Chapter 8
Dakota
Taking a werewolf to the hospital is a ridiculous prospect.
Most of the time, it doesn’t even come up, because we heal so fast that there’s no need, even for injuries that seem horrific.
The problem here was that Jax’s old friend wasn’t healing like a werewolf.
We weren’t sure he was healing at all, which might mean he was just healing at the normal human rate, which wasn’t visible to the eye, or .
. . well, it might mean he wasn’t healing at all.
By the time we could tell, it might be too late to do anything at all to help him.
So Jax carried him out of the motel room while I grabbed his stuff—one bag that hadn’t even been unpacked and a sad little Nokia phone—and then we headed for Jax’s place while I dialed Prudence.
Not that I wasn’t at least as powerful as she was, but Prudence had what I didn’t: years of experience. She knew more magic than me, including healing spells, which was what we needed here.
Grumpy as she was at being called late at night, Prudence promised to come over and look at him.
Jillian met us at the house, the door already open, Seth and Maia inside. Seth was putting sheets on the bed in the downstairs guest room when we arrived, and I could smell something plastic in there. Rubber under-sheet, maybe? Werewolves really were good at preparing for anything.
Jax set the man down carefully, and they all started looking him over.
The injuries were . . . well, they would have made any movie featuring the scene rated R, for sure. He was torn open from chest to hip, someone clearly having intended to gut him.
I doubted his attacker knew he was still alive.
“Is it poison, do you think? Wolfsbane?” Maia asked, standing at the bedside with a glass of water in her hands. She looked at a loss, which . . . well, werewolf.
Werewolves didn’t get injured, and thus, had no idea what to do with the injured.
“I can’t think why else he wouldn’t be healing,” Seth answered as he arranged pillows beneath the man’s head.
“It’s funny, I . . . I never thought I’d forgive him for abandoning us when we left.
I got why he did it, but I just sort of smacked a coward sticker on him and put the file away in my head. But now . . . damn, I hate this.”
Jax turned to stare at Seth in what could only be shock, his eyes wide and mouth hanging open. “You . . . you never said.”
“Wasn’t necessary. Wasn’t important. We got out. He stayed. What difference did it make that I didn’t trust him anymore?” The whole speech was so thoroughly Seth that I didn’t think I could have boiled down his personality any more succinctly. Short, to the point, and blunt as a hammer.
Jax, clearly, was less convinced of how in-character the commentary was for Seth. “But it’s—he’s Cash.”
No one but me seemed to notice the way Jillian had gone still and quiet, watching the barely-breathing man. They all fluttered around, fussing and adjusting and speculating on what could have happened, and Jillian just stood there at the end of the bed, staring at him.
“Jillian?” I asked. “What is it?”
She took a breath, sudden and deep, like she’d forgotten to breathe till right then. “Alpha,” she finally said.
They all stopped and turned to look at her.
Jax stepped toward her, but uncertainly, because of course, she never called him that. She was his sister and his equal, and she called him Jax.
“His alpha?” I asked.
She nodded. “His alpha did this. I—” She broke off and looked at the others, her gaze shying away from Jax, then focused on me, like she couldn’t look at them as she said what she had to say.
“I questioned our alpha’s word back in Idaho once.
He beat me black and blue and told me if I ever questioned his word again, he’d cut my throat.
The bruises didn’t heal for weeks. He’s not healing because his alpha did it.
” The noise Jax made then, something like a strangled sob, made her recoil.
She turned away, rushing toward the door.
“I’ll go see if anyone else has arrived. ”
Jax stepped forward as though to follow her, but I grabbed his arm and whispered, “Give her a minute.” He spun back to me, his eyes wild, ready to attack anyone to protect his sister.
Instead, I pulled him against me and held him tight.
There were no words that could help. He couldn’t go back and retroactively kick the guy’s ass.
He couldn’t stop it from happening, because it had been years ago. Two decades, easily.
It was the struggle of being a real alpha: Jax wanted to fight all of our battles for us, but that just wasn’t how the world worked.
It wasn’t even how we needed the world to work.
Jillian had fought this for herself, if not physically fighting the alpha, then wrestling with the demons of how he had treated her.
And that was her fight, not Jax’s. He couldn’t fix her past struggles, no matter how much he wanted to.
Her comments did bring up some serious questions, though. If an alpha attacking their pack members resulted in this, then that meant his own alpha had done this. Or could it be any alpha? Maybe the pack had been attacked by another, and Cash had been the only one who managed to escape.
I hadn’t gotten the impression that there was anything intrinsically different in Jax, biologically, than the rest of us.
He’d just taken on the mantle of leadership.
Even if it didn’t make sense to the human part of me, there was power in that—in his expectations for himself and our faith in him.
I didn’t realize it could be so literal, but after the past few months, I was willing to believe in the magic that bound wolves together.
Running to his estranged pack members in San Francisco made sense for Cash, in either case, since Jax had already proven himself stronger than the Idaho alpha.
I hadn’t been there, obviously, but as I learned about pack law, I’d realized that the only way my family would have been allowed to leave their old pack had been by “trial of combat,” which sounded positively medieval to me.
Everyone knew that the ability to win a fight didn’t make one morally correct.
Didn’t they?
But if we were talking about alphas having literal power over other wolves, then . . . maybe. Maybe if you looked at it from a certain angle, Jax winning seemed more like righteousness than desperation.
For my part, I wasn’t convinced.
“I’ll text Janice,” Maia announced, voice loud and strident, but staring at the floor rather than making eye contact with anyone in the room. “We still talk sometimes, maybe she’ll know something about what happened.”
Seth was still fussing over the unconscious man, also not looking at us, and then the doorbell rang, followed by quiet conversation filling the hall outside the room.
“Why would this be a surprise?” an unfamiliar voice asked, just on the edge of my hearing. “Beasts live like beasts. They kill each other like beasts. Why would you expect otherwise?”
I spun around, looking for the speaker, but no one had joined us.
Heading for the door, I threw it open, and everyone there in the hall paused and looked to me, then bowed their heads in that odd little bit of deference they always showed me. I was never sure if it was because I was with Jax, or because I was the ridiculously vaunted “witchwolf.”
But I knew all the people out there, and none of them had been the voice I’d heard.
“The dogs should be deferential to a mage,” the voice muttered, though not a single person in the hall had opened their mouth.
What the actual fuck?
The doorbell rang again, and Jillian turned to open it to Prudence, who was wearing a bright pink tracksuit.
That was . . . surreal. I’d never seen Prudence in anything short of Audrey Hepburn style before, but there she was, no makeup and all pink velour. I very much needed to not have her turn around to show off the word “juicy” on her ass.
But thank goodness she was there, clothing notwithstanding. “Prudence,” I practically shouted. “We need your help. You know healing spells, right? You once said you could teach them to me once I got to the right skill level.”
She pursed her lips, not in annoyance, but something that looked more like concern, her eyes flitting all around me, but then met my eye. “Of course, dear. Healing isn’t my forte, but I can do it.”
“If you can just get it started, he should be able to do the rest,” Jillian offered. “We just need to keep him from dying before he can heal himself.”
At that, everyone in the hall went silent, realizing the seriousness of the situation.
Without another word, Prudence followed us into the bedroom where Cash lay, hopefully not dying, and started her work.