A/N: Welcome to Chapter 3! Where we have Peter and Riley being a little more noticeably sassy, a not-very-helpful flashback, and Riley's best friend Carmen who has amusing shirts. Anyway, thanks to those of you who are reading this story, with bonus thanks to those who've reviewed so far: masqueraderoses, willdawg992003, MissAnimeMiss, and bridgetlynn. You guys are so great! :)
Chapter 3
Peter followed Riley down wide concrete staircase that led to the main body of the bunker from the door they'd entered through. At one point he made a comment about getting boxed in with just the one entrance, but Riley assured him (in a dismissive way that was vaguely insulting) that they had alternative entrances and that he didn't need to worry about it (that last part of her response had come accompanied with a fierce look that warned him against pursuing the topic, and so he had, reluctantly, let the subject drop).
They passed through the main area of the bunker, which seemed to be about the size of a ballroom, if ballrooms were dim and gray and full of people who looked like life had tossed them into the gutter ten times too many.
A few of them glanced at him curiously as he and Riley walked by, but most of them just stared at him blankly before looking away, like his sudden arrival wasn't anything unusual or interesting.
As far as he knew, it might not be. Maybe the Wild Hunt snatched and erased people all the time, and Peter had just never known about it because, well, the victims got erased from everyone's memories; remembering someone taken by the Hunt would be, by default, totally impossible.
That irritated him for reasons he couldn't put into words, but he supposed it was only reasonable to be upset; he'd been ripped away from a world that he...well, he hadn't been terribly fond of his life, especially not while in Eichen House, but it was his life, dammit; he'd fought and clawed his way through hell for it (hell, he'd fought Death itself for a second chance at it), and deserved to live it out. Not get abducted by some B-movie extra on an intimidating horse (the creepy rider and the horse with demonically glowing eyes were all that Peter had been able to recall so far about the Hunt and how he'd been taken, and even that much was still blurry and hazy in his mind, something he blamed on the drugs still twisting through his bloodstream).
"Where are we going?" he asked Riley as she threaded her way through the little clusters of people in the bunker, some of them sitting on makeshift pallets and others slumping against the support pillars.
"A healer," she replied shortly, lifting her injured arm with a slight wince. "I need to get this taken care of before I go back out."
"Fair enough," is Peter's automatic response before the last half of her answer fully registers. Once it does, he scowls. "What do you mean, go back out?"
She gave him a droll look and rolled her eyes. "You used to be smart, I swear. Has your IQ dropped in the intervening years or what?"
He flashed his teeth at her in a snarl.
She rolled her eyes again, looking thoroughly unimpressed. "Yeah, yeah. Grr, rawr, nasty werewolf, I get it. Don't pull a muscle, old man."
His snarl was replaced with a sputter. "Old man?" he demanded indignantly.
She just smirked at him. "You're pre-middle age, Peter. How's it feel?"
"You're not exactly a young little thing, either," Peter sniped back at her. "Thirty isn't so far from thirty-five."
"Excuse you," Riley replied, sounding vaguely offended. "I am twenty-nine, thank you. Twenty. Nine. Not thirty."
He snorted. "Such a difference," he said dryly.
She pointed a finger at him threateningly. "Don't make me hex you," she warned, eyes sparking with mischievous light.
Peter opened his mouth to dare her to try her worst, but then they evidently arrived at wherever Riley had been taking them, which turned out to be a room down the hall from the main portion of the bunker, a faded rod of asclepius painted on it, presumably denoting a medical purpose for the room.
When Riley knocked and the door opened, though, the woman who opened it didn't look like any nurse he'd ever met (and he'd seen more than his fair share of the type, both during his hospital stay after and fire and during his stint in the Eichen House).
A statuesque Hispanic woman in ripped jeans and a shirt reading THERE'S MAGIC IN THE AIR AND IT'S CALLED WI-FI gives both of them an assessing look before zeroing in on Riley's injured shoulder. "Dammit, Riley," is all she says, but there's enough exasperation in her voice to knock down an elephant so Peter figures that this is far from the first time Riley has come to this woman for medical assistance.
Riley, for her part, just gives a sheepish smile and lifts her uninjured shoulder in a slight shrug. "Anything I can say to make you less annoyed with me?" she asked wryly.
"Nothing whatsoever," the other woman replied before her gaze drifted to Peter. "And your sexy werewolf companion would be...?"
"The Hunt's latest victim," Riley explained. "Peter, this is Carmen, our healer; she's my friend, so behave. Carmen," she said to the woman, "this is Peter."
