Needless to say, sleep didn't happen. Nor did rest of any kind, even with Elena playing nanny in the room with us. I tried very hard not to take her presence personally for a variety of reasons. First being that I knew they all trusted me—medically at least. She wasn't there to ensure that I kept my fingers off of her Alpha and his best friend. Nor was she there to end me if Jeremy and Antonio suddenly took a turn for the worst. I guess she was there to make certain I didn't end myself by stupidly trying to climb out a window or something.
Believe it or not, that was the part I found offensive. Not her presence, nor the fact that she was yet another breathing reminder of my predicament. It was the notion that they honestly believed I was reckless enough to try and escape a third-floor room in a house that had no trellis, no gutters, and no ledges of any kind. It was almost as if Stonehaven was designed to be simultaneously impregnable and inescapable. A Fortress of Solitude to make the Man of Steel weep with envy, only it wasn't on a frozen polar cap of the planet.
No, it was right in the middle of civilization, where anyone (namely me) could wander in by accident and never leave again.
Okay, maybe it wasn't the FoS. It was more like the Bates Motel. Minus the creepy old lady. Though the verdict was still out on my chances of showering to the Psycho Theme and drying off with a kitchen knife. Somehow I got the impression that Jeremy was more refined than knifing me to death in the shower, but then again, who knew? Until about twenty hours ago, I'd thought he was just an eccentric, reclusive, rich human.
Emphasis on the human part. Sad that I now had to make that distinction.
Elena tried to engage me in conversation once or twice. We didn't get very far. Not that I hated small talk (okay, I hated it with a passion), I just didn't see the point in trying to get to know someone that may be ordered to kill me. All those TV shows and movies stated that a person's chances of surviving a kidnapping increased if you made your kidnappers see you as a human being. That meant you were supposed to engage them in conversation at every opportunity, spewing useless but humanizing factoids about yourself.
Hi, I'm a Taurus.I'm thirty years old.I'm a doctor.I love pizza.My favorite color is green.I hate country music and dub step isn't that far behind it in the kill-it-before-it-multiplies category, but you know, it's growing on me.Like a fungus.A hideous, mutant, fungus.
Okay, okay, that last part probably wouldn't have won me the Miss Congeniality award, but it was the best I could come up with given how terrified I was. Most people screamed or drank or did drugs when life got stressful. I got more sarcastic. Deal.
After snapping at her a second time, she shook her head and settled in to wait. Annoyed at me, yes. But surprisingly enough not unsympathetic. Unless she was the best liar in the world, there was a touch of compassion thawing the ice in her blue eyes as the dawn rose, the hours stretching out between us. Like she knew what it was like to be in my shoes. I shivered, trying to put that thought out of my mind. The last thing I needed to do was speculate on a future where I was doing exactly what she was doing right now.
I wasn't going to come to peace with this place. I wasn't going to agree to join the Supernatural Corleone family. I wasn't. I wasn't. I wasn't—
"It's hard at first," Elena whispered, as if reading my mind. Her eyes lingered over Antonio and Jeremy's unconscious forms. "The secrets and the lies are difficult to handle, and seem almost cruel to everyone. You get used to them over time. Once you fully understand why the law is the law, you know it's for the best."
I fought the impulse to give her a one-fingered answer, and gripped the stethoscope around my neck with both hands to keep it from happening. "I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to know anymore about this place or whatever the hell you all are, unless it is pertinent to saving lives."
"Neither did I," her eyes drifted to the bank of windows on the far wall, though I had a feeling she wasn't seeing them. She was seeing something from her own past. "I fought just like you did. Probably harder, truth be told. I didn't have anyone to protect when… when I first came here. It was just me."
I threw my hands up in the air. Peachy, now she was spewing factoids as if I held the key to her future, not the other way around. "What part of 'I don't want to know' didn't you understand? The don't or the don't? Sometimes the differences can be tricky, so if you need a road map, don't be afraid to ask."
