by Jeff Hale
My passivity only made him angrier, although he left off trying to beat my face to a pulp. Instead, he picked me up bodily again in a fireman’s carry, taking me further out into the parking lot before slamming me full on into the pavement.
I felt the back of my head hit the asphalt and everything went dim for a moment. Bright flashes filled my inner vision and nausea roiled into my throat. I felt his boot connect with my legs, three, four, five times, splintering my kneecap, before I heard a strangled snarl as he dropped down next to my head and sank his teeth into my throat.
It hurt, and he could have crushed my windpipe if he had wanted to, but he merely broke the skin, drawing blood and leaving teeth marks that would be evident to any other shifter who might be watching. He was asking me to yield.
As if I hadn’t already been doing that.
Struggle on my part would be taken as refusal. I lay still and let a small whine slip my throat, granting him his victory over me. Sure, I hadn’t fought back so his win had been a given, but it was the principle of the thing.
He gave me a shake, his teeth still locked on my throat, before letting go and standing back up. He punctuated his withdrawal with a final kick to my stomach that left me curled up and vomiting blood onto the pavement. For some asinine reason all I could think of was that I hoped no one had seen us and called the cops. I didn’t hear any sirens yet, so far so good.
I heard Darien walk away from me, saying nothing as he retreated back to the motel room. I lay on the pavement for several minutes, trying to breathe, feeling the strangely painful sensation as my bones began to knit. Once the nausea had subsided and I felt like I could move, I carefully got to my feet and staggered one legged back into the motel room, gritting my teeth against pain that wanted to drop me again, and shut the door behind me.
Darien was sitting on the small couch that faced the television, his eyes fixed on the screen. It was on the Disney Channel, showing Aladdin. He was drinking a beer. There was a second beer sitting on the floor next to his feet, the cap off. Next to it was a pile of wet hand towels and a Ziploc bag full of ice.
I dropped to the floor and crawled my way over to him, settling in against the front of his legs and using one of the towels to wipe the blood from my face. I picked up the beer and took a long drink, feeling it sting as it hit my lips, and burn its way down my windpipe. It tasted good. I took the baggie of ice and propped it between the back of my head and his knee, feeling the coolness seep into my skin.
Darien still hadn’t said anything, but we would be okay, eventually. He had forgiven me, as evidenced by his thoughtfulness with the ice, towels, and beer. It was just going to take him longer to forget.
We made it all the way through Aladdin and part way through Beauty and the Beast before he uttered a single word. And then it was just a simple question.
“Care to explain?”
I took a swig out of the bottle of tequila sitting next to me and then passed it up to him. We had given up on the beer a while back and switched to the hard stuff. I think we both wanted to do our best to get as drunk as possible, even if it was a vain attempt.
“She started it,” I told him. I didn’t want him to think that I had just blithely trod on what he considered his territory without some kind of invitation.
He smacked me in the back of the head with the tequila bottle. It hurt.
“Well, she did.”
He sighed. “Any chance you know why she might have started it?”
“I might.”
He smacked me with the bottle again and I winced. “Do you really want to try my patience right now, Alex?”
Did I ever mention that I was stupid enough once to shoot a hunger frenzied werewolf? And here I was purposely prodding that same werewolf whom I had angered yet again.
“Gimme the bottle first.” I held my hand up over my head until I felt the smooth glass touch my skin, then took another pull from it before answering him. “She doesn’t want to be in a permanent relationship, at least not for awhile.”
He was quiet for a few moments. “Alright, I can understand that. So we can just be boyfriend and girlfriend then.”
“That’s still permanent.”
“How?”
“Are you planning on ever breaking up with her?”
“No.”
“Then permanent. She knows that it’s permanent for you, and she doesn’t want that yet.”
He reached a hand down and I handed the tequila back up to him. He took a long drink. “I thought she felt the same way though, that I did.” There was confusion in his voice.
I turned so I could face him. “Mate, look, she likes you, a lot, but she wants to experience the world first, see what all is out there before she makes the ‘this is who I’m gonna spend the rest of my life with’ decision. You seem to keep forgetting how young she is.”
He looked crestfallen, almost depressed, and he tipped the bottle up and drained most of what was left in it. “I know. Wishful thinking on my part I guess.”
“I think you’re going to have a hard time reining her in anyway, Darien. It should be pretty obvious by now what her Aspect is, what she’s going to change into, and you know how fickle a lot of the cat shifters can be.”
“A cat?” He was quiet a moment, thinking. “Damn, you’re right, I don’t know why I didn’t sense it before.” He rolled the bottle between his hands. “She’s going to be a handful, all right.” He chuckled, then sobered. “And she’s going to be hard pressed to stay faithful even in a permanent relationship. God, I’m going to be picking a lot of fights.” He rubbed at his forehead with a finger.
“She turned the whammy on me in the car.”
“She did what?”
