Chapter 9
nine
. . .
It took me a long time to climb the steps next moonrise. Jane wasn’t there waiting for me. No, I was all alone in my ugly mustard robe, one slow step at a time while Joe watched me come, his eyes thoughtful, concerned, if I wasn’t mistaken.
I flashed a smile at him. “I’m fine,” I said with confidence I didn’t entirely feel, not when I was wrapped together with tons of pain-killers in my system that made the pain buzz distantly.
“Tomorrow is the full moon,” he said softly, but his werewolves heard and raised a howling cacophony that had me swaying on my feet. For all of Danny’s complaints, I’d lost a lot of weight in the last week, and wasn’t as stable or strong as I should be. Good thing I only had two nights to go. I just had to walk out of the cage that was still there, waiting for me. I only felt a twinge of fear, because I was focused on not falling over, not the bars waiting to wrap around me and suck the life out of me.
I shuffled over to him and kind of leaned against his arm so I didn’t fall over. His hand came around my waist, which probably hurt, but not nearly as much as it felt absolutely perfect.
“Tomorrow is the full moon,” he repeated in a growl that went through me like water lapping across my beach, and again with the rousing howls. They were really hyped up about the full moon. Maybe it made them super charged or something.
“Where’s Celeste?” I asked when the wolves had quieted down.
“She’s busy tonight. Is there another volunteer who can test our hopeful candidate?”
Jane came forward in loose pants and tank top under her robe. She was muscular, far more muscular than Celeste, and when she wasn’t wearing her neat suit, you could see how much damage she could do. She could kill me, but she had so much control. I’d be fine. Maybe.
She bowed to him and then went into the cage without wasting a word or gesture on me. I had to leave him and go into the cage. I closed my eyes while the moon peered over the buildings around us, shining light that made me feel even dizzier and sicker than before.
I was fighting for Sammy, so I had to get this done. I grabbed his hand and somehow pulled it off me before I headed to the cage, aware of the tension in the air from the crowd. I took a second to wave at them before I stepped through the door into the cage that closed around me like a grave.
First thing, Jane walked up to me and flicked me in the forehead, which knocked me over because I was so weak and unsteady. Once I was down, she crouched over me, holding me down with that finger on my formerly unwounded forehead while she knocked my arms and legs down effortlessly.
“A beetle on her back. However much you kick your legs, you aren’t going anywhere. That’s appropriate, considering the coward that you are.” She released me and then backed off, muscular arms crossed as she waited for me to stand.
Crap. This was not a good beginning. It took me a long time to roll to my knees and stagger to my feet.
She immediately kicked me down, knocking the wind out of me while I lay there, flailing. Celeste had held back, more interested in teaching me something than rank humiliation. Too bad she had something else to do. Was she busy with whatever had been occupying Joe? I turned my head to find him outside the bars, but I only saw his back, shoulders hunched, hands fisted.
Jane grabbed the front of my tank and dragged me to my feet, eyes golden with a rim of red over them that spoke of ravening violence.
“Don’t look at him!” she spat and then slapped me, hard. I struggled in her grasp, but my arms were so weak, and no matter what I did, she didn’t seem to feel it.
“I’ll look wherever I want,” I finally snapped back at her, punching her throat, then twisting and kneeing her kidneys, using her grip on me to take her down.
She came down on top of me, hard, elbow slamming my kidneys, her eyes burning into mine. “You left, and you plan to leave again. Do you know how long I have watched him and his untouched heart, safe, protected, and then you took it, dug your claws into it, and ripped it to pieces.” She grabbed me and raised me high enough to slam me back down on the mat. “He had your pillow with him for a year after you left, because it smelled like you. Do you know how powerful a pack leader has to look? Do you have any clue about the damage you did to his position, his ranking, his safety and that of our entire pack? No. You have no clue, no idea, no concept of responsibility for the power you hold over other people’s lives. You broke him, his heart, his spirt, and left him waiting, always waiting for you to come back. Every time the door opened, he’d hope it was you, but it wasn’t. You drove a million darts of undying death to his heart until you came with his precious cub, who was almost destroyed by your own fear. Do you have any concept how close you came to killing her? Do you know how difficult it is for a powerful wolf like Josiah to father a cub, and how precious she is to him, the child of the woman he gave his heart to?” She slammed an elbow into my eye. I wouldn’t ever see out of that eye again, but her words were worse, much, much worse.
