The Lost War (Hectic Series: Book One)

Chapter 11

The man whose name she thought was Robert lay dead on the forest floor just a few feet away. He had landed on his neck.
Kim had been able to slow her fall, although she still crashed into the ground hard enough
to do some serious bruising.
Lying with her cheek resting on a mat of springy pine needles, her head throbbing, she was tempted to just drift into unconsciousness and never wake again.
Instead she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled a few steps before falling to her knees.
Panting, Kim forced herself up once more and tried to incinerate the dead soldier, only to remember that her power was locked away.
She cursed in the High Speech and then a couple times in a few of the lesser languages. The curses in the Common Speech wouldn't do her situation any justice.
Kim pulled some pine needles out of her hair and gave herself a thorough inspection.
Her mangled left wing dangled crookedly, brushing the ground. Shreds of muscle dripped  blood, and there was a gash from her shoulder blade to lower back where the wing had been severed.
Blood ran in waves down her back, hot and greasy.
Whether she was nauseous just because or as a result of her screaming nerves she couldn't tell.
A purple bruise spread out from her left side, and more were appearing on her shoulders and arms. She assumed there was one across her cheekbone from the way it throbbed.
She swayed on her feet and thought herself lucky to be alive.
Wrapping her arm around to hold her bruised and bloody side, she stumbled toward town.
After only a few steps she began to tremble with each breath and hoped she would pass out soon, just to relieve her of the pain.
She proved to be too stubborn for her own good, though, and eventually, after a slow and tortuous crawl back, made it to the Palace.
As she staggered up the steps a couple of guards noticed and raced to her side.
She didn't mind when one of them picked her up and ran her inside.
She was dimly aware of being laid face-first on her bed and Oliver yelling something.
It wasn't that she was about to pass out; she'd fought through that a while ago, but the pain radiating up and down her back was so sharp she couldn't focus on anything else.
She could feel the sheets beneath her growing wet with blood.
Dried blood caked her back, only to be covered by another rush of red wetness as it pulsed from the open wound.
A healer bent down in front of her and offered a bottle. "Take a big drink," he said, "and then bite down on this."
Kim took the leather strip he offered. "I don't want any alcohol, just sew it up. Please."
He gave her a pitying look. "We can't sew it just yet. I have to cauterize it."
Kim just shook her head no to the alcohol again and bit into the leather as hard as she could.
The healer shared a look with Oliver before standing and moving to the fireplace.
He held a metal rod in the flames until it grew red hot.
He doused the wound with the alcohol, held her wing to her back, and used the rod to melt it to her flesh.
She didn't scream, she didn't even think she was capable of making any noise besides inhaling sharply through her nose, but she bit down on the leather so hard it felt like she was grinding her lower jaw to dust. Sweat beaded her forehead.
Again and again he pressed the glowing hot metal to her back until the bleeding stopped, and then he threaded a needle through her flesh to attach her wing.
Kim spat out the leather and pressed her face into the blanket, heaving and trying not to vomit.
Oliver was holding her hand and Dex was whining at the foot of the bed.
He must have thought she lost consciousness because he wasn't trying to make conversation.
Kim just lay there with her face smashed against the bed, trying to breathe deeply but aware that the way she was laying wasn't really helping the situation. She sucked in air through the blanket anyway. It smelled of soap and grass.
She rested her head against her arms so she could look at Oliver and the healer.  "It's bad, I know. But how bad is it?"
Oliver rubbed her hand. The healer said, "I don't know yet. Your wing will most likely be rendered useless. You could possibly regain the ability to fly by flexing your good wing and the tip of your bad one, but I can't say for sure. Only time will tell. I'm going to let you rest now, I'll send someone down with some pain medication as soon as I can."
As soon as the healer was gone Oliver turned to her. "What happened?"
Kim blinked a few times. Her head hadn't stopped pounding. "The prison...a guard said that the prison had been...robbed. That the Hectic cuff was stolen. But when I got there it...it was a set up and he snapped it on my wrist...tried to take me somewhere...cut my wing. I fell. Out of the window. He fell too and broke his neck and I...I was able to slow down enough." She heard the slight slur in her voice. "Do you think he could have been allied with the demons?"
Oliver looked at her oddly. "That seems like a bit of a stretch."
"So did the Reaper," she muttered.
He shrugged. "Good point. But why? What could his motive have been?"
Kim hesitated before speaking. "He said..." She caught herself. No way was she going to tell Oliver what the man had said about rapping her. "He refused to give or tell me where the key was. Called me a freak. Something tells me he was a bit biased against Hectics."
"Kim," Oliver said with urgency, "every single Hectic in the Alliance is in this building. It's not safe. We need to get them out, now. We should get you somewhere else, too."
"Tell the councils," she said sharply, "they need to evacuate now. Don't send an escort; who knows how many other soldiers were part of this."
Oliver stood. "But what about you?"
"I'm fine," she said, "I can't exactly
go running off into the woods. Please alert the councils without anyone else finding out."
She heard the door click shut and closed her eyes against the shooting pain in her back.
This was the worst she had felt since when she first fell sick at the Caves, not even counting the mutilated wing.
She was so out of it that when Mary came in with a syringe she didn't react.
And when Mary sunk the needle into her arm, giving her a staggering shot of poison, she barely struggled.
And when Mary made her stand and said, "listen here, bitch. You weren't supposed to come back here. You weren't supposed to kill that soldier either, but you went and fucked that up too," it registered in her mind, but the poison that she realized Mary had been feeding her for weeks made her body go numb.
Mary pulled a gold necklace out of her shirt-a tiny little cross-and muttered something Kim couldn't make out.
And then Kim succumbed to the demons pumping through her veins and went to sleep.