Dragos put a hand on her shoulder and asked his question with a look.
She couldn’t say the words out loud. She told him telepathically, My wings are pretty fucked up.
Dragos’s gold eyes widened in sharp concern. His Power speared through her in a quick, comprehensive scan. Then he shapeshifted into the dragon so abruptly that everybody else had to scramble out of the way.
“We’re leaving now,” he said to Pia. “We need to get Aryal to a hospital as quickly as possible. Quentin’s right, she needs surgery. The broken bones in her wings weren’t set properly, and they are already fusing together. Any healing right now might make the damage permanent.” He turned to the others. “Stay only long enough to finish cleaning up and do a sweep for more looters, then come home.”
Pia, Liam, Eva and Quentin climbed onto the dragon. Aryal couldn’t sit astride because of her bad leg, so she sat sideways while Quentin’s arms settled around her firmly. Dragos wrapped them in his Power to protect them from the harsh, chill winds in the upper air and he flew with such speed, she watched the route she and Quentin had taken to the shore scroll backward like a movie on rewind.
There was the side street where the shadow wolves had crippled her.
There was the house with the silent, still nursery.
There was the long meadow, rippling like another sea, and the forest, and a quick glimpse of the riverbed that had shrunk to the size of a creek, and last, the Guardian’s house set high in the cliff by the crossover passageway.
It was almost like watching the recent events of her life come undone, except that what had happened in Numenlaur, for good or for ill, had marked her indelibly.
Dragos didn’t slow as they hit the passageway. Instead he speeded up. Aryal’s heart thumped as she remembered how the canyon narrowed at ground level, but thirty feet in the air, the dragon merely banked his wings and used his momentum to shoot through the opening with so little room to spare, she could have reached out with one hand to touch the canyon walls on either side of them.
Immediately past the bottleneck, he snapped his wings out and they completed the crossover passageway without ever having touched earth.
On the other side, the Bohemian Forest looked chill and pale in comparison to the summer heat they had just left. She caught a glimpse of a hastily erected encampment for a much larger group than four inexperienced Elves. The new High Lord Ferion had learned a hard lesson. Unfortunately it was one that had cost the Elves yet another life.
“How much time has passed on this side of the passageway?” Quentin asked.
Pia answered him. “Almost two weeks.”
Time had passed more quickly than it had in Numenlaur.
“Plze
will have the closest hospital,” Dragos said. The dragon’s deep voice vibrated through his body. “We’ll go there.”
“No,” Aryal said. Everyone riding on Dragos’s back turned to look at her. She shook her head at them. She said, “I want to go home to Wyr doctors.”
Nobody tried to argue with that. She knew if they were in her shoes, they would want to go home too.
Dragos said, “Then I’ll bargain with one of the Djinn for transport to New York.”
“Don’t bother,” she said dully. “While I appreciate the effort, it’s not worth any possible danger that might come from a bargain with the Djinn. I’ve already healed so much from the first time we were attacked, some of the damage has already solidified.”
He spread his wings and glided a moment, his body language clearly speaking of his reluctance as he thought about that. Everyone else remained silent, waiting, while Quentin’s arms tightened around her to the point of pain.
Then Dragos flew for the airport at Plze, where the corporate jet sat on standby. They boarded the plane rapidly with a minimum of fuss. Moments later, the plane taxied onto a runway and took off. When a ruler of one of the largest Elder demesnes on Earth was in the middle of an emergency, he could slash through a lot of red tape.
As soon as the plane reached a high enough altitude, both Dragos and Quentin started making phone calls. Aryal lay on one of the couches, eyes closed against a pounding headache, as she listened to snatches of their conversations.
… notify the hospital of our arrival. We’ll be there in eight and a half hours, max …
… call Dr. Shaw, and have her assemble a surgical team …
… book an operating room and have it on standby …
“I don’t care if operating rooms are limited,” snarled Dragos. “This is one of my sentinels we’re talking about. We will get there just as soon as we can, and you will hold that room ready and available for when we arrive, or I will tear through your hospital from the inside out. Got it?”
Coming from Dragos, that was not an idle threat. Apparently the administrator on the other end of the line understood, because that was the end of that exchange.
For the rest of the flight Aryal dozed. When she did wake up, Quentin urged her to drink lots of water, so she did. Occasionally she caught glimpses of Pia, holding Liam and staring at her intently. Weirdly enough, the baby seemed to stare at her too, his soft, miniature Buddha’s face scrunched up and pensive.
But that couldn’t be right. Pain and tiredness must be making Aryal hallucinate. Liam was only a few weeks old. She doubted that he could even track anything with his gaze yet.
In less than two days, at least according to her internal body clock, Aryal went from a beach in Numenlaur to surgery in Manhattan.
Her arrival at East Manhattan Medical went by in a blur. In her Wyr form, her body and wingspan were much too large and unusual a shape for an MRI scan. Nurses x-rayed images of her wing joints in sections.
Then she met with the surgeon, who was a sharp-eyed Wyr falcon named Kathryn Shaw with thick chestnut hair, honey brown eyes, and a blaze of Power that was as sharp as a scalpel in her nervy, slender body.
Dragos kept Kathryn on retainer to treat high-level staff when needed, and Aryal already knew her. Kathryn had worked on all the sentinels at one time or another over the years, for injuries sustained on the job. That familiarity, along with the fact that the surgeon was both female and avian comforted Aryal immeasurably. Maybe her wings couldn’t be repaired, but at least she knew that this surgeon would feel any failure instinctively deep in her gut.
The pre-surgery consult was brief and to the point.
“Hi, Aryal,” the surgeon said. “I hear you’ve had a rough trip.”
“You could say that,” she said through clenched teeth.
The other female was obviously too intelligent to offer to shake the stressed-out harpy’s taloned hand. Kathryn scanned Aryal’s wings magically for a long moment, her gaze turning internal while her expression remained professionally neutral.
Quentin never left Aryal’s side. While the surgeon examined her, he gripped her wrists and talked to her telepathically while she flexed her hands and suffered the invasion of someone else’s Power coursing through her body. The harpy hated it and had to fight to keep from lashing out.
“I won’t go under,” Aryal said. She stared fixedly at Quentin. “I can’t.”
“You know that’s not a good idea,” Kathryn said. “I have to advise against it. It will be safer for you and for everybody else if I put you under a general anesthetic. Otherwise you are going to be fighting your instincts throughout the entire surgery.”
“No,” growled the harpy. The thought of going blank while someone cut into her body made crazypants want to come out to play again. “You will use a local.”
Kathryn and Quentin looked at each other. The surgeon asked, “Can you control her?”