“Like what she did at the club, only worse.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be. I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that I don’t find her extremely attractive, because I do, and I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t enjoy it, because I did.” I saw his nostrils flare and I could feel anger starting to rise. “But, I would never have started anything with her without an invitation from her first; I wouldn’t do that to you.” The anger started to ebb. “However, I reckon I deserved everything you dished out to me earlier, probably more if truth be told.”
I turned away from him again, hoping that he wouldn’t lash out at me again, but bracing myself just in case. He didn’t. He made a grumbling noise under his breath and switched the channel. We were now watching a late night cooking show and he made no move to change it.
I put up with the cooking show for as long as I could before giving up and heading into the bathroom to take a shower. Other than my face, I was still covered in blood from earlier. I had left it for as long as possible in deference to Darien.
Not only had he caught me playing tonsil hockey with the woman he had declared as his mate, but he was an Alpha as well, and I was not. While Darien’s pack was small, just me, and now Katelyn, it made him my leader, which only made my transgression even worse. He had been within his rights to kill me. It was a testament to our friendship that he had not. I had left the results of his retribution on me as a balm to his wounded pride, but damned if I was going to get blood on the sheets.
The hot water felt good on my skin despite the abrasions on my face and arms that stung. I stood there for a long time just letting it run over me, soothing the aches and pains, occasionally spitting up bits of blood. I pressed my hands to my side, feeling the ribs that were broken there. They had already started to heal, but I wouldn’t be fully recovered, broken bone wise, until almost this time tomorrow. It takes almost a full twenty four hours for a shifter to completely heal a broken bone, a little bit longer if the break was extremely severe. Soft tissues were the easiest to heal and the minor internal bleeding that had caused me to throw up blood had already mostly fixed itself.
I still couldn’t quite support my weight on my right leg; sharp pain shot through it when I tried. The kn
eecap was still a mess and beginning to twitch constantly as the bone fragments realigned themselves and began to mend.
I wasn’t a doctor, and I didn’t know all the technical ins and outs of shifter healing, I just knew that we healed pretty damned quick and it always seemed the worst wounds healed first, as though nature had her own triage list. Plus, the older the shifter, the faster they healed. The concussion Darien had given me had been gone by the time I had gotten fed up with the cooking show. Cuts and bruises, those might take a few days though since they were the most minor of my injuries.
I swayed a bit in the shower. My metabolism was so focused on healing that purifying the toxins in my system from the alcohol was the least of its worries. By the time we had finished the bottle of tequila, I had been quite pleasantly inebriated.
Shower done and dried off, I hobbled out to the main room and into my bedroom. Darien was still watching the television, a half empty second bottle of tequila sitting between his knees. He’d taken his pony tail out and his long dark hair hung over his shoulders, partly obscuring his face. My blood still streaked his knuckles.
He turned his head briefly in my direction as I passed by. I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, so if his gaze noted the livid bruising across my ribs and abdomen and the swollen mess of my knee, he made no acknowledgement of it. I didn’t expect him to. I also didn’t care. I was so tired that I didn’t even bother to find a pillow, being sound asleep as soon as I crawled under the blankets.
I woke sometime late in the morning. My muscles were still stiff and extremely sore, but my knee at least felt as though I could walk on it today. I’d be sporting a limp for the rest of the day, but I could deal with that. The ribs still hurt considerably when I moved, but a cursory examination showed that they were almost finished mending.
A quick look in the mirror showed me that my face looked as though someone had beaten the crap out of me. The bruising would go away last, and for a couple days I would probably look a bit worse for wear. I brushed my teeth and hair, rustled up some clean clothes and headed back out to the small sitting room.
Darien was asleep on the couch, his long legs dangling off the end and his head pillowed on an armrest. A count of the empty bottles lying on the floor around the edge of the couch suggested that he had tried to consume every bit of alcohol we had in the place, plus some extra that he must have wandered out to purchase after I had fallen asleep.
I rummaged through the kitchenette area, trying to be as quiet as possible, because now that I was awake, my body was demanding that I fill it with food to replace the reserves it had used up in healing me. I came up with a package of chocolate Donettes, two cans of Pepsi, and a singular slice of cold pizza, all of which I downed as though I were starving.
I left a few minutes later, Darien still asleep in the motel room. I had left him a note that said I was in search of food. It was ten forty five in the morning, so I headed to the nearest Denny’s that I had remembered seeing on our way here.
The waitress who led me to my table did her best not to stare, but I knew what my face looked like right now. I gave her an encouraging grin and had her take my order immediately, her eyes going wide when I asked for enough food to feed four people my size. I would have been better off hunting, but I didn’t know the area and I wasn’t taking a chance.
Food gone, a generous tip for the waitress, and a happy tummy later, I let myself back into the motel room. Darien was gone, although all his things were still here. I had noted on the way in that his motorcycle was missing from its parking space.
There were three words scribbled hastily on the back of the note I had left him. Be back later. Whenever later was. I didn’t worry too much; this was what he did when he needed to think.
Exhaustion hit me and I laid down to take a nap, just drifting off when there was a sharp knock on the motel room door. I pushed myself up from the bed, wondering who it could be; Darien had a key and I heavily doubted it was Brenda.
