Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [141]
“Think, Anita, think, damn it!” I had to get the bleeding stopped, but there were so many wounds. How do you put pressure on someone’s entire body? God.
I was remembering Cisco dying. He’d been a wererat and he’d bled to death with a team of doctors around him. But they’d tried to make him shift form. If you could get a lycanthrope to shift form, it healed them a little.
I put my hand back on his chest. His heart was faltering. No, no. I said, “Jason, Jason, fight, I’m here. Help me.”
I wanted him to open his eyes, anything, but he just lay there, and his heart wasn’t right. The rhythm was too slow. Shit.
I did the only thing I could think of, with his heart dying under my hand. I called my wolf. There was no running up the long corridor inside me, or trees; there was just an image in my head behind my eyes of the white and dark of her fur. I let that image fill me; in that moment if truly becoming a wolf would have saved him, I’d have done it. In that moment, I accepted what I was, and what was in me; there was no fighting now, only a desperate need. I shoved my wolf into him as I’d done with tiger and Crispin, as I’d done with so many others. I shoved my beast down my hand and into that slowing heart. I willed him to change, and knew that if it didn’t work, nothing was going to. If he was too hurt to shift, then he was…
For the first time, there was no pain to giving my beast, because I wasn’t fighting it. There was warmth and power, and a feeling of something pulled out of me, like an extra body part that I hadn’t known I had, and suddenly it was there and I could feel it and use it, and it was gone again. It pushed into Jason, and I could feel it, going deep inside him. I could feel that part of me seeking a matching part of him. I found his beast, and what had been gentle and loving was suddenly explosive. I needed him to change now. The beasts seemed to sense my urgency, or maybe his wolf didn’t want to die either.
Jason’s body jerked under my hand. He gave a sound, a cry, and fur flowed under my hand. His body shrank and re-formed. Once, feeling Richard shift and change against my body had frightened me to death; now it was the most wonderful thing in the world. It had worked. I kept my hand on him while the power of it danced across my skin like the kiss of something electric and alive.
When it was done, a gray wolf lay on its side, panting. The heart under my hand now was thick and steady. He opened wolf eyes the color of new spring leaves. For a moment he saw me, and he gave me that look that no real wolf will ever give, and then the eyes fluttered shut, and the body under my hand began to flow and move again. His human body flowed up and around the wolf, and I was left with my hand on Jason’s side.
I put a hand on the middle of his chest, and his heartbeat was there, thick and steady. His skin was still cool to the touch, but his heart felt better. I wiped my hand on my jeans, trying to get the blood and wet goo off of it. I put my hand back on his neck. I searched for his pulse, and found it this time.
His naked body was free of blood, so that it looked like he’d just been laid down in the middle of the carnage. Now the wounds that hadn’t healed were clear on his skin. He was covered in knife cuts like evil red mouths; from shoulders nearly to ankles he was covered in wounds. They began to bleed again as I watched. I’d bought us some time, but this wasn’t going to heal by magic; we needed doctors.
I picked up the gun from the floor and reached for the cell phone.
54
I DIALED 911 . A woman’s voice said, “Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?”
“Anita Blake, Federal Marshal.” I gave my ID number, then said, “Female, five-foot-three, long black hair, T-shirt, jeans. Two down. Officer-involved shooting. Partner wounded.” Technically, Jason wasn’t my partner, but he was mine, and they’d come faster for a wounded cop than a civilian. I’d sort it out later, after we survived.
“Address.”
“Shit, I don’t know.” I got up and looked out a window.