Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2), Sam Hall [leveled readers .TXT] 📗

“It’s OK…” I said in a shaking voice that indicated anything but. “It’ll be OK now.”

“She can’t breathe properly. She needs to shift,” Zack said, sliding down beside her. “I’ll reset her nose.” Bridget clawed helplessly at him as he inspected her face. “It’ll fucking hurt, but her nasal pathways are compromised.”

“Or?” I asked with an imperiousness I didn’t feel. His eyes slid to the others, Micah stepping forward finally.

“Make her shift. It won’t heal everything, but it’ll help. You’ve got the dominance and the blood. Force her.”

He held out a hand, and mine fit in his as a matter of course, Zack’s slapping down on my other, while the rest linked up around my frantically wheezing cousin. As soon as we linked, I felt it—a power. All of us carried a reservoir of it, being the creatures of myth and magic that we were, but as each hand joined another’s, something more rose. Big and unwieldy, like a leviathan rising out of the dark, it came.

Us.

It would get bigger than this. We truly would become greater than the sum of our parts when I had taken each one of them as mates, but right now, I had to pray we were enough.

Shift…

Like a far-off explosion, the command pulsed outwards, through the trees and over rocks, arrowing into my cousin. It had a weight to it, our compulsion, but what we were trying to do, it would take more than that. Her mind, her body, something fought the unnatural push.

Shift…

What was within us grew like a tidal wave stirred up by artificial forces, sweeping with a momentum of its own, but she fought it. Her wolf, her, they’d been pushed and beaten and manhandled enough. What was left inside her dug in its paws and prepared to fight.

Shift…

I felt the strain, the shake in bodies already worked hard. I felt hers tremble, at what we asked and at what she’d been through, but all her energy was directed at us, not her shift. I caught it, nightmarish glimpses of what Peters and Nance had done to her own daughter, and knew in the jumbled haze of her mind, we were just another abuser.

Shift…

My heart felt like it slowed with each push, labouring now to force the issue, but Bridget pushed back. “No one makes me do anything I don’t want.” Bridget’s words reverberated in my mind, reminding me of why this was never going to succeed.

Bridget wasn’t susceptible to dominance, otherwise she’d have been an empty-eyed doll just like Selma. We were never going to force her to do anything, but we’d put something in motion together, something I still didn’t understand, and it carried with it a momentum of its own. We needed to pull away, disengage but…

Shift…

I struggled to release my mates’ hands while they fought to do the same. This had been poorly thought out. We were asking too much, too soon. Hadn’t we already used up the coiled power of our wolf forms to fight this battle? Wasn’t now the time to rest? Shouldn’t we have been rushing Bridget to the nearest hospital, to let the humans with their tubes and machines help her breathe?

Shift…

“Paige…” Declan groaned as we all did, feeling the swell of what we were trying to generate either sweep over us or threaten to suck us down. We had overcommitted. Bridget’s body, mind, and animal fought us because it was stuck in a cycle of fight or flight and we were the only thing left to make an enemy.

“Fuck!” Lorcan ground out. I felt how every muscle in his body shook with the effort of what we required, but they all did. It took blood pattering on the forest floor, dripping from people’s noses, to make my hands jerk, needing to be free. But my hands stuck to Micah and Zack’s like glue, the muscles spasming erratically, no longer able to obey my mind’s orders, but I didn’t know why. As my heart raced and my body rioted, it occurred to me that we were connected. Bridget, the guys, and me, we were locked into some kind of fight I never wanted to wage.

Bridge… I pleaded, my breath coming in great ragged gulps. Please…let us go, shift. I didn’t know, and I could no longer care. Whatever we had decided to fuse with, it was taking us down. It felt like we had been welded together, imperfect and forced, and through it an unearthly power rushed. But at what price? I heard wet coughs as blood filled my nostrils until my own joined it until finally.

“NO!”

Mason jerked free of the circle with a strength I couldn’t understand, breaking the loop for long enough that the rest of us could stagger free. The forest rushed back in, too bright, too intense, my eyes going to slits as the tears streamed. But he didn’t just save us, did he? He was still connected. I saw it in the way he slumped down onto his knees, crawling through the dirt to my cousin. His pace was jerky and spasmodic, blood gushing from his nose. He needed to break the connection, not complete it, but…

“No…” The word was garbled and choked with blood I spat on the ground as I watched my cousin’s body arch like a bow, shaking and twitching until his hand slapped down on her chest.

“SHIFT!”

I felt the prickle of power washing over my skin like rain, clearing away the gore and the mess, then my cousin’s skin turned to fur right as he collapsed down upon her.

Wolf Bridget looked up at me mournfully, whining before licking the side of the unconscious man’s face.

Chapter 19

For a second, I just stared, looking down at two people I loved, one barely breathing, the other hurt badly despite being in fur, and I couldn’t move. I just stared, unable to reconcile what I was seeing, my brain transposing dizzying, disorientating memories of Dad in hospital, shrouded by tubes