Chapter 380 Shit. I Mean Shoot.
Garrett’s stride hitched for a fraction of a second. One stride. His right leg compensated for it, and his speed didn’t drop.
Agnes’s scream was involuntary. The sound of a woman watching the man she loved take an arrow at full sprint and keep running because the cargo on his back was more important than the metal in his leg.
Her scream carried across the forest and reached the pursuit team and reached the portal and reached every person within a quarter mile. Whoops.
“SHIT!” She looked down at Andrew. “I mean shoot.”
Fifty yards. Twenty. The portal shimmered, widened, the mage on the other side pushing the aperture open to accommodate a wolf carrying two passengers at a speed that turned the portal entrance into a blur.
They hit the portal at full stride.
The world folded. Gold light, then Darkhowler’s forest, the familiar scent of northern pine and cold stone, the particular quality of air that belonged to home and safety and the specific territory where Garrett Darkhowler’s authority was absolute.
She had never been so happy to smell cold stone and northern pine in her life. She was going to write a love letter to Darkhowler’s air quality.
The portal snapped shut behind them.
Agnes hoped her father’s men were close enough to see the portal close in their faces and now they felt stupid.
Garrett’s shift broke.
The wolf dissolved. The man replaced it, his body hitting the ground in a roll that spilled Agnes sideways and sent Andrew tumbling across the frozen grass. Agnes was on her knees in an instant, scooping Andrew up with one arm, the boy clinging to her neck, then turning to Garrett, who was on his back, panting, an arrow protruding from the back of his right thigh with blood soaking through his trousers.
Agnes stared at the arrow. The arrow stared back. She was going to kill everyone involved in this evening, starting with her father and ending with whoever manufactured that arrowhead.
She got under his left shoulder. Pulled him up. His weight settled against her, heavy, unsteady, the weight of a man whose body was processing an arrow wound and a full-speed sprint and a portal transit simultaneously.
She was carrying half her mate on one side and a fifty-pound boy on the other and a baby nobody knew about in the middle. Her lower back had opinions. Agnes overruled all of them.
If someone had told her this morning that she would end the day load-bearing three separate humans through a forest, she would have demanded for better shoes.
Cross was there in a flash. The Beta appeared from the tree line where Garrett had stationed a defensive perimeter around the portal, twenty wolves in combat formation, ready to engage anything that followed through before it closed.
Agnes swallowed the lump in the back of her throat. These men had stood in formation in a freezing forest waiting for her. For her. Agnes Viremont, who had grown up in a compound where her father’s wolves wouldn’t have crossed the hall to check on her. Garrett Darkhowler had stationed twenty wolves around a portal exit because she was on the other side of it. She was not going to cry about that. No.
The damn thing in her stomach was making her more emotional than she needed to be.
She would learn the names of all twenty wolves. Send thank-you notes. Include pastries.
Problem solved.
Cross ducked under Garrett’s right shoulder, taking the weight from Agnes’s side, his face carrying the controlled urgency of a Beta whose king had just come through a portal with an arrow in his leg and a woman and a child on his back.
His face asked fourteen questions. His mouth asked zero. This was why Cross was good at his job.
A healer was already moving. Gold magic flared from her palms, surging into Garrett’s thigh, wrapping around the arrow shaft, numbing the tissue, beginning the slow work of extraction that couldn’t happen while they were walking but could be stabilized until they reached the infirmary.
“I can walk.” Garrett’s voice was steady, carrying the specific stubbornness of a man who had been told he couldn’t do something and was treating the information as a suggestion. “I’m alright.”
Agnes watched the healer work and decided that if Garrett said ’I’m fine’ one more time, she was going to pull the arrow out herself.
He could barely walk. His right leg was dragging, the arrow still embedded, the blood still tracking down his thigh in a line that was darkening the fabric from knee to boot.
Those trousers were ruined. Agnes was aware this was not a priority. She was also aware that she was cataloguing irrelevant details because the relevant ones were too heavy to hold right now, and ruined trousers were easier to process than an arrow wound.
Each step required Cross’s shoulder and Agnes’s body and the combined support of two people who were letting him maintain the fiction of mobility because the fiction was keeping him upright.
Agnes and Cross exchanged a look over Garrett’s bowed head. The look lasted half a second. It carried the specific communication of two people who had arrived at the same medical assessment and had simultaneously decided to let the patient believe he was walking under his own power because correcting him would cost more energy than supporting him.
It was the first time Agnes and Cross had a moment like this. The partnership was evolving, Agnes noted. Good. He finally got the memo.
Garrett absolutely saw the look. He chose to ignore it, because the Alpha King of Darkhowler had priorities that outranked his pride, and the priority list currently included the woman under his left arm, the boy in her other arm, the arrow in his leg, and the army approaching his castle.
Agnes: You have an arrow in your leg.
Garrett:I’m aware.
Agnes:Are you? Because you’re acting like it’s optional.
He did not dignify that with a response.
Agnes carried her share without complaint. Half a mate whose blood was soaking through her dress. A boy whose arms were locked around her neck. A baby whose existence was still a secret carried by a body that had been backhanded, chained, silver-burned, nauseated, frozen, and shot at in the last six hours.
She gave herself a gold star.
She also gave one to Andrew for excellent unconscious grip strength, and one to Garrett for running through an arrow, and a star to Cross for the speed of his arrival.