Chapter 4
I carried the human all the way back to the house.
We were tougher than humans, but even so, the soles of my feet tingled, unused to walking over branches and pine needles.
Once we made it into the house—Dom’s porch still needed some careful navigating—the scent of home soothed me.
Dom and Linc kept close, though they shifted back almost as soon as we were inside.
I carried our mate…the human into our living room. His blood was all over my left side. Head wounds bled a lot, so that was normal. But… There were so many buts here.
The first was the most immediate one. He was hurt.
I was pretty good at diagnosing serious injury, much better than humans could ever hope to be.
It was why I’d gone into pediatrics to begin with—trauma and sickness could be harder to detect and diagnose in children, and I had a chance to save more people in that field.
That was how I knew, rationally, that our mate—that the human wasn’t in immediate danger of dying. But he was hurt.
Moments after he’d shifted, Linc came close, carefully taking our mate’s cold hand in his. “What do you need?”
“You can put him on my bed,” Dom offered in typical Dom fashion. He looked up from where he was plugging the human’s phone in to charge in our living room.
“Dom, clean towels on the couch. Linc, my bag.”
They sprang into action like the best ER nurses I’d ever worked with, and I only had to wait seconds before I could put the human on the couch without having to worry about getting anything worse than what he’d already come into contact with into his head wound.
Dom had also switched on the lights, and Linc had my bag open. He was hovering, but he had no idea what was what or what I needed, and I’d get this done faster myself. Looking at the way he was clenching his jaw, he knew it too and hated it.
“I’ll clean the wound first, then stitch him up.” I pulled on gloves as Dom started to hover as well. He took up position behind the couch where he had a good view of the human, whom I gently turned on his side so I could work.
Linc frowned. “He’s pale.”
I nodded. “From the cold and the blood loss. It’s nothing he won’t recover from.”
As I put on my gloves and started working on our—the human, I considered the second but.
The human was, well, human, but he was definitely our mate, that I was certain of.
It happened sometimes with wolves. There were theories about it sometimes being due to recessive traits in the human population, especially given the fact that omegas had once existed and that it had only ever been humans who had that special trait.
On the more supernatural end, some legends said that certain humans had the souls of wolves and that their true mates were drawn to that.
I didn’t subscribe to the latter belief, and with omegas being all but extinct, I hadn’t seen any research corroborating the former, so all I knew was that wolf and human matings happened sometimes. But not a lot.
I looked up. “Dom, don’t just stare at him as if he were a fallen angel, get him a blanket.”
Dom jumped into action, and the human had a blanket on him even before I had gotten the first stitch in.
“Also, go through his phone. It’s getting late, and if he’s supposed to be somewhere, we need to let them know before anyone files a missing person report.”
“Let’s see.” Dom powered up the device, his face looking paler in the light coming from the small screen.
“For fuck’s sake. His screen isn’t even locked. Um, guys.” Dom looked up from the phone. “Some guy called Stevie has been trying to reach our boy.”
Linc came up behind Dom, all growly, and took the phone. “Let me see. He hasn’t responded. ‘Call me, babe, and let’s talk about it.’ What the fuck is the matter with Stevie? He’s ours.”
“He” being the human. I felt the same way as Linc did about this, about this man whose skin I was stitching up, whose scent was home and family. I couldn’t help it.
Dom shifted again and climbed on the couch next to the human’s legs as a wolf to warm him up. That was a smart move. I realized it was a move I’d like to make myself; climb under a blanket with the human, pull him against my chest, feel his breath against my skin.
Well, there certainly was little point in denying that this man was my mate.
But—and this but was a big one—the whole biology of mating was something that ran in the werewolf population, not in the human population, so while I would have loved nothing better than to share my body heat with our human right now, he…
Well, humans didn’t feel a mate bond. And humans, at least those in the Western world, were not raised polyamorous.
I hadn’t even considered another but—to wit, that this human mate of ours might not be gay, no matter what text this Stevie person had sent.
Stevie wasn’t exactly gender specific either.
With all those thoughts pinballing around my head, I knelt there, closing up the ugly cut on the back of our human’s head, thinking about how fucked the three of us were if he happened to be straight, totally in a relationship with this Stevie, and totally opposed to even considering sharing the three of us.
And that was if he could accept one other tiny detail, namely that werewolves existed.
Dom looked up at me, clearly scenting some of my anxiety.
“He’ll be fine, I promise. I was just thinking… This might be difficult.”
Linc, meanwhile, had done his thing with the human’s phone.
He liked calling himself an entrepreneur, but what he really was was a security specialist, and cyber security was part and parcel of the company he’d built on the other coast. He’d been running it from his home office since moving here to be with us.
“His name’s Marcus. Marcus Waite.” Linc’s eyes were still on the screen.
“He rented a car to get to Corpsewood Manor. Apparently a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Stevie is Steven Bryce, a physicist. It looks like they had a fight, at least judging by Steven’s texts.
Marcus didn’t respond to a single one. Steven is his emergency contact. ”
The tone of Linc’s voice as he told us all of that about mirrored my own feelings on the matter, which ran along the lines of Oh hell, fuck that, as Dom would have put it.
“We should call him, then.” Those words out of my mouth were a surprise even to me.
Linc turned toward me, his expression hard, and Dom growled.
I sighed. “I don’t disagree with either of you, but put yourselves in…in Marcus’s shoes. Wouldn’t you want your security contact to know that a bunch of strangers picked you up in the woods and that you’re safe?”
I really hated saying that, but it made a lot of sense. It was the right thing to do. It had to be the right thing. I couldn’t think about the list of buts and ifs attached to it.
I cleaned up the wound as best as I could after I cut the last suture, then turned to Linc. “I can do it if you want.”
Dom kept up his growling, actually flashing teeth now.
“No, you’re right, Ell. I’ll do it.” He let out about the weightiest sigh I’d ever heard out of him. “What about Marcus? We can’t keep him on the couch, and his clothes are wet.”
Dom yapped. He still wanted Marcus in his bed, but he wasn’t the only one. Heavens help us.
I sighed. “Let’s change him into some of Dom’s clothes and then put him in the guest room. Dom’s closest to him in size.”
Linc scratched his head. “I guess.”
Dom, of course, was up in a flash, dashing into his room to find some flannel, because he owned far too much flannel.
“What do I tell that Steven person? That we found him out near our property?” Linc asked.
I shrugged. “Sounds good enough. We took him inside, and I took care of his laceration here rather than driving him to the hospital. Tell him he’s still out cold but doesn’t present with anything immediately life-threatening.
” Dom came back, still all wolf, clean flannel pj’s in his mouth.
“Shift, I need you to help me undress him.” Dom dropped the flannel and shifted back immediately.
Linc forced out a long breath. “Right. I’ll call Mary at Corpsewood as well, let her know her guest won’t show because he showed here.”
“How exactly did he get out into the woods anyway?” I was mostly trying to distract myself while I began carefully working Marcus’s clothes off. Dom was already pulling our human’s shoes off.
Linc’s lips were pressed into a tense line. “I’ll go look for the car after I finish the phone calls. Either it broke down or something else happened that made it impossible for Marcus to use it. Once he wakes up, we can ask him.”
Once he woke up, there was a whole lot more we needed to talk about, not just the car or how he’d ended up in the woods.
But that was for then. Right now, I had to focus on remaining as professional as I could while undressing my unconscious mate.
Since all three of us were still naked, I could have measured out how well each of our efforts went in that department.
I would’ve needed the long kind of ruler to do it.
In Dom’s words, we were very, very fucked indeed.