Elijah (34 page)

They crashed into each other as she finally reached him, his opened arms scooping her up as she threw herself awkwardly against his body. She pushed herself into him, and into him again, forcing him to hold her tighter to keep her from harming them both in her desperation. She was so violent as she grabbed at his body that her feet came up off the ground, her arms nearly throttling him. She held on to him as if the world was ending and she needed to meet doomsday with him from the inside of his body, or his soul, whichever she could reach with all her efforts.

Her claws retracted to safety as she reached for his face, cupping it with desperation as tears fell over her furred face and dripped onto him, her soft lips trembling with sobs as she kissed him.

She could not even breathe she was so upset, her padded fingers inspecting his scorched and wounded body frantically. It was merely battle scarring, nothing lethal, since this time his surprise at running into a pack of magic-users at Gideon’s had been buffered by the fact that the open area had given him visual warning. In fact, he had been the one to surprise them. He had been fighting them, chasing them into the woodlands even as he picked them off one at a time with hailstones, lightning, and hurricane-force winds that blew right past any defenses they tried to throw at him.

He had only broken off when he had felt Siena’s arrival and her highly panicked distress. He hadn’t even realized she had come awake until she had entered the closer proximity. He had mistakenly thought that between his efforts and her sleeping state, she would remain blissfully unaware of the danger he was facing.

“Get a medic,” she sobbed, gasping the words out as her terror and pain continued to overwhelm her body and soul. “Get a medic. Please. Goddess, please! Don’t just stand there!”

she screamed at Jacob who had finally, breathlessly, caught up to her and Elijah. “Get him a medic!”

Siena fell apart, not even seeing that Bella had also caught up to them, leaning hard into a stitch in her side. The Queen was lost in her pounding emotions, her body reverting to its human shape as she lost all strength and buried her face and fingers into Elijah’s scorched shirt and burned chest.

“Siena!” Elijah grabbed her arms and gave her a shake. “Calm down, kitten. I am not hurt!”

But as he tried to get her to see sense, he felt her wobbling limply in his grasp. Her head bobbled weakly as her strength seemed to bleed out of her with the suddenness of a mortal wound. He heard Bella gasp, and, out of the corner of his eye, was aware of her hand covering the appalled opening of her mouth. The Enforcer was near to tears herself as she watched the Queen collapse so hard and fast. Elijah had to move with the reflexes of the wind, changing his
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grasp on her in order to hold on to her, keeping her from dropping like a stone. The hands that were grasping at Elijah’s shirt went lax, her gold eyes closing halfway as they rolled back into her head.

“Siena!” Elijah bent to lift her into his arms, but she was dead weight now, her body suddenly locked into the rigidity of a seizure that made it impossible to do anything but follow her down to the ground.

The worst part of it was when his mind went completely blank of her presence. Elijah had never known such fear as he felt when she seemed to vacate his soul so suddenly. Not even when he had faced his own death a week ago had he known this kind of terror. The sudden silence after so much pain and panic tore at him, leaving him with open wounds in his spirit that outstripped the pain of those on his body by massive proportions.

Then he was forced to watch her body lock and release in wave after wave of rigid muscular contortions, her skin fading from gold to gray to a splotchy red, her clenching teeth tearing at her own tongue so her mouth filled with blood that spilled over her face and into her slackening hair.

“No! Siena, don’t do this!” Elijah shouted as he bent over her, holding her thrashing head between his hands in an effort to keep her from further injuring herself on the rocks and forest debris scattered underneath her.

“We have to get her out of the sun, Elijah. She’s killing herself,” Jacob commanded, a strong hand on the warrior’s shoulder to try and draw his attention.

“Wait,” Bella said, gently urging her husband aside as she reached for Siena. “I can absorb her power. If it works like it did on Legna when she was Summoned, her weakness to the sun will disappear as Legna’s vulnerability to the pentagram did. It could keep her just as safe as Legna was. It will give you the time you need to get to safety without allowing the poisoning to advance any further from continued exposure.”