“He had cages,” I said, words so slurred. My heart was about to rupture.
“But none as strong as the cage around your own mind and heart. Ignorance,” she said, slamming my ear with her backfist. “Fear.” She boxed my other ears, and I could feel blood leaking out of both. “And selfishness.” She bashed my face with her forehead, and I was down, in and out of consciousness while her words danced around me like Pix sparks, burrowing deep under my skin.
She leaned close to me and hissed in my ear. “You caused your daughter’s worst suffering. Years of her pain all came from your neglect, your refusal to face your fear and treat the man you married with the respect and honesty he deserved.”
“He lied,” I whispered, but my lungs were filling up with something, and I wasn’t sure she could hear me.
“To protect you, as he always protects the weak, and you are so pathetically weak, worthless, irredeemably flawed. Even if he does still love you, you will never be worthy of it. You are worthless, which is why your parents threw you away, or did they die to get away from you?”
She stood up and took a few steps away from me while I lay there, disoriented, the world spinning, my heart shriveling into nothing.
“Get up!” She kicked my ribs, snapping several, followed by a sharp pain that added to the feeling of drowning.
I rolled up into a ball, blood smeared all over the white mat under my cheek.
“Get up!” She kicked my back, which sent a wave of agony through me, followed by numbness in my lower extremities.
I closed my eyes tight and tried not to think, to feel, to hurt. I was strong. I could win a place for Sam. I had to win a place for Sam, particularly if she was right about how much I’d let my fear hurt her.
I would stay curled up like this, and then I would somehow walk out of the cage. Except that I couldn’t feel my legs, couldn’t move my legs, couldn’t walk at all.
That’s when I started crying. I couldn’t walk out of the cage. The door was open, but I was trapped here, just like a bug on its back. Maybe Jane could help me. We’d been friends once, a long time ago. So long, but not long enough for her to not be angry with me.
“Jane,” I whispered out of my one working bleary eye. “Help me up. Please. I need to walk out of the cage.”
She smiled at me and then walked away, leaving me there to struggle while burning tears streamed down my temples. I had to get up. I had to save her. But I couldn’t save anyone, not even myself.
I passed out soon after that, waking up in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of me like that creepy octopus man with the tentacle beard.
I’d failed. I closed my eyes and tried to lose consciousness, but apparently, I was still kicking, not literally because I still couldn’t feel my legs, but whatever. I was fine. Everything was fine.
“Mom?”
I bit back a sob, because it hurt so much. I opened my one good eye, although good being relative, it wasn’t anything close to good, and tried to smile. Crap, what was the point of trying to smile? I was paralyzed. She was going to die without the pack, all because I couldn’t face my fear.
“Hey, baby. I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t really talk with the tubes coming out of my mouth, and then I started coughing up blood, until I was too exhausted and passed out again thinking how I’d failed her. The one thing I’d tried to do, to be a good mom, to give her stability and love, I’d ruined by keeping her away from her father, who would have made her life so much easier. I’d failed him and I’d failed her. And Danny. If I was paralyzed, I’d be too great a burden even in the face of his promises of solidarity. I had nothing to give anyone, no reason to try to be strong.
After that, I was swallowed up in fevers as the flu I’d been fighting off pounced on me and devoured me ruthlessly. Fevers shouldn’t accompany broken spines, but whatever. Now I really was spineless, or legless, also past misery to downright awfulness. Death skated around the edges, a specter that looked like Tom in ice skates, but that may have been fever dreams.
When I came out of it, the hospital room was quiet. A lamp cast its golden light over Joe, who was nodding over a big book in his hands, a book that looked identical to the last book he’d read to me. My skin itched, at least the parts I could feel, like my flesh wanted to run away from me and my failure as a human being. It was dark out, maybe past moonrise. I’d missed the last night.
A sudden burst of anger brought enough life into me that I could say, “Celeste wouldn’t have been so clumsy, breaking my spine. Jane doesn’t have enough control.” My words weren’t as garbled because the tubes were gone. Why didn’t I have tubes?
He raised his head, blinking his eyes slowly. “You’re awake. How do you feel?”
“I failed. You set me up to fail. At least Jane did. Not that I can blame her for hating me, but for Sammy…”
“She’ll probably survive with the treatment she’s already had.”
