The Midnight Watch

Chapter 2

Nope. Not possible.

The Shadowcats had withdrawn from society years ago, when the king had died. Sightings were few and far between. And while you'd probably meet plenty if you wandered into their territory,  they were almost unheard of down here.

The Shadowcat didn't move a muscle as I crept closer to the light switch. When the lights flickered on, I drew in a sharp breath. It was hurt ... and badly. A deep gash down one side was bleeding excessively all over our new rug.

I took a second to admire the sleek coat of fur, the pair of piercing green eyes and the long curved claws on each paw. While it was only the size of a panther, there was a sort of deadly grace about the whole thing that no normal animal could ever achieve.

Right. Time to stop admiring the Shadowcat and kill it before it kills you.

But he's injured, another part of my subconscious argued. Was it even a he or a she? As usual, my mind started going off track. I didn't think it was really appropriate to look at its butt for an answer, especially when it was nearly unconscious. As it turned out, I didn't need to. The pair of eyes flicked to mine and the look of a male trying to assert his dominance was unmistakable.

He was breathing pretty heavily. I reckoned there was a fair chance he would bleed out before I even had to decide what to do. Maybe I should just creep upstairs and pretend I didn't see anything. But then he would die ... or worse, survive and kill me out of spite.

Ah, crap. I would have to help him, if only because I wanted a Shadowcat as a friend. But how, exactly? Somehow, I didn't think a plaster and an antibiotic wipe would fix a wound that size. On TV shows they did stitches, but I didn't have the faintest clue how to go about that.

I decided that the most likely way to help him was to stop the bleeding and hope he was strong enough to heal himself. I returned to the kitchen for a first aid kit and rummaged through it, resigning myself to staying up most of the night.

A bandage and a medium-sized dressing were the most helpful things I found. Before returning to the living room I also grabbed a towel, a wad of kitchen roll and a jug of water. Almost as an afterthought, I filched a bottle of gin my parents hadn't got around to opening. Because you had to wash wounds, right? So you didn't get infections and shit like that.

The Shadowcat had twisted onto his stomach by the time he returned. He was watching me warily, the picture of feigned indifference. I knelt down beside him and hesitantly examined the wound.

"I'm going to clean it now," I warned him quietly. "It's probably going to sting."

He snorted at me, but through gritted teeth. His teeth were longer than mine were in wolf form, but maybe that was just a feline thing. His breathing was getting gradually heavier and more laboured. The wound was hurting a lot, even if his stupid male pride wouldn't let him show it.

For all I knew, I might be killing him even more, but I used the jug of water and the towel to clear a bit of the blood away and then poured the gin into what looked like teeth marks. The shifter hissed at me. Someone had ripped a large chunk of flesh out of his side. Oh great, now I wanted to be sick.

"You're going to have to give me a hand here," I said, frowning. "I don't know how to help you."

He lifted his head off the ground with a lot of effort and gestured at the dressing and the bandage. I picked them up, still not quite sure what the hell I needed to do. It would be so much easier if he was a werewolf. Then at least we could have mind-linked.

Some small part of my mind remembered about putting pressure on a wound to stop the bleeding. And if the bleeding stopped, he should be able to heal himself, albeit very slowly. I pressed the dressing onto the wound hesitantly and covered it with the wad of kitchen roll. Then I put a fair amount of my weight into keeping it in place.