“Bella, don’t!” Jacob warned, trying to grab her to stop her. But his mate pushed his hand aside, turning glaring violet eyes up to him. “Damn it, Bella, you have no clue what you will do to her or yourself if you do this! Stop fighting me every time I try to protect you!”

“Would you rather I let her die?” she demanded. “Should I let someone I love as a brother, who has treated me like family since the day I arrived among you in spite of everyone else’s condemnations, be deprived of his soul mate? Should I protect myself and allow an entire people to be deprived of their Queen?”

“Not at the cost of my soul mate, Bella!” He was breathing harder, edging toward a volatile alarm, a condition he was not prone to unless her safety was at stake. “You do not know what will occur if you do this. You could end up killing her,” Jacob argued, his hands fisting at his sides as he forced himself not to reach for her again, “or yourself.”

“The possibility of death is a risk all of us take the minute we wake up in the evening. My safety is in jeopardy every time I accompany you to destroy the Transformed or track those who need enforcing. You don’t make a stink about it then, so stop doing it now.” Bella turned her attention back to the Lycanthrope female, feeling Elijah’s frantic gaze on her. “Everyone step back. I don’t know how to narrow my abilities yet. I don’t need to draw all of you in.”

“All the more reason you should not do this,” Jacob snapped, losing all sense of awareness for anything but the danger to her safety that was clawing at him relentlessly.

“Fine, then stay where you are. I’m doing this with or without your cooperation, Jacob,” she said hotly, the determination in her voice and the set of her stubborn jaw putting an end to her side of the argument. “Without is only taking longer.”

Elijah suddenly decided for all of them. He stood up and physically reached to haul Jacob back away from both women. The Enforcer struck the warrior’s hand aside, his dark eyes flaring with outrage that the Captain would try to strong-arm him from protecting his mate.

“Move back, or I will move you, Jacob,” the warrior hissed, understanding that Bella’s suggestion was the quickest, most plausible action to take to stop Siena’s agony. Had he simply
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tried to carry her to shelter, she would probably have died from the continuous exposure to the sunlight before he reached his goal. Even he was feeling the drag of lethargy that affected his kind in the sun, in spite of his own strength at resisting that very condition.

Jacob could have held his ground, but it would have clearly invited an altercation. Outvoted, he finally backed away and gave Bella the room she had requested. The only other solution would have been for each man to assert his need to protect his mate above the other’s through violence. In spite of the volatile emotions involved, it was not worth the price they would pay should it come to that.

Feeling her husband watching her with mental as well as visible anxiety, the Druid took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She reached out to touch Siena’s bare skin with tentative fingers, more to focus herself than for any other reason, and sought within herself to unlock the power that had lain tamped down deep in her body for so long now. Bella had not released this power from her repressive control since she had been attacked six months ago by Ruth and her brethren.

So when it flared to life, it was with a visible eddy that pushed at the everything like an artificial wind, making the trees bend with loud creaks of stressed branches, the leaves and grasses blowing and scattering in a circular tide outward from the Druid. Jacob felt his heart leap into his throat. He had never seen this exude from her before. Usually hers was an invisible, imperceptible ability that insidiously bled Nightwalkers of their innate gifts. It terrified him to see everything around her blow back with sudden violence.

A minute later, the surge hit both males, even at their distance of several yards back. It propelled them both off their feet, slamming them to the ground in startled unison as all the capability of their elemental bodies was sucked out of them in a heartbeat.

At the same time, Bella robbed Siena of all her innate nature, from shape-shifting to the sensitivity to the sun that came with it. Unfortunately, Jacob also remembered a moment later that Bella not only dampened the innate abilities of Nightwalkers, she took on all of their characteristics.

Bella fell back onto her backside as all the power she had just invited into herself hit her hard.

Suddenly the wind picked up and began to whip at them all. Then the grass began to grow at a frantic rate, becoming a tangled mass of blades in a heartbeat. Too much, too enormously powerful, the abilities she had stolen from them were out of her control. And as Siena finally fell into a relaxed loss of consciousness, Bella’s hair began to spread, forming into black, silky fur all over Bella’s body.

