The twins!  Just as quickly, I was back up at the surface, where I saw to my relief that Vance had dragged Hayden into the boat and was attempting to tie up his leg.

I grabbed the edge of the boat and Vance yelped, then sagged with relief when he saw it was me.

“We need to get him to the hospital,” I said without preamble as Skye surfaced next to me.

She took a quick look at Hayden.  “Go.  We’ll deal with them.  Ask for Dr. Ling.”

The closest place was the beachhouse, so I aimed the boat there and then picked Hayden up as carefully as possible when we arrived, heading straight through the house to where the car was parked.

Vance followed, but he paused long enough to grab some clothes and a couple of blankets.  “People will wonder if you show up dressed like that,” he pointed out as he got in the driver’s seat.  “Where am I going?”

I gave him directions, then tossed the blankets over Hayden in the back seat before struggling into some pants and a shirt from the passenger seat.  I was still barefoot when we reached the hospital, but hopefully no one would really notice.

The hospital wasn’t very large, so there was a bit of a flurry when three guys came in, one with a shark bite injury on his calf and looking decidedly less okay with the situation by the minute.  I did repeat Skye’s direction at the front desk, insisting on Hayden seeing Dr. Ling, then ended up going with Hayden to the room the nurse directed us to while Vance stayed behind to fill out paperwork, though he didn’t look happy about it.

Neither Hayden or I talked, but he was holding my hand tightly and I knew he had to be in a lot of pain – probably scared, too.  It’s not every day you get a serious injury to your leg, and I was more concerned about the amount of blood seeping through the makeshift bandages by the minute.

I figured out why Skye had directed us to Dr. Ling as soon as she came into the room and shut the door behind her.  She was a shifter – land type, though the exact variety I wasn’t sure.  We wouldn’t have to hide what had happened.

She introduced herself and then went straight to work peeling back the bandages and checking on the bite mark.  I didn’t much like the look on her face as she saw it.

“Shark shifter,” I explained simply.  I was worried that when I’d hit the shark shifter, it had maybe caused more ripping when he was forced to let go of Hayden abruptly.

“Shifter?”  She asked, looking slightly angry as she glanced towards Hayden’s chest – where my practically useless protection mark was visible.  “He should have known better,” she muttered, shaking her head.  “I don’t know a lot about merfolk’s tendencies in water, if they’re like our predator shifters’ risk of losing themselves and becoming feral, but I find it hard to believe any shifter would lose themselves enough to attack a human, particularly a protected human, by accident.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway.  “It wasn’t an accident.”

She started asking Hayden questions, then paused when a nurse came in and gave directions on what medications to give him.  After starting some morphine – which Hayden seemed grateful for, the nurse, a land nymph, stayed to help Dr. Ling as she started scrubbing the wound clean – a process that looked and no doubt felt awesome.

Vance arrived, paused when he saw what Dr. Ling was doing, looking a little green as he took the other chair.

“What exactly happened?”  He murmured to me.  “I kind of felt like I only got bits and pieces of it.”

“The shark shifter dragged him underwater,” I explained at normal volume, ignoring the surprise in his eyes and the way his eyes flashed to the doctor and nurse, “I knocked it off him, then ended up flipping it over to send it into a trance.”

Dr. Ling chuckled appreciatively, still leaning over Hayden’s leg.  "Nice.  Shifters sometimes forget we can be victims to our biology in shifted forms.”

“I brought Hayden to the surface – he did spend a while underwater,” I added for the benefit of the doctor and nurse, “so I don’t know if you need to check that out later.  Anyway, you know what happened when we came back up.”

Vance apparently figured out that we could talk without worry and relaxed some, rubbing the back of his neck.  “Actually, I don’t really know?  You knocked the guy into the water, that was all I could tell, and then you were back up and there was another girl.”

“Since I don’t really have magic, I had to rely on physical attacks, which he wasn’t expecting so at least that gave me the element of surprise.  I intended to strangle him if I needed to but Skye and Bruce got there and took care of him and the shark.  They shouldn’t bother you again,” I added, “assuming Skye does arrest them.”

