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"I just need a second and I'll be okay," I mumbled, my words slurring as the adrenaline well and truly abandoned me.

He nodded but didn't move otherwise, not until I tried to release his hand. He shook his head then, tightening his grip, but not tight enough to hurt me.

"You don't have to stay. I'm fine." It was a blatant lie, and he didn't even dignify it with a response. He just knelt down beside the bed and laid his head on the mattress near our joined hands. It had to be uncomfortable. I knew his wounds had to be hurting. I parted my lips, trying for some form of protest, but I was too far gone and consciousness left me on a wordless breath.

Chapter 16

Typhon

Quinn's breathing settled after a few minutes, the strain of the day leaving him as he slept. Without the stress and fear weighing him down, he seemed younger. Some of the color crept back into his face, barely visible even to me in the darkness of the room, but he was still pale, the bruises standing out in stark relief on his throat.

Find him. Kill him. He hurt our Quinn.

Restraining the beast when we saw the bruises had been impossible, especially when both of us wanted to find the person who'd touched him and utterly destroy him. Paralyze him with our venom, rip him apart with our claws and teeth for daring to hurt Quinn.

I looked down to where his hand held mine. Now that our human slept and we guarded him, reality came crashing back in, leaving me reeling.

I was holding Quinn's hand. I had hands. Not talons and scales and fur. Flesh and blood, wholly human hands. The change had ripped through our body without a thought. All I knew was that I needed to touch him, to ask him who'd done this, and I couldn't do it with the limited communication we'd had until now. Fury clouded our thoughts, rage blanketing everything in a red haze, and the next thing I knew was pain, a quick, searing agony, then I stood in front of Quinn like this.

Have we always been able to do this? Was I a skin-changer?

The beast snorted. Impossible. We hunt the skin-changers. They are prey.

But why do we hunt them?

Neither of us had a good answer for that. We just did it. Hunting them was our reason for existing… wasn't it? I tried to remember a time before we hunted, but that infuriating wall in our mind blocked the memories, allowing only flashes of images and feelings that didn't make any sense.

The facts remained the same, though. I'd changed into a human shape and I didn't know how I'd done it. I also didn't know how to undo it.

We're weak like this. Can't protect Quinn.

The beast paced in our head, his stress and anger clashing with my confusion and worry.

But I can talk to him now. He can help us figure out where we came from.

Doesn't matter. It's gone, and we are here.

To him, it truly didn't matter what had happened before the woods or what would happen in the future. All he cared about was now, protecting Quinn and getting him to care for us.

If we don't know where we came from, we won't know who's hunting us or why they would come after Quinn.

That got the beast's attention. He clearly hadn't put the pieces together. Our hunters hurt Quinn?

Nothing else makes sense. No one hurt him before we came along.

Although that wasn't true. He'd admitted as much when trying to get us to accept his human friend. Someone in his past had hurt him badly, enough to nearly kill him. Never again, though. Quinn was mine to protect now, and no one would touch him again.

Ours, the beast growled. Ours to protect.

Ours, I agreed hurriedly. So for now, we need to stay like this so I can talk to him. We need to know more if we're going to hunt these humans down.

Even in this shape, my senses were sharp enough to catch the lingering scent of the man who'd touched Quinn, and his scent was distinctly human. That same strange chemical smell from before clung to him, but underneath was all human. Human and almost… familiar? Something about the stranger's scent prodded at something in the back of my mind, but whatever it was, it was locked behind that damned mental wall.

Quinn shifted in his sleep and our attention locked on him. He whimpered once, a tiny little sound that shattered our heart. He settled again, but I couldn't. I hadn't been able to protect him, and now he had new nightmares to deal with.

The tight grip he kept on my hand, even in his sleep, helped ease some of the guilt, but not enough. If that's what he needed from me, though, I'd stay right here all day. The wounds in my left leg throbbed, and the stitches Lain had applied hadn't survived the skin-change. A thin trickle of blood crept down my thigh and pooled in the back of my knee where I knelt on the floor. My right shoulder burned, a relentless fire eating through my arm that grew worse the longer it hung limply at my side. At least without my wings, that pain was gone. Where they'd gone, I couldn't begin to guess or understand, but at least it meant a little less pain.

It was a price I'd pay a dozen times over if it meant I got to stay here by Quinn's side. In this, the beast and I were in agreement. He wanted to get closer, to crawl into the bed and hold our human while he slept, but I kept him in check. I had no memory of being human or even being around them, but I knew he would panic if he woke up with someone holding him. Just the way he'd reacted to seeing me like this told me he wouldn't like it.