by Lori Drake
While Adam drew Lucy into his arms and out of the way, Chris approached the doorway and looked inside. There was blood everywhere. It had sprayed the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and the bedspread, where a woman lay on her side with her entrails hanging out. On the wall above the bed was a message scrawled in blood. One word. Three letters.
Run.
Joey pushed past Chris into the room and rushed for the bed. “Jenny! Chris, get Ben!”
Chris tore his eyes from the grisly scene and turned to do that, but Ben was already there. He stepped aside to let his brother past, and Ben rushed in to join Joey. Chris moved back to block the doorway, not wanting any of the rubbernecking guests to get an eyeful. He could just barely hear Ben and Joey conversing in hushed tones behind him.
“She’s alive, but barely. I’m going to need my bag. It’s in the trunk.”
“I’ll get it.”
“She said she wanted to lie down,” Lucy said, sobbing against her brother’s shoulder. He held her and rubbed her back, questions in his eyes that Chris didn’t have answers for.
What in the actual fuck?
Joey slipped past him, pulling the door closed behind her. She grabbed Chris’s arm and caught his eyes. “I’ll be right back. No one enters, understood? No one.”
He nodded and watched as she strode off with such purpose, such presence, that the crowd naturally parted around her.
Eric shoved his way through the crowd to get to them a few seconds later. “What’s going on?” he demanded, his eyes boring into Chris’s as if whatever it was were all his fault.
Chris chose his words quickly, but carefully. “Jenny had a mishap. Ben and Joey are taking care of her.”
Eric frowned. “Get out of my way.”
He tried to move past, but Chris stepped in his path and held his eyes, alpha to alpha. “You can’t do anything for her. You’ll just be in the way.” Joey may or may not have meant to include Eric in her instructions, but getting in Eric’s way gave Chris enough satisfaction to make it worthwhile regardless.
Eric’s eyes glinted dangerously. He grabbed the front of Chris’s jacket and slammed him against the door. The door rattled in its frame. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. She’s mine,” he said. A low growl rumbled from his throat.
Chris’s eyes narrowed and locked with Eric’s. He wasn’t intimidated in the least by the other wolf’s domineering behavior. Truth be told, it made him want to step aside even less. “Get your hands off me.”
Eric’s grip on his shirt only tightened. “Or what?” he sneered, leaning in closer.
Chris smirked, laughing on the inside. The guy was comically easy to provoke. It may have been truly unwise to needle him, but Chris just couldn’t help himself. “Or your girlfriend’s gonna be pissed, for starters. I think you’ve been humiliated enough for one night, don’t you?”
Eric’s low growl intensified. A muscle in his cheek twitched and a vein in his forehead stood out. A few long, tense seconds passed before his lips slowly curved in a smile and his balled fists relaxed. “You’ve got balls. I like that.”
Chris stared at him in disbelief. While he’d remained unfazed by Eric’s aggression, this abrupt shift in his demeanor caused the hairs on the back of Chris’s neck to stand up. It was unsettling as hell.
Eric smoothed wrinkles from Chris’s jacket and gave his chest a pat, then stepped back and turned away. “Adam, get your sister upstairs,” he said, then motioned the rest of his pack closer and had a few quiet words with them.
Shouldering Ben’s medical bag, Joey returned just as the Granite Falls pack was dispersing through the crowd. She paused only a moment to frown at Eric. “Get these people out of here before someone calls the cops.”
“Wait,” Chris said. “Whoever did this might still be here.”
Joey frowned, but nodded. “Deal with it.” She slipped past Chris and into the room, closing the door behind her.
Though he had no desire to get up close and personal with Eric again, Chris stepped forward to speak quietly with him. “There’s a lot of blood. Whoever did this should stink of it.”
Eric nodded. “My people are at the doors. If they’re still here, we’ll get them.” Then he faced the milling crowd of curious partygoers. “All right, scabs! Party’s over, get out!”
