Chapter 21
Vaelenor
Ilean against one of the walls in the compound’s basement at HQ. I’ve got a boot kicked up on the exposed brick, head tipped back as I blink at the recessed ceiling lights, and my arms crossed like that could somehow keep my insides from unraveling.
My hands won’t stop shaking. They’ve been shaking since the moment I saw Caelan strapped to that fucking table.
Dax is here too, pacing back and forth while we wait in the hall across from Caelan’s hospital room.
I guess hospital’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s not a hospital, exactly. Just a high-tech military-grade wing with species-specific doctors, a full staff, and enough blood bags to keep us on our feet.
At least, that’s what Dax says. All I know is that it’s where we come when we get shot, stabbed, crashed, or need bags of blood shoved down our throats in the form of a transfusion. Which is exactly what our brother’s receiving for the fourth time in two hours.
“Will you, for the love of the gods, sit the fuck down, please,” I snap, eyes still glued to the ceiling.
It doesn’t matter that I can only see Dax in my peripheral vision. I can hear his boots smacking across the tile floor, and it’s driving me insane. Back and forth, back and forth, like a malfunctioning Roomba.
“Why hasn’t anyone come out to tell us what’s going on? Why won’t they let us in there?” He stops pacing mid-step, and his eyes snap to my face. “I mean, who the fuck comes up with slow-drip silver poisoning anyway? How does a human even know about silver?”
It’s a good question. One I’ve asked myself a hundred times since we pulled up, tires squealing, with our brother’s blood staining our hands and the smell of burnt flesh in our nose.
I’ve seen some fucked up shit with my pack over the last couple of centuries.
Caelan, especially, tends to get into binds thanks to his savior complex.
He always just assumes that whatever pain he experiences is worth the sacrifice.
Once, he got himself in a particularly nasty situation with an Italian Mafia Boss with a silver-backed whip in Tallemelo.
But I’ve never seen my brother in so much pain that he had blood dripping down his face from chewing on his tongue to keep from screaming.
That image will haunt me until the day I leave this world.
Getting him stable and transporting him to HQ was a lesson in futility. Once Dax realized what was happening and got that fucking IV out of him, Caelan seemed to calm down a bit. That only lasted until we hit a pothole or I had to make a sharp turn. Then he started screaming.
I haven’t heard a sound like that since two centuries ago, when a rogue Old World House Lord burned alive in front of us and kept screaming even after his lungs gave out.
I drove while Dax used what medical knowledge he had to stabilize Caelan. We called ahead to make sure our best Doctors were ready to go. Dr Aaron Calder and his Second, (because what screams “hospital” like a military chain of command?), Lenora Dennic.
Watching them roll my brother away was like watching part of my soul rip itself out of my body.
“Vae.” Dax snaps, pulling my attention back to him.
“What?”
He glares at me, hands on his hips. “I said, how the hell do you think a human knew about silver?”
“Well, he’s working with the Severed. I imagine Alexander or whoever the fuck informed him of its ability to make us scream like babies and shit ourselves in agony.”
“They’ve never let the information slip before.
They know the second it gets out, they’re as fucked as we are.
So why now?” Dax scrapes a frustrated hand through his hair.
I don’t have an answer for him, and honestly, it isn’t something I plan on spending a ton of time focusing on.
It happened, and now we have to deal with it.
The worst part of this whole nightmare isn’t even the waiting. It’s that I still can’t feel anything from Caelan in our Bond. His side isn’t gone, but it’s ominously silent. Muted. Like he blocked it off to protect us from his anguish.
He would do something like that. Self-sacrificing son of a bitch.
Like he can read my thoughts, Dax throws himself down on one of the leather couches placed around the room and asks, “Have you felt him? Since we got here, I mean?”
I shake my head. “No. I haven’t. But that’s better than the alternative. I’ll take a muted Bond all day over the alternative.”
The alternative is no Bond at all, because our packmate is dead.
I slide down the wall and rest my forearms on my knees, dangling my clasped hands between my legs.
We sit in silence for another twenty minutes before Dax mutters, “What do you think he was talking about when he asked us to stop the light?”
Too tired to lift my head, I let it drag along the wall until I’m facing him. “Dunno. He was really out of it. Muttering a lot of incoherent shit.”
