Help

“Quickly, carry her in here!”

August Reeves heard a commotion outside of his office as he sat behind his desk, looking over a treaty a neighboring pack had sent to him a few days ago. They wanted hunting rights on a hundred acres of his northern territory, in exchange for no longer disputing a border they’d been contentious about for centuries, something he was considering granting them, but when he heard the chaos going on outside of his office, he was lured outside, leaving the papers behind.

A band of his Omegas were walking by, quickly, carrying what appeared to be the body of a small, unconscious woman with them. His mother, the pack healer and acting Luna, Isabella, was motioning for them to hurry and get the woman to the clinic. Though his pack, Rising Moon, held over six hundred members, August was almost positive he’d never seen this woman before, even though he couldn’t see her face from the angle she was being carried.

He hurried along behind them, almost forgetting to close the door to the small office building behind him as he went. That wouldn’t do. There were papers in there not just anyone needed to see. As he rushed after the trio, he called for his Beta, Beaux Thibodeau, to meet him at the clinic, using the mind-link. Whatever was going on, Beaux would need to know about it, too.

He caught up to them just as his mother was pulling back the curtain to one of the roped off areas, directing the others to lay the woman down on a hospital bed. There were no other patients in the clinic at the time, which was a good thing. It looked like this woman was going to need all of the attention his mother had to give.

“What’s going on?” August asked, pausing near the door. The three Omegas who’d been out patrolling on the eastern border were some of his best. Ronnie, Sidney, and Grant were fast and not afraid of anything. They stood back away from the bed now, their eyes flickering from the young lady to their leader and back again as they fought to control their breath and speak.

“We found her lying out in the woods about three hundred meters from the border with Black Hole Moon Pack,” Ronnie explained. He was sweating from exertion, not that the girl was big, but it was clear the three of them had been in a rush to get her back here.

“What happened to her?” August asked. He looked at the woman for a moment and noticed, even though she was covered with dry blood and bruises, and her dark hair looked as if it had recently been chopped off by someone who had no business wielding a pair of scissors, she was quite pretty. He tried not to stare at her as his mother was checking her vitals and returned his attention to the three rescuers.

Sidney shook her head, her long, curly brown hair dancing over her muscular shoulders as she did so. “We’re not sure. She was just lying there, unconscious, covered in blood and bruises. She smelled like she might belong to a nearby pack, but we thought, if she was running through the woods in her human form, she must be afraid of something.”

“How do you know she was running in her human form?” August asked, taking a few steps closer as he ran his hand through his caramel blond hair. This entire situation smelled like trouble to him.

“Her feet,” Grant explained. “They’re torn all to hell. She’d obviously been running for a while with no shoes on. Clearly, human feet are not meant to take that sort of a beating.”

He wondered if she was even a shifter. Why would anyone run through the forest with no shoes on when they could utilize a wolf’s paws, which were meant to carry them over the rugged terrain of the woods?

“She’s definitely a shifter,” his mother said from her perch on the edge of the bed next to the girl. “But… there’s also quite a bit wrong with the poor dear. She has bruises, both old and new, as well as cuts and scrapes in all stages of healing. I can tell she’s had some broken bones in the past as well, though I don’t think any of them are currently broken. Her shoulder seems to be out of its socket. That will need resetting, which is horribly painful. Still, I think she is one of us. Just not sure where she’s from. She doesn’t quite seem like she belongs to Black Hole, does she?”

“What’s going on?” Beaux arrived, stepping in behind August, just in time to miss everything Isabella had just explained. “Who’s that?”

“That’s what we’d like to know,” August said, patting his second on the shoulder.

“Maybe we should contact Black Hole and see if they’re missing anyone?” Grant suggested.

“Are you crazy?” Sidney spoke up. “For all we know, all of those scars and bruises are from some asshole over at Black Hole. The last thing we want to do is hand her back over. No way. We wait until she wakes up and then ask her who she is and what happened.”

Both Omegas looked at August, waiting for him to tell them which of them was right. He caught his mother’s eyes, and she nodded slowly. “Yes, let’s wait,” he said, agreeing with Sidney. “Let’s see what she can tell us first. When she wakes up.”

His mother’s face fell, and a grim expression overtook her as she said, “If she wakes up.”