Chapter 43 #4
I recoiled at the idea. “No! She wouldn’t survive it!
” My voice rang loudly throughout the room.
I had never intended on turning Arax, even if she had wanted it.
The risk was too great. Many humans did not live to see themselves transform.
Healthy humans sometimes didn’t make it, much less ones with injuries as serious as Arax’s.
“Perhaps not.” The doctor shook his head sadly.
“But I can guarantee you she will die if you do nothing. We’ve done everything we can on the medical end.
The gunshot severed her femoral artery. We were able to stop the bleeding, but she had already hemorrhaged an enormous amount of blood.
Turning her is her only chance—not a very good one, but still more of a chance than anything we could do medically.
” He took a deep breath. “You have to decide now. She could slip at any moment. The bond is the only indication she’s still with us. ”
Indecision wracked my heart, my head, and my soul. I gazed at Arax. In the few moments that had passed, her skin seemed to have gotten even more grey. There was a chance that if she survived, she’d never forgive me. Yet if I didn’t try, I’d be robbing her of her one last opportunity to live.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It couldn’t be the end. Not like this.
Konstantine. Apollo spoke steadily to me, in a way no one else could. I knew he was tapping into those senses, drawing on instincts that my human side could never access or understand. She’s not ready to die. Not today.
She might hate me, us, our world, for the rest of her life. My name might be the bane of her existence until the day of judgement, or whatever type of afterlife she believed in as a human. She may only look at me, if she even ever did again, as the man who desecrated her mortal soul.
Still.
Not today.
I looked at the doctor and made my choice. “What do I have to do?”
“We’ll have to do it without ceremony. I’ll walk you through the steps,” he replied.
“Sit her upright,” he instructed, “and bite her marking spot, hard, through the bone and into the marrow. Whatever you do, do not let go.”
I did as I was told. I held her sagging body tightly and pierced my fangs into her flesh, immediately tasting the warm blood seeping into my mouth. Her pulse was weak, the blood ebbed and flowed slowly across my canines.
A sensation nestled within… drowsiness, lethargy.
My skin pulled, the veins in my arms swelled, and blood overfilled every vessel.
The wolf in me, not Apollo, but the relic of an ancient primal beast with baser objectives, answered the bloody call of this ritual.
My kind had since evolved, but in situations such as these, our nature reverted back to that old, coarse code.
The stories I’d heard of other turns were enough to scare any wolf who valued life into never considering it.
Disfigurement. Brain damage. A lifelong proclivity towards violence.
And of course. Death.
Still, I dug my canines deeper until I heard the brittle crunch of bone cracking under pressure.
The dam burst and my blood drained, driving venom into its new host. Arax’s eyes opened to just the whites.
I thought she was revived, but she seized in my arms. Stiff with rigor, she shook, fighting the exchange, or so I thought at first.
“Stay with her,” the doctor said. “You’ll know when it’s over.”
I fed her marrow my blood and venom steadily, waiting the moment the doctor spoke of, but it never came.
My lightheadedness worsened. Arax’s head jerked suddenly, almost making me lose the hold I had on her.
She stared into my eyes with her own, soulless and white.
There was no one behind them, but now they grew black, the vessels darkening as they filled.
She looked possessed. I lifted my eyes to Dr. DiStefano.
“Goddess,” he whispered.
She started pulling from me faster than I could give and my legs buckled. One knee slammed into the side of her gurney, but the doctor caught me around the shoulders.
“Keep with it, Alpha.”
I was spent. Her convulsions resumed but her body did not stop taking its fill and then some, until my vision went blurry and I started to see spots.
Annalee returned, watching closely so the various needles and equipment weren’t ripped out of Arax.
My mate’s eyes rolled back even further, and her arms and legs flailed uncontrollably, and in the chaos, the monitors reawakened, screens bright, and resumed their beeping.
Venom bubbled back into my throat, and I nearly gagged.
My breaths were shallow, my heart was pumping overtime, and straining effort I retracted my fangs and surveyed the damage I’d done.
The wound was deep. Black ooze mixed with crimson spurted from her neck.
It was ghastly. Arax had stopped moving, but her quiet brought me no comfort.
The doctor and Annalee tried to help but I waved them away.
Though I had next to no sensation left in my legs, I laid Arax back down gently and ran my hand down her face, caressing her cheek.
Here I stayed, bone-tired and half-conscious, drenched in sweat.
Annalee tremulously draped a blanket around my shoulders, and my body relaxed into the warmth enough so I could drag myself to an armchair.
“We’ll get her cleaned up, but now all we can do is wait,” Doctor DiStefano stated.
After a while, Cyrus came and sat next to me.
“You had to do it, Alpha,” he said softly.