“Oh, she definitely will,” Dr. Ling piped up grimly.  “She doesn’t like it when people bother protected humans.  Well, any humans, for that matter, but protected ones are illegal to harm anyway.”

Illegal, but it didn’t stop it from happening, as Hayden’s leg clearly proved.

The next few hours were fairly busy.  Dr. Ling ended up wanting to do some surgery to try to repair deep tissue damage, and after that was done, she explained to Vance and me that there was some risk of amputation due to the tissue, nerve, and tendon damage.

“We’re keeping a close eye on it and tried to repair what we can, but – you need to be aware it’s a possibility.”

From her grim tone, I got the impression it might not be a small possibility.

Vance was probably more shaken by this than Hayden himself, who was so loopy following the surgery that all he could focus on was repeatedly asking me to snuggle with him on his left side, the uninjured side.

“Hayden,” I responded for the third time, pinching the bridge of my nose, “there isn’t enough room in the bed for two guys to cuddle.”

He made a pouty face.  “You could fix that?”

“Fix – ?  Oh.”  I sighed, but fine, whatever.  If it made him happy, might as well.

There were some scrubs in the room, likely intended to use for patients if necessary, but I was able to find some in approximately my female form size and then shifted in the bathroom where I could change in private.  When I came out, I dumped the clothes I had been wearing in the bag by Vance’s chair and then gingerly climbed onto the edge of the bed where I could rest against Hayden’s side, one arm across his body, my head on his heart, and his arm around my back.

He sighed contentedly.  “That’s better.”  His eyes were still somewhat crossed, but at least he seemed generally aware of what was going on.

“By the way,” I told Hayden, “you should stop falling off boats, you know.”

He laughed slightly and gave me a groggy smile.  “I’ll try.”

Vance moved to the chair next to Hayden’s bed and reached over to grab his brother’s hand.  “This will be okay.  It’s kind of – it’s a lot, but we’ll get through it together.”

I was quiet for a bit, finally starting to really process what had happened.  “I’m sorry,” I said at last, “this is all my fault.”

“No,” Hayden scowled at me, but he was having so much trouble focusing, it was not very intimidating.  “If you’re talking about the magic thing, we’ve been through that.”

I sighed.  “Yeah, I know, and I’m – I’m finding a way to accept how I am, though you can’t entirely blame me for regretting that my magic wasn’t strong enough to create a proper shield.”  Protection marks worked against supernaturals, not so much against humans and they were iffy on wild animals.  Had the injury been caused by an actual shark, a real protection mark might not have helped, either, but with a shark shifter?  It should have.

Still, there was nothing I could do about my magic levels, as had been readily proven over and over.  So while I regretted that I lacked the magic to protect my twins, that wasn’t the point.  “It’s not that, though – they were targeting you because of me.  Because they wanted to hurt me.  And if I’d been in the water, I’d probably have realized they were there before they got close enough to actually attack you.”

Vance rested his free hand on my arm.  “Morgan, we weren’t attacked because of you – we were attacked because some jerks decided to break the law.  And you can’t blame yourself for not being in the water and realizing in advance – unless you could know the future and know for sure that would happen, there’s no reason to blame yourself.  You can’t take on responsibility for every bad thing that happens to us.”

“’Sides,” Hayden mumbled, trying to run his fingers through my dreads but ending up just roughly patting me instead, “you saved my life, like, at least three times down there.  All because you were fast on your feet.  Erm, tail?”

“You saved both of us,” Vance agreed, then leaned over to kiss the top of my head.  “Even without magic, you proved yourself more than a match for both of them.”

That brought me up short.  I…had.  I didn’t end up entirely subduing the male oceanid, but when Skye had intervened I could tell he was tiring, unused to having to engage in physical combat, and I knew that I could – would – have worn him down, with enough time.

Maybe magic wasn’t quite as necessary to stand my ground with merfolk, after all.

A knock at the door interrupted my musings, and then Skye came in, with her an unfamiliar man and Dr. Ling.