She sent me a level look, one that reminded me of Jeremy. "You need to know."
"No, I don't."
"Charlotte, you need to understand—"
"You see, there's that other word I'm beginning to hate. That 'need' word that you all throw at me as much as 'for your safety' and 'alpha.' All I 'need' to do is get the hell out of here and pretend you all don't exist."
Wonder of all wonders, she shut up again. Lips compressed in a thin line, of course, her displeasure at my rudeness plain on her face. But she didn't press like Antonio, or urge me like Nicky. She didn't even physically try to restrain me like Clay would have, determined to wait out my stubborn flailing until I was in a better mindset to listen to him. Trust me, that event happened a lot when we were kids. In fact—
I gave myself a mental and physical shake. I really didn't need to relive childhood memories of Clayton Danvers. All that good karma he'd built with me was cashed out the moment he stood in my path when I'd tried to follow Nick.
Stars, Nick… was he okay? Was Char okay? Was any of this ever going to be okay again?!
I ran my hands over my face, letting the fingers wrap around the length of my braid and tug. "This is so fucked up!" I hissed, glaring at her. "If you understand this predicament, if you've really been where I am right now, why aren't you helping me escape? Why are you putting me through what you know is a terrifying and heart-rending ordeal?"
Her eyes brimmed with sudden tears, the first real emotion I'd ever seen from the Snow Queen. "Because this is the best way to save your life."
I shook my head again, giving up and picking up the chart book and pencil. "For once, could I have a conversation with one of you that doesn't end in cryptic riddles that spell my doom?"
"My favorite flowers are lilacs."
I blinked. Okay, non-sequitur much? "Come again?"
Elena closed her eyes, took a deep breath. "I like lilacs. You?"
It took me longer than I would have liked for my brain to wrap around what she was saying. Too much bad had happened for me to switch mental gears without grinding a few. Was she for real? Did she… did she really just try to have a conversation about flowers of all things?
"Girl, you are a special kind of crazy, aren't you?"
She made a slightly vexed sound, crossing her arms over her chest and tapping her foot impatiently. "You asked for a conversation that didn't end in riddles. I've told you my favorite flower. Your turn."
I sank down onto the stool between Antonio and Jeremy's bedsides, fighting the urge to laugh and cry all at once. This was so absurd. "Crysthanamums," I found myself saying anyway. "Followed by carnations."
"Why carnations?"
"Because they're common and overlooked and treated like they aren't real flowers. I'm a sucker for the underdog, I suppose. Carnations are the underdog of the flower family. They need love, too."
Elena smiled slightly. "I guess lilacs fit into that category, too."
"Neither of you are overlooked," Jeremy whispered, eyes slowly fluttering open. "Not in this house and not in the eyes of the world."
Elena was at his side before I registered the fact that he was speaking. Just a blink of an eye and she was there, kneeling at his bedside and taking his hand in hers. "Jeremy, thank god. We feared… you don't want to know what we feared."
He was still pale, and the breathy quality of his voice had nothing to do with a man recovering from a deep sleep. I was moving quickly, too, towards the table with the blood pressure cuff. I didn't see his smile, but judging from the subdued but utterly relieved almost-laugh that left Elena's mouth, he must have smiled. I'd seen patients and their families do that enough to know what happened just from the sounds.
Just like I knew he was trying to sit up by the sound of the blankets rustling.
"Stay," I barked, picking up what I needed and heading back to his bedside. Sure enough, Elena was trying to help him sit upright. "You're nowhere near well enough to move about on your own."
I expected a load of backtalk from him. I received a frown instead, followed by Elena lowering him back to the bed after he nodded. So much for being the authority in this room. If he'd told me to go to hell, I think she would have pitched me through those windows after all. Flower talk or not.
"I thought I collapsed from blood loss," he murmured, eyes closing again. "But a night's rest should've fixed that. There's something wrong, Elena. Very difficult to breathe."
