could speak, and though the junior soldier’s voice was calm, her mouth was pinched, her eyes a stark wolf-yellow. “He’s in there working on Shane.” The gleaming strands of her shoulder-length braid became apparent when she angled her head toward the door, her profile strong.
Garnet didn’t immediately step inside the doorway. Instead, she turned a flinty gaze on the packmates buzzing about at the end of the corridor, and suddenly everyone had someplace else to be. Only when the corridor was clear did she move forward. “Lorenzo,” she said, looking into the room without entering, “what’s the damage?”
Kenji put his back against the wall on the opposite side of the door from Eloise, close enough to listen without butting into Garnet’s space. It caused a flicker of pleased surprise in her wolf. She and Kenji had worked together on pack business for the past three years, ever since she made lieutenant—at the same age at which he’d originally been promoted. However, given their different specialties, they’d never had reason to work side by side this closely.
Cocky as he was, part of her had been waiting for him to attempt to take charge.
“Shane’s unconscious.” Lorenzo’s familiar accented voice broke into her thoughts, the healer having lived in El Salvador until two years earlier. His birth pack was small and the only wolf one in the entire country—but, oddly, it had been gifted with the births of two highly talented healers of a similar age.
The situation had left neither one truly fulfilled: healers as strong as Lorenzo and his packmate needed their own group of people to nurture. The El Salvador pack was tight-knit and the two healers were best friends, but there was simply too much drive and energy between them and nowhere for it to go.
Meanwhile, before Lorenzo’s SnowDancer mate snagged him, Garnet’s den had been making do with three junior healers supervised remotely by SnowDancer’s head healer, Lara. These days, a deeply contented Lorenzo acted as Lara’s deputy in a number of matters, including training the younger crop of healers.
Garnet trusted him without question.
“He has a pretty big bump on the back of his head,” Lorenzo continued. “He’ll have to be carried out. Some facial bruising. Possible broken ribs, too.” A compact man with silvered black hair against skin of a honeyed brown, the den healer got up from his crouch beside Shane’s sprawled form. “Stretcher’s on its way, but you can have a quick look at the scene as it is. I’m going to take a few readings from Russ’s body.”
Garnet glanced at Kenji. “Can you take some photos?” If she didn’t have to worry about him attempting to pit his dominance against hers, she could use his support.
“No problem.” He slid out his phone as he entered the room with her, his shoulders fluidly muscled under the white of his shirt, the sleeves of which he’d rolled back to the elbows.
He wore the shirt untucked over jeans of dark blue denim, his only ornamentation—aside from his hair—a handcrafted pendant carved from black hardwood and polished until it gleamed like stone, which he wore at his throat on a rawhide tie. She was used to seeing that circular pendant with its simple spiral pattern. His maternal grandfather had made it for him, and Kenji wore it in remembrance after losing the other man to an unexpected lung ailment three years earlier.
Now he began to snap photos from beside her while she took in the scene; neither one of them would move any farther into the room at this point.
Death was a sticky, iron-rich scent in the air, but it wasn’t old death. No, the iron was too bright, tasted “wet” to her senses, while Shane’s breath was a living warmth. Russ, by contrast, was bleak white in death. The fifty-four-year-old lay on his side on the floor; he was facing Shane’s feet, an improbably small red stain on the front of his white shirt, and his head resting against the oat-colored carpet that showed every drop of blood. There was no pool of dark red, just droplets. Russ’s skin appeared plastic with lack of life even from a distance, his head covered by sandy brown hair cut with military precision.
A delicate handkerchief lay half-crumpled and streaked with blood on the carpet beside his curled-up left hand, as if it had fallen from his fist. The dried blood Garnet could just glimpse on his palm seemed to support that theory.
Shane, meanwhile, lay on his front on the carpet not