Joey picked her way across the bloodstained carpet carefully but quickly. There was so much blood. It was hard to believe that it all came from one small woman. The room looked like something out of a crime drama. No, more like a horror movie. She’d never been a fan of slasher flicks, but she imagined they were something like this.
Ben had rolled Jenny on her back while Joey was gone. He knelt on the bed beside her, pressing a formerly white pillowcase to her abdomen.
“We need a doctor,” he said, calm but not quite collected. “Hell, we need a fucking surgeon.”
“You’re all we’ve got at the moment. You said it yourself: she probably wouldn’t survive long enough for us to call for help,” Joey reminded him, setting his bag down on the edge of the bed.
“If I can get her sewn up, she might be able to regenerate her way out of this, but she’s lost a lot of blood and her pulse is thready. She may need a transfusion.”
Joey unzipped the bag and started pulling out supplies. “What do you need?”
“Scotch. Make it a double.”
“Be serious.”
“Gauze pads, lots of them. Suture needles and thread.”
“Disinfectant?”
“Don’t bother. If she survives long enough to get an infection, she’ll heal that too.”
“Even during the new moon?”
The question gave Ben pause. Wolf regeneration during the new moon was at its weakest, but it still happened. He grimaced, then shook his head. “We’ll have to take our chances. We don’t have the right supplies or the time.”
Nodding, Joey rummaged in the bag for what he’d requested, then took over compress duty while she watched him struggle to thread the needle. His hands were shaking, making the task difficult.
“You can do this,” she said. The confidence in her voice surprised her, but it was more important for him to hear it than for her to feel it.
Ben stopped and closed his eyes. His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath. “You sure about that scotch?” he asked.
Joey snorted. “When you’re finished, I’ll find you some.”
Ben opened his eyes and eyed her briefly, then went back to his task. “I’m holding you to that.” This time, he managed to thread the needle on the first try.
As Ben set to work, Joey counted her blessings that Jenny remained unconscious. She kept her fingers pressed to the pulse point on the girl’s slender wrist, keeping track of the slow but steady beats while Ben worked. As long as Jenny’s heart kept beating, she was in good shape—or, if not good, at least not dreadfully bad.
“I need both of your hands for a second,” Ben said.
Joey set Jenny’s arm down and complied, but when she went back to check for the young wolf’s pulse, she had difficulty finding it. “I can’t find her pulse. Shit, Ben, she’s not breathing!”
Ben cursed and abandoned his work, scrambling to perform compressions while Joey worked on keeping Jenny’s insides from spilling out again. Blood welled between her fingers and she grabbed a fresh handful of gauze to press to the partially stitched wound.
“Come on, girl… don’t quit on us,” Joey whispered.
She couldn’t be sure how long Ben spent performing CPR. He switched back and forth between doing chest compressions and puffing air into Jenny’s lungs several times before she finally took a breath on her own.
“It worked!” Ben exclaimed.
“Don’t look so surprised, please. And get back down here.”
Ben shifted on his knees to resume his stitching. “Sorry. In training, they said that it didn’t work as often as it does on TV.”
Joey nodded and curled her fingers around Jenny’s slender w
rist once more. “It could be my imagination, but I think her pulse is stronger now.”
“I work out.” Ben glanced up and grinned.
Joey couldn’t help but laugh. It was an anxious laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. “Shut up and sew.”
When they were finished, they sat back on their haunches and studied Ben’s handiwork. It was, frankly, terrible. But the wound was closed.
“Nice job, bro.”
“Don’t thank me yet. She’s still bleeding internally. The rest is up to her. Speaking of which, about that transfusion…”
Joey’s eyes darted to the bag. “Do you have a blood-type kit or something?”
“No, unfortunately.”
“Maybe one of her packmates knows her blood type.”
Ben smirked and wiped his bloody hands on a strip of bedsheet. It didn’t help much. “That’s what I love about you, Joey. Your unflinching optimism.”
“A negative.”
“What?”
“Your blood type, jackass. A negative.” Joey climbed off the edge of the bed and looked down at her own bloody hands, then around the room in the vain hope that there was an attached bathroom. There was not.
