A Pack of Love and Hate

by Olivia Wildenstein

  Large fingers swept over my cheek, through my hair, curled around my human neck, lifting my limp form, cradling it.

  The world spun, as though toppling off its axis, and the green and gold melted into black, then gray, and then pure white as though the night had been shot through with fireworks.

  Had August lit up the sky for me again?

  I so loved fireworks.

  I looked for him, but he’d gone.

  All was quiet.

  All was bright.

  54

  Fire singed my veins.

  55

  Noise crashed against my eardrums.

  56

  Heat charred my skin, and then a chill slid down my throat, and my lungs expanded like bellows, ripping a cry that reverberated against my palate and pulsed my cheeks, awakening a ferocious ache.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  57

  Metal clinked.

  Wild battering inside my chest.

  Strips of glaring light.

  Flashes of blinding pain.

  Smears of color.

  Light blue.

  Peach.

  Green.

  Brown.

  Then white.

  So much white.

  58

  Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep.

  “She died but she came back, Mom.”

  Who’d died? Sandra?

  “Wait. I have to—I’ll call you back.”

  A loud, shrill scrape.

  Then five dots of heat on my cheek.

  And green.

  Two green orbs.

  Not orbs.

  Eyes.

  “Dimples?”

  The green blurred, faded.

  Not into white but into black.

  59

  Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep.

  The warm scent of skin.

  Spice and sawdust.

  The steady beat of a heart against my spine.

  Ba-bump . . . Ba-bump . . . Ba-bump . . .

  Rhythmic and solid.

  The sharp spike of beeps echoing around me jolted the body cocooning mine.

  “Dimples?”

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  I blinked, but everything was dark. So dark.

  “I want . . .”

  “What do you want, sweetheart?”

  “Colors.”

  Something clicked, and then hands gently eased me onto my back.

  Against the cream ceiling, green, sable, and gold churned. Heat stung my eyes; then something wet rolled along my cheek: a tear.

  The beats of my heart lengthened. Slowed. Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .

  “What is it?” the deep voice trembled in the air between our faces.

  I lifted my hand to touch August’s jaw. He turned his face until his lips connected with my palm. “It was so dark and then so white,” I murmured. “What happened to me?”

  His breaths faltered.

  “What?” I asked as I lifted my other hand to push the hair obscuring my left eye.

  Found it wasn’t hair but gauze.

  Thick gauze.

  I prodded it until I found the edge and then started peeling it away when August caught my fingers. “Don’t take it off.”

  “Why not? Am I bleeding?”

  “No. Maybe. Just don’t take it off yet. Greg said he’d be here in the morning. He’ll do it.”

  “O-okay.” Something about his expression had my heart thump a little quicker, which filled the hospital room with nippy, harsh beeps. “Is Cassandra . . . is she . . .?”

  “Dead? Yes. She’s dead. You killed her. Which killed you.” His voice broke. “It . . . killed . . . you.”

  I ran my palm along his jaw, pressing a little harder to make sure he was real, and that I was too. “I died?”

  The quiet white void had been death.

  “How . . . how did I come back?”

  His lids swept down over his eyes as though to clear them of the memory. “I bit you.”

  I frowned. “You bit—oh . . .” My unbandaged eye widened. “Like in the legend?”

  He nodded, his dense stubble scraping my palm.

  “You brought me back to life,” I said in wonder. As I remembered who told me the story, his name burst through my lips. “Liam! What about Liam? Is he alive?”

  “He’s alive.”

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  “We won then?”

  August closed his eyes. “Oh . . . Ness.”

  “What? We didn’t win?”

  “No. We won. But—”

  “But what?”

  He removed his cheek from my hand and laced his fingers through mine, careful not to shift the heart monitor clamped to the tip of my index.

  “What is it, August?”

  His silence intensified my pulse. The beeps pinged against my eardrums, against the EKG machine, against the fawn-colored walls, against the closed hospital door. He lowered our twined hands to my abdomen.

  “It’s gone,” he whispered raucously.

  My brow furrowed. “What is?”

  “The link,” he murmured. “It’s gone.”

  And that was when I felt it.

  Or rather . . . when I didn’t feel it. “Oh.”

  He watched my face as the revelation settled like silt on the bottom of a river.

  “Death severed it,” I said matter-of-factly.

  He pressed his forehead against my collarbone, his body heaving, first with ragged breaths and then with quiet sobs.

  Was he mourning its absence, or had its absence made him realize that the link was the reason he’d been attracted to me?

  Probably the latter.

  He wouldn’t be crying over a broken link.

  Not if it hadn’t altered his feelings toward me.

  He was probably worried confessing his change of heart would send me into a tailspin of intractable pain. Or back into the white void.

  I shuddered just remembering.

  I lifted my free hand to his hunched spine and stroked the hard knobs of his vertebrae. “It’s okay,” I whispered, trying to act strong even though I felt the loss inside the marrow of my very bones. “You don’t need to feel guilty, August. I won’t break, I promise.”

  I was too broken to break, right?

