Where Winter Finds You

Touching Trez’s cheek, she knew she had come home to him.

“My love…” she whispered roughly. “How I have missed you.”

 

* * *

 

Trez couldn’t hear what Therese was saying as he leaned over her. But he wanted her to keep talking. Needed her to. She had been terribly injured, whole sheets of her skin… gone. Parts of her clothes melted onto her. Soot covering her to the point where the whites of her eyes glowed as if backlit in contrast to her smoke-stained skin. He had no idea how she had survived at all.

Reflexively, he went to take her hand again and had to stop himself. It had hurt her too much the first time.

“Stay with me,” he begged. “Help is coming—”

Her eyes locked on his, and the light behind them made the back of his neck tingle. Then she smiled. Even through her pain, she smiled at him and was beautiful.

“My love…,” she whispered. “How I have missed you.”

As she spoke the words, a cold shock went through him—and a vision of his shellan’s face overlaid Therese’s, or maybe it was more that his Chosen’s was revealed through Therese’s. Revealed to be… the same.

“Selena?” he choked out.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I don’t know how… but yes.”

Without warning, her eyes fluttered closed and a sound that was more animal than anything remotely civilized ripped from his throat. He lunged forward, as if he could go into her failing body and drag her soul out of the burned shell.

“No!”

Planting his palms on either side of her, he was yelling, babbling, crying. He had done this once—he had already done this! He was not losing her again—

Someone touched his shoulder, and he bared his fangs and snapped at the hand, nearly biting it off at the wrist.

Doc Jane, instead of falling back, grabbed the front of his throat with a hard grip. “It’s me! Trez! I’m here!”

He blinked, aggression and agony warring for control as his faulty brain tried to pull some kind of rational anything out of the no-sense-anywhere that just happened. That was happening.

Oh, God… was it possible they were the same people after all? But how?

Or was he just getting back on the train he’d gotten off of, the one that had hurt a female he… loved?

“Back off,” Doc Jane commanded. “If you want her to have a shot at surviving, you need to back off right now.”

When he didn’t move—because he couldn’t—the Brotherhood’s physician put her hand out behind her, and snapped, “And you stay there. I do not need any help. I got this.”

Trez shifted his eyes up and over. Vishous, Jane’s mate, was standing off to the side, his diamond eyes flashing a bonded male’s urge to kill, his enormous body poised to attack, his fangs likewise bared. Which was what you got when you tried to bite someone’s shellan.

“I’ll fucking kill you and not even care,” the Brother ground out.

“Vishous! Lay off—”

Trez reared away from Therese, holding his palms up like someone was pointing a loaded gun at him. “I’m sorry—just help her! Please! I can’t lose her again—”

His voice broke, and then he was collapsing, his body refusing to hold his weight, what was left of him pitching to the side and slamming into the hard floor. Even as he went down, his eyes did not leave his female and he had to swipe his face with his hand to try to clear his vision.

“Just save her,” he kept saying, over and over again.

And he wasn’t only talking about Selena. It was about who Therese was, as well. It was both of them, a single life that had been lived in two parts, in two different eras, but with one true love.

This was the solution to the equation. Provided she lived.

Thank fuck Doc Jane was on it. She had come with a backpack strapped to her shoulders and an oxygen tank mounted on her chest, and she moved fast, putting a mask on his shellan and checking for a pulse at the neck. Then she was injecting things into an arm—no, an IV. She was setting an IV and then injecting things.

“Come here,” someone said to him. V. It was V.

Trez felt his position get moved, his torso lifted from the floor and laid in someone’s lap. And then something was passed over his face. He tried to bat it away, but his hands were unceremoniously slapped aside.

“It’s oxygen,” V said in a dry voice. “You’re wheezing.”

Was he?

“I need you to breathe slow and steady for me.”

Trez did what he was told because it was easier than arguing. All he really cared about was trying to keep track of what Doc Jane was doing—and the fact that she was still moving so fast was the good news and the bad news. It meant that his shellan was still alive, but it also meant that the injuries were serious. Like he didn’t already know that, though? Dear God, his female’s skin had been ravaged by the fire.

As he started coughing, he nearly vomited.

Doc Jane put a cell phone up to her ear. “Where are you. Right. ETA? Got it. Yeah, we’re going to have to move her.”

Trez’s body inflated with strength. Shoving himself up off of V’s lap, he pushed the oxygen mask onto his forehead. “I’m going to carry her. No one else.”

Doc Jane ended her call and opened her mouth, no doubt to hell-no him.

“That’s the way it’s going to be,” he said grimly.

“Not if you want her to live.” Doc Jane rezipped her backpack and got to her feet, the thin, clear tubing running between the oxygen tank and Therese’s mask terrifying because it seemed so fragile for its critical purpose. “You hold the oxygen mask in place and the IV bag. That’s just as important as her body. V, you’re going to have to pick her up. I haven’t given her any morphine, but I can’t run the risk of depressing her respiration any further.”

When he opened his mouth to argue, Doc Jane shook her head sharply. “Let’s make this fast, gentlemen, so I can stabilize her properly in the mobile unit.”

Trez was of a mind to disregard it all, but something in those forest green eyes got through his possessiveness. Doc Jane wasn’t giving him a choice, and not because she was playing games or didn’t understand how bonded males were. It was because she understood everything that mattered medically.

V’s face barged into Trez’s line of sight again. “I’ll get her down safe. You can trust me.”

Trez nodded numbly. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

He was given her oxygen tank and a flappy plastic IV bag full of God only knew what.

“Put that mask back on yourself,” V said. “The tank’s in my pack, so we need to stay close.”

“I love her,” Trez explained. “Even though it doesn’t make sense.”

V was known for empathy to the same degree one would expect it from a loaded shotgun. Nonetheless, the sadness and regret that transformed his harsh face was not so much a testament to a character transformation, but the life-or-death situation they were all in.

“I gotchu, true?” Vishous said softly. “And you and I are going to get her out together.”

Trez nodded and got to his feet. Or… tried to. The fact that he lurched and had to throw out a hand to the wall was a good indication Doc Jane had made the right role assignments. To help himself, he snapped his oxygen feed back into place, and took as much as he could of the plastic-scented, force-fed air.