I looked through the peephole in the door and was surprised to see Katelyn standing there, shifting nervously. Emotion flooded me, feelings that I shouldn’t have for her, and I felt my own nerves begin to frazzle. I wasn’t sure what she wanted and Darien wasn’t here. If she decided she wanted to finish what she had started with me last night, I was afraid I just might do something that would get me killed.
THIRTEEN
Katelyn
I wasn’t sure what had possessed me to go to their motel room. The clerk had given me the number and I had stood outside the door for several minutes before actually knocking. Once I got up the courage, it was another minute before the door finally opened, Alex standing there in a pair of faded blue jeans and a thin white t-shirt.
He looked like someone had tried to kill him.
Both of his eyes were blackened, his nose was mottled purples and blues, his lips split in several places and puffy still. There was even bruising along his forehead. Cuts and abrasions marred his face and there were fading bite marks on his neck. His arms sported bruises and scrapes as well and I could see that he was putting most of his weight on his left leg.
“Jesus, Alex, what happened?!” I exclaimed, my eyes going wide.
He didn’t answer me, but he did move to the side so I could enter the room, shutting the door behind him. I stared around the living area of the motel room, seeing the crack in the wall near the dining table, the large amount of empty alcohol bottles scattered on the floor around the couch, a bloody hand towel lying amongst them.
“Darien’s not here,” Alex said, almost defensively.
I felt a wave of guilt and shame go over me. I remembered what I had done in the car the night before and I felt bad about it. I had already known Darien wasn’t here, due to the lack of radar ping in my head, but in truth I had come to talk to him, not Alex. I thought he deserved to hear my reservations about our relationship straight from me and not secondhand.
“I’m sorry about last night, Alex.” I was too embarrassed to look right at him. “I just had to… I had to know if the way Darien made me feel was just a shifter thing, or because it was Darien.”
“And?”
My cheeks flushed. It had felt good kissing Alex, really good, but it didn’t have the impact on me that kissing Darien did.
“It’s because it’s Darien.” I laughed softly. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Katie, it’s okay, my ego isn’t damaged.” He laughed, then winced, a hand going to his ribs.
“You didn’t tell me what happened, Alex,” I reminded him, although I was starting to have a scary suspicion.
He didn’t say anything, just considered me, and I felt my suspicion snap to certainty.
“Darien did this to you, didn’t he?”
Once again I got silence, but that was all I needed. “Fuck! And here I came over to try to smooth things between us, to explain myself to him. He did this because we kissed, didn’t he? Possessive, overbearing asshole!”
“Just let it be, Katie.” Alex was shaking his head at me.
“He had no right to do that to you, Alex!”
He gave me a look of disbelief. “You don’t get it, do you, Katie? Maybe not in the world of human social norms, but in our world,” and his gesture included me as well, “shifter society, he had every right! He is my Alpha, he has claimed you as his mate, whether you reciprocate the feelings or not, and I knew that! I allowed things to happen with you last night that shouldn’t have, I knew the risk I was taking, and this is the result of my transgression. I might not like it sometimes, I was human once too, but believe me, it could have been a lot worse, so don’t go getting dirty at Darien for doing something to me that I deserved.”
I just stared at him, wide eyed again. He was right, I didn’t get it. I hadn’t been exposed to shifter society yet, not really, and I didn’t know the ins and outs, what was acceptable and what wasn’t. They had told me that violence was part of being a shifter, but I hadn’t realized they had meant it
so broadly.
“So let me get this straight. Darien has the right, at least in his mind, to beat the shit out of any guy I get cozy with?” I demanded, incredulous.
“Another shifter, who knows how Darien regards you, yes. A human, no. Doesn’t mean he won’t want to, but he won’t act on it. Not unless he wanted some severe repercussions himself from the Elders.”
“That’s good to know, at least.” I looked Alex up and down again. “Still doesn’t make me feel any better about what he did to you, though.”
He smiled at me, a soft smile. “I appreciate your concern, Katie, I really do, but I’m a big boy, I can handle it. A day or so and you won’t even know I was hurt.”
“Yeah, shifter healing, I know.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “So if this happened last night, and you’re still this banged up… just how bad did he hurt you?”
“Katie.” He raised his eyebrows.
“Alright, alright.” I headed back towards the door. “I have to go, I have a party tonight I still need to figure out what I’m going to wear for.”
“Did you want me to tell Darien anything?”
“You don’t even have to tell him I was here, Alex.”
“Yes, I do. He’ll smell you in here when he gets back, and if I pretend you weren’t here, he’ll assume the worst.”
“And he’ll beat the crap out of you again?”
“If I’m lucky.”
“Shit.” I rubbed above my eyes. I was getting a headache again. “Just tell him whatever you want, Alex, but add that I don’t like possessiveness, and if he ever lays a hand on you again, I’ll never see him again, okay?”
“Okay.” He didn’t sound too sure. “He’s not a bad person, Katie, please don’t think that. He’s not human, never has been. You have to remember that.”