Ben’s brows shot up. “You know my blood type?”
“I know everyone’s blood type. Everyone in the immediate family, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Why not? I mean, what if it were you lying on that bed? I’m gonna go talk to Eric and see what I can find out.”
She was almost to the door when Ben asked, “What’s yours?”
Joey paused to glance behind her with one hand on the doorknob. “Same as yours. You need anything besides that scotch, doctor?”
“Um, about a gallon of hand sanitizer.”
Smirking, Joey cracked the door open and peeked out. The hallway was mostly clear, but Chris was leaning against the wall outside.
“Did she make it?” he asked, concern shining in his baby blues as he straightened.
“Yeah, so far. Where’s Eric?”
“In the living room with the others. Want me to get him?”
Joey hesitated, but nodded. “Yeah, but she needs blood. Can you ask if anyone knows her blood type while you’re out there? Also, if anyone is…” She frowned and looked over at Ben. “What’s the universal donor type again?”
“O negative,” Chris and Ben said in unison.
Joey blinked, eyes flicking back to Chris. “That’s your blood type.”
“I know.” He smiled, if faintly. “I’ll ask anyway. They might prefer to keep it in the pack.”
She lingered by the door longer than necessary, watching as he moved off down the hall. Maybe it was the stress of the last… however long it’d been… starting to catch up to her, but she couldn’t squelch the warm feelings that flooded her. He hadn’t even needed her to ask. It’d just been a given that if Jenny needed his blood, she’d get it. Why did he have to be such a nice guy? Damn him.
“Oh! And try to find a bottle of scotch,” Joey called after him.
Behind her, Ben chuckled. “Better late than never,” he muttered.
Joey returned to the bed and went back to monitoring Jenny’s pulse. “Do you want to go wash up?”
“Yeah, but I want to update Eric while I can still form coherent sentences.”
Joey chuckled, regarding him fondly. “You were great.”
“Don’t pat me on the back yet,” he said, and glanced down at the pale, unconscious girl on the bed. “If she survives, then you can do it.”
“When she survives, she can do it. Seriously, it’s a shame you’re with Brandon, because these sorts of heroics will get you laid.”
“Oh, I’m definitely getting laid, just not with her.” He grinned, but the moment of levity was brought up short by Eric’s arrival.
The door swung open and the Granite Falls Alpha filled the doorway, taking in the grim scene with an equally grim expression.
“I’d say it’s not as bad as it looks,” Joey offered. “But really, it’s as bad as it looks. Maybe worse.”
Eric closed the door behind him and crossed the room to stand beside the bed. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s stable, for now,” Ben said. “She took a deep slash to the abdomen. We got everything back inside and stitched her up. The rest is up to her.”
“We don’t know her blood type,” Eric said. “Jess is trying to reach her parents.”
Joey’s brow furrowed and she looked at Ben. “How long can we wait?”
“Hell if I know. I’m just an EMT, but given the amount she lost… I’d say time is of the essence.”
A pall fell over the room for a few seconds while Eric stared down at Jenny. He was impossible to read at times. This was one of those times.
“Chris volunteered to donate blood,” Joey said, fingers still pressed to the inside of Jenny’s wrist. She stroked her hair with the other hand. “He’s a universal donor. Right now, it’s our best option—our only option, unless anyone in your pack is type O negative.”
Eric’s eyes lifted at the mention of Chris, but met hers only briefly before they twitched upward to the message on the wall. His hands balled into fists.
“Do you have any idea who might have done this?” Joey asked, when he didn’t answer.
“Not specifically, no,” Eric said, his voice tight with emotion. “But it wouldn’t be our first run-in with a hunter.”
Joey exchanged an uneasy glance with her brother. “You think a hunter did this?”
“Who else would it be?” Eric sighed and rubbed the top of his stubbly, shaved head.
Joey had no answer for that, but withheld judgment. After all, they’d thought Chris had been killed by a hunter, and that’d turned out to be pretty off base.
