Beneath the Skin

by Amy Lee Burgess

  “If at any point he stops breathing, you call nine-one-one. Do you know CPR?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m going to hang up now, but I’m going to call back in one minute when I’ve arranged things. Do you understand? Call nine-one-one if he stops breathing.”

  “I understand.”

  The phone went dead.

  Murphy squeezed my hand and his eyes went very wide and dark.

  “Sorcha!” he whispered.

  “Murphy, it’s me, Stanzie,” I whispered back, squeezing his hand. He jerked it away from me.

  He cried out her name again, then something in Irish that I couldn’t understand. But I understood enough to know he thought he talked to her and it killed me.

  “Liam, lie back.” I pushed his thrashing body into the pillows, and he was so weak he couldn’t fight me. He lay there panting and sweating, tangled in the sheets, and I tried to straighten them as he whispered her name again and again.

  Chapter 11

  Hospital chairs sucked. Plastic and hopeless, they were incapable of offering comfort and instead increased suffering. It didn’t help they were usually puke-green or garish orange.

  After the mad rush to the hospital in the back of an ambulance with a paramedic working like hell over Murphy’s inert and collapsed body, they stuck me in some damn waiting room with green and orange plastic chairs from hell, and a broken vending machine.

  I lost track of time after two hours. I sat in a puke-green chair with my head in my hands and thought about the Armani shirt and how the stretcher with Murphy’s body strapped to it had rolled over it on the way out the door.

  If Murphy died, maybe he could be buried in the shirt--if it weren’t ruined by the

  stretcher’s wheels. Maybe they’d let me do that much.

  The ghosts of Grey, Elena and now Rudi haunted me. I kept seeing them die on me.

  Elena’s broken neck and vacant stare from the backseat of the Mustang. Grey trying so hard to tell me it was okay, blood running out of his mouth as he stared into my eyes and died. Rudi, clutching at my hand, slumped against the expensive gold-flecked wallpaper in the ballroom of a French chateau, saying my name before dying. And now Murphy, pushing my hands away and calling out for his dead bond mate.

  I’d been shopping and he’d been dying. He’d tried to show me how to be a proper wolf and I’d bitten him, and because of that, he was dying.

  These people, these beautiful, vibrant, wonderful people, gone. I’d have to pick up the broken pieces of myself and try to put them back together again. Only each time it happened, more pieces went missing, and I’d never be whole.

  Although I knew I wasn’t responsible for any of these deaths, they still weighed heavily on my conscience simply because I’d been there. It was the grandmothers and grandfathers--they were the ones responsible for all the deaths. It hadn’t been an accident that the pill Murphy had swallowed had contained some sort of deadly narcotic. It had been placed there on purpose to kill him. Just as everyone else had been killed on purpose. But still I felt guilty--as if I were stained to the soul with some unspeakable evil and I would never come clean.

  I was crying when I felt someone’s strong arm go around my shoulders.

  I lifted my face to see Councilor Jason Allerton through a haze of tears.

  “Do you have it?” His voice was gentle.

  I reached into my purse, which I had braced between my feet and withdrew the aspirin bottle. It contained only the homemade capsule.

  “Don’t let a grandmother run the tests,” I whispered.

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  “The grandmothers and grandfathers, they don’t like the modern Pack, where we’re

  headed. Everyone who died had a good job in the mainstream. Jobs that needed networks of Others, that brought attention. Elena developed new computer games. One was about

  werewolves. They were just games. Grandfather Tobias looked over my car that day. He was a mechanic. He did something. To kill Elena, and he didn’t care if Grey and I were killed too. A grandfather worked in Sorcha’s lab, didn’t he? Or a grandmother.”

  “A grandfather. He was a janitor. He found Sorcha’s body,” Allerton confirmed. He kept his arm around my shoulders and I was grateful for the contact.