She didn't need to send me the 'please don't let him die' look. I put the pressure cuff to his arm, the 'scope to my ears.
Elena peeked beneath the blanket at his wound. "I don't understand. You're healing normally but you're burning up."
"Your blood pressure is dangerously low," I leaned in, checked his pupillary response with a small pen light. And I knew. I knew at the same moment he knew. "Poison."
He nodded faintly. "They must've dipped the knife in a toxin."
"What do you need to do to find an antidote?" Elena asked urgently.
"It's not that simple," I said.
"Lotte's right," he said, wincing slightly, breathing becoming more labored the more he spoke. "We need to figure out what the toxin is first. The wrong course of treatment could be fatal."
That was all she needed to hear, apparently. She was up and moving as fast as she had moved to reach him in the first place. Out the door, leaving me alone to stare into the bright, feverish eyes of the man that had tried to kill me mere hours ago.
As far as awkward silences went, it could have gone worse. We stared at each other for the longest of minutes, eyes locked. His steady, faintly glassy in a way that had nothing to do with crocodile tears, and mine cycling through all the things I wanted to say and knew I couldn't for a variety of reasons. First and foremost being he was pretty much knocking on death's door, and doctors just don't scream at their patients in such situations. Secondly, it wouldn't have done any good.
Poisoned or not, the look in his eyes was as steady as a rock. And his mouth was just as firmly shut. As in apologies would start pouring from his lips the moment rocks learned to speak. Thus the staring. The quiet, meaningful, staring… until I just couldn't take it anymore.
I turned away, my intention being to close the door. Elena had left so quickly that it was wide open. Hard for people to rest if they heard half the things that everyone else said in this death trap. I turned, and felt his hand grip mine. And I braced myself for the worst, for a lightning strike or a full on Chernobyl-like meltdown when his power hit mine.
I got a whole lot of his fingers entwining with mine, tugging gently. That was it. Well, that and the usual amount of supernatural heat that poured off of him and his kind. There was no answering coolness from me this time. Nothing to indicate that a power surge was going to rip through us.
Just hands. Touching.
Seriously, we really needed to find out what sparked these storms and put an end to it. Oh, wait. Killing me would solve the problem just as easily. Faster, too, and better for everyone—except me. However, Lady Fate and I had reached an agreement long ago, that being she was going to screw me every chance she got and I was going to take it like a bitch.
Was it a bad sign that I found relief in the fact that my kidnapper/future murderer didn't react to my touch in a supernatural way? I'm going to go with yes. Because that meant my life was a whole other level of screwed up.
I turned my head, staring at our hands. "What?"
"I never got to properly thank you… for saving Antonio."
I heard the words, but the light in his eyes was saying something else completely different. Something I couldn't quite define, but it wasn't the apology he was spouting. "You're welcome."
That half smile touched his lips, like he knew I wanted say other things than those two little words. "When this is over, I will thank you properly."
"When this is over, I don't expect—" To be left alive? Yeah, that was what I was going to say. I licked my lips and just shrugged. "Sure, Jeremy. When this is over. I'll hold you to that."
Jeremy shook his head, reading between the lines. His hand tightened gently around mine. "Things have changed, Charlotte. Things we need to discuss before too long. I… wanted to…" he trailed off, wincing again. And when he opened his eyes, his pupils seemed to have a hard time focusing. "I wanted to say…"
My fingertips brushed his forehead, came back slicked with sweat. "Your fever is worse. You're done talking for a bit. You need to rest, sleep if you can. I can't give you anything for the fever until Elena discovers what kind of poison we're dealing with. Sleep, and I'll try my best to keep you comfortable."
I might as well have dropped a spell on him. I don't think he heard much of anything after the 'your feve' in my statements, as his eyes closed and stayed that way. I filled up a basin with cool water, dropped a cloth into it, and dabbed at his forehead. He groaned faintly in his sleep, turning towards the cold on instinct.
"Hurry, Elena," I found myself whispering. "We're nearly out of time."
