Chapter 116: I Thought She Didn’t Have A Wolf

The medic pressed two fingers against her shoulder joint and Nova watched his face go through the professional version of yikes.

"It’s dislocated. We need to reduce it now before the swelling locks it in place."

The words entered her ears and her brain accepted delivery but requested a grace period before opening the package. She blinked a few times. She understood the reasoning behind why it needed to be fixed.

She pulled her oxygen mask off. "Can you look at my eye first?" The sentence came out as a rasp that dissolved into a cough. "Please."

The medic stared down at her with the expression of a man who recognized a stall tactic and was deciding whether to honor it or override it. The shoulder was the priority. The eye was a distraction. Both of them knew it. One of them was hoping professionalism would lose the argument.

Maria jumped in before professionalism could win.

"Just give her a moment with that. Her eye has also been bothering me." She clapped her hands twice. That settled that.

The medic looked at Maria. Looked at Nova. Looked at his career and the choices that had led him to a courtyard at midnight where an Emberclaw princess was running his triage. He put Nova’s oxygen mask back on her face and turned his attention to the burst vessel.

"How did this happen?" he asked Maria, leaning close to Nova’s left eye with a penlight that Nova wished would go away.

Maria launched into an explanation that started at the Alpha command and included the stairwell and the nose bleeding and the steps Nova fought for and the phrase "she walked through it like it wasn’t there except it was definitely there because I couldn’t move at all."

Nova was halfway listening. Her shoulder was screaming at her now, the adrenaline’s departure leaving behind a pain so sharp it made her teeth ache in sympathy. Every micro-movement of the medic working on her eye traveled down her neck and into the joint and the joint responded with a throb that pulsed in time with her heartbeat.

She coughed under the mask. Winced. The cough moved the shoulder and the shoulder objected and the objection was filed directly into her spinal cord.

Her eyes drifted to Maverick’s hologram on Maria’s wrist. He was still there. Six inches tall. Red eyes steady. Jaw tight. The Alpha who had been watching her all night, who had caught her when she stumbled at the Moonfire, who had held her in the rain and called her pretty girl and kissed her ear while she shook in his arms.

She remembered his face on the field. The moment Derek carried her away and Maverick was left standing in his own bootprints with his chest caving in and his fists open and nothing coming out of his mouth.

He looked back at her from the hologram. His jaw worked once. His eyes held hers with something that a six-inch projection should not have been able to transmit and was transmitting anyway.

"Those bruises weren’t there at dinner on her neck," Maria said, her voice changing from motormouth to something sharper.

Nova winced again. Maria had moved behind her and was unzipping the rest of the shirt she had on because apparently that was needed. The medic leaned around to look. His penlight moved from Nova’s eye to her neck. Then down to her wrists.

"I thought you don’t have a wolf. How long were you in silver for, 7709?"

Maria’s head snapped towards him. "She doesn’t have a wolf. Since she was a child. And her name is Nova. Not 7709."

Maria had been making that exact correction to every person she met since the Moonfire and would continue making it until every wolf in Helix got it through their skull or she died trying, whichever came second. She answered the silver question with such sincerity, such genuine expertise, that Nova almost laughed under the mask.

Before the medic could respond, boots sounded on the courtyard stone. Alpha Thunderfang appeared at the ambulance bay, bandaged hands at his sides, oxygen mask pulled down around his neck.

"Status," he said, looking at the medic.

Maria slipped her oxygen mask back onto her face, as if she had been wearing it the entire time and the Alpha who had been watching her talk nonstop for the last several minutes was mistaken if he thought otherwise.

The medic straightened. "The Emberclaw princess has smoke inhalation, minor abrasions, nothing that won’t clear by morning with rest and oxygen." He glanced down at Nova. "7709’s shoulder is dislocated. Anterior displacement. It needs to be reduced immediately. She asked me to wait."

Alpha Thunderfang looked down at Nova. The look lasted two seconds and contained something she couldn’t read because her one functional eye was tired and his face was a language she was still learning and the curriculum had changed three times tonight.

"I’ll have our Master Healer handle it," he said to the medic.

The medic gave a nod.

Nova was surprised Alpha Thunderfang was standing here at all. Then she remembered Tavian was issuing orders, taking over for his Alpha so his Alpha could get inspected. So Alpha Thunderfang had come over here to check on his Beta Luna for his Beta. That tracked.

The rest of what Alpha Thunderfang said to the medic dissolved into cotton.

Her shoulder was screaming. The oxygen was helping her lungs and doing nothing for the joint that was currently auditioning for the role of worst pain she had experienced tonight and winning against stiff competition. Conversations were happening around her and she was present for precisely none of them because her brain had reached the end of its processing capacity.

She blinked. The courtyard blurred. Sharpened. Blurred again. Snow was still falling. Sirens were still strobing. Somewhere behind her, Thunderfang Keep was still burning.

Then it happened.

Nova winced behind the mask, her good hand shooting across her body to clutch the sleeve covering the forearm of her dislocated arm.

The motion was instinctive and immediately punished because moving a dislocated shoulder’s arm was the body’s way of reminding you that it had filed a grievance and the grievance was pain. But the burning under the fabric was competing for first place and winning.

Alpha Thunderfang winced at the same moment.

The synchronicity was so precise it looked choreographed. He was standing a few feet away and his hand moved to his own forearm in a mirror of her gesture, his eyes locked on her forearm.