Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Cole hadn't gotten any worse, but he wasn't doing any better either.
Two more nights had passed since her insane attempt to heal the alpha on her own, and Elise hadn't had a chance to sneak back into his room and try again.
She'd intended to stay up late last night and give it another shot, despite the consequences, but as soon as her head had hit the pillow, she had passed out and slept until sunrise.
She had found Nico watching her when she woke up, which should have been disturbing and a little creepy. It should not have sent a spiral of heat deep into her gut.
But her guts clearly didn't know what they were supposed to be doing.
Now it was late afternoon, and she and Nico had been sitting in Cole's room all day.
And today, Elise didn't have anything she could pretend to do to tend to the alpha.
She had sorted through the pile of pilfered goods that Nico had provided and was grateful when she realized there weren't any opiates in there.
Not because she was about to abuse them, but because if that whole robbery fell on her, she really did not want to catch a drug charge too.
"Why isn't Cole doing any better?" Nico asked. He was extra intense today, his dark eyes raking over her so harshly she could almost feel it, like a scalding touch.
"Have you ever been to a doctor?" she demanded with a scowl. "There's only so much I can do. The body does most of the healing on its own; it’s my job to guide it.”
Oh crap. Did that sound too healer-y?
It was true, and she thought it was also true for human medicine. But she was pretty sure doctors didn't talk that way. Nico didn't answer her question, but she didn't expect him to.
She had been stuck here for five total days, and she was going to burst out of her skin. By now, her coven sisters should have tried to contact her magically. She hadn't even received a message in a dream.
Did they think she was dead?
Had her family tried to pull something and made the coven think that she was with them instead? Why would they do that?
Unfortunately, she could answer that all too well.
Her family, and by extension the Wallace Grove coven, were meddlers, and they'd wanted her back for months.
But at this point, Elise was starting to fear that she was never going to get rescued.
And she didn't know if that was because she was catastrophizing, or because she hadn't been outside since her stolen moment on the balcony.
To make matters worse, she hadn't managed to do any of the secret spy shit that she had promised herself she would do. How could she? One of the betas was always with her, and she was stuck in the same hallway every day.
If she couldn't manage healing magic, she certainly couldn't manage any other kind.
And she had perhaps overestimated her capabilities when she first thought that she could turn this situation into her favor.
Elise just needed to find another opportunity to finish the healing on Cole and then somehow get Nico and the others to agree to let her go.
That sounded so much easier said than done.
"So is there really nothing you can do for Cole right now?" Nico pressed.
I could if you let me stay in this room alone with him, she thought.
A small part of her was tempted to beg him to leave the room for an hour or even half that time so that she could do her magic and get this over with.
Could she make up an excuse that Nico would buy? What would even work? A sterile field? That was a medical thing. But then she would need to do something medically to get him to believe that she had actually needed the field in the first place.
For half a second she considered telling him that she was really a healer, a witch, and that she could heal Cole if only Nico gave her the opportunity.
That thought was beyond insane.
She'd spent five days desperately trying to pretend to be human and hide her powers. She couldn't throw it all away just because something inside of her liked kissing Nico, and—even worse—thought she could trust him.
And that instinct was freaking crazy! He had kidnapped her. He was a werewolf. He was the werewolf who had kidnapped her. She couldn't trust any werewolf.
Why was she so certain deep within her soul that she could trust him?
She forced down the temptation to confess all and refused to consider it any further.
"No," she said, and considered her patient. "There isn't anything I can do for Cole right now. We just have to wait. He's in stable condition. He doesn't have a fever. We've gotten some liquid into him. We just have to hope that his body can do the work."
Nico crossed his arms and turned his scary glare to Cole's prone form. "So why isn't he improving?"
She couldn't be anything other than honest. "I don't know."
Though, if she wasn't pretending to be human, she could have told him about the silver. Shouldn't the werewolves be able to smell that on him?
She wasn't sure about werewolf senses, but they were supposed to be heightened. Maybe they couldn't differentiate between precious metals or smell them within someone's body. It would probably be annoying if they could smell every piercing or piece of jewelry a person was wearing.
"So you're saying that sitting here in this room isn't doing Cole any good," Nico pressed. His voice had shifted from intense to something almost … schemy. She wasn't sure she liked it.
She shrugged. "Yeah, I guess that's true."
He nodded, expression going from all-consuming concerned werewolf to, well, just a normal guy, and then he held out a hand. "Come with me," he said.
"The last time you said that I ended up being kidnapped from my job and taken to a compound in the middle of the woods," she said. "I don't know if I want to come with you." But she was smiling.
He wasn't smiling, but there was a softness in his eyes she hadn't seen before. "I'm asking," he said. "Believe me, you'll like it."
Was she really joking about the kidnapping already?
These thoughts were all more points to the fact that she had gone mad. But a part of her just liked Nico and didn't want to be angry with him, so she took his hand and stood up. Nico led her down the hallway and held up a finger to his mouth.
"Be quiet," he warned, "because the other guys will kill me if they find out I'm doing this."
Would a human be questioning the power dynamic here, she wondered.
She understood that the other werewolves she met were betas. She was pretty sure Nico was the head beta, Cole's second in command when he was conscious. But she knew humans didn't organize that way.