"Peter," Carmen repeated carefully, as if testing the taste of his name on her tongue. Then her eyes widened slightly. "Peter Hale?" she asked in disbelief before spinning around to look at Riley again. "Your Peter Hale?"
Riley huffed out an irritated sigh. "Not my anything," she grumbled, but Peter heard a faint tremor in her heart at the words, which only increased his frustrated confusion to infuriating levels.
Riley's words and attitude implied that they knew each other, but he knew he'd never met her before today. He had flaws aplenty, but he never forgot a face. He certainly wouldn't have forgotten a pretty face like hers, particularly if she was a tenth as powerful in magic as he suspected.
"Can we come in," Riley was saying now, her heart-rate evening out as she spoke to Carmen, "or are you going to leave me bleeding all over the hallway?"
Carmen rolled her eyes and waved at them to come inside and hurry up about it. "Get in here, you dweeb. You, too, wolf." She closed the door after them and started walking towards the opposite end of the room where there was an examination table surrounded by a dividing curtain hung from the ceiling, which split the room into two smaller rooms. "You know the drill, Ri, strip to the waist and lay face-down."
Riley hummed an affirmative, pulling out the two knives she'd used earlier and setting them gently down on a nearby table before turning to pin Peter in a very severe look. "Turn around," she told him in an incredibly serious if-you-don't-do-this-I-will-carve-out-your-spleen-and-feed-it-to-you voice, "and don't you dare look."
Peter wasn't sure why Carmen gave a snort of laughter, but nodded, finding Riley's threatening tone equal parts annoying and endearing. "Yes, ma'am," he drawled, spinning on his heel and fixing his gaze on a patch of dull gray wall that looked exactly like all the other bits of wall around it.
There were some rustling sounds as Riley shucked out of her clothes in a quick and efficient manner, and then her sharp intake of breath as she settled down on the chilly examination table.
"Dammit, Riley," Carmen said again, this time sounding genuinely upset. "What are doing, picking fights with shadow hounds?"
"I hardly picked a fight," Riley retorted. "I was bringing Peter here and it just attacked us."
A moment of silence, then, "Sundown isn't for another two hours," Carmen said in a low voice, and Peter could hear the underlying tension in her voice and smell the sudden hint of fear in her scent.
"Oh, really?" Riley shot back. "Here I thought I'd somehow confused day and night. Good to know we've straightened that out."
Carmen gave a low curse and Peter suppressed the urge to chuckle. "Are you sure there's no off button for you?" the Hispanic woman griped, her tone once again one of affectionate exasperation.
"Mm," Riley said in response. "'Fraid not. I'm a defective model."
Carmen snorted again, then finally seemed to remember that Peter existed. "You want me to send your wolf away, or let him come over?"
"Again," Riley said, and that edge was back in her voice, "he's not mine. I just happened to find him wandering around like a moron on my way out to hunt."
"Hey," Peter said, affronted. "My muddled state is hardly my own fault; I'd just been abducted from a bedlam house and brought to an alternate dimension, after all. Not the best circumstances for lucid behavior."
"I'm sure the drugs didn't help, either," Riley muttered, but her voice was either low enough so that only Peter could hear, or Carmen was choosing not to comment on the remark, because Riley's friend circled right back around to her original question.
"So am I letting him stay," she pressed, "or kicking him out?"
A really long stretch of silence, before Riley finally answered. "He can stay," she said, her voice tired but firm. "And he can turn around now," she added, clearly more for Peter's benefit than Carmen's, "if he gets bored with the incredibly exciting staring contest he's got going with the wall."
Peter rolled his eyes even though no one was paying him enough attention to see. "What happened to don't dare look?" he asked slyly.
Riley snorted. "I'm face-down on the table, asshole. There ain't nothing to see now but my ink."
"Ink?" Peter repeated, curious despite himself. Turning around, he saw that Riley was indeed face-down on the examination table, with Carmen bending over her and prodding gently at the gashes on Riley's shoulders. Gashes that, Peter saw now, were a bit more severe than he'd initially believed; they were at least half an inch deep and three inches long, and Peter found himself wondering how Riley had been able to act so casually when sporting what must have been an excruciating injury for a human woman. Was she just so used to being wounded that she paid it no mind?
Peter found that he didn't like that idea very much, although he couldn't say why precisely it bothered him. Then his gaze zeroed in on the picture inked across Riley's back and discovered something else that bothered him even more.
