Page 132 of Cast By Flames (Dragon's Breath)
“You better make it worth it,” she said as he lowered to cover her again.
A feral grin spread across his lips. “Oh, I plan on it.”
Galadon pulled her into his arms again, kissing her with a passion even greater than before. Their bodies collided in heat and magic so powerful Rayna would wonder about it later. She took everything the lone shifter offered and let all her worries go.
Chapter 41
Danae
Sweat beaded her brow as she finished with one patient and moved to the next. Danae found a dark-skinned man lying on a cot with his hands gripped around the hilt of a dagger embedded in his stomach. At least he knew not to pull it out, but she could tell the urge was there. The female soldier who’d helped carry him into the bunker talked to him in a low, soothing voice as he moaned in pain.
“Shh, shh. It’s going to be okay. They’re going to help you.”
“She’s right,” Danae said, crouching beside him to examine the wound. “I can heal this in no time, and you’ll be fine with only a little scar to show for it.”
Under different circumstances, there would be no sign of the wound when she finished, but these conditions weren’t ideal. Unfortunately, her power was finite. She did what she could to save people and nothing extra. Nothing was worse than having patients come in later in the night when she was drained and couldn’t help them with magic. Already, she ran low.
“Really?” he asked, eyes bright with pain.
“Yes.”
His female friend looked at Danae. She was a large-boned woman in her late twenties with straight brown hair and a look in her hazel eyes that said she probably gave the Kandoran hell on the battlefield. “How can I help?”
“Hold him down while I pull this out.”
She leaned over the man and gripped his arms. Danae didn’t hesitate, pulling the blade and setting it aside on a small table. Blood immediately gushed from the wound. She went to work locating the source of the bleeding and repairing it. Thankfully, her patient only had damage to his stomach but no other major organs.
She fixed his internal injuries and sealed his skin enough to keep it from getting infected. He’d have to heal the rest of the way on his own. Probably in two days, he’d be back out fighting again. They couldn’t afford to lose any soldiers if they could help it.
“He’s good,” she said, giving them a wan smile.
It was barely midnight, and they’d already received half a dozen severe cases plus a handful of moderate injuries. If they bled a lot, she intervened, but the rest she left to the human medics. The attack at sunset had started intense and brutal, with far more enemy forces than they usually saw.
They simply didn’t have enough shifters, slayers, and soldiers to handle such a surge. Perhaps before some of them had been pulled to other ends of the front line, but not now. Something told her the Kandoran had been aware of that and reacted accordingly.
That was the trouble with war. All the leaders could do was estimate the best use of their resources and hope they choseright. With the Kandoran changing locations regularly on where they hit the hardest, they couldn’t predict it or react fast enough.
Danae moved to a basin on the back table to wash her hands. A volunteer ensured it was always full of clean water and restocked medical supplies from a storage area in the tunnel below. Another helper kept the cots and floors clean. These people didn’t want to fight and had no medical skills, but they offered to assist wherever possible. Whether they realized it or not, it made a significant difference to her.
As she dried her hands, Aidan shouted for her from the entrance. He held Bailey in his arms. The slayer was holding a bloody rag to her neck with a pained expression on her face. The fact she remained awake was a good sign, but it must have been deep.
A volunteer pointed to a freshly cleaned cot. “Put her there.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Danae said, forcing a calm expression onto her face. How many times had she said that tonight to patients? Now she was saying it to one of her closest friends, and it was almost mechanical.
Bailey tried to talk, but only blood gurgled out of her mouth. It had to be deep then. She looked at Aidan as he gently set her down. “What happened?”
“She was fighting a dragon and already had her sword buried in his chest when a Kandoran human came from behind and slashed a scimitar at her neck.” A strained expression crossed his face. “I sensed her pain and came for her immediately.”
Good grief, a scimitar? The Kandoran humans never ceased to amaze her with the types of weapons they used. Theirarmy was so large that they took whatever they could find. Some even had firearms, but after more than six years since the dragon’s arrival, ammunition was difficult to acquire.
Danae gave him a weak smile. “She’s lucky she has you.”
He caressed Bailey’s face, tenderness in his gaze. “I don’t know about that, but she’s certainly lucky we have you here.”
Danae lifted the soaked rag and winced at the wound. Half of the slayer’s throat had been sliced through right below her jaw. She’d have been dead already if she’d been any other race.
Placing her hands on the wound, she went to work repairing the arteries first. Though her energy already flagged from too many back-to-back healings, it didn’t take long to stop the severe bleeding. After that, she focused on repairing the skin and linking the smaller veins, which was far more intricate. Exhaustion dragged at her as she worked, and her magic fell to a trickle.
