. That elicited a groan, but Logan didn’t wake.
Honor really wished he would wake up.
Lupines had amazing healing powers. Things like minor cuts and bruises lasted barely more than minutes for them. Uncomplicated broken bones? A few hours. Some of it was probably linked to their freakishly rapid metabolisms. It stood to reason that they burned through fuel so fast because their bodies were constantly repairing and replacing cells. A good dose of magic likely helped the process as well, which was why Honor would be a lot less worried if Logan were conscious.
Something in the shifting process hated injury. An injury sustained in one form could be rapidly improved simply by shifting into another. Honor had always theorized that the magic tried to create a perfect version of the shifter at every change, so when the shifter was injured in one form, the magic tried to erase the injury during the transition to the other. It wasn’t a perfect system. Serious injuries took more changes to heal, and some injuries could be made worse; for instance, a badly broken bone had to be straightened into the correct position, or there was a chance it would heal but remain deformed. Honor had never seen a Lupine heal a bullet wound, but she’d be very glad to see it now.
Until he came back to consciousness, though, Logan would retain his human shape. While shifters could and did occasionally shift in their sleep, unconsciousness caused by injury or illness worked differently. The trauma somehow cut off access to the part of the mind used in the shift, so the unconscious Lupine couldn’t even be triggered by a large group shifting around him, or by a powerful alpha, as could sometimes otherwise happen. The wolf was trapped until the man woke.
Honor kept the pressure on the wound for ten minutes, counting silently in her head to distract herself until it was time to check for bleeding. It had slowed, but it took another ten minutes before it seemed to have stopped completely. She took a deep breath as she set the cloth aside and moved the lamp closer so she could examine the wound.
It looked angry, of course, dark and meaty and just plain wrong. She could see the path carved by the bullet and the inflamed tissue surrounding it. Bits of metal appeared buried amid torn flesh, along with small pale flecks that she realized after a moment must be shards of bone carried along on the bullet’s way through the body. It must not have missed the collarbone as completely as she had thought.
Cursing, Honor rose to grab the first-aid kit out of the cabinet beside the dry sink. Usually, she used it for removing splinters or bandaging up a cut that had gone particularly deep. Once, she’d even used the tape inside to make a splint for a young duckling with a broken wing, but she’d never really imagined she’d need it for a medical emergency. How often did werewolves have those?
She placed it on the bed beside Logan’s hip and popped it open. Inside, she found a ton of useless Band- Aids, some totally inadequate alcohol wipes, and some individual human-dose packages of aspirin. As if that would help even if all he’d done was stub a toe. Thankfully, she also found a small, but unopened, bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a roll of gauze, surgical tape, thick absorbent pads, and a package containing a sterile pair of disposable plastic tweezers.
Honor took a deep breath, tore open the package, and adjusted the lamp once again, turning up the wick for a brighter light. Then she leaned forward and began to meticulously pick debris from her mate’s open wound.
The work was slow and tedious, but necessary. While Lupine immune systems could do amazing things to fight off infection, leaving the metal and bone fragments in the wound would cause them to remain in place after he shifted and the wound closed. Shifter bodies hated foreign objects. The fragments would be pushed slowly to the surface through the healing tissue, both delaying the final healing process and causing pain until they finally broke the surface and could be removed. Better to deal with them now.
The wound had already begun to heal at the surface, necessitating that Honor occasionally dig and reopen an area to get at the shards of bone and bullet. She gritted her teeth every time she did it, praying she wasn’t really hurting her mate. Not that she would mind the occasional moan or curse. The fact that he’d gone completely silent worried her more than if he’d woken up and tried to fight her off. She almost wished he would.
When she had removed all the material she could see, Honor slipped the tweezers back into their package and tossed the whole thing in the trash. She doused the wound in peroxide and used gauze and tape to fashion a bandage which she placed on top of another absorbent pad, just in case there was more bleeding. Then she turned her mate back over, cleaned the entrance wound with peroxide, and bandaged that as well.
By the time she sat back on her heels and stretched to relieve some of the tension and soreness in her back, she realized that the lamp had ceased being necessary a long time ago. Judging by the light pouring into the shack through the single window, it had to be mid-morning at least. With no other trouble since that single gunshot, she imagined the shooter hadn’t stuck around to assess the damage.
On the one hand, the fact that the shooter fled meant there was likely no imminent danger to either herself or Logan. If the shooter had meant to stay and finish them off, he could have done so a hundred times over by now. On the other hand, if he had fled immediately after pulling the trigger, the trail the shooter had left would be cold. Honor could still follow it, of course—with her nose, hiding it would be close to impossible—but the time lapse would make it a bit more challenging.
Her feet itched to move. She wanted nothing more than to spring into action. The urge to head straight into the forest in the direction the bullet had come from made her literally vibrate with suppressed energy, but she couldn’t do it. Just because she suspected the shooter had disappeared didn’t mean she felt anywhere near comfortable leaving Logan alone. Not while he remained unconscious. Until he could shift and begin speeding his own healing process, it was too big a risk for her to go anywhere.
She knew she could summon help if she just threw back her head and howled, but could she take the risk? Her cry would draw the attention of any Lupine within hearing range, but who knew what that would mean? Would the shooter return to finish the job? Would one of the males gunning for Honor’s position in the pack hear and come first? It would be easy out here for them to take advantage of the opportunity to get rid of both her and the wounded Silverback interloper.
Right now, about the only people in the pack that Honor would trust to help her out of this situation were her