He slept fitfully as the poison did its worst, his rest interrupted more and more by periods of lucid dreaming alternating with outright hallucinations. Antonio was able to talk Jeremy back from the brink of total madness on those rare times he was awake. But he was healing from serious wounds, himself, and the brief times he managed to struggle to awareness from his own healing sleep grew farther and fewer between as the hours ticked by. Until all that stood between Jeremy and death was… me.
Little ol' me, and tiny things I could do to keep him comfortable.
The cooling effect of the towel against his forehead soothed the worst of the lucid dreams; it was the walking nightmares that were the real issues. Flailing, cursing, wishing vengeance on someone named Santos with one breath and growling incoherently at someone named Malcolm in the next. With no restraints to pin him in place, he was literally a danger to himself and the rest of us.
No amount of talking him down on my own worked in those moments. Everything was an attack, an attempt to kill him. It was when his flailing became a clawing at himself that I'd had enough. Supernatural strength or not, I wasn't about to let him tear himself to ribbons while I stood there and did nothing.
"Jeremy, stop!"
Those eyes snapped open, hit mine with a steady blow of self-righteous indignation that nearly had me stumbling back into Antonio's bed. "You have no say over this, human," he growled. "This isn't your fight."
"Nor is it yours," I snapped back, grabbing his wrist in both hands and holding tight. "You're going to kill yourself long before you can return to your little war."
Maybe grabbing his arm wasn't the brightest of moves. How many cases had I read about doctors underestimating the strength in their patients, especially those in the grips of fevers? Yeah, guess I was a statistic now.
I figured that out when he laughed, a dark cruel sound, and merely curled his arm back towards himself. Which brought me along with the ride. I crashed into the bed, well within reach of his other hand. Panic rose up to strangle me anew, fear that that hand would return to my throat, would finish what he'd started. I could talk a big talk about wanting all this crap over and done with, but the fact of the matter was that I didn't want to die. No one wanted to die. And I knew I would fight him if it came down to it. I'd fight to the end.
That free hand latched onto my shoulder instead, yanking me on top of him. Until our faces were within inches of each other.
"I am your alpha, Lotte. Do not dictate to me."
"You are a large pain in my ass, Jeremy. And I'm your doctor, which outranks you right now. So let go."
Sarcasm, oh, how I adore you. Masking my fear behind sharp words. Because I was afraid. I wanted to scream, to howl and beg and plead. But he was essentially a madman in that moment, a through-and-through lunatic. Even though he used my first name, I doubt he saw me. No, his mind was turned inward, seeing the face of another woman that had done him wrong, or had angered him or… or something.
God, please let it be that.
That hand on my shoulder shook, thumb hooking into the neck of my T-shirt and starting to slide it down my shoulder. The other hand gripped my side. That thumb tugged at the fabric, the cotton collar tearing free until that perfect pentagram was visible. The one burned into my flesh courtesy of Tommy Braxton's ignorance. That got Jeremy's attention, stopped whatever had entered his thoughts in mid-motion. His thumb circled it, traced it in gentle circles.
And then he growled deep in his throat, a sound no human could have ever made. A sound so primal and predatory that it froze the breath in my lungs.
"You will tell me who hurt you."
"You already know that," I managed to whisper.
"Braxton," he hissed, his finger leaving the scar, the rest of his hand slowly returning from where it came, fingers curling around the back of my neck. "I will not let this happen again."
"Sure you won't," I soothed, trying to put a smile on my lips.
Trying to show the madman before me that he was right, that the world was safe and fun and happy and he didn't need to kill me by accident because I was doing exactly what he'd said. I forced my hands to let go of his wrist, to rest lightly on his chest. He allowed it, appearing to relax but unwilling to let go of my neck just yet. Swallowing hard, I leaned down until my head rested against his shoulder, felt him sigh with relief, like his whole body had been tensed to leap if I hadn't done exactly that. That hand caressed gently, his other arm wrapping just as gently across my shoulders.
