Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
Idon’t realize what’s happening at first.
A deep, feral roar cuts through the air.
I turn my head, but I can’t see through Jordan, can barely see through the pain.
When I look down, it’s to discover the knife hasn’t penetrated very far.
With a sort of sick fascination, I realize it’s caught on my ribs.
But a hunting knife is designed to tear through muscle, sinew, bone. One shove and I’m as good as dead.
“Get the fuck off my mate!” The voice is deep, enraged, bestial. It makes me think of woodland forests and wounded animals, the moonlit dance between predator and prey. Terror thrills in my heart even as something within me settles.
I know that voice. I’ve never been so fucking relieved in my life.
Overhead, there’s a rush of air, a frightened squawk. And then Jordan isn’t there anymore.
The knife is still in my chest.
I lift my head, searching for Jordan. I find him beneath a monster, struggling.
I know that monster. Would know him anywhere, even like this.
“Can you transform halfway, like a wolf man?” I’d asked Duncan once, tracing stars across his chest, grinning and stupid and basking in post-orgasmic glory.
“I could,” he said, reaching to brush the hair from my face, a lazy smirk on his lips.
“But it would be excruciatingly painful. And it’s fucking scary.
I wouldn’t do it without a really, really good reason.
” And then he kissed me, sweet and sensuous, and I forgot all about my question and ended up back underneath of him, which was exactly where I wanted to be.
Like this, he isn’t as big as I might’ve expected.
Hair sprouts from his back and limbs in massive tufts.
Caught halfway between wolf and man, his face is barely recognizable, but his eyes and brow are familiar.
His ash-blond hair is still sideswept, but now it’s streaked with gray.
A wolf’s muzzle dominates his face, but it isn’t as furry as it should be, mottled pink skin on display.
His mouth is huge. Where his wolf is beautiful and elegant, this form is like something from a nightmare.
Hunched, with massive claws, bulging muscles, a sweeping tail.
He’s not wearing any clothes. I catch a glimpse of hairy wolf cock, and then his back turns to me as he leans over Jordan’s prone form.
There’s a lot of screaming. A ripping sound has me pressing my hands to my ears, or where I think my ears should be, because the noise isn’t dampened.
Another wolf flies into the room on all fours. Dark gray and massive, it pounces onto the shorter man, who has only just registered what’s happening, and tries to crawl to his feet, gasping, “Stay back!”
There’s a knife in my chest and I have no legs. All I can do is stare at the scene playing out around me in sheer horror.
Duncan is hunched over Jordan, panting. “What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Doing.” His voice is deeper, growlier than I’ve ever heard it.
I take shaky breaths. Duncan is here. I trust him. He’s going to keep Jordan away from me and maybe he’s going to carry me out of here but probably I’m just going to bleed out and—
Jordan makes a noise like a sob. “Get off me.” It’s more a plea than a demand.
“Why the fuck are you carving up my mate?”
There it is again. My mate.
Surely that doesn’t mean what I think it means. It’s probably just a term of endearment, I think, staring at the hilt of the knife. There are some weird symbols carved into it. Is this ceremonial? Was this supposed to be some kind of ritualistic killing? Horror zings down my spine.
The hook is still in my neck. I grasp the handle, manage to gently extricate it. There’s a wet sound. I hope it’s not an actual waterfall of blood, pouring from my neck.
But I already know how this is going to end. I’m not going to get lucky. Adrenaline dampened the worst of the pain, but I’m fucked up. There’s a lot of blood.
“You can’t stop it,” Jordan says. Beneath the belligerence, he sounds scared. Nervous. Like he’s just realized there’s a giant wolf man on top of him, ready to pulverize him if he says the wrong thing.
“What are you talking about?”
“We need to get down here,” Jordan pants.
The smaller man lets out a terrified moan from where he’s pinned beneath massive paws.
The wolf snarls, snaps its jaws. Unlike Duncan, this wolf is just a wolf, exactly the kind I might expect to find in the wilderness.
