“Don’t just sit there, Firebrand! How about you start patching him up before he starts leaking my blood all over the ground?”
I jumped, but Tristan was already moving, pulling out disinfectant, bandages and a needle and thread with grim determination. He glanced up, dark blue eyes meeting mine, and I saw the raw emotion behind his careful soldier’s mask. A lump caught in my throat, and I gently lowered Garret to the ground, then accepted the supplies thrust into my hands. For the next few minutes, we worked to keep the soldier we loved from dying on the barren flats outside Salt Lake City, while Riley loomed over us both, connected to Garret by a thin stream of red, his expression like a thundercloud.
RILEY
Whoa, getting light-headed here.
I swayed, gritting my teeth, as a wave of dizziness washed over me, making me stagger back a step. Thankfully, Ember and St. Anthony, still bent over the soldier, didn’t seem to notice. They’d patched up his many wounds, either by wrapping them in gauze or sewing them shut, and he now lay between them on the salt flats, still as death and nearly as white as the ground beneath him. I looked at Ember, at the tear tracks staining her cheeks, and wondered if she would cry for me if I ever bit the dust.
“He still alive?” I asked gruffly.
The other soldier of St. George felt his wrist, then nodded once and sat back on his heels with a sigh. “Yeah,” he answered in an equally brusque voice. “For now.”
“Well, that’s good. I’d hate to be getting this nauseous for nothing.” I watched him carefully remove the tube from the soldier’s arm and tape the final wound shut. The end of the tube dropped to the ground and leaked my blood all over the salt.
“You should go,” St. Anthony said in a low voice, not looking at me. “Get him out of here. Before the rest of the Order shows up.”
I nodded wearily. “I’ll call Wes,” I told Ember. My human hacker friend waited on standby, ready to speed to our side if anything went wrong. I’d say this classified as very, very wrong. “He should be here in a few minutes.”
She nodded without looking up, her attention riveted to the soldier, and I stifled the growl rumbling in my throat. Instead, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and pressed a familiar button.
“Tell me you’re not dead, Riley,” said the terse English voice on the other end.
I sighed. “No, Wes, I got my head blown off, and this is just my ghost speaking to you from the afterlife. What the hell do you think?”
“Well, since you’re calling me, I take it things did not go as planned. Did St. George manage to get himself killed?”
I looked down at Ember and the soldier. “Maybe.”
“Maybe? What kind of bloody answer is that? Either he’s dead or he isn’t.”
“It’s complicated.” I explained the situation, and what led up to it, as briefly as I could. Wes already knew that Garret had been challenged by the Patriarch, the leader of St. George, to a duel to the death. The soldier had defeated the man, barely, and forced him to yield, ending the fight. But then he made a mistake. He’d spared his life. And while the soldier was walking away, the Patriarch had pulled a gun and shot him in the back. That move had ended his life, as one of his own seconds responded immediately by putting several bullets through his former Patriarch, but it came too late to help the soldier, who now lay like the dead on the salt flats outside the city.
“So much for the famed honor of St. George,” I muttered into the shocked silence on the other end. “So now we need to get him, and us, out of here pronto. Think you can manage that?”
“Bloody hell, Riley.” Wes sighed. “Can you not, just once, go into a situation without one of you nearly dying?” There was a pause, and I heard the growl of an engine as it rumbled to life. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Try not to let anyone else get shot, okay?”
“One more thing,” I said, lowering my voice to a near whisper and turning my back on the trio kneeling in the salt. “I’m initiating Emergency Go to Ground protocol now. Send the signal through the network, to all the safe houses.”
“Shit, Riley,” Wes breathed. “Is it that bad?”
“The leader of St. George, their Grand Poobah himself, was just killed. Even if they don’t blame us—which they will, you can be sure of that—things are going to get crazy from here on. I don’t want any of us out in the open when the shit starts to hit the fan. No one moves or pokes a scale out the door until I say otherwise.”
“Bugger all,” Wes muttered, and the faint tapping of keys drifted through the phone. Even when he was on standby, Wes’s laptop never left his side. “Initiating protocol...now.” He sighed again, sounding weary. “Right, that’s done. So now I suppose we’re heading to the bugout spot to wait for the Order to flip the hell out when they hear the news.”
“Get here as soon as you can, Wes.”
“Joy. On my way.”
I lowered the phone and glanced at St. Anthony, forcing a smirk. “I don’t suppose you people brought a stretcher.”
“Actually, we did.” The other soldier still knelt in the salt beside Sebastian’s body. His voice was grave, but a tremor went through him, barely noticeable. “The Order always comes prepared. Though we thought it would just be...one body.”
A chill went through me, joining the dizziness. I lifted my gaze and looked over the huddle of people in front of me to where a still form in white lay crumpled in the salt a few yards away. Like the soldier, he was covered in blood, the back of his once-pristine uniform spattered with red from where the series of bullets had torn through his body. The Patriarch of the Order of St. George lay dead where he had fallen, the final look on his face one of disbelief and rage.
I guessed I’d be surprised, too, if I’d been shot several times in the back by one of my own soldiers. And not the one I had challenged in a fight to the death.
“Tristan St. Anthony.” The new voice echoed behind us, low and frigid. I saw the human briefly close his eyes before raising his head.
“Sir.”
“Get up. Step away from the dragons, now.”