Book 2 - Warriors: The Servant's Promise

Chapter Thirteen

Evectri hissed under his breath as his unsheathed claws dug themselves further into the ground. His amber eyes remained narrowed with concentration and focus as he stared at no spot in particular. He felt Cura moving his wing, just like she had since sunrise, and immediately he felt pain, which made his muscles tense even harder.

"Stop moving, Evectri!" Evectri's sister ordered him as she continued to prop up the wing. "You're just going to make it worse!" He heard movement behind him, and once again he felt more pain. He wasn't able to tense further, so he began to hold his breath.

"How broken could it be?" asked Evectri impatiently. "You've been working on my wings for what seems like moons!" The grey Volan exclaimed, though he wasn't really mad at Cura. In fact, he was glad that he was finally getting his wings properly treated.

"It's not my fault this wing is broken in twelve places!" Cura yelled back to him, though she, too, wasn't angry at him. She was probably just irritated with the state of his wings. "I mean honestly, the next time our father fights with another Volan, I'm going to make sure I have at least twice as much cobwebs!" Evectri smirked, laughing a bit as he tried to think of things that had nothing to do with the pain.

"What's exactly wrong with them?" asked Evectri, trying to continue a conversation. "I can feel that the bones have not exactly healed together since I've been gone." Another round of pain shot through his body, making him suck in his breath as Cura laughed slightly.

"You think? It all healed together like a knot in a line of moss." Cura stated. "It would probably be less painful if it hadn't healed so strangely. No wonder you had a crash landing." Evectri laughed, though it transformed into another hiss as more pain came to him.

"Alright," she told him a few a few moments of comfortable silence that wasn't filled with pain. "I just have one more thing to do before I can wrap it in cobwebs, but it will hurt a lot more than the other twinges." Evectri nodded in understanding, though he was reassuring himself more than his sister. "One...Two...Three!"

Evectri gave a very loud hiss, the agony coming from his right wing scorching through his skin as it rippled throughout his body. He closed his eyes, as if hoping that would mask the pain, and waited quietly as Cura wrapped it in sticky cobwebs. The pain ebbed away the more she wrapped it, and soon, he opened his eyes to see his sister in front of him.

"All done." She said, sighing with relief. Evectri nodded, carefully standing as he noticed that his wings were wrapped up to allow him to move. His sister noticed this, and smiled slightly. It turned into a smirk slowly after, as if she did that for a selfish reason. "Now you can't make it worse by moving it." She said, proudly walking out of the den as if she'd won some sort of verbal battle. Evectri rolled her eyes before following her.

"So is there any news that I should know about?" asked Evectri, hoping to get an edge on what was being planned out so that he could figure out how to protect the cats. Cura's expression grew darker, her eyes looking to the ground as they walked.

"Ever since you left, there hasn't been a balance in the flock," Cura murmured softly after a few moments of silence.

"With your intellect, battle strategies were less of a massacre and more of an actual plan to keep the cats down like all of our generations have done. With that intelligence and balance gone..." Evectri stopped as she finished, his eyes narrowed with determination. She looked at him, giving an expression that made it seem like she accidentally told him something that he wasn't supposed to know.

"How many have died?" Evectri demanded. "How has my father and brother been sending out battle patrols? How...have the little ones been trained?" Cura shrank back a little, as if his shouting was hurting her. He didn't let up on his expression though—he needed to know.