Is this another shifter? Or did Duncan somehow convince a wolf to follow him here? Is that something he can do?
A loud growl. “Who do you work for? Who’s paying you?”
Jordan’s answering laugh is garbled. He struggles, but Duncan barely seems to notice. Without his knife and his hook, Jordan is just as useless as I am. “My fucking parents.”
“What the fuck?” Duncan says. Even with that growly new voice, he sounds so much like his regular self that I could laugh. All I manage is a wheeze.
“You’re so privileged. What, you didn’t think anyone could hurt you? You’ve forgotten what some of us do for a living,” Jordan sneers.
“It’s illegal,” says Duncan. I want to roll my eyes. Like that matters. “And why go through all this? Why drag him here?”
“You’d better hope you never understand,” says Jordan. “If you understand, it’s already too late.” He coughs. “And do you know what mer go for these days? I’d be stupid to pass up the opportunity.”
A snarl echoes through the room. Jordan thrashes, but Duncan bares his teeth, snaps his jaws, shoves him into the tiles with clawed hands.
“OK, OK,” Jordan cries, finally going still. “I’m just saying!”
The pool of blood around me expands. It’s all over my chest, seeping past the blade. My hand is scarlet. My throat is hot and wet. Every breath strings.
I need help.
“Duncan,” I whine. The same tone I use whenever I want him to stop studying and pay attention to me.
It works. He whips around to look at me, eyes widening as the gravity of the situation sinks in.
And then, horribly, unexpectedly, I shift back.
I am, for a moment, terrified that the knife will somehow fuse into my body.
That everything will be so much worse. But it gets spat out somewhere in the transformation.
My throat is raw from screaming and there’s a hole in my chest, but it’s not as deep as I thought it would be.
When I manage to crawl onto my knees, a fully nude, half-wolf Felix Cervantes is standing with a massive hand on the shorter man’s chest.
Holy shit. Mild-mannered Felix is a shifter.
“—the hell do you want to do, Duncan? Do we kill them, or not?”
“There’s no fucking way out of this without killing them,” Duncan says. His gaze is locked on me. “They’ll tell everyone."
“No, no,” protests the short guy. “I won’t say a word. Right, Jordan?”
“Right,” Jordan insists. His voice is ragged, frantic. He starts kicking again, but nothing lands. “Not a fucking word.”
My pants are shredded. My junk is freezing. My shoes have disappeared. All I’ve got is a shirt that looks like it was chewed on by piranhas. I struggle out of it and press the scrap of fabric to my chest, hoping to staunch the bleeding.
“Right,” says Felix, glancing at me. Somehow, I can sense his worry even through his distorted appearance. “Close your eyes,” he says.
Once again, I obey.
It takes ages to navigate our way out of the tunnels.
Duncan and Felix stashed clothes somewhere in this labyrinth of hallways and corridors. Someone had the foresight to bring an extra pair of shoes and gym shorts with a draw string. I bleed all over them.
They shift back to their human forms. Sometimes, Duncan carries me on his back, other times I walk, staggering like a drunk pirate. Mostly, I don’t remember the journey. Just that I spotted some strange, round holes in the walls that weren’t exactly doorways, but might be massive pipes.
I wonder if this place used to be filled with water.
They ask me questions. I give babbling, incoherent answers and cry. I remember begging for forgiveness, but I’m not sure why.
“Where are we?” I ask during a moment of lucidity, and Felix answers.
“Underneath Halea.”
I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with this, so I don’t.
I just press my face into Duncan’s neck and try really, really hard not to die.
He talks to me, a low, soothing murmur that I can’t process through all the pain and confusion, but I’m glad he’s there, that he isn’t going to leave me alone in this place.
I remember the sea. The ocean air, the sunlight bright on rippling waves, the pale, puffy clouds in the sky. This is just another day for the rest of the world.
We take a boat back. Felix unmoors Jordan’s boat, pushes it out to sea. It bobs away, bright and shiny in the sunlight.