I looked at the doctor, who was standing over Arax, examining her.
“You knew, didn’t you?” I said to him. “You knew she was my mate from the very beginning.”
He turned his head slowly. “I had only my suspicions, nothing more,” he replied, and gazed at Arax again with some wonder.
“She truly is extraordinary, Alpha. I attributed her ability to heal so well to the possibility that she may be your fated mate. Yet…what I just saw.” He paused, clearly perplexed.
“No fated bond, to my knowledge, has ever survived death.”
He then looked at me kindly and composed himself, his tone matter of fact.
“You will need to eat and drink, Alpha, replenish all that you have lost, then get some rest. You as well, Beta.” He nodded at the door. “With your permission, I’ll take my leave. I have many other patients that need my care.”
I nodded and expressed my gratitude for his efforts. With a small bow, he and Annalee exited the room.
Cyrus and I sat in complete silence. The only sounds were coming from the devices hooked up to Arax.
“Go,” I said to him at long last. “The doctor is right. You need your rest.”
“What about you?” he asked as he stood up.
My mind was still racing. I couldn’t put together a single coherent thought.
“I’ll be staying here a while,” I replied dejectedly and put my head back in my hands.
Cyrus gave my shoulder a light squeeze, and I heard him leave.
An unexpected wave of nausea came over me, and I put my head farther between my knees, focusing my efforts on fighting the urge to vomit.
I had to do it.
I had no choice.
She had died. Flat-lined. And now the soft sounds from the machines told of a different possibility.
But if she was going to live, why was my heart in such despair?
I didn’t know how long I sat there. I may have fallen into a shallow sleep, but a small hand taking mine jostled me awake.
“How is she doing? How are you?” Penelope asked, setting a glass of orange juice down on the end table and shoving a sandwich at me.
“She’s…and I’m—” I sighed, shrugging.
She sat with me, laying her head on my shoulder. “Eat, Stan.”
I looked at the food Pen had brought, and my stomach revolted. My sister sniffled, something very uncharacteristic for her. She started talking before I could ask.
“I’m so sorry, Stan. Mom was shot. Cy was…and Leni had seen so much.” She was babbling, in tears.
“I wanted to send someone after her but there was no one in bunker that could go to her! Cy had pulled them all to the field to help and Dorian, I needed him, Stan. We couldn’t get to the hospital and Mom was this close to…”
“Shhh.” I tossed the sandwich aside and held Pen’s dainty, ice-cold hands in mine.
“This is all my fault,” she whispered, shaking her head and looking in Arax’s direction for the first time. “How is she?”
“I turned her, Pen,” I confessed, though I was certain my sister already knew. “I had to. She was going to die. She still might.”
“No, she won’t,” she replied, rubbing my arm. “She can’t. I won’t let her.”
My head fell back onto the edge of the chair, and I shut my eyes. “I basically rap—”
Penelope smacked my arm and grabbed my shoulders. “Don’t you say it, Konstantine,” she snapped, her usual brashness returning quickly. “Don’t you dare! That is not what this was!”
She shook me, roughly.
“I did it without her consent.”
“To save her life! You had no choice. And when she survives this—yes, when—she’ll understand. You did what you had to do to save the woman you love.”
I stared at her, not knowing what to say next.
“Come on.” Her voice softened; a tear ran down her cheek. “I’ve known for a while. I bet you’ve been in love with her since the first day you met, but you didn’t know it. It’s why you didn’t reject her. You couldn’t let her go, not then and not now.”
Pen put her head back onto my shoulder, and I sighed into her hair.
“What do you think her wolf will be like?” she asked wistfully.
I mustered a laugh. I’d turned her, but the thought of Arax actually having a wolf hadn’t crossed my mind. “Strong like her, I’d wager,” I answered. “Beautiful too.”
“Maybe her wolf will teach her how to dress,” my sister joked, and we shared a chuckle.
She stayed with me a little while longer, making sure I ate and drank every last crumb and drop then left to see to her mate.
The aftermath of the day still needed to be sorted, but I hadn’t the energy. I got up and stood beside Arax’s bed, sorrow and anguish weighing my legs back to the floor. There was no color in her cheeks, no warmth in the hand I touched. Her heartbeat was telltale, driving me insane with guilt.
“I have never deserved you, Arax,” I whispered to her, wondering if she could hear me. “I am unworthy; I knew that from the start. You would have been better off without me.”
I stroked her fingers, running my thumb across her nails, dirty and broken.
“Where have you gone, baby? Come back to me.”
I put my forehead in her hand and pleaded. “Fuck, Araxia. Come back. Please, come back.”
Her heart thumped, cursing me with each beat.
What have I done? I thought in agony.
What… have… I… done?