  “Rudi gave a lecture on something I couldn’t even understand. But he was going to make his pack rich. And that little girl’s father, the one who drowned in the hot tub. He didn’t want to tell his daughter what she was until she was sixteen. So she could go to school with Others and build a network and be mainstream when she grew up. They don’t want us to change. They say we’re soft and losing our connection with the wolf inside. They say we use that side of ourselves as a hobby, a game, an escape. And maybe they’re right, but killing us off, would we really go back to the old ways?”

  “You’d be surprised what people do when they’re scared enough. There’s been a huge

  cultural shift in the last hundred and fifty years, Constance. Modern things, modern times. And they’re old enough, most of them, to remember something different where most of us now are not.”

  “They lied about the tox screens and the autopsies. They must have put something in the water, in Rudi’s water, and then lied or substituted the results.”

  “I watched his autopsy performed. But you’re right. They could have tampered with the tox screen results. The water bottles were misplaced. No way to test now. But yes, Constance.

  You’ve proved what I’ve been afraid to face or suspect.”

  “They’ll say I tampered with his medicine,” I warned. “But I didn’t.”

  “I believe you and I will protect you, Constance. My word as a Councilor.” He gave my shoulders a squeeze and I took a deep breath.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he? Nobody’s come to talk to me, or tell me anything and it’s been hours. He’s dead and you made them wait so you could tell me, didn’t you?” My fingers went to my pendant and found the smooth perfection of the pearl Murphy had chosen for me. “Can I see him? It won’t be real for me until I see him.”

  Arm around my shoulders, Allerton walked me down a long hallway, past a nurse’s

  station and two orderlies lounging by a staff room door. I smelled lilies and medicine and sickness.

  I waited to smell death, the black, strangling stench of death, Murphy’s death, and the last little bit of my wolf faded out of existence. I didn’t think I’d ever bring her back again.

  Allerton opened the door to the room and I braced myself. I didn’t smell death, which confused me until I walked through the doorway and saw Murphy.

  Allerton’s arm slipped away from my shoulders and he gave me a little shove toward the bed where Murphy sat up, pale but very much alive.

  “I close my eyes for five minutes and you go and figure everything out and don’t even clue me in. That’s damned selfish, Constance, don’t you think?”

  I couldn’t even begin to describe how I felt. It was a rush of emotions, but joy was predominant.

  “You’re the selfish one, Liam Murphy.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so I did a little bit of both. “Making me think you were dying. I ought to kill you for scaring me, you know that?”

  “I keep telling these fools it’s jet lag, but they tell me it was a huge overdose of oxycodone. Doctors think they know every damn thing.”

  A white-coated doctor with a nice smile and a very shiny stethoscope shook his head. He stood by Murphy’s bed but I hadn’t even noticed him.

  I knew by his smell he was Pack.

  “Severest case of jet lag I’ve ever treated.” He held out his hand for me to shake. “I’m--”

  “Just leaving I hope.” Murphy snorted from the bed. “Can’t you see I want to talk to my bond mate, doctor?”

  “He’s going to be fine, as you can plainly tell.” The doctor gave me a smile as he walked briskly to the door and left. Allerton was already gone.

  Murphy and I looked at each
other.

  “Are you gonna stand there staring, or will you come closer? You scared of me or

  something?” Murphy gave me one of his boyish grins and I went to the bed, uncertain if my legs would hold me up much longer.

  I sat on the edge of the mattress but didn’t touch him. I wanted to so much.

  “You been crying, Newcastle?” Murphy’s voice was gruff and I nodded.

  “You know I’m a crybaby. I cry over every damn thing,” I said and to prove it, I started to cry again.

  Instead of hugging me, he patted my arm and something broke inside me.

  I got up and went to the window. Seven stories below a freeway crowded with cars

  flowed in a loop around the city. Houston was so faceless. I couldn’t wait to leave.

  “Guess who called and offered us a place in his pack?” Murphy’s voice was jovial but strained.

  As I’d sat in a puke-green hospital chair crying my eyes out, he’d been talking on the phone. He’d had time for Allerton to tell him the score and for phone calls from Irish bastards with different colored eyes. And when I’d needed him to touch me, he patted me on the arm like he would a child.