"Safe," he murmured, lips brushing my forehead as he spoke. "I will keep you safe at Stonehaven. Should have done this … long ago. Kept you here…and Elena… safe."
"I'm safe here," I agreed, trying not to move too much. Praying he wasn't going to see through the platitudes I was spilling until I could somehow get out of his embrace. "You should sleep, Jeremy. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere. Sleep," I urged softly, letting one hand caress his cheek. "I promise I'll be right here when you wake."
He seemed to do exactly that, drifting back to sleep. Until I stirred next to him, attempting to slide from his arms. His face turned towards mine just as I glanced up at him, and I couldn't be more honest if I had a whole stack of Bibles in one hand and a burning bush in the other, our lips met by sheer accident.
His lips touched mine. Parted. And fates help me, I felt my brain short-circuit. Every logical inch of me was screaming at how it was a really bad idea to kills my kidnapper. My body, however, had other plans. I sank into that kiss, parting for him, tasting him. He growled again, deep in his throat, and deepened the kiss.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! This was so wrong! He was sick, delusional, dying. He was my patient. He'd tried to kill me, for fuck's sake! And when his arms pulled me in closer, the last fuse in my brain blew, melted by the heat that he threw off in droves. It felt… right to kiss him. To feel the delicious weight of him shifting on that mattress, slowly and by inches positioning us until he was nearly on top of me, my arms wrapped around his neck.
"We… can't," I gasped when his lips started to travel down my neck. "Jeremy… we… we can't. You need to stay calm. We… we don't know what this poison is doing to you. You… you aren't in your right… right mind."
But oh, stars, I didn't want him to stop. I wanted to feel that heat all over me, sink into it, absorb his power into my own and share it with him until we glowed with it. And as if that thought was a light switch flicking on, it happened.
The vision.
The lightning inside.
Inky, dark, lightning striking at his will and his self-control, the poison eating at everything he was. Pain… such pain siphoning his sanity until one image emerged from the darkness. Cold, icy water of a lake I'd never seen but somehow knew as well as my own skin. Something heavy tied around our throats by a man we wanted to love us with all our little nine-year-old hearts. We begged, pleaded, as our father picked us up and tossed us into that water. And we were sinking, drowning as the rock around our necks—the rock larger than any cross-section of our tiny body—drug us deeper into the black waters.
Only to burst through the surface and into a new kind of terror altogether, no less horrible than the sensation of water filling our lungs. This time we drown on dry land, fear taking us down as surely as that rock. Drowning in fear as we ran beside our twin sister. Nine years old and running for our lives in a real enchanted forest from giant wolves, only to watch our twin slip, fall, and vanish beneath the water. Screaming for her, stopping and nearly being trampled by those larger-than-life wolves.
She couldn't die. We couldn't let her, even if it meant being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf. Or begging that wolf to save her, sacrificing ourselves for one that was everything to us.
Then we were the wolf, staring down at the child, the girl that should not be there, hearing her beg for her sister's life. A growl, a turn of the head, and Antonio knew what to do. Knew to go after the twin. The other wolf hit the water, going under… and surfacing as a man, holding the unconscious girl to his chest. And we stared at her twin beneath us, and felt her hand fall against our paw. The lightning, the storm, the arc of a power beyond our understanding burst over us. Threw us backwards and started to force us back to our human state.
Hunt her. Kill her. Oh, how we didn't want to do it. So young, around our age the first time we faced death. The parallels were too strong, too intimate, too horrific. To take the life of a child was anathema, but so many other lives were at stake, the future of our entire race in the palm of our hand. How could we not? Unless… unless… we could convince the girl that this was a dream. Watch over her all the days of her life to ensure it stayed 'just a dream.' And maybe, just maybe, she could live a normal life.