“Tick tock,” Ben reminded them, gently.
“I’ll get Chris,” Joey said, and laid Jenny’s hand down on the bed.
“No,” Eric said. His eyes lingered on the blood-smeared wall.
Joey and Ben exchanged another glance, but Ben just shrugged and slid off the edge of the bed. “I’m going to go wash my hands. You two work this out and let me know when you’re ready.”
Frowning, Joey waited until the door closed behind Ben, then stood and joined Eric on the other side of the bed. “Hey.” She reached for his arm.
He turned when her fingers brushed his skin, but his brown eyes were hard. “I said no.”
“Yeah, we both heard you. But why the hell not? She needs this, Eric. This is serious. She could die. Hell, we’re lucky she’s not dead already.”
A muscle in his cheek twitched. “I know.”
She held his eyes, silently daring him to look away. “Do you? Because it sounds to me like you’re turning down her best chance at survival. For the record, this goes one of two ways. Either you agree to it or we do it behind your back, because I am not letting an eighteen-year-old girl die. Not when there’s any other option.”
He looked at her long and hard, then emitted a frustrated growl of a sigh. “Fine, do it.”
Joey took his face between her hands and drew him down for a light kiss. It seemed like the least she could do to soothe his bruised ego, and in that moment, the least she could do was all she could muster. She couldn’t pretend to understand him. She could barely pretend to like him.
His arm curled around her, pulling her against him, as if the kiss invited more. “Stay with me tonight?”
It was hardly an appropriate time for a proposition, but that wasn’t what made her stomach roll over. She’d been playing hard to get for weeks, not wanting to take the deception too far.
Fortunately, a quietly cleared throat saved her from answering.
“Sorry to interrupt, but are we doing this or not?” Ben asked.
Joey pushed Eric out of her personal space and turned toward the door. Chris stood behind Ben, regarding her with ice chips for eyes.
“Can we move her?” she asked, again wishing she had a chance to explain herself, but more tha
n a little annoyed that she had to at all. “This room’s a goddamn nightmare.”
8
Chris yawned and eyed the thin plastic tube that ran between his arm and Jenny’s for the umpteenth time. He had no idea how long Ben intended to leave him hooked up to the young wolf, but it’d been a couple of hours at least.
“How’re you doing?” Ben asked, probably noticing the yawn. He was observant like that.
“Okay. Starting to feel lightheaded.”
Ben checked the clock on the nightstand. “Let’s give it ten more minutes and then you can have a cookie.”
“There are cookies?”
“Technically, no. Jessica said there were some brownies, though.”
Chris chuckled, thinking back on the conversation about Jessica’s culinary exploits. “I’ll pass. Some orange juice would be nice.”
“Screwdriver?”
“Hold the vodka.”
Ben crinkled his nose. “It’s like we’re not related or something.”
They weren’t, technically, but it was just a joke, and Chris was content to leave it at that. “Says the man that hasn’t even opened the bottle of scotch he asked for.”
“I’m working.”
Chris chuckled again. “I’ll be sure to put a good word in when I get the survey.”
As quiet settled between them once more, Chris let his eyes roam the room again. Every time they did, they caught some new detail. The room featured the same shabby carpet and peeling wallpaper that the other rooms had, but some effort had been taken to decorate. Landscape paintings and prints hung on the walls, along with a few framed photographs and awards.
If the photos of Kate’s strong-jawed Native American relatives hadn’t tipped him off that it was her room, the awards would have cinched it. He learned more about her from sitting in her room for a few minutes than he’d learned from the meet-and-greet. For one, she was an expert horsewoman, with accolades for barrel racing and showjumping. There was also a certificate of graduation from the Quinault Tribal Police Academy, dated 1965. That meant that she had to be at least seventy, by his math. There was also what looked like a birth certificate, complete with baby footprints in black ink, but even his sharp eyes couldn’t make out the name or date on it from where he sat across the room. Was it Kate’s, or had she had a child at some point?
