Fighting Fate - EXCERPT

Chapter 3

Anna blinked her heavy eyes open. She blearily looked around, noting that she was lying on a bed that wasn't her own with a white privacy curtain pulled around it. She couldn't see much but she knew that this room was completely unfamiliar to her.

Anna looked down her body, which was dressed in a thin, cotton gown and covered in a soft, white blanket. She lifted an arm to rub at her eyes and felt a pull, looking down to find an IV line taped to the crook of her arm. The light above her bed was off but on the other side of the curtains, she could see bright, fluorescent lights and there was a stench, like an abrasive cleaner, that seemed to fill the air.

Anna became aware that hushed voices were speaking somewhere in the room. She closed her eyes, tilting her head to the side, trying to make out the words, but her head started to ache with the effort. She coughed, her throat feeling extremely dry and scratchy, and almost immediately the voices fell silent. The curtain right in front of the bed twitched and a woman, with black framed glasses on the tip of her nose and a messy bun piled on top of her head, poked her head through, smiling at Anna. "Oh good, you're awake! Let me just notify Zach and then I'll be right back to check on you, okay?" She disappeared before Anna could answer, so she waited patiently for the woman to come back. A few minutes later, the privacy curtain was pushed against the wall, revealing the rest of the room. There were three other beds placed around the room and various pieces of medical equipment, leaving Anna to make the connection that she was in the den infirmary. 

The woman came into view as she stepped towards the side of Anna's bed, dragging a blood pressure monitor behind her. She was quite petite and dressed in white scrubs, with a stethoscope hanging around her neck. She smiled at Anna, lifting up the blood pressure cuff, asking, "do you mind if I check your vitals?" Anna responded by lifting her arm up, which the woman efficiently wrapped the cuff around before pressing a button on the monitor that made it start increasing. While the healer waited for blood pressure result, she picked up Anna's other hand, pressing a heart monitor clip onto her index finger. She wrote all the results down on a piece of paper that she tucked into a pocket on the front of her shirt, before taking the cuff off and sitting in a seat placed next to the bed.

"I'm Natalie, head healer for the pack." Natalie's voice was kind. Anna felt drawn to her and she wondered if the was a part of the healer's talents in her field.

"I'm sorry to be such a bother," Anna murmured huskily before coughing, her voice feeling rough in her dry throat. "I don't know what came over me." As she finished talking, Natalie stood and left momentarily, returning with a glass of water and a straw, which she held to Anna's lips. Anna gratefully sipped at the water.

"Don't be so hard on yourself." Natalie said softly as she sat back down on a chair, putting the glass of water on a bedside table next to her chair. "You've been out for almost four days."

"F-four days? Are you serious?!" Natalie nodded her head, leaning forward with her elbows leaning on her knees.

"Piper came and saw me not long after you were brought here. I hope you don't mind, but she shared some of the conversation that you had with her. She told me that you had never properly linked with GreyWing..." Natalie trailed off as Anna nodded.

"That's right. I was blocked or shielded in some way. I was never fully connected to the pack but I had no idea it would be like that."

"That's the thing, it isn't always like that." With her elbow still on her knee, Natalie lifted one hand up and tapped her index finger on her chin thoughtfully. "While SilverRiver is a much larger pack, coming into the pack bond shouldn't have affected you that much. However, GreyWing shutting you out of the pack bond for so long meant that you were deprived of the full energy that every shifter needs to survive. You must have had a small connection to the pack. I know this, because if you didn't," Natalie paused and took a deep breath, glancing at Anna carefully, "if you didn't, you wouldn't be alive right now."