"I've seen your tattoo before," he realized, staring at the detailed depiction of a crow that spanned the majority of Riley's upper back, the wings outstretched and curving across her skin.
It then occurred to him, as a tense silence settled in around them, that he couldn't remember when he'd seen it. Immediately after that, it occurred to him that it shouldn't be possible for him to remember since he'd never met Riley before today.
"Of course you've seen it before," Riley said at last, her heart rate steady even as her scent soured with loneliness and grief. "You were with me when I got it."
"I-" Peter shook his head, thoroughly confused. "What? No. No, I can't have been, that's impossi-" But even as he spoke, faint and disjointed images began to flicker in his mind's eye.
He was standing in the reception area of a tattoo parlor, waiting for something. (What was he waiting for?)
Then suddenly one of the employees came out of one of the curtained-off rooms and approached him. "She said that you can come on in," the guy told Peter. (She who?)
"Thanks," Peter said in reply, his lips forming the word without conscious thought, and then he realized in a distant sort of way that his voice sounded young. And after glancing down at his body, he realized that not only did he sound young, physically he was young, too; mid-twenties, maybe?
Ducking through the curtain and going into the little client room, Peter was met immediately by the sight of a young woman face-down on the tattoo bed, naked from the waist up with her back exposed. And across her back was an incomplete version of the glorious crow tattoo, and Peter could once again appreciate how long the art must have taken given both the size of the tattoo and the level of detail.
"What are you doing here, Peter?" the woman on the table asked, and Peter was shocked to hear a voice that sounded like Riley's, only much younger, like she was in her late teens.
"I came to help with the pain," young Peter said in a voice just low enough to keep the tattoo artist from overhearing. "It's the least I can do,"he went on, pulling up a chair at the end of bed near Riley's head and reaching out to grasp her hand with easy familiarity, "since it's partially my fault you're getting this to begin with." Besides, he almost added but didn't, you hate needles. I didn't want you to be alone. (Riley hated needles? How did he know that?)
The younger Riley on the bed twisted her head so she could give Peter an exasperated but affectionate look, her long hair swishing across the headrest as she changed position. (Long hair? That wasn't right...Riley wore her hair short. Well, obviously she didn't always, current-Peter told himself, mind reeling from what he was seeing...no, not seeing...re-living?).
"I wanted to get the tattoo, Peter," young Riley was saying now."And they gave me some sort of numbing thing," she added, gesturing vaguely to her back with her free hand in a motion that made the bracelet around her wrist flash as it caught the light, briefly illuminating the faint symbols carved into the metal. "It's helping with the pain."
"Not enough," young Peter retorted, not letting go of her other hand even as black lines started crisscrossing on the underside of his wrist. "I could smell your pain the second I came in."
Riley opened her mouth to say something back, then subsided when her tattoo artist finally returned with the next round of ink and a new needle attachment for filling in more of the crow's plumage. "Thanks for coming," she said at last, her grip on his hand tightening in his as the tattoo artist resumed his work.
"Of course," was Peter's response.
Then suddenly the vision (the memory?) was splintering apart and fading, and Peter was left standing in a dingy little room with current-day Riley face-down on an entirely different kind of table with gashes on her shoulder and Carmen eyeing him with a mixture of concern and wariness.
"I know you," he blurted out, staring at Riley (or rather, Riley's back, because, duh, face-down on the table). "I knew you."
"Knew being the operative word there," Riley said after a moment of startled silence. "Past tense." Then she twisted her head slightly to look at Carmen. "Can we get on with the healing? I've got shit to do."
Carmen nodded briskly. "Yeah, sure thing. Let me just grab a crystal from my kit." She went over to a small metal box that was stored behind some other medical equipment on top of a nearby counter. "This is going to hurt," Carmen warned as she returned to Riley's side, a glowing red stone in one hand.
"It always does," Riley muttered, laying her head back down and closing her eyes as if bracing herself.
Peter found himself walking over to Riley's other side, dragging over a rickety stool to sit on even as he reached out and took her right hand in his.
She stiffened immediately, her heartbeat ratcheting up in tempo. "What are you doing?" she demanded, voice low with suppressed emotion.
"Siphoning your pain," he told her in a calm tone, trying not to wince as the pain drain started and began sucking Riley's pain out of her and into him, leaving a burning sensation under his skin.
"Why?"
Because I want to, he almost said but didn't. "Well," he said instead, "it seems like the least I can do, considering the fact that you wouldn't have been injured in the first place if not for me. Also," he added, injecting false cheer into his voice, "I need to make up for having forgotten you."
