“Where is she?” I spoke right over him.
“In the carriage. Shouldn’t have moved her, but she refused to stay at the inn… Your groom… The groom went in search of the local doctor. Not sure when to expect him, but… We should get her inside.”
“Doctor?” Pax’s question had enough of a bark that the stranger threw up his hands in surrender. “Did you touch her? I will kill you if you are the reason she needs a doctor. If a hair on her head is out of place. A single tear dried on her cheek, you’ll not see nightfall.”
While they squared off, I ran to the carriage and ripped the door open.
Beatrice lay on the bench, blankets and Hero’s arms wrapped tight around her. My mate’s face was clammy, looking too like good soldiers, dragged off the field. No, I wanted to roar, but no sound left my lungs, no matter how many breaths I swallowed and then screamed. Silence.
Then she moaned a little as Hero shifted.
“Mates…” she mumbled. “I want my mates.”
Anger fled in the face of seeing her so weak. My heart clenched. “Here, Trix. Here.”
“It is my fault,” Hero cried pitifully. “All my fault.”
“Hush, child.” I purred. My mate, my omega, was in severe distress, and the young beta was hysterical. I needed them both calm so that I could help my mate. “Hush. It was not your fault. Stimpson—”
“Got away,” Hero’s whole being changed. She became stiff. Her jaw clenched. “He. Got. Away.”.
“Mates…” Trix whimpered.
“Pax! I need you.” I shouted over my shoulder. “Where are you?”
His scent came to me first—soothing pine—and then a hand on my shoulder. “We need to lift her out carefully,” I said, as softly as I had been loud earlier. “Trix, we are here. Pax, get to the other side. We need to ease her out. Hero, girl, let her go…”
In the end, it was the stranger who provided the most help through the simple removal of Hero. His stern tone and eventually throwing her over his shoulder and walking her inside past a stunned duke meant that with Pax and Orley, we could carry Trix to her nest.
“How d’you do it?” Orley asked once we’d settled her.
“What?”
“Show no emotion. Dammit, I’d have… I don’t know what.”
“Ever seen a dead man? Not just dead, but wounded and dying? You find it in you to move. An automaton… I’ve never been more grateful to have seen a man’s leg blown off than I am right now.”
His answering grunt was all I would get. And thank the Goddess because the minute he was gone, I wrenched the window open and vomited. Great heaving gasps as nothing but bile came up and then nothing. I might be able to handle a bloody battlefield, but my mate? Pale, wounded, and insensate with what I expected to be a fever? I was not man or alpha enough to stomach it. Pax stood by my side the whole while, and when at last I pulled my head in, he offered me a wet cloth.
“You don’t need to keep up some facade for Orley. He’d understand.”
“Be that as it may—”
“No heroism, Soldier.” He gave my shoulder a little shake. The shoulder he had bitten not so long before. The residual pain focused my senses. The stale air, the summer breeze coming from the open window, and slowly each muscle making itself known. Sore, tense. I hurt more now than after any fight or brawl I’d brought upon myself.
“Benedict… Do you think she will live?” The question I’d refused to consider escaped before I’d time to give a name to the fear in my heart. “I… I—”
“She’ll live. She’s Beatrice Jane Hartwell.” He had the damned impertinence to grin, one that never reached his eyes. But then he was correct. She was our Trix. Our Vixen. And she damn well better not die over something so inconsequential as a flesh wound.
We moved at once, crossing to her nest and looking in on her restlessly sleeping form. They’d found some juice of the poppy to quiet her, but the housekeeper had been clear. Just a little rubbed into her gums until the doctor came.
“What of that alpha?” I asked at last.
“He seemed competent. Knew how to handle Hero, and I didn’t smell him on Beatrice.”
“I need to look at it,” I said at last and dropped to my knees to pull away her bloody shirt. The wound was stitched with catgut, the bleeding nearly stopped, and the blood no longer bright and red but that dried colour that was somehow worse for it spoke to how much blood she had lost. I wanted to lean in. Sniff the wound like some primordial beast, lick it, and tend my mate like an animal. Humanity fled and in its place frailty so acute I could not remember the name of the creature who lay in front of me. She was beautiful and mine, but beyond that and a carnal knowledge of her body, I could not remember her name.
“How can I—” A man I should know stood in the door, his alpha scent clogging my nostrils.