Chapter 115: Miniature Maverick Needs Oxygen Too

Across from the Thunderfang brothers, Maria Emberclaw was simultaneously the most devoted friend and the worst medical patient in the history of Thunderfang emergency care.

"—and the pipes were melted, Maverick, completely melted, the copper was drooping from the ceiling like candle wax, and the door was bolted, and I kicked it, and it didn’t move, and the thing inside was laughing, it was LAUGHING. Then it lost its HEAD—"

"Maria." Maverick’s hologram was still on her wrist, six inches tall, arms crossed, his tiny red eyes glowing with the focused intensity of an Alpha who had been listening to his sister narrate a near-death experience at four hundred words per minute while her oxygen mask dangled from one ear. "Put the mask back on."

Maria put the mask back on. Three seconds passed. The mask came off.

"—and Nova broke an Alpha command and her eye was bleeding when she came back—"

"Mask. On."

The mask went on. Two seconds this time. The mask came off.

"—and Landon’s hands, you should see his hands, the skin was literally peeling off. That means he lifted it to get Derek. Or Nova figured something else out—"

"MARIA."

"I’M BREATHING FINE, MAVERICK."

"You are breathing fine because of the mask. That is how masks work. They go on. They stay on. The staying on part is the part you are failing."

Maria put the mask on with the exaggerated compliance of a woman performing obedience for an audience of one tiny hologram. She lasted four seconds. A personal record. Then the mask migrated to her chin.

"—stairs, Maverick. They were completely collapsed—"

Maverick’s hologram put both of his tiny hands over his tiny face.

"Maria Emberclaw, if I have to say mask one more time, I am flying to Thunderfang tonight and putting it on your face myself."

"Also, your flame went around Nova. I think we should all acknowledge that because nobody is acknowledging that and it was the coolest thing I’ve ever—"

"MASK."

The mask went back on and Maria’s eyes rolled so hard they nearly completed a full rotation. Miniature Maverick’s jaw was so tight his hologram was vibrating.

The medic working on Nova reached for the clasp on her cloak. The midnight blue fabric, Derek’s gift, the one she had told him she loved, was pulled from her shoulders and folded onto the gurney beside her. Then fingers found the zipper at the back of her thermal and pulled it down, easing the fabric over her left shoulder.

Pain arrived at the party without an invitation. It had apparently been waiting in her shoulder the entire time, quiet, well-behaved, content to let the nosebleed and the burst blood vessel and the smoke inhalation take center stage while it sat in the back of the room and bided its time. The second the fabric moved, it stood up and announced itself.

Nova’s jaw locked behind the oxygen mask. She couldn’t talk. Talking meant coughing and coughing meant the medic would stop working and stopping meant this took longer and longer meant more time sitting in a courtyard when she should be checking on Derek.

Her eyes found him across the courtyard. Thirty feet away on his gurney, oxygen mask on, medics wrapping his hands, his torso a roadmap of burns that were healing in real time.

He was watching her.

His eyes were on her over the top of his mask, steady, wolf-gold at the edges, tracking her from his gurney with the intensity of a man who had just been pulled out from under a burning beam and his first act of consciousness was to locate the woman who had pulled him.

Alpha Thunderfang was also watching her from the adjacent gurney. A medic was wrapping his left hand and he was ignoring the medic entirely, his eyes fixed on Nova with an expression she still lacked the energy to translate.

On Maria’s wrist, miniature Maverick was also watching. Three sets of eyes, all locked onto the same girl in the back of an ambulance hover, probably because she was bleeding out of one eye and looked like she had been exorcised by a building.

"Derek is fine. Alphas heal fast," Maria said, pulling off her mask for good. She closed the distance and pulled Nova’s hair up, twisting it into a messy bun on top of her head because she understood medical treatment required hair management. "Right, Mav?"

"He’s fine," hologram Maverick said flatly.

The medic peeled the thermal further down Nova’s arm, working the fabric past the shoulder joint with a gentleness that said the damage underneath had already told him things the patient hadn’t. Nova had a sports bra underneath and was past the point of caring if anyone saw it. They would survive.

She looked back up at Derek. He was still watching her. His eyes dropped to her shoulder. The one that was screaming at her. She looked down at it.

It was bleeding. A gash ran from the top of her shoulder down towards her collarbone, the edges ragged in a way that suggested tearing rather than cutting, the wound open and wet under the courtyard lights. The blood was bright against her skin and had been soaking into the thermal this entire time, invisible against the dark fabric, quietly doing its job while she had been too busy surviving to notice she was injured.

She blinked down at it. Once for confusion. Twice for the specific bewilderment of a woman who had been through so many traumas tonight that a new one had apparently arrived, taken a number, and waited in line without making a scene.

When had that happened? The beam? The door? The corridor? The thing’s fingers when it grabbed for her? She ran the timeline backwards in her head and came up empty because the last hour was a blur of fire and smoke and Alpha commands and physics problems and her brain had been operating on priorities and a bleeding shoulder had ranked below everything else and so her body had simply handled it in the background like a process running on a server that nobody checks until it crashes.