Riley huffed out a short sigh. "Why does it even matter?" she asked tiredly. "You still don't actually remember me, you just know that you should."
"Even so," he returned stubbornly, trying to ignore how frustrated he was at the combined smell of blood and magic that was drowning out Riley's scent, "I owe you for it."
"No, you don't," she muttered. "It's not your fault." Her hand tightened in his before relaxing. "The Wild Hunt is responsible. For then and now," she added bitterly, left shoulder spasming as Carmen passed her crystal across the first of the gashes, sealing it closed with a peculiar whooshing sound even as the scent of ozone crackled in the air. "Fuck, that burns," Riley hissed, even as her flesh knitted back together without any hint of scarring.
Peter gripped her hand a little tighter, barely managing to suppress his wince when the black veins on his arm throbbed a bit in protest of the additional pain siphoning. "What magic are you using?" he asked Carmen in an attempt to distract himself.
"I'm not doing much myself," Carmen replied, expression intent as she finished up the first of Riley's wounds and moved on to the next. "This ruby is one of the Jewels of Aceso."
"Aceso was a goddess of healing," Riley explained through gritted teeth, her entire body tense. "That gem and the others in that box were created by a sisterhood that worshiped her; they're imbued with different healing powers, supposedly blessed by the goddess herself."
"Red for repairing open wounds; slashes, gashes, gunshot wounds, punctures, stuff like that," Carmen said, picking up where her friend had left off and rattling off additional information. "Blue for internal injuries, purple for broken bones, green for sicknesses or infections, orange helps with fevers...there are a couple others, but they don't get as much use here." She pulled the glowing red crystal away from Riley's skin and gently prodded at her friend's upper back. "How's it feel?" she asked.
Riley lifted her left shoulder a bit. "Sore," she answered. "Achey. A little stiff." She flexed it again. "But much better. Thanks."
"No problem," Carmen said, patting Riley lightly on the shoulder before turning around and crossing to the metal box on the counter to stow away the red crystal that was still pulsing with power. "Just remember, your shoulder's going to be tender for a few more days; try not to strain it, and you should be fine."
Peter could practically hear Riley rolling her eyes when she spoke. "Yeah, yeah," the red-head answered, her tone wry. "I know. Not my first time on this joyride, Carmen, and you know it."
"I do know it," Carmen returned, snapping the lid of the box shut and turning to survey Riley (well, Riley's now-healed back) with her hands on her hips. After a moment, she turned back around, grabbed a small bundle of clothing from a nearby cupboard, and then strode over to her friend's side. "Get dressed," she told Riley, tossing the clothing over her friend's head before stepping away and yanking the dividing curtain around so that it separated Riley from both Carmen and Peter.
"Bossy," he heard Riley grumbled, followed by a shuffling sound as she presumably slide off the table and tugged on her new clothes.
Sure enough, Riley shoved the curtain aside a couple minutes later, wearing a t-shirt proclaiming If you tickle me I'm not responsible for your injuries, along with a gray hoodie that hung a little loose on her. Peter idly wondered if the smart-ass t-shirts were something Carmen had had with her when she'd been taken by the Hunt and that was why she seemed to have such a healthy supply of them, or if the Wild Hunt was just prone to abducting sassy people who had amusing shirts and Carmen just ended up with them all somehow once the originals owners didn't want or need them any longer.
He almost immediately decided that such a trivial thing probably didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, and dismissed it from his mind, instead returning his focus to Riley herself. "Now what?" he asked.
"Now," Riley replied, "I go out hunting, and you get some rest." She turned to Carmen. "Get him settled into a room for me, will you? He needs to sleep off the shock and the drugs, and I need to go and get dinner before it gets too late."
"Sure thing," Carmen replied easily. "Just...be careful, alright?" Her eyebrows drew down into a faint frown. "The next sacrifice is less than a week away, and if they catch you, we're all screwed."
Riley made a dismissive noise but nodded anyway. "I'll keep an eye out," she promised, heading for the door. "And as soon as I have enough hares for tonight's stew, I'll come right back."
Carmen chewed on her lower lip, but assented with a slight nod. "Okay," she said after a moment. "Just watch your back out there, yeah?"
"Always do," Riley replied, and then she was gone, out the door and down the hall.
A/N: Aaaaand, that's Chapter 3 all done! It actually ended up being longer than I anticipated, so that's nifty. ;D Chapter 4 will be posted sometime within the next week, depending on my work schedule. See you next time!