Syndrome, page 11
part #2 of The Shift Chronicles Series
The two of them stared intently at each other for a minute, and if I had to guess, I would’ve said that Shane’s angry thoughtspeech was filling my attacker’s head. After a tense minute or two, said attacker’s ears drooped and he turned and sulked off across the river.
Shane turned to me. (Jesus, Alex, I’m sorry about that.)
His dark, dark blue eyes fell on my bloody leg, which I had gingerly propped up so I wasn’t putting any pressure on it. Now that the human mind was back in control, the pain seemed a lot worse.
Still, I attempted to keep my head high, and I choked down a whine as I thought, (It’s fine. I’m fine. But what the hell, Shane?)
(The idiot is new to Laurel Cove,) he explained.
(New?)
(Yeah, we’ve recruited a few new members lately. Ironically to help protect you, among other things.)
(Well, they’re doing a fantastic job. I’ve never felt safer.)
(He didn’t recognize you—I had him on perimeter watch, told him not to let anybody cross this river and get too close to the house. Guess he was just a little overzealous...can’t really blame him, though; that Sera girl’s been slinking around here since last night, and she’s got everyone on edge. Nobody trusts her. Hell, I don’t trust her either, but I’ve been keeping myself from ripping her throat out as a personal favor to Eli, because, god help me, I like that little nerd. And he seems to think she might be useful. Damned if it hasn’t been a pain to get the rest of my pack to calm down, though. Everyone’s looking for a fight.)
I’d really, really wanted to shout a loud thank you at the words “nobody trusts her”, but I managed to stop myself from saying anything. If only because I kind of hated it when I found myself agreeing with Shane.
He stepped closer, so he could examine my leg better, and let out a curse as he did. (That looks bad,) he said. (Why don’t you come up to the house and let me take care of it?)
(It’s fine,) I repeated.
(Look, if any of your dear friends find out you got hurt on my territory and I didn’t do anything about it, then I’ll never hear the end of it. Just let me do the right thing, will you? To keep the peace?)
I averted my eyes. Lora’s scent was already fading, but what was I supposed to say? I couldn’t exactly tell Shane what I was here for. And he was right about the others; they’d freak out if they saw me like this. Especially Kael.
Although, something told me that Kael would be just as pissed off about the thought of Shane playing doctor to me.
Maybe he’d even prefer it if Shane left me to bleed and fend for myself….
Either way, I was damned if did, damned if I didn’t. Again.
Seriously; why did that have to be my life’s slogan?
Shane’s house wasn’t quite the extravagant mansion that Eli’s parent’s had left him, but it wasn’t exactly a shack, either. Unlike Eli and the rest of my little ragtag pack who all stayed together with Eli at said mansion, Shane usually stayed alone (“I like my privacy,” he’d told me once), but you’d never know it from the several thousand square feet worth of the house that he walked me into.
I’d only been in here once before, when Vanessa, Will and I came to ask for his pack’s cooperation when those werewolf attacks first started around my house, however many weeks ago that was now. The activity level had tripled since that last time, and now lots of curious eyes—many of the new “recruits” who were temporarily staying with him, Shane explained— followed my every movement as I walked through the halls with my bloodied arm.
I met some of their gazes, mostly searching for faces I knew. There were two faces in particular that I was searching for.
“Are Jack and Emily around?”
Jack Lawing and Emily Vaughn were two of the lycans who had worked hard to keep my family safe all those months ago, when I’d first been pulled into this whole Descendant mess. I felt like it had been forever since I’d seen their faces, and it would have been nice to catch up with them.
Unfortunately, though, Shane shook his head. “‘Fraid not,” he said. “They’re gone. Have been, for awhile now.”
Well, that explained why I hadn’t seen them. But what I didn’t get was why the mention of them made Shane’s body tense and his voice turn distant and guarded.
“Gone?” I repeated, curiosity getting the better of me. “Where?”
“No idea.”
“Why’d they go?”
He cut his eyes sideways at me. “Because we had our differences,” he said. “So they left. It happens. Now, about that wound of yours…”
I frowned, but backed off for the time being, mostly because a sharp, distracting spasm of pain shot through my arm just moments after he mentioned it. I probably should have just stayed in my lycan form, relaxed, and let myself heal, but I’d wanted to be human again—even if it meant slower healing.
It was still faster than a normal human’s healing, at least. And in this form it was easier to block out the lingering scent of Lora, and to not think about how far away she might have been getting as I stood in the kitchen with Shane, letting him inspect the bone-deep gashes just beneath my elbow.
The tissue was already rebuilding, leaving only a tiny sliver of bone visible, and the bleeding had stopped—though not before getting all over my shirt. At least it was just the old raggedy theater camp shirt I’d slept in.
“Here,” Shane said, pulling a roll of gauze from the little medical bag he’d retrieved from the bathroom.
“That’s really not necessary, and we both know it.”
“Yeah, but just humor me, will you? I feel like crap that this happened on my territory.”
I held in a laugh as I took a few sips of the glass of water he’d gotten me. He’d added some sort of pain-killing herbs to it, and it had a bitter aftertaste that I had to swallow several times to get rid of. “Okay. So remember last night how you were all ‘come back to my house, I’ll keep you safe?’”