“Damn it!” Jacob bit out, staggering to his feet under the press of remarkable weakness, the power of which he had never felt before. He lurched over to his wife just as her form began to mutate painfully, her half-human body never intended to alter in such ways. One minute she was looking at him in wide-eyed shock, the next she was a violet-eyed jaguar, struggling to wriggle out of the confines of her jeans, T-shirt, and underclothes.

“Bella! Calm down!” Jacob said as he reached for her mind on both the level of an Imprinted mate and a creature of the Earth who could charm any animal he set his mind to. He worked quickly to free the huge cat of the clothing it was caught in, watching with actual awe as those eyes so eerily familiar to him seemed not to know him all of a sudden.

He had known that she could absorb and utilize Demon powers, but he would never have thought the same would apply to Lycanthrope powers. He had thought, until a moment ago, that the ability to shapechange had been as natural as a heartbeat for Siena, something Bella could not borrow or steal or use for herself in any way.

But he was clearly wrong. And even though this was Gideon’s area of expertise, even the medic had never seen anything like Bella’s abilities before she had arrived a year ago. This was new to all of them, and none of them should underestimate these hybrid powers. So it was with caution that he tried to soothe her. But he realized quickly that his power to charm had been stolen along with everything else, and all he was left with was the connection of soul mate to soul mate.

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Elijah moved to Siena’s now totally lax body, hastily scooping her off the ground and out of reach of the unpredictable danger the situation might provide. Bella had achieved her goal, however, and Elijah knew it on some inner level of his spirit. Siena was horribly ill, but the little Druid’s brave act had effectively halted her vulnerability to any further damage.

The Warrior Captain met Jacob’s eyes briefly, apologetically, and then he turned and hurried back toward Gideon’s home with his limp burden, leaving Jacob to handle his altered mate.

Without his powers, there was nothing Elijah could do in any event. It was best to leave them alone. Powers or no, Jacob knew more about dealing with animals than anyone else among them.

Noah was perhaps the only one who could have found Legna in her present state, and the only reason he did was because of her residual body heat. But she was already mostly cold to the touch as he scooped her off the floor. He knew immediately that this was Gideon’s doing. He could sense the tracks of the Ancient’s residual energy in her. And he also understood he had done it in order to try and protect her, to keep her from sticking her neck out into the situation that had clearly been desperate and dangerous to the degree that it had killed even the Ancient as a result.

Noah also knew his sister was dying. He felt what remained of her life force fading as he rushed out of the room and down the stairs to find medics. Unfortunately, there was only one at present, and he had his hands full working on Gideon.

Noah commanded a Mind Demon to fetch more help, then laid his sister on the ground outside of the charred house. He tried to focus, pushing aside the fear clawing at his soul. He covered her heart and her solar plexus with his hands, seeking her fading source of life and energy. He began to feed the depleted supply, slowly, careful of the also-fading spark of life within her child.

Perhaps it was because he was of her own blood, or merely by force of their stubborn wills, but she began to warm, to flush with energy, if not true signs of life. His momentary relief was profound. At least he could maintain the stasis. Though he could not reverse the effect, it was enough until he could find others skilled enough to do so.

Elijah shouted for help, earning the attention of several warriors who rushed to his side, eager to be of any assistance.

“I need a medic!”

Elijah pushed into the house and for the first time he saw the destruction that had been wreaked upon it and its inhabitants. He had given chase to the assailants who had fled the scene, never once considering that Gideon couldn’t handle his end by himself. Seeing a medic leaning over the Ancient took the Captain’s breath away.

The younger medic looked up at his superior, then stood up and rubbed his hands nervously as he approached the Wind Demon.

“Sir, there is nothing we can do for her,” he informed cautiously. “Not even Gideon knows how to heal a Lycanthrope.”

“Don’t tell me that,” he commanded with a bark, gently laying his mate down in a dark corner before turning to confront the other man harshly. “You have basic skills, something that can cross species, and you will do what you can.”