Jane waits for us on the beach and she’s the one who takes me to the hospital. She cries when she sees me, and she cries while she explains to the hospital staff that I went missing, that she looked for me all night and found me like this.
I tell the police I got mugged.
They ask a bunch of questions about my life and decide it’s probably a targeted attack, despite the total lack of motive. I describe the perpetrators as masked, but it’s quickly discovered that Jordan and his brother are missing. The cops think they probably ran away after the assault.
I spend two nights in the hospital, hooked up to an IV, a machine beeping away next to me. I have four cracked ribs. I have an infection. I could have complications from being strangled.
Gretchen arrives and weeps all over me. “Your mom never would have wanted this,” she says, blowing her nose into a tissue.
“You need to come home. Don’t give me that look,” she adds, reaching for my hand.
“This is the second highly suspicious incident you’ve been involved in, Dominic. Somebody has it out for you.”
“And they ran away,” I rasp. “The police think they know who they are.”
“If Halea can’t keep you from being beaten to death, you don’t belong here,” Gretchen argues. As much as I hate to admit it, I see her point.
“I don’t wanna go home yet.”
“This is not the life anyone wants for you—”
“I was stupid!” I burst out. “I let somebody lure me off campus, and it—it went wrong, OK? I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.”
“Who?” she demands, hands on her hips. “Who lured you off campus? I don’t know if you understand, but someone nearly killed you.”
“I understand,” I grumble. What I wouldn’t give to forget.
“If you won’t leave, then I’m going to have to stay here,” she snaps.
I push the button for more pain medication and doze off to her shouting at me.
When I wake, there are roses in my room. A cheerful nurse hands me the card. “Somebody likes you,” she says.
The card makes my entire chest hurt all over again. I hope you feel better soon. I’m so sorry. They won’t let me in. I miss you.
—D
I wish it was in his handwriting. I think of all the little slips of paper in my room, how he sounded when he said, “My mate.”
If I had a phone, I’d search the term. But all I have is Gretchen’s ancient ereader, which refuses to connect to the internet, but is loaded with dirty romance novels. She’s probably going to be mortified when she realizes how many of them I’ve skimmed over the last two days.
Gretchen finds the note and sighs. “Is this the reason you won’t come back? This mysterious ‘D’?” Then she realizes the implication, lets out an uncharacteristic, self-conscious little laugh.
“Part of it,” I say. Then, softer, “This place reminds me of Mom.”
I’m not talking about the hospital.
She goes quiet at that, shoulders slumping, lips thinning into a line.
“I know,” she says at last. “But I’m afraid to leave you here.
” She sighs, puts her head in her hands.
When she looks at me, her eyes are wet. Guilt surges in my chest. “This place drove your mother mad. She was never herself again after she graduated. I don’t know what happened, if it was related to your father or something else, but she just…
She never really thrived.” I wince, and Gretchen is quick to add, “It wasn’t your fault.
We saw changes in her long before you came along. It just wasn’t good for her.”
I hate hearing that, learning that this place did something to my mom. But it’s the one of the reasons I can’t leave.
On the other hand, maybe Gretchen’s right. Whatever waits for me in those halls is nothing good. If I’m not around, nobody can force me to reopen them.
Then I remember what Jordan said about Mom doing too good of a job protecting me, that this all would’ve ended years ago if she hadn’t been so determined, and I realize that there’s no point in leaving.
This is a problem that has chased me all my life, whether I knew it or not.
It’s not going to stop just because I run away.
Whatever happened, whatever’s going on in those haunted halls, I need to know.
And if I can stop it, I will.
I wish with all my heart that I could tell Gretchen the truth about what I am, what I know about Mom, but that might put her in danger. But it’s hard to look at her tired, red eyes, her shuddering shoulders, and keep secrets.
“You don’t have to stay here,” she says. “Just know that. You can come home at any time and I won’t ask questions. I won’t be disappointed. I don’t want you to ever, ever worry about letting me or your mom down, OK?”
I nod, my eyes burning.
When she leaves, I start crying and I can’t stop.