Chapter Seventeen – Carter

 

The world came back to me in bits and pieces. First, the noise of the distant car alarm. The damn honking. Then, the realization set in that the alarm was much closer than I’d thought. That it was practically inside my own head.

Next came the pain, the feeling of muscles reknitting themselves, even as my broken bones struggled to heal. After that, the feel of the cold wind over my skin, and the cold steel beneath my body.

I opened my eyes, looked up at the rectangular boxes of yellow light floating above me, stretching off into the sky. Windows. Those were windows.

I blinked, tried to move my head, and groaned against the sudden burst of pain all over.

I’d fallen out of one of those windows. I was naked, and I’d fallen three stories while in my bear form, landed on what felt like a car hood and its windshield. I must have shifted back to human while I’d been knocked unconscious.

And, just as suddenly and jarringly as I’d impacted the car on my landing, the reality of the situation came back to me.

The hitters! Lucy! I wasn’t safe here. She wasn’t safe!

I struggled to roll off the hood of the car, the safety glass sticking to the skin of my back. Agony as the broken bones of my upper arm slipped against each other, somehow caught, and began to heal already even as I put weight on it.

Thank God I was a shifter. Even if this was pain incarnate, that still meant only one thing: I was alive. And if I was alive, I was still able to fight, dammit.

I rolled off the busted hood of the car, the safety glass tinkling behind me as it fell into the cab, the hood sounding like an out-of-tune drum as it popped its shifter-shaped dent back out. I landed on my hands and knees, the rocks and pebbles of the gray concrete lot stabbing into my skin. Beside me, the car alarm continued to blare, its flashing headlights brightening and darkening the lot intermittently.

At least I’d only fallen from a third story window. It could have always been worse – I could have gotten shot, too.

Shakily, I rose to my feet and began to stumble towards the grass surrounding the hotel. I needed to find a way back inside. I needed to find Lucy, make sure she was safe. I reached up, ran a hand down my face, and felt the sticky, drying blood that had run down my body and matted my hair.

“Carter!” shouted a voice from behind me. “Carter!”

I spun, lost my balance, and fell against the car next to the one I’d just totaled by using it as a makeshift trampoline.

Hitter Two loomed in front of me, also as naked as the day he was born, also covered in blood.

“Ain’t that something?” I asked, musing a little on the fact that we were both in similar states after our fall.

I didn’t have much time to muse, though, as he put his head down and rushed at me.

I pushed myself off the car and locked my arm around his neck as I tucked him against my body, his speed and force spinning me around. I slammed back into the undamaged car, using his head as a battering ram against the fender.

He grunted, but didn’t scream in pain, just continued to struggle against me.

So I did it again, and again. “And one more to grow on,” I growled as I hit him back into the fender one last time, his body going slack in my grip.

Exhausted, I dropped Hitter Two to the asphalt, and stumbled away.

Confused and disoriented, I made my way between the cars, my head throbbing, my vision bleary, and my body ricocheting back and forth between vehicles. I realized too late, though, that I was going into the parking lot, and not towards the hotel, and I stumbled out into the drive.

Concussions, I’ve discovered, are a hell of a thing. Even for bear shifters.

I lost my balance and went flailing forward in the cold, autumn air, my arms pinwheeling as I headed for the next line of cars across the empty two lanes of parking lot drive.

“Lucy,” I whispered, even as I fell to the concrete, my knees and palms scraping my skin across the rough surface. “Lucy,” I whispered again, my voice raspy.

Between the exertion of the fight, and the fall from upstairs, though, the world again began to fade. Darkness pushed inwards on all sides, as unconsciousness seemed to close in around the corners of my vision like a constricting circle. I blinked again as I lay on the concrete, as I struggled to rise to my feet. But, still, the night seemed to grow darker still.

“Lucy,” I whispered as I collapsed to the concrete, my bearded cheek pressed to the cool not-quite-stone.

“Carter,” slurred Hitter Two from behind me in a sing-song voice, his bare feet crunching on the scant rocks of the smooth parking lot. “I’ve got you now, you motherfucker. Got you right where I fucking want you.”

“Shit,” I groaned, forcing my body to roll over onto my back. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

He stepped farther into the light, his small, muscle-packed body looming over me as he lurched shakily from one foot to the other.

How the hell was he still standing? Hell, how was I even fucking conscious? We’d both dropped three stories, and had had it out in the parking lot once since our less than graceful landing.

He lurched towards me again, just as the infinity of blackness seemed to come for me.

I tried to get up, but the strain was too much. Even with my bones fixing themselves and my muscles repairing, I was wasted and spent. I’d never done this much damage to my body, and now I was paying for it.

