"You're fine," Hawk muttered, pressing his hand over the wound in Teige's front, and his chest over the wound in Teige's back. Teige gritted his teeth. In front of them the elderly werewolf was trying to tell the Order soldier that Teige had been shot--the soldier glanced back, and in a voice that seemed a million miles away asked Hawk if Teige was injured.

"No," Teige grunted in response to Hawk, his voice shaking, "I'm bleeding a lot."

"You're gonna be fine," Hawk answered, rocking slightly.

"I can't bleed out."

"You're gonna be fine."

He kept repeating himself, as though that would make it more true. Then, quite suddenly, his head began to fill with a loud buzz that drowned out the voices and the din outside. The world shuddered for an instant in front of his eyes, and then a strange, luminous smoke began to pour from his eyes and nose and mouth--painlessly, almost silently.

He glanced over his shoulder. A barn owl was sitting, innocuously, on the shoulder of the dead man in the corner of the truck. No one had noticed it--a blue light fell on it and the dead man, but nothing else. It swiveled its head around to stare back at him.

"Oh," Hawk heard himself say.

He bumped into the Order soldier on his way to scramble out of the truck, Teige slung heavily over his shoulders. He heard, very distantly, the soldier and the werewolf shouting at him to come back to the safety of the barrier, their voices muffled by the sharp report of gunfire, the loud slam as the rain snake pounded the asphalt with her tail, and the buzz inside Hawk's head.