Bailey Bradford - Southwestern Shifters 06 - Reverence by Bailey Bradford

food and kitchenware, he’d never had and never would have been able to afford. Were the shifters trying to buy him off? Or were they, as Nathan said in the note, truly sorry he’d been hurt? Did it matter?
“Yes.” Though he couldn’t say why. Harley finally looked in the fridge then the freezer and was trying to figure out what the hell he’d do with so much food when his mind just blanked, like the electricity cutting off right before a storm hit.
Then he crumpled on the floor and sobbed as he clutched at his head, the nightmarish memories slithering out to torment him on that pretty gold floor.
* * * *
    It was agonising, but Val Whitley was a determined man. He’d almost died during the attack on Marcus Criswell’s former residence. Val had been hit by a damn SUV driven by Joshua Dobson, and had lingered in a coma, something previously unheard of for a shifter.
    Well, there was much unknown about shifters. It wasn’t like they could have just gone running to a human hospital and asked for Val to be treated. He was damned lucky to be alive, and, even though he didn’t believe it more than half the time, he was lucky he wasn’t more badly scarred, inside and out.
“That’s it, stretch out your leg all the way.”
    Val wanted to snarl at Shania, the best doctor in the entire world, he’d wager. She’d saved his life, so there was no one he’d rank above her. Val grunted as he held his left leg up. He was flat on his back on the exam table, and extending his leg just fucking hurt, but he could do it. What he couldn’t do was shift. Or see out of his left eye.
    He was shit as a shifter, but he’d still be the best he could be, period. Just because he hadn’t been able to shift didn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to, eventually.
“What’s your pain level?” Shania asked as she felt his leg, prodding at the deep scars that should have healed. Shifters always healed unless datura was involved. Datura was a plant native to the area that was highly toxic for them. A little on the skin acted much like battery acid. They were all beginning to think he’d been exposed to some of the nasty stuff somehow, considering his scars.
“Three,” Val gasped, sweat breaking out on his forehead from the strain of holding his leg up. He was incredibly out of shape, and not much more than a bag of bones instead of the bulked-up guy he used to be.
Shania narrowed her eyes at him. “Only a three?”
“Yes,” Val snapped, lowering his leg back down. “It’s just my stomach muscles aching from holding my leg up, mainly. My leg isn’t even a full three on the pain scale.”
Shania began massaging his damaged thigh muscles, talking as she did so. “We don’t know that this is permanent. Unfortunately we have no records of past injuries in shifters, not any from before when I started keeping records, at least. It seems to me that since we do heal from virtually everything but datura contact, you should eventually get over this damage. It’s because it was so severe—you’re lucky to even have this leg. If you’d been human, it would have been amputated.”
Val had heard the story more times than he cared to. They suspected that, along with his femur being shattered, the artery in his leg had been torn, and he’d very nearly bled to death internally, but really no one knew exactly what had been fucked up inside him immediately after he’d been hit.
Whatever it was, it’d taken him a little over two weeks to come out of the coma, and while he was recuperating quickly, as a shifter should, he wasn’t recuperating in the ways they’d hoped. No one, including him, thought he’d get his vision back in his left eye. There wasn’t even the hint of a shadow there, and the iris, once a solid dark brown, was almost solid black as the pupil was permanently blown. Val felt like a freak every time he saw himself in a mirror.
“You’re able to walk with hardly a limp at all,” Shania muttered, not asking him. Val was