His head was another story. Jessie didn’t like what she saw. Most people with head injuries like that didn’t survive.
“I need Willow.” Cara’s eyes were closed, her brows drawn down.
A thump announced the donkey’s presence at the back door. Kitani ran to open it, and the animal trotted straight through the kitchen to Cara. Buffy was already on the table, pressed against Cara’s arm. Willow ducked beneath the table and pushed her head against the woman’s leg.
Howls and snarls echoed through the shattered windows. Not in the yard, not yet. But closer. Kitani and Jessie exchanged a tense look.
“Can you help him?” Jessie whispered to Cara.
The older woman reached out to her. “Take my hand.”
She took it, and Cara’s special brand of calm flowed over her and then amplified. How was the woman healing him? All Jessie perceived were waves of energy that translated in her brain to color. They pulsed from Cara into Zach.
Cara’s energy was cool blues and soothing greens, but that radiating from Zach was throbbing, angry reds, condensing in areas almost to black. What did that mean? As Jessie struggled to understand, Cara’s energy spread out, engulfing the reds.
They pulsed erratically, crimson and black, pushing back. The sheer amount of it was staggering. Jessie’s heart twisted. It was bad. Even with Jessie’s power, it was taking everything Cara had to try to heal him.
Jessie opened her eyes. What was Cara doing? To her eyes, nothing was happening. Zach just lay there, bleeding. Blood covered the entire side of his face. And at the point of impact, there was a large cut. The bone around it looked almost dented.
She swallowed. If he’d been wheeled into emergency, her instincts would have screamed that he was critical. That he wouldn’t likely make it through. Head injuries were brutal things. The brain had little impact resistance.
And then Zach moaned.
Was it working? Jessie closed her eyes. Cara’s energy was everywhere, engulfing the red and black, pushing on it, condensing it to small points, then swallowing them whole.
Beneath Cara’s hands, Zach moved. Twitched, really. Like he had no control over his body. And suddenly, images flooded through Jessie. Images of lights.
The accident. He was dreaming about the accident.
“Jessie. Grab on to him.” Cara directed. “Get him to project.”
“But—” How could Cara ask this of him? He wasn’t even conscious.
“Do it.” She’d never heard such a note in Cara’s voice.
She let go of Cara. And took Zach’s hand.
Lights flashed through her. And sound. Screams, the crunch of metal and shattering glass. Terror, raw and primal, filled her. Filled her, and spilled through her in a wave, sending Cara and Kitani crumpling to the ground, flashing past them to Laura who screamed and fell to her knees, and onward across the yard, past the burning barn, across the pasture and into the forest, where the Sabre Weres battled in a fight they could not win.
Jessie sensed each individual, Sabre and Dire, for the microsecond it took for the terror to slam straight through them, leaving them shrieking and writhing on the ground.
Movement beneath her hands. Zach jackknifed up to a sitting position. He stared straight at Jessie, his eyes a startling emerald in his gaunt face. The torment in his soul pierced straight through her.
And then the eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed back on the table. Taking it all down with him.
32
Kade was buried beneath three Dires. He twisted and snapped and slashed, denying them a target for their long teeth. But his body ran red with his own blood.
The damned Dires just kept coming.
Too many. There were too many. The Sabres weren’t going to win this one. The thought of what that meant to those that counted on him, and to one woman in particular, filled him with rage. It sustained him, as he died the death of a thousand cuts, but it couldn’t do so forever. The bastard responsible for all this stayed stubbornly out of reach.
Braden, the coward, wasn’t anywhere. Kade looked for him. The scarred Dire hid, while others bled for him. How he’d managed to recruit so many to his cause, Kade had no idea. Normal Dire packs had about ten members; extended family accounted for possibly double that number. Braden had at least forty out here.
Against nine Sabres. Kade’s warriors were bigger and stronger, and damned hard to kill. But they couldn’t hope to hold out against these odds.
Then Zach’s wave hit them.