I kind of put my head up and started to get up, but Hayden made a noise of protest and threw enough of a tiny temper tantrum that I just gave up and stayed where I was.  I was a little embarrassed, talking to Skye and this stranger curled up against Hayden like that, but Hayden was going through enough right now, I wasn’t going to make things worse for him if my presence at his side could help.  I did, however, roll over and scoot up slightly so I could see our guests, just remain pressed against Hayden with his arm around me, his face now pressed into my waist.

Skye paused for a long second upon seeing me, her face a mixture of confusion and disbelief.  Was she that surprised at seeing me with the twins?  She’d been the one to figure out they were my soulmates, but maybe she hadn’t realized that meant we’d all be together.  No, wait, Bruce had informed her we were that night, basically.  So if she already knew, why did she look like that?

“Right, first things first,” she shook herself off a bit and motioned to the man.  “This is a friend of mine, Dr. Woodson, and when Dr. Ling mentioned that the damage was more severe than she first thought – she only told me for the legal aspects,” she added swiftly, “but anyway, when I heard that there was a risk of amputation and my friend here happened to be in town…I thought maybe he could help.”

Fairy, I realized, and felt a sudden surge of hope.  Fairies could heal.

The fairy doctor shook Vance’s hand and gave me a smile before settling into a chair and taking a look over Hayden’s charts that Dr. Ling handed him.  “I’ll be honest,” he said as he looked over them, “in case you’re not aware – I can heal only what the current condition is in, my healing doesn’t automatically restore an injury to 100%.  For example, if a bone is broken but set incorrectly, we heal it – but heal it where the bone was set, not where it truly belongs.  What that means here is I can heal him, but I can’t guarantee that he’ll have full functionality of his leg if I do.  There’s a good possibility that I could heal something into the wrong place.”

Vance, who was more lucid than his brother, was taking his time to process this – even if the whole thing probably sounded ludicrous to someone unfamiliar with the idea of magic a mere few weeks ago.  “So…if you heal him, he might not have full feeling or use of his leg, but if you don’t, he may risk amputation?  That seems – fairly easy?”

The fairy doctor glanced at Dr. Ling before answering.  “There’s a possibility if he heals more normally, Dr. Ling here can catch any issues before it turns bad enough to require amputation – he may get full use again.”

“So…one option is possible full use but possible amputation, while the other is more of a sure thing but may result in some limitations.”  He considered for a moment, then looked over at Hayden, who was sleepily nuzzling his face into my shirt.  “I’d ask him, but he seems a little out of it at the moment.  Morgan?”

I was kind of startled.  “What, you want my input?”

Vance gave me an affectionate, if tense, smile.  “Why wouldn’t we?  You’re our, um, girlfriend, and you know more about this stuff anyway.”

I suppose that did make sense, but I’d never been asked to help make medical decisions for people.  I took a moment to consider, especially given that this was Hayden, one of my people, whose future was at risk here.

“Fairies tend to be helpful people,” I said slowly, thoughtfully, “so he wouldn’t do anything intentionally that would hurt Hayden, and he’s a doctor on top of that – my guess is he’s telling you the worst case scenario but it could actually go better than that.  We can’t count on it, but it could.  Furthermore,” I glanced at Dr. Ling, who thankfully seemed unbothered by me having switched genders since her last visit to the room, “I get the impression Dr. Ling thinks we should do it, which means the chance of amputation is probably higher than she wants to admit, so, as far as I can see, the fairy doctor seems the best option.”

“’Kay,” Hayden mumbled into me.  “We’ll go with that, then.”

I think we were all surprised that he was actually paying attention enough to even seem to have kept up with what we were saying, but after a pause, Vance shrugged and looked at the fairy.

“It seems unanimous that you help him.  Um, heal him.  How does that work, exactly?”

The fairy doctor’s face broke into a soft smile.  “Not really used to this world much, are you?  Fairies like myself have healing magic.  It’s not an instant thing, especially with an injury this deep, so it will take a little while to heal this.  It may feel weird for your brother, simply because everything is being put back together, as it were, and it might hurt a little, but since he’s on morphine right now anyway, I doubt he’ll notice.”

“Okay, good.”  Vance looked relieved and finally a little less tense as he sat back in his chair.