Chapter 198

Almara’s Pov

In only a month, the state of my life has completely changed. Not just mine, but everybody’s. This realization paralyzes me as I stand in a white lab coat, feet glued to the aluminum tile that’s been scuffed by squeaking gurneys drenched with the blood of the dying.

“Almara! Get back to class!” A doctor racing past me yells. Still, it takes my legs a minute to regain their mobility.

The bathroom door shuts behind me and I cross the hall of the hospital, careful to keep an eye out for gurneys carrying a wounded soldier screeching past. I already got hit by one once and no one batted an eye as they hurried the poor victim off to the intensive care unit.

Since then I try to hold off my bladder’s demands to be released for as long as I can while in class, but as I progress in my pregnancy the urge to pee is getting harder to ignore.

Since Arthur made that risky step of entering vampire land, the war has expedited, and at a bloody cost.

No one blames Arthur for sending a pack of trained Alphas into battle territory, it’s what they’re supposed to do. Not even the pack members of Alpha Braxton who held a wolf-wide service for his brave sacrifice.

It was only shortly after this that a counterattack ensued.

Reports of mangled beasts were seen storming through the city. Goats with bat-like wings were weaving in between buildings, cracking glass windows with their impeccably strong hooves. Pigs with claws like alligators were scratching up people’s cars. Rabid rabbits with bodies like snakes wrapped themselves around lampposts and hissed at pedestrians.

Their goal, for that time being, was only to stir up fear and to make their message loud and clear: they will be back.

That’s when Arthur, as commander-in-chief, decided to go into battle before these monsters, make their return.

Just as the vampires and their pets did, an army of wolves stormed into the vampire land ready to attack and kill any vampire or beast that stood in their way. This proved harder than anticipated.

We’ve fought the vampires before, we know their strengths and weaknesses, but now there’s a new entity involved. Whatever these creatures are, they’re different than the one before it. We can’t predict each of their own personal strengths and weaknesses, but they know ours.

That’s how I ended up in this hospital as a nurse in training. Not just me, but Cathy, my mother, Elanor, and many others. Every wolf of every rank across the nation is involved some way or somehow.

Arthur wanted to keep me home with Grace, but his father and other top members of the pack said the Luna is needed. The country needs to see the power couple as exactly that, in power and united.

I agreed. Besides, I can’t just sit at home any longer anxiously awaiting every call from Arthur, whilst keeping up with the endless negative reports from the news, and a phone that still struggles to function properly. All while trying to tell Grace that everything is fine when clearly everything is not fine.

So, my dad is staying with her and I’m here, just as worried about her as I was with Arthur. There’s no win-win in this until the war is over, and that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. I swallow the lump in my throat.

In fact, the only way this war will seem to end is with one side being completely obliterated, and at the rate of injuries and deaths I’ve seen come hurdling through this hospital door- it doesn’t look too good for us.

I open the doors to the classroom and slide back into my desk. The lights are dimmed and the head nurse, Tori, is continuing through her presentation of major artery wounds.

I get lightheaded at just the thought of seeing a wolf come in with exposed ligaments torn to shreds, maybe I’m in over my head. Get it together. You can do this. Lily barks at me and I straighten my posture. I know, I tell her.

Luckily, we have another class today where we’ll be shadowing a nurse operating on a wounded soldier. Not so luckily, it’s after lunch.

The sounds of the hospital doors continue to open and close, though no one but me seems to take any notice. Meanwhile, I count each time that door swings open and medical lingo I’m only barely acquainted with gets shouted out. Three . . . Four. It’s up to eight times by the time class is finished.

“Do you think we’ll be able to save lives?” Cathy asks me as we pack up our notes. I quickly shut my notebook so she wouldn’t see my blank page pale in comparison to her thoroughly documented and detailed accounts from today’s class.

Maybe you’ll be able to, me on the other hand . . . I shut my brain off from finishing that thought. Lily’s right. I can do this. I have to do this. Wolves need their Luna and this is what I signed up for. Surely, Arthur and I wouldn’t be fated if I wasn’t made to handle these situations.

I just can’t help but think back to our vows. When Arthur and I promised each other for better or worse, I never could have imagined that this would be what we were promising top.

“I think we’re going to do our best,” I say and that I know to be true.

I push my food around with a fork, not really hungry. The food is mediocre, which is better than what I was expecting given the times that we’re in, but the less-than-appetizing food isn’t why I’m eating. I can’t stomach the thought of enjoying lunch while there are wolves all over this building that may never enjoy a meal again.

“You have to eat something,” Cathy says pointing at my now cold drumstick with her fork. “You’re going to need your strength.”

I pick up the drum stick and bite into it. It’s dry, like chalk dust in my mouth. Cathy has a point though, me not eating isn’t going to ease the pain of anyone on that operating table. In fact, me not eating may only make me preform worse.

An hour later, Cathy and I stand covered head to toe in our scrubs standing at a respectable distance behind a nurse and a doctor who work swiftly and meticulously on a wolf who lays unconscious. He has a long, rugged gash across his chest that’s going to need stitches.

He’s not writhing in pain, but that’s only because they’ve put him under anesthesia, if not for the harsh white light and the cold metal table benath him, and the nearly lethal wound striking him from the top of his left shoulder down to his right upper rib, he looks peaceful.

Meanwhile, faint screams of others fill the hallway. The hospital doors open and close, footsteps pounding on the floor above us, gurney tires squealing in protest of the speed being required of them.

Eleven . . . Twelve.

“Gauze.” The doctor says not taking his eyes off the patient’s. The nurse rolls out some gauze tape about a foot long and the doctor puts hydrogen peroxide on the wound and then uses the gauze to dab at the injury.

Fourteen. . . fift. . . sixteen.

The number keeps climbing and I can’t help but think with each new number, that’s one less on the field protecting Arthur.