  “Wh-what?” He picked his head off my chest and dug the heel of his palm into his reddened eyes.

  “We’ll go back to being . . .” I shrugged to buy myself time to clear my throat. “Friends.” I tried to smile, but my lips wobbled too much for it to stick.

  His strong brow grooved. “What are you talking about?”

  “I . . . you . . . I thought . . .” My eyebrows pulled together. “Why are you crying?”

  “Because I lost you.” He said this with an anger that made me shrink deeper into the tough pillow propping my head up. “Because when Liam told me to bite you, I thought it was some sick joke, that he’d gone soft in the head. Ness, you died in my arms. And then for the past week, you’ve been in and out of consciousness. I apologize for being emotional, but until a few minutes ago, I was terrified you might never wake up. Or that when you did, you wouldn’t remember my name. Or that you might not want me now that nothing binds us.”

  “The past week?” I whispered. “The duel was last week?”

  He nodded carefully, as though waiting for me to touch upon the rest of what he’d said.

  “You think I forgot you?” I dragged my thumb across his palm. “How could I forget the boy who picked me up from school to buy me ice-cream? Who taught me to climb my first tree and who sat by my bed to make sure all the monsters stayed underneath it?” I kept stroking his palm. “I remember everything about you, August. I remember when you came to talk to me the day of the pack gathering, when you shot Lucas at the paintball arena, when you collected me in the woods the night Liam called me a traitor. I remember our swim in the lake when you tried to tickle me, and the feel of your palm on my skin. It was the day I realized my feelings for you weren’t all
that platonic.” While I kept caressing his palm with my thumb, I raised my other hand to touch the faint-white line where I’d carved his cheek the night I’d had a nightmare, and he’d woken me up. “I remember giving you this scar, and then licking the blood away.”

  A full-body shiver went through him.

  “I remember our first kiss. Each one of our kisses, for that matter. I remember my birthday dinner and all that happened after.”

  His lips parted a little, as though he were trying to catch his breath.

  “I remember you, August.” I cupped his chiseled jaw.

  Those glorious emerald eyes bore down on mine.

  “And concerning the link, it’s not the first time the bond between us has been absent, now is it?”

  His eyes seemed to shine a little harder.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “What about me, what?”

  “Have your feelings for me changed? I know you love me, but do you still”—I shrugged—“want me?”

  Shaking his head, he captured my wrist and brought it up to his lips. “Want is a mighty feeble word for what I feel for you, Ness Clark.”

  When he kissed the delicate skin, the room filled with the melody of my heartbeats.

  He peppered the inside of my arm with kisses before carefully laying my hand down on the twisted sheets, wrapping his fingers around the back rung of the bed to keep his weight off me, and leaning over until his mouth was parallel to mine. I tried to reach around his back, but the cord of the heart monitor fumbled my first attempt.

  “Can you turn off that machine so I can get my finger back? I don’t want to remove the clip and give all the nurses strokes when they hear me flatline.”

  He winced.

  I wrinkled my nose. “I didn’t mean to remind you.”

  “I don’t think it’s something I’ll ever be able to forget, sweetheart. Those were the worst minutes of my life. On par with crashing in the helicopter and having a heart-to-heart with Evelyn.”

  “Evelyn! Does she know?” I asked as he studied the EKG machine to figure out how to turn it off.

  In the end, he simply unplugged it.

  “She knows.” He slipped the clamp off my fingertip. “The first two days, she didn’t leave the chair next to your bed, but then Frank forced her to go home at night so she could rest. She made me swear not to leave your side, then muttered a couple things in Spanish, but I didn’t quite catch their meaning. She was probably hexing me.”

  I grinned, but it tugged on my injured cheek, so I uncurled my lips.

  As I raised my hand to feel what was underneath the gauze, August caught my fingers and towed them away. “Tomorrow. You’ll get the bandage off tomorrow. Now, where were we again? Right . . . I was just about to do this.” He kissed me gently, and it made me forget all about my injury.

  It made me forget about a lot of things . . .

  Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in my head, and I skated my mouth off his. “You could’ve died!”

  “What?” His voice was all raspy.

  “When you bit me! I had silver in my blood. You could’ve died. How come you didn’t?”

  “That Sillin injection Greg gave me counteracted the silver I ingested. Counteracted the metal in your blood, too.”

  I blinked but then snapped out of my daze. “Liam should never have told you about—”

  August pressed a finger against my lips. “When I bit you, I understood the risks, and I would take them a thousand times over to get you back.”

  Tears welled up.

  “Oh, sweetheart. Don’t cry. There’s been too much crying around here.”

  I inhaled a breath, trying to rein in my emotions.

  “Between Mom, Evelyn, Matt, Sarah—”

  I smiled, even though my cheek turned wet. “Sarah cried?” I scrubbed the tears away with the back of my hand. I could believe Matt had gotten teary-eyed; he had the gentlest heart. But Sarah?

  “Don’t tell her I told you. She swore me to secrecy.” August tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. “You’re the most popular girl in this hospital. Every single Boulder has come to visit you, to the greatest pleasure of the nurses.”

