THE SEQUEL TO 'LUNA OF ROGUES.'
Last Haven is scattered to the wind. It has been nineteen years since the castle burned - nineteen years of bitter warfare - and rogues are a dying breed. Defeat is starting to look inevitable.
Every rogue has a choic...
Hello, hello, hello. I am now heading at full tilt into another exam season, but don't worry. As usual, my motivation to memorise medication names is at rock-bottom, while my motivation to write is all-consuming! So the updates should continue as normal. And what's this? More art? Yes, you lucky bastards. Local pest LittleLoneWriterGirl has been drawing again. The bridge features later in the chapter :)
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"What if..." I began quietly. "What if it was Mal?"
Liam looked at me sharply, only to look away again just as quickly. He was sweating through his shirt, and his breathing was heavier than it should have been. I'd have to take a turn carrying Eira soon. At the moment, my only job was to lug around a backpack full of medical supplies and beat down the brambles so he wouldn't fall flat on his face.
"Shit," he said after a long moment. "Shit, it could have been..."
"It'd be our fault, if it was him," I murmured. We'd shown him the way to Haven, only a few hours before it had happened. We'd trusted him. Granted, we hadn't had much choice in the moment. Neither of us could drive, and we had needed to get away from the church.
Liam acknowledged that with a weary nod. "But ... it was him who was calling me, right before. Like he was trying to warn us. And he wouldn't have done that if he was part of it, right?"
"How would he even know to warn us ... unless he was in on it?" I demanded.
He just shrugged as much as he could with an unconscious wolf draped across his shoulders. And before we could speculate any further, I felt a hand on my arm and turned to see Dad. There was dried blood coating the side of his face and his neck, but he looked well enough, if you ignored the dark circles beneath his eyes and hollow, haunted look about him.
"We're stopping," he said. "Just for a few minutes. Don't get too comfortable."
I tried not to visibly sigh my relief. We'd been walking at breakneck pace for more than an hour, and my legs felt like they were made of lead. None of us had eaten. All of us were suffering from various degrees of blood loss. But our efforts seemed to be paying off so far. We hadn't seen a single flockie.
"Hang on," I said, even as Dad was already beginning to turn away. "Why are we stopping?"
He let out a long breath and then cast a glance behind him. "Matty won't wake up."
I was moving before he'd even finished talking. They'd laid the stretcher down, and Aunt Fion was now knelt beside him, checking the bloody bandages around his abdomen. She wasn't a doctor, but she was the closest thing we had now that Rhodri's mother was dead. I went to join her.
"Bryn responded to the fluids. Matt didn't," she told me quietly. "I don't know what we can do for him. I can't find what's bleeding. We don't have another bag of saline. We don't have the equipment to give him a transfusion. And there's only so much I can do with bandages and gauze. He's deathly cold..."
