Edge Walkers by Shannon Donnelly Page B

everything in her eyes—all she’d gone through in that instant. She still had his knife in one hand. It was more than she should have had to endure.
    “I’m sorry. I—” Breaking off the words and keeping his movements slow—both to calm her and not kick up any more pain in himself—he reached up and smoothed a thumb over her cheek to brush away blood that had dried to a crumbling smear. Taking his knife back, he flipped it one-handed, gave it to Temple and he told Carrie, “You don’t really need a hospital for a transfusion. Not here.”
    Her stare dropped to the bandages wrapped around him and she reached out, pulled the top edge down to show the puckering scar from one of the exit wounds. “You do if you’re not going to risk infection. But…this is…what? Increased metabolism to regenerate tissue? Your pulse is up. I can see it in your throat, feel it in the heat off you…that could be fever. What kind of strain does this…this healing put on you?”
    Gideon shrugged, even though he knew what this was costing. This had pushed the limits of Temple’s skills—and he knew where the blood had come from to replace what he’d lost. He glanced at Temple, got back nothing—except a faint stir of amusement at the thought that there’d been any choice. Even with Temple’s patchwork—and Temple’s blood in him, making them even more kin than they had been—Gideon’s body had to do its part. It took every scrap of energy he had left to hang onto coherent thought. He put most of his focus into staying on his feet.
    “Around here, Temple used to be…well, shaman is about the closest we’d get to it back home. It’s a lot more involved than that and I don’t know all the details. I’m generally not aware enough when he...”
    Gideon let the words trail into a gesture and he saw Carrie’s mouth tighten. Ah, damn, he shouldn’t have said anything because he’d just implied he’d been this bad off before—which wasn’t quite true. He’d never been shot. Carrie looked at Temple and the harshness on her face softened. Temple kept up that black wall of silence, wasn’t even giving a twitch of his mouth to say anything. Carrie’s attention came back to Gideon and the faintest smile curved her lips.
    “He’s a witch doctor?” she asked. “So the dolls behind the...”
    “Uh, ‘scuse me here.” Jakes stepped forward, one hand resting on the top of his cradled gun, the other hand still not far from the trigger. “Hate to break up the reunion but there’s a couple issues on the table. Like where’s what’s left of your team, Brody?”
    Mouth pressed tight, Carrie turned and put her back to Gideon. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened, didn’t want to think about how everyone she’d worked with for the past few months were dead. She’d almost lost Gideon, too, and now she had him back and wanted to keep it that way. She stood between Jakes and Shoup, and Gideon—she’d put herself there by accident and if any shooting started she’d be hit. But she stayed where she was anyway. She wasn’t suicidal—or she didn’t think she was. However, she wasn’t letting anything else get to Gideon. Not today.
    Pulling in a breath, she let it out and shook her head. “Jakes, I know—oh, dammit, fine, there’s no easy way to…” She rubbed fingertips over her eyes and that didn’t wipe out the strain or the grit, so she straightened and just dove into it with the same rush of jumping off a cliff. “I think the people I worked with are all dead. At least, I hope they are, and aren’t like…like Chand—” She broke off, swallowed hard and forced the rest of the words out. “He was back there. Near…my lab. Only he’s…his body…it’s no longer a foothold for that thing that had him. And, right now, we’re stuck. So how about backing off for a few hours. We’re safe enough at the moment and—”
    “Uhm, actually...” Gideon let his words trail, but Carrie turned. She