Chapter 117: Tavian, Your Mate Is Broken

Six people flinched in Thunderfang’s courtyard like they’d all been zapped by the same god.

The first was a slave who hunched over because it felt like her forearm was being branded from the inside out. Her dislocated shoulder vetoed the hunch.

Nearby, an Alpha folded in perfect sync with the slave, then recovered like the whole thing had been a stretch.

Third up: a princess who had appointed herself the slave’s best friend and was not taking questions. She gasped into her oxygen mask. Sweat slid down her temple in the dead of winter.

Fourth was a Beta, mid-order to the firemen, who dropped "fuck" loud enough to pause the whole yard. He whipped around, locating his mate immediately only to see that she was looking at the slave.

The fifth was a pocket-sized Alpha hologram who grunted in unison with his sister’s gasp.

The sixth and last had been told to stay put. His ribs hurt more than the thing he felt, so the thing he felt could fuck off and wait its turn.

Maria’s oxygen mask came off. No gradual migration this time. No chin-resting halfway point. The mask came off her face and stayed off because whatever Maria had just seen or sensed had priority over breathing and the priority was absolute.

She moved. Her hands found Nova’s thermal sleeve and pulled it down from the shoulder, working the fabric past the elbow, down towards the forearm.

Nova let out a noise that was part gasp, part sob. The sound was high and sharp and leaked out of her despite the oxygen mask because Maria was pulling fabric down an arm that was attached to a shoulder that was currently residing outside of its socket. Tears spilled over both cheeks, the functional eye and the burst one producing them in equal measure, because pain didn’t discriminate between working and damaged equipment.

Maria didn’t seem to notice the gasp or the tears or the fact that she was manipulating a dislocated limb with the focused tunnel vision of a woman who had seen something and was going to reach it regardless of the infrastructure she damaged on the way. She pulled the thermal down to Nova’s forearm and stopped.

Nova looked down.

A symbol was glowing on the inside of her forearm. Bright enough to be visible through the snow and the courtyard lights and the red-and-white strobe of the ambulance hovers. It was gold-white, intricate, pulsing with a rhythm that matched her heartbeat, and it was embedded in her skin like it had always been there and had been waiting for tonight to announce itself.

She blinked down at it because blinking was the only response her brain could manufacture. The symbol looked like it belonged on a temple wall or a priestess’s robe or the base of a sacred fire, and it was currently living on the forearm of a slave.

Maria went still. The kind of still that Maria Emberclaw was biologically incapable of, the kind that required every system in her body to simultaneously agree that movement was suspended until further notice. Her hands were frozen on Nova’s forearm, fingers framing the symbol without touching it, and the golden retriever, the motormouth, the woman who had phoenixed through a forest and crawled through a servant window with a hologram brother on her wrist, was standing in the back of an ambulance hover looking at Nova’s arm like the ground beneath her had just shifted.

"How long have you had that?" she asked, voice quiet, which was louder than any sentence she had ever screamed.

On Maria’s wrist, miniature Maverick’s hologram leaned forward. His jaw tightened so hard his tiny face looked like it had been carved from stone. His eyes blazed Emberclaw red again, locked on the symbol with the focus of a man who recognized what he was looking at and the recognition was rearranging furniture in his head that had been bolted to the floor.

Nova couldn’t answer. Her shoulder was drowning everything else. The pain was a white-hot current that ran from the joint down through her elbow to the wrist that was being held at an angle it was begging to be released from, and every second that passed was compounding the agony with interest rates that would have made a loan shark blush.

Alpha Thunderfang stepped forward. His hand reached past Maria and tapped her holo-band once. The tiny Maverick vanished mid-stare, the hologram cutting to black without warning, without goodbye, without the six-inch Alpha getting to finish whatever calculation his jaw had been clenching around.

Alpha Thunderfang said something. The words were muffled, spoken low, aimed at Maria, and Nova caught approximately none of them because her ears were ringing again and her vision was tunneling.

She was hunched forward, oxygen mask fogging with each shallow breath, her good eye watering from the pain. She turned her head slowly to look at Maria.

The color was gone from Maria’s face. All of it. Every shade of warmth and flush and life that normally lived in the Emberclaw princess’s cheeks had evacuated without leaving a forwarding address. She was pale in a way that Nova had never seen her, pale in a way that looked wrong on a woman made of fire, and she was standing perfectly still with her hands at her sides and her eyes locked on Nova’s forearm where the symbol was still pulsing gold-white.

Maria had not moved.

Tavian appeared out of nowhere. He picked up Maria with both arms and walked her to the other side of the ambulance hover.

The oxygen mask went back on her face, his hands adjusting the strap behind her head with fingers that had clearly done this before. He stepped between her legs where she sat on the edge of the hover and planted himself there like a wall she didn’t ask for and was getting anyway.

Her head turned to look at him, color still drained from her face.

That’s when the medic grabbed Nova’s wrist.