He frowned.
“It was a joke, Shane. Lighten up. How many times do I have to tell you? I’m fine—really.”
He ignored me at first, just started securing the gauze over the cut. I awkwardly rolled my sleeve a little further up and focused on the clock above the sink.
“I went to med school for a while, you know,” he said as he finished bandaging me up.
“What? You?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.” He grinned. “I was in the top of my class before I dropped out.”
“I guess I just can’t picture you…you know. In the workforce or whatever. And you’ve got this house, and the rest of your family’s estate. So you don’t really need a career, do you?”
“Not technically, I guess.” He shrugged. “But I went to school thinking I wanted to leave all this behind. To live among humans—really live like them, I mean. Like some of our kind do.”
“Like I usually do?”
“More than that. Did you know there are those who willingly stop shifting and everything, who take all kinds of measures to suppress the wild side of themselves? It seemed appealing for awhile there.”
I did know that, actually; Eli told me about it. It wasn’t generally a successful or safe thing to do, he’d said, but my father must have done something to suppress my shifting without my knowledge.
One more sore spot in my past full of lies.
And I didn’t want to discuss it, so I tried to keep the conversation on Shane.
“What changed your mind?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Shane said. “I guess the more time I spent with humans, the less appealing they became.”
I remembered some of the horror stories my mom had told me, about things she’d seen on hospital shifts, about people who were victims of awful crimes that others had committed over the stupidest things. And I knew what Shane meant, I thought. I never had any desire to follow in my mom’s footsteps and become a doctor; I don’t think I could’ve taken it. I’d want to hunt down every person whose violent temper or stupid decision had landed one of their fellow humans in the hospital—and then that whole “do no harm” oath that doctor’s have to take?
Yeah, I didn’t know about that.
“Plus,” he added, “My family has controlled the Laurel Cove territory for generations, so it wasn’t exactly easy to turn my back on that. And there’s plenty of violence in our world, too, obviously—but at least back here, there’s the loyalty of the pack. The kind of trust I don’t think I ever would have found with humans.”
“Yeah, I get that.” I had human friends that I liked a lot—but still, he was right. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt closer to Vanessa and the others than I ever had to most of the people from my old life. Some sort of weird instinct built into the lycan genetic code, maybe. You found your pack, and you became inseparable from it— for better or for worse—and then you’d do anything to keep them safe.
“Anyway,” he said, “apparently I didn’t even need a degree, because behold my amazing doctor skills.” He lifted my newly-bandaged arm up, flourished a hand around it like he was showing off a prize on a game show.
“Well done,” I said, fighting a smile.
“And now, interrogation time—which is the real reason I brought you in here, of course.”
“Um…what?”
He let go of my arm and started packing everything back in the medicine box. “What were you doing out by yourself this early in the morning? And all the way over here in my territory?”
“I was just out for a run. And who cares if I was over here? Am I not allowed to be here?”
He gave me one of his careless, lopsided grins. “Of course you are. I was just wondering if you’d changed your mind about staying with me.”
“I haven’t.”
“I would say I’m surprised, but your stubbornness is becoming something of a legend in these parts, so yeah. I’m definitely not surprised.”
He didn’t press it again, but I could still hear that question hanging onto the edge of his words: why are you really here, then, Alex?
I busied myself with pulling my bloody sleeve back over my bandaged arm. And then, desperate for a change of conversation, I pretended to care about said blood. “Geez,” I said, “I didn’t realize how soaked my shirt got during all that mess. It’s kind of gross.”
Shane didn’t answer, he just gathered up the medical stuff and left the room. But when he came back, he was carrying a sweatshirt, which he tossed to me. “Probably too big, but you can wear that if you want.” He nodded toward the hall behind him, where an open door led to what looked like a bedroom. “You can change in there. I’m going to make something for breakfast—as long as you’re here, are you hungry?”
I got the distinct impression that he was trying to get me to drop my guard, so that I would either let the real reason I was running around in his territory slip, or so that he could break into my thoughts and find it for himself.
I wasn’t falling for it.
“Sure,” I said, guarding my mind as I clutched the sweatshirt and disappeared into the bedroom. I could feel his eyes follow me.
He was still watching as I turned to shut the door behind me.
Twelve
territorial
I’d just finished changing when I heard the sound of the front door slamming open, and my heart sank, because I already knew who it was.
Kael never really shouted, but he didn’t need to; even as human, my hearing was still good enough to hear his angry voice, demanding to know where I was.
At least I heard Vanessa, too, speaking in a much more reasonable tone and telling him to calm down.
Not that it was doing any good.
I hurried out of the bedroom, thinking that just seeing that I was alive and well would be enough to make him chill out. When his eyes fell on me, though, I think it only made him angrier. “Why didn’t you answer us when we called?” he snapped.
“I…I didn’t hear you,” I said, and it was the truth—I’d been so busy trying to block Shane from my mind that I must have inadvertently blocked everyone else, too.
Whoops.
