Chapter 2
Silas
The hospital smelled like bleach and recycled air.
I sat in the chair beside her bed with my forearms on my knees, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest and trying to remember the last time I’d wanted something this badly.
I couldn’t.
She lay with her head turned slightly toward me, one hand resting open at her side on the blanket, palm up, fingers loosely curled.
The hospital gown was pale blue and thin enough that it did little to hide a body I had spent an unreasonable number of the past hundred and sixty-eight hours thinking about doing things to that would have to wait until she was in good enough health to be bred. Or at least until she was conscious…
The medically induced coma had been the attending physician’s call.
Something about intracranial pressure. I had sat outside the glass partition while they explained it to me and nodded with the face of a concerned friend, which was what I was pretending to be.
A concerned friend who had been hiking with her when she fell, carried her down the mountain and driven her to the nearest emergency room, and spent every possible minute I could watching over her since then.
A nurse passed the open doorway. She glanced in, recognized me by now, and moved on. I’d been here often enough that the night nurses had started leaving a cup of coffee outside the door when they did their 2:00 AM rounds.
I looked back at Katie.
Her chart said the swelling had reduced.
They were going to bring her out of sedation tomorrow morning if the overnight readings held.
Shifter healing ran quiet and fast, faster than any human physician would expect, and I’d watched the bruising around her temple fade in three days instead of ten.
They’d attributed it to youth and good health and didn’t seem to have thought much about it.
She didn’t know what she was. I was almost sure of it. She didn’t have the telltale scent of a she-wolf who had shifted, and there was no muscle memory of a wolf body in her unconscious flinches when the nurses moved her limbs. She must have been raised entirely in the human world.
But my wolf had known she was mine the moment I’d caught her scent on the mountain.
She’d know it soon too, once she was all healed up and taking my knot.
I leaned back in the chair and rolled my neck and felt the dull ache that had been living in my bones since I’d crossed the Rio Grande.
This far from my territory, holding human form required constant, exhausting effort.
Every hour I sat here in this chair cost me.
My joints ached. My vision blurred at the periphery if I didn’t concentrate.
I could feel the wolf straining against the imposed shape, the way it always did when I kept it too long in terrain that wasn’t mine.
I needed to be home. I needed to hunt.
But the alternative was leaving her here, unguarded.
I looked at her hand on the blanket. The knuckle of her index finger was scraped. She’d already been healing when she came in, the abrasion barely pink now. Her hands were small and delicate, but the skin on her palms was roughened in a way that indicated time spent climbing.
Her chest rose and fell. The gown had slipped slightly off her left shoulder, and I reached over and pulled the blanket up to cover her.
Tomorrow, I told myself. She’ll be awake tomorrow.
* * *
Katie
I opened my eyes, and for about three seconds I existed in that blissful state where I didn’t remember anything and the world was just a white ceiling and a beeping machine and the vague sense that I’ve been sleeping for too long.
Then it all came rushing back.
Walking in the mountains with Mark. A wolf the size of a small horse. A creature that looked like God had started sketching a coyote and then gotten angry and kept pressing harder with the pencil until the lines went wrong. The word run. The ground rushing up. The crack of my skull against rock.
I sat up too fast and the room tilted. I grabbed the bed rail and waited for everything to stop spinning.
My head hurt, but in that distant, almost-finished way of a headache that had already done its worst and was now just hanging around out of spite.
I touched my temple where I’d hit the rock and found smooth skin over a bump that felt weeks old.
The room was small and private, with white walls, blue curtains half-drawn, monitors doing their steady electronic thing.
Through the window I could see a parking lot and beyond it the unmistakable sprawl of Albuquerque, strip malls and cottonwoods and the Sandias sitting on the eastern horizon like they hadn’t just been the backdrop to the most terrifying day of my life.
Well, the second most terrifying now that I’d had the chance to meet “it” in the flesh.
I looked at the date on the monitor and blinked. Seven days. I’d been out for seven days.
And I was alone.
I jabbed the call button.
The nurse who came in was young, dark-haired, and equipped with the kind of professional smile that’s designed to convey calm. She checked my vitals while I vibrated with the effort of not grabbing her by the scrubs.