The anger left me, followed by relief that had me slumping down with my eyes closed. If I died, she’d have a place in the pack, but even if I didn’t die, she’d probably survive. “Thank you.”
He came over to my bed and pressed his large hand to my forehead. “You have a fever.”
“I don’t want to talk about how I feel. I don’t want to think about it, or I’ll start crying and never stop.”
“You’re already crying,” he said, brushing tears away with his thumb as they trailed down my temples and into my hair. “I’m going to carry you to the platform, all right?”
“No. It’s not all right, because I already failed. I don’t want to hurt anymore. I don’t want to be humiliated anymore. I just want to sleep and never wake up.”
He kissed my forehead, like Danny, which made me cry more, but it hurt, and I was tired of hurting. There was no purpose to the pain, only misery. “I won’t put you down. The full moon is calling, so we will greet her.”
“Are you all going to eat me? That’s cool, because if I die, you’ll let Sammy into the pack, right?”
“Sh. She’ll be taken care of.”
“Passive past tense. That sounds like a mob boss with cement feet talking.”
He picked me up carefully, like I was a bundle of delicate flowers. “I swear that I will see that she achieves her full potential to the fullest extent of my ability.”
I snuggled against his chest and relaxed. “Thank you. If you’re going to eat me, can you start with my head so I don’t have to watch someone eating my legs while I can’t feel them, because that would be so creep?”
“I promise.”
“Can I have a last meal first?”
“That I cannot give you, because you are too sick to keep anything down. The IV you were on will have to do for now.”
“And for later, it won’t matter. Can you promise not to hurt Danny, even when he freaks out after he finds out that I was a human sacrifice? Do you have gods you worship? Do you have an organized religion, or is it a group based on common interests, mainly lycanthropy? That’s what it’s called, right?”
“You can call it whatever you like.”
I held onto him while he carried me down stairs, out into the cool night and the darkness before the moon stirred and spread herself over the night sky. A pile of cushions was in the middle of the platform, and on that, Josiah carefully lowered me. He didn’t need to be so careful because only half of me could feel anything.
“Rest if you can,” he murmured, and then with a shiver of his body, he shifted into a wolf, an enormous, beautiful, dark brown wolf with soft eyes and the silkiest tongue. He licked my face, my arms, my hands, while I lay there on the pillows and waited for the bite that would take off my head and the following full moon wolf feast.
But he kept licking me, and then more wolves came, wolfy wolves, all smaller than Joe’s enormous dark wolf, and again with the licking. I couldn’t feel from the waist down, but I got the idea my feet were getting very well-washed.
Eventually, I stopped bracing for the beheading or the throat ripping and closed my eyes, because being licked to death would take forever. The moon spilled over the clearing between the buildings, and my fever spiked, making everything weird and jumbled. The wolves faded into nothing but a sea of moonlight that I was swimming in, kicking and kicking, but it got sticky like molasses, and I couldn’t see my way to shore, only to more moonlight everywhere I turned.
At least I could kick in my dream. I slipped under the surface, my mouth and nose filling up with sharp liquid that tasted like blood before I kicked back up. I tried to float, but I was wearing a long robe that kept dragging me down, and I couldn’t get it off me.
The dream got fuzzy, endless swimming, struggling until I finally saw something in the distance, an island the size of a king mattress, with a russet wolf the color of my hair standing on it, watching me. I was drowning, and she was starving. Could I make it to the island, and if I did, would I have a worse death than if I stayed where I was? Death or wolf?
I cried out for someone, anyone, to save me, but the robe only dragged me down heavier, submerging me for long enough that I barely made it back to the surface to gasp for air before being dragged down again.
Teeth clamped around my arm, dragging me through the water, towards the island, the russet wolf who would save me only to devour me. Once I reached the shore, I crawled up the small slope and collapsed while the liquid moon washed over my feet, again and again, endless pulling of the tide to her force. I could feel that pull beneath my skin, working higher and higher up my legs while the wolf lay beside me, her heat soaking into me hotter and hotter until the cold moon water had melted away.
The wolf pushed me over with her head, knocking me onto my back. I was so weak, so exhausted, I didn’t struggle. If my life could feed the wolf, it was better than drowning in the moon. I took a deep breath and braced myself to be devoured. The moon dream went fuzzy and sketchy, something about a monster exploding out of my chest to rip apart the wolf, devouring her while I stared sightlessly into the pale sky.