They woke the next morning to the smell of smoke. Kain could smell more than that. He could smell panic on the air. Fear. Burned flesh. In the far distance he could hear running feet.

They packed their things quickly and ran against the wind. It was an hour of moving before they saw the first shifter. A hare, with wild, rolling eyes.

“Stay here,” Kain whispered to the creature and in its weakened mind, it immediately obeyed.

Next they passed a hyena shifter, but this one hadn’t made it much past the fire they could smell over the mountain. It lay still and half burned, its eyes open.

They ran faster. When they made it to the top of the mountain, Valentina immediately swung up a tree; she needed a vantage point.

What she saw changed her forever. Took her heart and split it right in two. Fire. Fire for miles. A hundred miles. It spanned all the way to the main city. The air was filled with haze, patches of orange, but mostly there was just black and grey, rolling out into forever.

She was just climbing out of the tree when Kain whirled. And sure enough, a band of hunters.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Six hunters. Six arrows. Six heads.

She hopped down from the tree and started collecting her arrows.

“Holy shit.” Kain looked around at the wreckage. He’d seen her kill hunters before. But never six in a row. “Really glad you’re on my team.”

She sheathed her arrows. “They must be hunting the shifters who are fleeing the fire. There’ll be more.”

They worked their way around the edge of the fire, corralling shifters and bringing them back toward where the hare they found still trembled. When the light failed, they decided they needed to cut through and figure out a way back to Green Mills with the four shifters they’d found. The hare, a panther, a little red fox, and an owl.

They’d just cut the portal through to earth when the hunter came through the brush. Kain sensed him first and whirled. The hunter, seeing all those vulnerable shifters and just two weak humans in his way, bared his teeth in joy. Fresh kill, and treasures abounded. He reared back and threw his hatchet, aiming at the woman first.

Without a single thought, Kain stepped in front of the hatchet and it buried itself in his heart. He fell backward, through the portal that Valentina had just hurried the shifters through. She rushed forward, straight toward the hunter. She flung two darts, one hit his throat and the other hit his eye. He flinched and fell, the pain from the poison already searing his veins. She didn’t care.

The last thing he saw was the woman’s shoes and his own blood on the ground.

 

 

***

 

 

Valentina closed the portal and immediately pulled the cell phone out of Kain’s pocket. She called Matt. He was level-headed and would know how to track Kain’s phone.

The four unshifted shifters trembled together in a little huddle as they watched the woman fall over her lover. She yanked the hatchet from his chest and he didn’t even grunt.

“Kain. You’re going to live. I cut your carotid artery last night and you chatted my ear off right through it. You can do this. You can heal. You are going to live.” She pulled his shirt to one side and gasped at how deep the wound was. Inches deep and filled with blood. He didn’t move.

“You’re a healer, Valentina,” she told herself. “Heal him!” She glanced wildly around at earth and saw none of the herbs or plants that she was used to using. She saw nothing. All she saw was Kain whitening as he lay there, no breath, no heartbeat. Just a valley of blood where his chest was.

“No. No. God. Not Kain. Please, not Kain. Kain!” She screamed his name, and maybe it was the sound of her voice that did it.

Valentina heard a whispery, light noise and she whirled behind her to see a naked young woman where the fox had been sitting. Grubby and wild-eyed, but beautiful with her wild, strawberry-blonde hair in knots down her back, she knelt over Kain. The girl didn’t look at Valentina. She didn’t look at anything but the gaping wound on Kain’s chest. She fell to her knees next to his body and held her hands a scant inch above him.

Kain’s eyes opened.

Valentina jumped a foot in the air. “Kain!”

His eyes moved wildly, and his face grimaced in pain, but he wasn’t breathing yet.

Valentina grabbed his hand and stroked it. “Breathe, Kain, breathe.”

“I. Can’t,” he replied in the halting, wispy voice of a man with no air in his lungs. The young woman moved her hands over Kain’s chest, still not touching him, and the pool of blood trembled as if there were a small earthquake underneath it. The blood spilled away, down his ribs as new flesh pushed up under it, the sides of the wound knitting together.

Kain took a huge, stuttering breath and Valentina laid her own hand on his chest, right above the wound. There was his heart. There it was. Stuttering, but alive.

He took another breath and another.

“Thank you,” Valentina said to the girl, but there wasn’t a girl there. There was a fox, watching with light, intelligent eyes.

Kain’s own healing powers took over then but it took an hour for him to be able to sit up. It wasn’t long after that that John Alec, Griff, Ansel, and Milla all came pouring out of two cars. They moved quickly, gathering the shifters in as well.

Night had fallen completely when Valentina held Kain in her arms in front of the fire in Ansel’s living room. The rest of the family sat in silence around them. All in shock from the story. From the idea of losing Kain.

Valentina wanted desperately to bring Kain home. Back to their house, but she knew that his family needed a little time with him. Time to reassure themselves.

“Looks like you two made up,” Ansel said from across the room in that squinty way of his.             

“Eh,” Kain leaned back into Val. “We were never really fighting. She just thought she was fighting with me, but really she was fighting with John Alec.”

Across the room Alec groaned and dropped his head into his hands. “Can I just apologize again?”

“No,” Valentina answered flatly, not quite ready to forgive her bonehead brother.

“So does this mean you’re gonna be Aunt Valentina?” Inka asked, rubbing a hand along her stomach. She’d been having contractions for the last four hours but hadn’t told anyone yet. Valentina’s phone call with Matt had taken about ten years off his life. He was snoozing on the couch with Carmen against his chest. She’d tell him in an hour or so.

Valentina jumped as if the thought were shocking to her. “That would be nice,” she answered and charmed the room by blushing like a girl. In a very un-Valentina-like way.

Kain winked at Ruby and Ansel across the room. They weren’t gonna be able to keep their secret much longer, grinning like loons at one another. But they didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the right moment for them.

Kain took Valentina’s hand and kissed her palm. He couldn’t wait to have that kind of secret with her.

She traced her hand over his chest. “Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered in his ear.

It hit him, what it meant for a warrior like her to say those words.

“I love you, too,” he whispered back.

 

The End