Vanessa frowned at me now, too, which somehow was way worse. I was used to Kael being moody and pissed at me. But Vanessa’s frown was like that disappointed look my mom used to give me, back when she still cared about the things I did. I hated that look.
“What does it matter?” Shane asked, stepping from the kitchen and to my rescue. “She’s fine.”
“I really am,” I agreed hurriedly.
“Then why do I smell your blood?” Kael stepped closer to me, and it took me a moment to find words.
“Because I was… bleeding,” I said lamely.
“No kid—”
“Speaking of blood,” Shane interrupted, “there’s more than the scent of her blood in here, all of a sudden.”
At first I thought he was only coming to my rescue again by taking the focus off me. But then he sat the bowl he’d been carrying on the dining room table, and he advanced toward Kael with a look in his eyes that I’d seen too many times before.
Hate.
And not the quiet, smoldering kind.
No, it was the kind that was about to start a fight.
“Yeah, there is,” Kael said, barely even glancing back at Shane. “You should teach your pack members how to pick their battles a little better. They were in my way, and seemed convinced they shouldn’t let me pass right away. But I managed to convince them otherwise.”
“Everyone is fine,” Vanessa added in a rush, “when I caught up to him they were fine with letting us come by, there was only a little scuffle before I got there, only—”
Shane wasn’t really listening to her. He grabbed Kael’s shoulder and jerked, forced him to turn around.
Mistake.
Kael had already been on edge, and it wasn’t like he ever needed much of an excuse to hit Shane. So Shane should have seen it coming. He apparently didn’t, though—or at least, not in enough time to avoid Kael’s fist slamming into his jaw.
Shane stumbled back, grabbing an edge of a nearby coffee table in an attempt to keep his balance. The second he regained it, that coffee table was flying at Kael, sailing through the air as easily as if it had been made of leaves instead of wood. Kael twisted, but it still caught him in the shoulder, and it still had enough momentum after that to hit the wall behind him hard enough to splinter into several pieces.
What a waste of a perfectly good coffee table.
“Stop it!” Vanessa shouted. “Both of you! Now!”
I don’t think they could even hear her. And I knew that if someone didn’t step between these two, chances were they’d just fight to the death, and then if there was a life after this one, they would just pick up where they left off and start fighting there, too.
So I jumped in front of Kael before he could completely regain his balance after being hit, and I gave him the most menacing glare I could. It didn’t come close to the ones he could manage sometimes, but it was enough to get him to pause, at least.
Behind me, Vanessa was holding Shane back.
After a few tense moments, both of the guys took a deep breath, and the tiniest bit of tension faded from the air. While Vanessa argued and tried to reason with Shane, I grabbed Kael’s hands, hoping to further distract him.
I thought it might be less nerve-wracking to be this close to him now, after the way he’d kissed me last night. But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. As his fingers intertwined with mine and he took another, slightly less reluctant, deep breath, I felt that familiar-by-now heat skipping through my blood, up into my brain. And I couldn’t stop the tiny tremble of pleasure it sent rippling over my skin.
At least my sharper-than-normal inhale caught his attention.
He finally stopped trying to glare at Shane over my shoulder, and he looked down at me instead.
God, his eyes could be completely paralyzing when he looked at me like that.
“I thought you didn’t want to stay here,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t. I mean, I don’t. Is that what’s really got you so upset?” I realized then that the reason his eyes were roving so intensely over me had nothing to do with the heat building between us, and everything to do with the fact that I was wearing Shane’s sweatshirt. “Oh. You’ve completely misread this situation.”
“Have I?” he asked, except what he really meant, at least by his tone, was: do you think I’m an idiot?
If it was anybody but Shane involved, I’d like to think that he would have believed me. But he was blind when it came to Shane. Blind, and territorial, apparently. And yeah, I knew I wasn’t territory for anyone to mark, but trying to explain that to these two— who wanted nothing more than an excuse to rip each other apart— would be a waste of breath.
This morning was turning into an absolute disaster.
Vanessa steered a still muttering Shane back into the kitchen by suggesting that she help him finish cooking breakfast. Her peacemaking skills were second only to her cooking skills, I was pretty sure. And I was incredibly grateful for that, even now that I was stuck alone in this room with Kael.
We managed to not say an entire word the entire time we were picking up the coffee table mess.
But then I finally couldn’t take it anymore, so I said, “I’m sorry I worried you, alright?”
“Are you ever going to grow a sense of self-preservation, do you think?”
“I doubt it—but that doesn’t have anything to do with today. I know you hate Shane, but he wouldn’t hurt me. This?” I held up my arm. “It was an accident. Shane’s territory is usually perfectly safe, and you know it.”
“So safe that you should probably just stay here after all, right?”
Heat—a much different kind from earlier—seared through me. “Maybe I should,” I spat.
“Alright then, it’s settled.”
“You…! Okay, do you want to know the real reason I was here this morning, you idiot?”
I didn’t even realize what I’d said until his powerful gaze jerked toward me, and then it was all I could do to keep myself from clamping a hand over my mouth—you know, in that exaggerated way soap opera people do after they’ve just said something incredibly stupid?