And then we stared down at ourselves as separate people once again. I was in the cage, Elena kneeling beside me. He stood at her shoulder, eyes closed in silent prayer. "Soon now," Elena was saying, voice trying to be reassuring and filled with quiet terror anyway. "Soon now. Don't fight it. Don't fight it or it will kill you. You can do this, Lotte. I promise you can do this…"
All the while silver glowed against my collarbone, the pentagram in my flesh throwing off its own light.
He broke the kiss before I could, hands cupping my face, alternating between pushing me away and pulling me in closer.
"It was real," Jeremy whispered, quiet panic in his voice. "I thought what happened downstairs in the den was a dream, but it wasn't. It was… real. Always I almost kill you, almost killed Elena. Almost failed you all."
Elena… had she done something similar to me? Found out about them by accident? It would make a sick sort of sense and put into perspective what she'd been trying to tell me. What Antonio and Nick had been trying to tell me, too.
"Jeremy, you don't know what you're saying," I whispered, voice stuttering and breathy, trying to move out from being partially beneath him. "You're sick. You need to rest."
"Clay," he said, allowing me to get to my feet. "Where is Elena?"
What did he mean by that? Clay was—
"Tracking the woman who stabbed you."
I jerked, nearly falling on my ass. I hadn't even heard Clay walk into the room. Then again, I was so shaken by all this that a nuclear blast could have gone off on the front lawn and I wouldn't have noticed.
"No," Jeremy said, shaking his head almost too rapidly. "No more secrets. You need to tell her about the first day in Stonehaven."
Clay brushed past me, a pained look on his face. "Lotte, go have a nap in Elena's room. I need to speak with Jeremy alone."
I couldn't argue with that, not with Jeremy's taste fresh on my lips and the vision clouding all my judgment. I nodded, heading quickly to the door.
"You need to tell Elena—"
"This isn't your death bed," Clay was saying, sitting on the stool. "Not yet."
"What about Cain?"
"Doesn't seem to know about the poison."
"Do what you have to do: hurt him."
I stopped listening after that, all but running from that room. I didn't stop until I'd hit the kitchen and then cursed silently. Because Elena's room was on the second floor. I'd bypassed it in my haste to get away from all that had transpired up there. The images were dancing around inside my brain, the certainty that Jeremy had been the wolf that had chased me as a child centermost in the vortex of my panic. Antonio had been the one to save my twin. And Malcolm… gods, the stories we told as children didn't even hold a candle to the horror in that man.
What kind of monster tries to drown their own child?
My ass hit the bench, my face in my hands, and I sobbed. Heaven help me, but I finally broke down and lost it. They were wolves. Wolves! And my twin was out there with Wolf Nick and probably Wolf Max, alone. Most likely a prisoner at Ravenswood if they hadn't killed her already, just as I was a prisoner at Stonehaven. The only difference being that they need me. They didn't have a doctor to heal them. Nick had said as much last night.
But they had a plethora of lawyers.
Do what you have to do: hurt him.
Do what you have to… It seemed like a justification for so many horrors. Do what you have to: kidnap Lotte. Do what you have to: kidnap Char. Do what you have to: hurt him. Kill them. Ruin their lives and trap them in hell forever. All in the name of protecting their secrets…
It never dawned on me that I was alone for the first time. That I could literally get up and run out that door and there was no one to stop me. Sure, they'd find out eventually (sooner rather than later given my luck) and come after me. It would be a toss-up if I reached the main road before they noticed my absence. But it was a long, long way to the first hints of civilization. Good money said they'd find me before I'd made it a quarter of the way to town.
No, running wasn't an option. Elena was right. I had someone to live for on the outside, a twin that could be used as leverage against me if I broke my promise to Antonio. I laid my head on that table, arms wrapped around myself, and tried to stem the rising panic.
In the silence that followed, I heard the growl. The deep, hair-raising, rumbling sound close to the one Jeremy had made. Only darker, more threatening than protective, and pissed. Pure fury in that utterance, like whatever had made it was biding its time. Wiating for the perfect moment to leap and destroy its target. And it was coming from the door across from me. The one that lead to the basement.