“Yeah, but…” Dax picks absently at a callous on his palm, clearly lost in thought. “You didn’t see him when he looked at me. He was passed out the whole time except for that one moment. He just seemed so fucking frantic. I’m sure he was trying to tell me something important.”
“He was probably talking about the pain, Dax. I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it.”
He clears his throat and tips his head back, squeezing his eyes shut. “Yeah… You’re probably right.”
“Where do you think—”
The double doors to Caelan’s room swing open, and I snap my mouth shut. My body tenses, fear making my adrenaline spike as Dr. Calder and Lenora walk out. They look like shit. Blood spots their scrubs, and exhaustion is clear in every line of their faces.
Calder tiredly pulls off his scrub cap as Dax and I scramble to our feet.
“I’ve called Gavran in. He and Silas will be down in a minute, and I’ll go over everything with you,” Calder says.
He looks like he needs caffeine and three days of sleep. Lenora doesn’t speak. Calder’s always reminded me of a mix between Hawkeye Pierce and Dr. House, but Lenora’s more reminiscent of the Grim Reaper with a scalpel. She’s damn good at her job, but she scares the actual shit out of me.
Thank the gods we don’t have to wait. Silas rushes in seconds later with Gav on his heels. Before he’s made it down the hall, Gav barks, “What’s the damage?”
Calder takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. My muscles coil tight, some primal instinct preparing me to fight.
It’s a stupid instinct. Silver poisoning isn’t something I can fight. It’s not something anyone can fight.
“He was about three minutes from cardiac arrest when we got him in the room,” Calder explains solemnly. “It took us forty-five minutes just to stabilize him. The asshole had him on a custom IV of silver diluted with glucose-saline.”
He cracks his neck from side to side. “I’ll be real with you. It was horrifying. Clever, but horrifying. I almost want to find the fucker to ask him how the hell he came up with it.”
Calder sinks onto the couch across from us, scrubs wrinkled, mask hanging from its strings around his neck.
“From what we could tell, the silver was set up to trickle slowly enough to bypass his body’s immediate rejection system.
That let it circulate longer. If he was dealing with anything high-stress and his heart was pumping harder, well, it would eventually turn his insides into a burrito of internal damage. ”
Lenora’s face is a blank mask as she adds, “We flushed his system with multiple rounds of Bonded platelets, and then followed that with a saline-magnesium blend with trace copper.” She finally glances up from her charts and notices we’re all staring at her.
She turns to Calder, brow wrinkled in confusion.
“They don’t know what that is, Lenora.” He murmurs.
“Oh!” She seems shocked for a second. Clearly, she can’t comprehend how it’s possible we’re all dumb as shit.
“It helps offset internal destabilization due to silver poison, right?” Dax asks, but his tone makes it clear he’s only being polite.
Of course, he’d know that.
For a second, Lenora’s face looks like she wants to smile, but she doesn’t. “Right.”
That’s it. No further explanation offered. She refocuses on her chart, flipping through pages like she’s already forgotten we’re in the room.
I take a step forward, nervous energy firing through my veins. “What else?”
“We had to dose him with a custom sedative to slow his autonomic responses: Heart rate, breathing, body temperature, all of it. Pain, trauma, and stress prolong his body’s “fight or flight” response, and that’s extremely dangerous while the silver is still circulating in his system and trying to shut down his organs. ”
Calder takes another deep breath. “His heart was already close to failing, so anything that affects metabolic stress is going to push him closer to cardiac arrest.”
“So, he’s in a coma?” Silas weaves his fingers through his hair and tugs on the strands, eyes tight with anxiety.
Calder nods solemnly, then shoots a weary look toward Dax and me.
Dax clocks the hesitation on the doctor’s face instantly and turns on him. “What aren’t you saying, Calder?”
Calder leans forward and clasps his hands between his knees. His expression morphs into something that scares the shit out of me.
“Don’t freak out.”
I let out a disbelieving bark. “Yeah, okay. You’re about three hours too late for the Don’t Freak Out portion of this evening’s activities, but sure.”
“We had to dampen the pack Bond.”
Everyone’s voices explode at once.
“What? How the fu-”
“That’s not possible-”
“You can’t just-”
Dax’s bark cuts through the chaos. “Speak. Now.” His voice is dangerous. If I were the doctor, I’d be about three seconds away from pissing myself.
“Just what I said.”