  I nurtured the spurt of anger, because it helped stop the tears.

  “Your friend, Paddy,” I said to the window.

  “Your friend too, Constance, if you give him half a chance. What do you say? I get the hell out of this damn hospital bed and we’ll go to Dublin and join Mac Tíre.”

  I didn’t say anything. I started to get pissed at myself. I’d thought he was dead and he wasn’t and I should be happy, two minutes ago I had been happy, but now I was absolutely miserable. The man had nearly died, he had IV lines running in and out of his veins and all I could think about was that I wanted him to hold me.

  Oh, Constance, you’re pathetic, I told myself.

  “If you’re worried about shifting, I told you, it’ll be you and me until you feel

  comfortable with others around you. Paddy won’t push anything, I swear, Constance.” His voice was gentle but starting to fray.

  I still didn’t say anything. My reflection in the window was puffy. My eyes were red-rimmed, my hair a frigging mess and I saw the blatant lie of my pendant gleaming against the dark glass.

  “Tell you what, I’ll find us a small pack and then you don’t have to worry at all. You can run and play all you like, Constance. That’s better, isn’t it? That’s what you want?”

  “Murphy,” I said with an impatient, bitter sigh. “You’re lying in that damn hospital bed because of me. Because I bit you. I cannot continue to be what I am. I have to grow, if I’m going to shift, I have to be more than I am right now. So don’t tell me we’ll join a small pack and I’ll go around being the child anymore because I can’t.”

  “I pushed you too hard, Constance. It’s why you bit me, because I pushed too hard, too soon. And I’ll never make that up to you, I know, but let me try at least.” Murphy’s gaze fixed upon me but I wouldn’t turn around.

  “It’s not my birthday until August, but that’s just a formality. That’s when it will be official, so you’ll have to wait a few months but it’ll go fast.” I unclasped my pendant and held it in my palm. Murphy did not need the chaos that was me in his life. He’d done me a favor and saved me from Ducharme, but I’d paid him back. I’d figured everything out and now I should get the hell out if his life and not put him through the wringer every damn time I got insecure.

  “You want to sever the bond.” His voice seemed to choke a little and I leaned my

  forehead against the glass.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know how to fix this, but, please, Stanzie.

  Don’t leave me. Give me a chance. Just one? That’s all I’m asking, and if you’re not happy by your birthday, then we’ll have this talk, but please not right now.”

  I shook my head. A few months would make no difference.

  He pounded a fist into the mattress. “What are you going to do, Constance? Run back to Boston with your tail between your legs? After your birthday and you’re free, are you going to go to Regionals to find another bond mate?” Reproach and anger scorched through in his tone and I continued to look out of the hospital window rather than at him.

  “I’m not going to go to Regionals, but I am going to go back to Boston,” I admitted.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” exploded Murphy behind me. “You’re gonna turn your back on the Pack, is that it? Because you’re scared? I don’t understand you!”

  “It seems to me the Pack turned its back on me long before I turned mine on it.” I put one palm flat against the glass. It was cold because of the air-conditioning and felt almost slimy beneath my skin. “I loved that old man, Grandfather Tobias. I used to visit him at least twice a week and have coffee in his little kitchen and listen to his tales of the old days when he was young and had a bond mate. I used to tell him things about my life and my bond mates and I loved him.”

  Behind me, Murphy sat up straighter in bed and gave me his full attention. I saw his handsome face in the glass of the window, totally consumed with what I told him. I had no idea why all this stuff spewed out of me, but it was as if I were a bottle of champagne someone had shaken then uncorked. I spilled and fizzed everywhere, unable to contain any of my buried resentment and my betrayal and rage.

