AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She whined again. I moved around to her front and set her head on my lap, stroking her ears, murmuring thanks and soft encouragement to keep breathing.
Caelan, panting from the effort of freeing himself, observed us through one eye; the other was closed tight and swollen, before he staggered through the tunnel.
When he returned, several others—human and shifted—followed. The vast majority were at Calico's side, including a woman dressed in an EMT uniform.
A small wolf with more humanistic features pulled me to one side when Caelan waved them off. The sheriff had shifted back into a human and thrown on an undershirt and pants. The thin cotton did little to hide his cuts and bruises. Slung over his arm was a large plaid button-down. He walked with a distinct limp and kept touching his jaw, but he was healing.
What I wouldn’t give for some rapid regeneration right about now.
He passed me the shirt, helped me slip it around my shoulders and button up. I felt stupid and looked stupid, but I couldn't get my right arm into the sleeve, couldn't move it, without severe pain.
“Guess I won't be wearing a two-piece at the beach this summer,” I said dumbly.
“Color me disappointed, Miss Davins.” Whatever tentative cheer he’d found vanished at the sight of his brother.
With folded arms and narrowed eyes, August, who had taken the time to throw a sheet over Winnie, watched us limp along.
As we passed, Caelan stopped to press his forehead to his brother’s and share a private word.
A horrid screech had me cringing and turning back toward Cal with wide eyes. I couldn’t see her around the rapidly working medical team, but hoped she was okay.
“She's tougher than she thinks,” Caelan said, ushering me through the tunnel. “Most wouldn’t have survived the night. Talon is in good paws going forward, if she manages to scrub off the art theft.”
Sweating, dizzy, uncertain of what had happened and was to come, I stayed quiet.
We wound our way back into the daylight and through the night's wreckage of ruined bodies and scorched earth.
I faced the welcome breeze. “Why’d she come?”
“She requested to,” Caelan said. “I couldn’t let her in with the rest; she may be Talon’s alpha, but she’s still a civilian. It was better for her to sneak along the fringe where she has experience avoiding conflict.”
“This is exactly what she was upset at Stephen for doing. She’s got Aiden and the rest of the pack at an already vulnerable moment.”
“Ms. Finn may be a thief and a troublemaker, but she's a good leader. You're her pack, Marcy. She wouldn't sacrifice her family. They don't know you. They don't care. But no matter what she says in the heat of the moment, she will always care.” He stopped me very gently by my uninjured elbow. “Why don’t we find a shady spot and sit a spell?”
Fanning my neck, I shook my head. “I can keep pace. Werewolves are little healing saunas, aren’t they?”
“You’re overheating.” Frowning, he made me sit on the ground in the reedy shade of a blackened pine. A wash of red discolored the shirt. With my permission, he undid a couple of buttons and examined my shoulder. “You ain’t healing,” he decided, rocking back on his heels. “Not at my speed if I were to have a similar injury.”
“Is that normal?”
Taking my hand, he ran his thumb along the jagged scars his teeth had cut from my wrist. Caelan had made the correct call, yet I never wanted to be a werewolf; to be one now, of an extremely restricted variety, I didn’t have the effort or energy to grapple with.
“I’ve never bitten someone with the intent to turn,” he said. “In the standard werewolf, as the bite scars, the change begins. Sometimes it can take a month for the transformation to take full effect, but you should be recovering. Fast recovery is one of the reasons it was so difficult to catch a werewolf back in the day: bit in the arm at midnight, chopping a cord of wood come dawn.”
All I could think about was Zakar’s jolly, We'll see.
“What I don't understand," Caelan was saying, buttoning up my shirt, “is how you got August to stop.”
As we waited in the shade, I told him about Zakar. “He wanted this, Caelan. Everything had been orchestrated to give him the right outcome, except maybe your bite.”
His troubled expression mirrored my own. “So, you’re bound to him?”
“He is bound to me,” I said; the reverse sounded so defeated. “Whatever that means.”
“Reckon it means you might could be the new host. Ingram Hayes and the prior Second Heads have always been human; you being a werewolf, I don’t know what that means for how he jumps in your skin, or what that result will look like.”
A man Caelan later informed me was the sheriff of Vermont, walked up to us and offered to get me to a hospital so Caelan could return to the pit. Caelan declined, explaining he had questions, but even in his pleasant smile his distrust of his peer was evident. He promised to fill the sheriff in, and, once the other had moved off, urged me onto my feet.