They had families, sure, but they didn't have thirty people living in a compound with a hierarchical power structure. A human would probably be curious, she decided, but she didn't say anything because she didn't want to give herself away by knowing too much or accepting too much.
She was really bad at this pretending thing.
And she was pretty sure Nico might have questioned her about it if he wasn't trying so darned hard to hide the fact he was a werewolf.
He led her down the same stairway he had forced her up several days ago and out the back door into the backyard. It was a beautiful day out. The sun was shining high, and the sky was bright blue with fluffy clouds in the air. There was a breeze that blew over her skin, and everything smelled fresh.
Elise tilted her head back and closed her eyes to soak in the sun. She stood there for a while, but after a moment she could feel Nico's gaze on her.
She looked at him, and he was smiling. Her heart did a little flip, which it could not afford to do, because that was just more evidence that she really liked him. But she smiled back.
He was a werewolf, she reminded herself. He had kidnapped her. He was holding her hostage. The other werewolves wanted to kill her.
Even with all those reasons not to smile back, the expression didn't slip off her face.
He took her hand again and led her deeper into the yard. There was a nice gravel walking path that led into the woods. Wildflowers, like the one he'd given her at breakfast the other day, poked up along the edge of the path. Nico leaned down and plucked one, handing it to her as they walked.
"How many acres do you have?" she asked as she idly stroked the petals of the delicate purple flower. That was a normal human question to ask. She was sure about that. Humans loved talking about real estate, if reality TV was anything to go by.
"Not as many as you think," he said. "We back up onto a national forest, and some of the people who live here …" He stumbled a bit over how he phrased that, and she was pretty sure he meant to say some of the pack. "They like to go running in the woods," he finished.
She wasn't sure what her next question should be. Part of her brain was hung up on the fact that Nico had casually given her a flower, like this was a date or something. She needed to figure out something.
And then it came to her.
"Um," she began. "This isn't like a cult or anything, is it?" she asked.
Yes. If this situation was anything human, a cult was what it would remind her of, if Netflix documentaries were anything to go by.
The trees got thicker as they stepped off the gravel path and properly into the woods.
It smelled green and woodsy, and the pack probably had a hundred different ways to describe it.
The dirt was edging towards mud in a few places, and it must have rained recently, so Elise stepped carefully.
But not even a tiny part of her wanted to go back inside.
"Cole isn't like your leader or something, the incarnation of God, right?" Okay, she was laying it on a little thick, but in addition to reality TV, she really loved documentaries about cults, and it just fit.
Besides, Nico wanted her to believe he was just as human as she allegedly was. She was doing him a favor by asking this question.
Nico coughed out a startled laugh. "A cult?" he asked. "Why do you think that?"
"Um, I don't know," she said. Then she rattled off the reasons as they came.
"The whole no doctors thing is a bit strange, and a bunch of people living together in the middle of the woods away from civilization," she said.
"I don't want to, like, offend your church or anything.
I mean, you can believe anything you want. "
Nico hadn't stopped holding her hand since they left Cole's room, and now he squeezed it. "I promise you we're not a cult."
They walked farther into the woods, and she decided not to press any further. If he didn't want to agree that he was in a cult, she couldn't make him.
It was nice walking with him. They didn't say much, but they didn't need to.
It felt normal. Two people out on a nice date in nature, one of them secretly a witch and trying desperately to hide that fact.
One of them, a werewolf who didn't know he had been found out, and the threat of death hanging over her head every moment.
Okay, date ruined.
But right then, Elise refused to let herself dwell on that. Nico was doing a nice thing for her. He was letting her outside, and she was breathing fresh air and it was a beautiful day. And—
And Nico was pressing her up against a tree and covering her body with his.
She thought he was about to kiss her, but his body was much too tense for that. He leaned in close and shushed her. She barely dared to breathe.
His body was pressed up close to her, chest to chest, one leg accidentally or not so accidentally lodged between hers.
If he kept her in this position for much longer, it would turn into a kiss, no matter what was going on.
He held her there for so long she began to worry about danger.
This was his pack’s territory, it should have been safe … for him at least.
Her heartrate kicked up, half from his closeness and half from imagining monsters in the shadows.
After another two entire minutes, she counted the seconds, he backed up.
"What was that about?" she asked. He was breathing deep, his shoulders moving up and down with every exhalation.
"I thought I smelled …" He cleared his throat.
"Um, I thought I heard someone," he said.
He ran a hand through his hair, tussling it a bit, and a strand fell over his forehead.
He didn't look relaxed. She could almost see the werewolf prowling deep under his skin, ready to face a threat that wasn't there.
"Okay." She let his slip-up slide. Maybe a human would catch it. Maybe they wouldn't, but there was no benefit to her calling him out on it.
He looked really good in the woods with the trees all around him. Like he belonged there. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to pull him right back up against the tree and get lost in him just for a little bit.
But she couldn't do that. Cole was still sick in his room. Nico was still a werewolf. She was still a witch. And there was like a forty percent chance she was going to end up murdered.
Now the date was really ruined.
"Is everything alright?" Nico asked.
She smiled sadly and couldn't help the way her shoulders slumped. "Alright as can be," was how she managed to respond.