Page 18 of Legacy Ascended

The bonds don't get closer. They arrive.

Three wolves come up the slope out of the dark, and I know every one of them before I have any of them in focus — not by color, by the way they move.

The mahogany wolf stops at the edge of the trees and takes in every body, weapon, and doorway. Then Luke swings wide toward the people coming out of the building, putting himself between them and me.

The iron-gray wolf races past Luke and plants himself between the slope and the stable shelter, and nobody is walking through that.

The black one comes straight down the middle at a flat run and doesn't look at anything else. Torres pulls up short of my bad side, gets his head under my jaw, and presses there — and fear, rage, and relief crash through the bond so hard my legs nearly give again. I push back with everything I have: recognition, relief, the certainty that I'm alive.

Behind them, two men on two legs.

Jon goes straight past us toward Luke and the men behind him.

Ander comes up the slope with a torch in one hand, looking for me.

The man under Benny stops struggling after that. Klaus arrives at a run with four of his own, armed for the alarm, takes one look at the pistol and the open service door and the children behind Soren, and puts the transport cuffs on the outsider rather than on anybody else.

"He's not one of ours," Benny says, breathing hard. "He was at the staging ground."

Klaus picks the pistol out of the frost with two fingers and turns it over.

"This isn't ours."

I hold the shape as long as I can, because the second I let go I'm a woman on a frozen slope with a hole in her shoulder.

Ander is already moving before I lose it.

Then my back end stops accepting instructions, the way it did in the wet grass, and I contract inward at speed — the trees seem to get taller, the ground coming up. My bones fold and it hurts, and the cold comes back all at once, and my shoulder burns.

My knees hit. Torres is still shifting. Ander reaches me before the ground does.

There's nothing neat about it. He goes down on one knee hard enough that I hear it, gets an arm behind my back and the other under me, and takes my weight against his chest.

"Jessica."

His hand is spread across my back, half on my collar and half on the bare skin where my shirt has torn away from my shoulder, and I'm close enough to feel his heart going.

"Ander. You came."

"Obviously I came. Where else would I be?"

Then he checks me, fast, and his hand comes away red.

"You are bleeding a great deal." His voice isn't steady. "Where else? Jessica. Tell me where else."

"Flank. This morning. It's reopened."

"Jon!"

Then Torres arrives on two legs and drops beside us. His gaze catches on Ander's arms around me, but only for a second.

"Baby. Hey. Look at me."

One of his hands comes up and closes around the side of my face, thumb at my cheekbone. The other closes around my left wrist.

Ander's palm is flat against the bare skin where my shirt has torn away from my shoulder.

Heat tears through both points of contact at once.