  “He was the first person I wanted to show my new car. I actually drove that car to him and asked him to take a look at it, because I trusted him and I wanted his approval. And he pretended to be happy for me and joked around with me and went underneath the car to inspect it and he did something, Murphy. He set me up. He wanted to kill Elena, but didn’t care who he used to do it, and he used me, the one person in the whole pack who actually loved him and didn’t think he was a duty or a burden. He didn’t care if I died too, or that I would always bear the weight of knowing I was driving when my bond mates died. He cared more about the Pack than he did about me.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw Grey and Elena as they had been that last, final night. Grey’s hair pulled back in a ponytail. Elena’s white dress. My fists clenched at the unfairness of it. I saw Grandfather Tobias and his crinkled, lopsided grin. I could taste the coffee he used to make for us to drink on Saturday mornings.

  “He turned against me after the accident. He wouldn’t answer the door when I went to him, when I wanted him to comfort me. He was the only one I wanted near me and he wouldn’t answer the door. That’s when I gave up, Murphy. When I started to think I was guilty and I did kill them. I wanted Grandfather Tobias to tell me it was a freak accident and not my fault, and he wouldn’t answer the door. And the irony of the whole thing is he was the one who really killed them.”

  “His concept of the Pack, Stanzie, was skewed.”

  “Was it?” I whirled around. “We are a bunch of weak, posturing children. We don’t live by our wits, and our wolves are pastimes and playthings, nobody knows that better than me.

  Somewhere along the line we’ve lost our pride, our honor. There are actually packs out there who don’t tell their children what they really are because they’re ashamed. They rationalize their decision and pretty it up so they don’t actually say what they mean, but they are. They are ashamed! Grandfather Tobias was ashamed of me and you are too. Just let me go, Murphy. Let me go live in Boston and not be Pack anymore. I don’t deserve it and I don’t want it.”

  “I was never ashamed of you,” he told me.

  “Bullshit!” I shouted. “You liar! I saw your face after the first time we shifted. I heard what you said about how a bigger pack would never have let me get away with what I am. I’m a disgrace and I thought I could change, but I don’t know if I can. What is the point? Everyone dies or goes away, and what is the point?”

  “I didn’t die. I’m not going to go away, not if you don’t shut me out, Constance.”

  Murphy’s eyes were very dark as he stared at me.

  “You? You’re the worst one of all,” I s
narled. “When we’re in bed together you won’t even look me in the eye, and when I try to touch you, you always shy away. I was right there with you, holding your hands, and you pushed me away and started talking to her. I’m not dead, but if I’m with you I’ll have to live in the shadow of a dead woman, and I thought I could do it but I can’t. I can’t. I am tired of the dead having more power over me than the living. I’m tired of living in their shadows. You can work with me and help me and I could become a better wolf, a better person, but I will never be her and that’s not how I want to live my life, Murphy.”

  He stared at me. “What did I say?” It was my turn to stare.

  I had my arms wrapped around myself, because I was cold and wanted to be sick and it felt as if I were falling apart.

  “When?” I gaped at him.

  “To Sorcha. When I pushed you away and talked to her, what did I say?”

  “I don’t know. You were speaking Irish or Gaelic or whatever the hell language you

  speak. How the hell do I know what you said?”

  He shook his head.

  “So I’m being condemned by my words when you can’t even tell me what I said, because you don’t understand the language? That’s harsh, Constance. You’re going to walk away from it all because of something I said that you didn’t even understand.”

  “I didn’t have to understand. You’re always talking to her. You say her name before you come, Murphy. You think my eyes are closed, but they’re not. “

  He bit his lip. “She was the only one I ever slept with until you. I’ll admit the first time we went to bed I felt overwhelmed and guilty. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry for that.”

  My lungs could not seem to suck down a decent amount of air.

  “Tell you the truth, Constance, I don’t think I could have actually gone through with it with Sharon or Karen or whoever the hell she was at the Great Hunt. I just wanted to be alive again, that’s all. I came to that Gathering and I realized how I’d been hiding and refusing to live without Sorcha. You think you were betrayed by your Grandfather Tobias, well, who the hell do you think got Grandfather Mick that job as a janitor? So he could watch over Sorcha, because the woman would work late nights, even when I pleaded with her not to.” He shook his head, eyes dark with futile memory.