“Where’s Mark?”
“Let’s just see how you’re—”
“My friend. Mark Alvarez. He was with me in the mountains. Where is he? Is he here? Is he in another room?”
She kept her eyes on the blood pressure cuff. “You’re at a medical facility in Albuquerque. You’ve had a significant fall—”
“I know I had a fall. I was there for the fall. What I need to know is what happened to my friend, because there was some kind of creature that looked like it crawled out of a geometry textbook’s nightmare, and I understand how that sounds but I am telling you what I saw.”
The nurse’s smile held, but her eyes did the thing a medical professional’s eyes do when they’re recalculating how much sedative is in the cabinet.
“I’m not crazy,” I added, despite suspecting that was exactly what a crazy person would say.
“No one is suggesting that. You sustained a traumatic brain injury, and it’s very normal for memories to be—”
“Scrambled? Unreliable? Sure. Except I remember everything with the kind of clarity that makes me wish I were confused, because confused would be a lot more comfortable right now.”
She finished with the blood pressure cuff and set it aside. “There are some people here who’d like to speak with you. A detective and a forest ranger. They’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”
“Great. Send them in.”
She hesitated, probably weighing whether I was too agitated for visitors right now, but I must have looked stable enough, because she left and returned two minutes later with company.
The cop was exactly the kind of man central casting would send if you requested “detective, white, mid-forties, seen some things.” He had a rumpled suit, thinning hair, and eyes with a permanent squint.
He carried a small notebook with the air of a man who had already decided this conversation would not produce useful information but was going to go through the motions anyway.
The woman beside him was more interesting. She was dressed in the green-and-khaki uniform of someone who spent more time in the field than behind a desk. Late twenties, maybe early thirties. Her dark hair hung in a loose braid, and she had bronze skin and sharp cheekbones.
“Miss Gregory,” the detective said. “I’m Detective Cole. This is Ranger Yazzie.”
“Is Mark alive?”
Cole’s expression tightened just a fraction and Ranger Yazzie’s gaze dropped to her hands for a beat before returning to my face.
“Why don’t you start by telling us what you remember,” Cole said, which was not an answer.
So I told them. All of it. Mark’s weird behavior, the buttoned collar, the flat eyes.
The drive into the Jemez, his robot-walk through the trees, the wrong smell that clung to everything.
The creature with its jagged angles and void eyes.
I watched their faces while I talked and I watched them exchange The Look.
The one that said This poor girl bumped her head and doesn’t know what’s real.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said when I’d finished. “And I’m telling you, I wasn’t hallucinating.”
Cole shifted his weight. Yazzie was very still.
“Miss Gregory,” Cole said, “We have some difficult information to share with you.” He glanced at Yazzie.
She gave him a nearly imperceptible nod.
“Your friend Mark Alvarez was found dead outside your apartment complex on Canyon Road. Forensics indicates he was killed the night before you went up to those mountains.”
The room went very quiet. Even the monitors seemed to hold their breath.
“His injuries were consistent with a large animal attack of some type,” Yazzie said softly. “His body was discovered by another resident early that morning.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I understand this is—”
“No, he knocked on my door at six forty-five in the morning. He was standing in my hallway wearing that stupid buttoned-up flannel, and he asked me to go hiking. I drove to the Jemez with him. I sat in his truck for an hour and forty minutes.”
They exchanged The Look again. Yazzie’s version of it lingered a beat longer than Cole’s, but then it transformed into something more sympathetic.
“Your friend Mark was never in the mountains with you,” Cole said gently. “But you did have someone with you. A man brought you into this hospital and said he’d been hiking with you when you fell. He’s been here almost constantly since.”
“What man?”
“Silas…” he paused, giving Yazzie a ‘don’t leave me hanging here’ expression.
“Black,” she finished for him.
“Silas Black…” I repeated, as if saying it out loud would give me some idea who the fuck this Azkaban escapee’s cousin was.
It didn’t.
“I don’t know anyone named Silas Black.”
“Large. Dark hair. The nurses can describe him.”