Hitter Two stumbled forward again, a punch-drunk grin on his face. “I’m gonna have fun. Pay you back for Zoey, you son of a bitch.”

My head nearly lolled on my shoulders as my eyes tried to roll back in my head. I was going to pass out, and I was going to be at his mercy. To do with as he pleased. There was nothing else I could do.

And then it happened.

The cavalry came to the rescue.

“What the—?” Hitter Two suddenly looked right, his whole body ungainly and imbalanced as he threw his hands up in defense. But there was no defense against a Jeep Wrangler barreling down on you at fifty miles an hour. His body crunched loudly, and he flew through the air as the Jeep, my Jeep, locked its brakes and skidded to a stop where he’d just been standing.

“Carter!” Lucy screamed from the driver’s side as she threw the door open. “We need to go!”

I couldn’t believe it. She’d saved me. “Lucy?” I rasped, my voice airy and delirious-sounding in my ears.

She came running around the front of my car and came to a stop over me, blood covering her hands and arms.

“You’re bleeding, Lucy,” I said, reaching out for her.

“Oh, shit,” she said, ignoring my words as she bent down over me, draped one of my arms over her shoulder, and went to stand. “Carter, we gotta go. We gotta go right now.” Grunting, she heaved me to my feet, leveraging her very much alive weight against my own dead weight. “Can you walk?”

I tried to shuffle my feet forward, to try and help her move me. But my legs wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t work the way I needed them to. I growled as I tried to move them, but no amount of anger on my part was going to move what was refusing to move. I didn’t know if it was just damage to my body, or if it was some kind of exhaustion from the fight. But my body just wouldn’t work.

“Leave me,” I gasped. “Leave me, Lucy. I got this.”

“Oh, shut up,” she said, then was ducking down at my waist. “Quit being such a fucking martyr,” she said, her head very nearly between my naked thighs.

“What’re you—?”

Suddenly, I was up and over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry, just like they’d taught us to move a wounded soldier in the Navy.

“Jesus,” she grunted, “you weigh almost as much as Cassidy.”

It was like I was reliving my fall from the hotel window. The feeling of weightlessness, of the lack of control. And to think a woman so much smaller than I was carrying me this way. “How’re you…?” I groaned as she carried me the short distance to the Jeep and got the passenger side door open.

“Shut up, Carter,” she breathed as she deposited me in the passenger seat. “It’s just fucking physics.” Then she was retreating, slamming the door shut, and running back around to the driver’s side.

“You’re driving my car,” I said, my head lolling to the side.

“And you’re naked and bleeding.”

“What’re we doing?” I asked, finding it very hard to think, to put my thoughts together.

“Besides stating the obvious?” she asked as she took off out of the parking lot, the sound of sirens filling the air behind us. “Going to the goddamn hospital. I was going to wait for the ambulance, but I think I can come up with a store at the emergency room—”

I rose from my seat, wincing as a new spasm of pain lanced through my body. “No,” I said, cutting her off, “I’ll be fine. I just need a place to rest. My body’ll heal itself, I promise.”

“Carter, you just fell out of a third story window!”

“I know,” I groaned, “I know. But they didn’t get me with any silver, so I’ll heal. I just need some rest. Us shifters are strong like that, that’s why Col. Harrington recruited us. We’re like Timexes.”

We rode in silence for a while longer, just the singing of my tires on the roads of Shamrock filling the Jeep’s cab, the humming rising and falling as we drove through the scant traffic.

I let my eyelids droop. “Lucy?” I asked just before I drifted out again. “Are you still taking me to the hospital?”

She sighed, a long, dragged out, grating sound that was seemingly filled to the brim with exhaustion and frustration. “No, Carter. I’m taking you home with me.”

“Figured you’d at least give me a chance to get cleaned up first. Don’t you think we’re moving a little fast?”

“Ha ha,” she said. “Look, it’s the only place I can think of. And, this way, I won’t accidentally get my friend’s work shot up if they come for us again.”

Eyes still closed, I sighed. She was right; her place wasn’t ideal. But where else could we go?

“I like you,” I said suddenly, surprising even myself. Maybe the fall had damaged my internal filter, or something. “Thank you for saving my life.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. In my exhausted, broken state, it felt like that moment stretched on for hours, not just scant seconds. “I think I like you, too, Carter. Besides, on the saving part, you’re still one up on me, big guy. Now hang in there, kitty. It’s a drive.”

As I finally drifted into unconsciousness, Lucy drove into the night. But, even as I lost my hold on the waking world, I couldn’t help but feel I’d heard something in her voice. Something deeper.