  I laughed, and again it tugged on whatever awaited me behind the gauze.

  “I have more questions.”

  He sighed. “Let me get comfortable.” He scooted me to the side of the narrow bed so he could lie down beside me.

  “I know Evelyn visited me here, so I imagine she’s okay, but did Cassandra—did she send someone?”

  “Are you sure you want to know everything tonight?”

  I nodded.

  He splayed his hand against my ribcage. “After you warned Matt, Frank left with Derek. They found Morgan’s daughter lurking on his property.”

  I blanched.

  “Little J.—Frank made him stay behind—he managed to put a bullet in her leg with his dad’s old shotgun.”

  Dread creeped up my veins. “He’s only fourteen.”

  August smiled. “Stood his ground like a grown man.”

  “What about the girls? Were they okay?”

  “The girls?”

  “Tamara, Amanda . . .” I didn’t add Sienna’s name to the list, since, to my knowledge, she wasn’t dating a Boulder, which meant she probably wouldn’t have been targeted.

  “Liam ordered two of our guys to stay with them before the fight began. They’re all fine.”

  I was glad to hear Liam had guarded Tamara.

  “Any more questions?”

  I nibbled on my bottom lip. “Do you think they’ll discharge me tomorrow?”

  “Greg will decide. If it was up to me, you’d be recuperating at my place.”

  His place . . . Thankfully, I was no longer connected to the machine, because I was pretty certain my heart rate had just shot through the roof.

  “Is that where I’m going after this?”

  His freckles darkened. “I’d like that, but I’d understand if that’s too much for you. Your new house is also ready.”

  The memory of the blood and urine made the walls of my hospital room squeeze in around me. “It was Justin. He confessed to the vandalism. He probably had help, though.”

  August’s head dipped. “Don’t worry. I already took care of it.”

  It being my house or the rest of the perpetrators? I didn’t ask. “What about Alex? What happened to him?”

  “He’s gone too.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead. Lucas.”

  “And Lori? Did Frank kill her when he got to his house?”

  “No. She’s in captivity back at HQ. Liam wanted to keep her for questioning. He’s trying to find out who Morgan’s biggest supporters are.”

  A yawn popped out of my mouth.

  August’s eyes softened. “You need to rest.”

  “I’ve been sleeping for a week.”

  “You’ve been mending for a week. You had three cracked ribs and several other . . . injuries.”

  I inhaled deeply. Nothing hurt, which told me my ribs must have already set.

  “Nothing feels broken anymore,” I said. Except my face.

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  “Did Liam . . . Did he”—I wrinkled my nose—“eat Morgan’s heart?”

  “He did.”

  “How? Did your blood also—”

  “Remember how Dad was with the Rivers? The afternoon of the duel, Greg was worried about how little Sillin we had left, so I told Dad to purchase some from the Rivers. They ended up giving it to us for free.”

  “Oh. That’s . . . kind of them.” Since nothing was ever free in this world, I assumed it was given in the hopes of getting something in return. Was August that something?

  “They arrived at the duel right after . . .” He shuddered.

  “Right after?”

  “Right after you made it back to us.” His words lingered in the air. “But he got the whole story, which made his hair go a lot grayer.”

  “He
must hate me for having put you at risk.”

  August’s body went a tad rigid. “Hate you? First off, Dimples, my dad loves you. Both my parents do. Secondly, you didn’t put me at risk, so don’t ever say that again. Don’t even think it, all right?”

  I said, “All right,” even though I knew I would always think it. How could I not? When August reached over me to click off the light shining over the bed, I said, “Can you leave it on?”

  “Of course.”

  He played with my hair, and the gentle movement lulled me.

  “I didn’t see them,” I murmured.

  “Didn’t see who, sweetheart?”

  “Mom and Dad.” My throat narrowed. “When I died, I didn’t see them.” A beat passed. “You think I wasn’t dead long enough, or do you think there’s nothing waiting for us after?”

  Although his chest rose and fell steadily, his pulse picked up speed. “I don’t know.”

  I appreciated his honesty, even though it made my throat close up some more. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For bringing me back.” At least people had waited for me on this side.

  He dropped my hair and tucked me closer, stamping a kiss on my temple, which I felt even through the gauze. “I’ll always bring you back.”

  And I knew he would. Every time I’d gotten lost, he’d been the one to bring me back.

  60

  I woke up to a brightness so white I snapped my lids up—lid. The other one was still mummified by the gauze. The tan wall came into focus first. I’d never been particularly fond of that color, but as I gazed at it, I thought it was quite marvelous.

  The low drone of voices outside my hospital room made me turn onto my other side. Chair legs scraped, and a tremulous whispered, “Querida,” rose in time with Evelyn.

  With trembling hands, she cupped my cheeks, careful not to apply too much pressure to my bandaged one, and then pressed her uncharacteristically pale lips to my forehead, then to my nose, and then to my forehead again. “I will not make old bones if you keep doing things like this to me.”