I had one of those moments that everyone hates in a horror movie, the one where the idiot girl is alone and something bad is lurking in the basement. Any sane, rational person would grab the nearest phone and call for help, or would arm themselves and get the hell out of that place. What does said idiot do instead? She goes down the stairs—alone—and promptly gets eaten.
The only difference between me and that stupid girl? I grabbed two kitchen knives from the block on the counter before I approached that door.
Don't ask me what was going through my head right then. I don't even know. Maybe I was suffering a sort of contact poisoning from kissing Jeremy. Maybe I really had suffered a nervous breakdown and was moving on autopilot. But I opened that door and went down those stairs.
It was dark, gloomy in that massive subterranean room, the light coming from a single window at about head-height on the far wall. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, to realize that the other windows were boarded over, blocked, until the only source of light came from that one portal to the outside world. And that window gave enough light to illuminate the one thing I had hoped and prayed I would never see in real life.
My heart froze and I dropped one of my knives, my hand flying to my mouth.
There it was.
The cage.
The. Fucking. Cage!
The one in my vision, the one that I would be locked inside eventually. Not if. Not maybe. But truly and utterly locked inside. It pulled me forward as if I were in a trance, everything around me bathed in shadows and all but invisible. It never registered to ask why wolf-men would have a cage in their basement. It never crossed my mind, either, to check to see if someone or something was in it. It was too dark, too dim to see the lower half clearly. Just that the cage was there.
Which meant my fate was decided. There was no escaping it now.
I reached out, hand shaking… and gripped those bars.
Sharp pain was my reward, something too large to be a dog melting from those shadows and rearing its head. There was no time to react, no split-second to scream. A flash of too-white, too-sharp teeth, as they raked the knuckles of my right hand was all I knew. Internal pain answered the external, a flash of blue-white light against my shoulder and the sensation of being branded all over again was more shocking that the scrape of razor-sharp teeth. The black wolf flew back, crashing into the far wall and going utterly still. I flew backwards, too, landing awkwardly on my side.
The blade I'd still possessed cut deep into my left palm and I instantly covered the wound with my other hand, trying to stop the bleeding.
"LOTTE!" Clay screamed, flying down those stairs like a man possessed. It took him two seconds to assess the situation, and then he was kneeling beside me, gripping my arms hard enough to leave marks. "Did he bite you? Did he break the skin? Answer me! Did he bite you?"
"N-no," I said instantly. "No, he startled me. I-I fell on the knife. I…"
My teeth started to chatter uncontrollably. Clay grabbed my hands, pulling them apart. Fresh blood gushed from the left, my right covered in it. "Are you sure he didn't bite you? Lotte, this is important."
"No, he didn't. I don't think he did."
His large hand covered mine, pressing hard to try and stop the bleeding. But he didn't try to help me stand. He didn't offer to get medical supplies, either. He just stared at me. Stared as the migraine was starting to build behind my eyes. My shoulder burned continuously as fear started to collect inside my veins. Werewolves… didn't werewolves make other werewolves by biting them?
I let my gaze drift past his, locking on the motionless form in the cage. Had he broken the skin? There was so much blood, it was hard to tell. And if he had, how much time did I have left? Until the next full moon? Were they even tied to lunar cycles? Would I go mad? The way Clay kept staring at me, as if expecting… something… wasn't doing anything for my rising panic attack.
After what felt like forever, his shoulders slumped and he let out a deep sigh of relief that sounded like it came from his toes upwards. He put his hand on my shoulder, drew me forward until our foreheads touched. Whatever it was he was searching for having expired, apparently.
"Come on, darling. Let's go," he said, pulling me to my feet. "Let's get this cleaned."
I didn't have it in me to glance back at that cage. Or down at the brand on my flesh. I was afraid I would see it glowing, and then see myself in that cage. Just as I was afraid to see how much blood was from the knife wound, and how much from those teeth.
