Page 46

The Uber shows up five minutes later. I tell the driver to hurry up, and he does, just by looking at Felix’s sickly form and our final destination, Redwood Regional Hospital. We walk into the emergency room, and I nag the lady at the front desk until she takes us to a curtained-off part of the hospital. Felix is still looking around in a daze. He’s probably never been in a hospital before, at least not as a patient.
Felix doesn’t have to wait long to see a doctor. As soon as she sees the wound on his stomach, she gets to work. She looks at the chart that a nurse had filled out and sees that Felix’s fever is 103 degrees. She moves us to a private room, where Felix gets an IV with fluids and an antibiotic. He whined a lot, which would have been very funny if he weren’t so sick.
A nurse came in to dress his wound and take care of his other injuries. He started cursing at her for being too rough. I kept my mouth shut and apologized for Felix’s behavior. The nurse didn’t seem too bothered by the angry warlock; she looked like she had dealt with much worse patients before.
I sat on the edge of Felix’s bed when the nurses and doctors stopped coming in and out. He looked a little better already; he wasn’t sweating as much, and the painkillers must have kicked in because he seemed calmer. His fingers were in a splint, but nothing else was broken.
“Do you feel any better? I asked softly.
He smiled and put his hand on mine. “Yeah.” Calla, thank you for looking out for me. “You’re a good friend.”
I smiled back at him, glad to see the Felix I know instead of the angry guy he’s been since we got here. “What can I say? You save me, and I save you. We’re even now.
His eyes get dark right away, and his eyebrows scrunch up in anger, but I don’t know why.
“We need to talk about why I came to see you.” They have a plan. They want to—
Felix stops talking, and we both look at the hospital door. I can hear a lot of yelling coming from the nurse’s station, and my heart starts to race. I stand in front of Felix to protect him, half expecting his whole coven to come through the door and hurt him again.
I don’t expect my friend to burst through the door with silver eyes blazing. He comes into the room and goes straight to me, and two nurses come running in after him to make him leave. The nurses aren’t ready for a “visitor” as big and strong as Jaxon, so they don’t know what to do. One of them holds a phone in his hand and gets ready to call hospital security. The other nurse looks scared at me and Felix.
“Do you know this guy?”
I look to Felix, knowing that if he says no, hospital security and half the people who live here will die. I beg him with my eyes to say yes.
“Yeah!” This is my cousin Richard coming to see me when I need him. Everything’s fine, nurses. Go away!”Felix makes a shooing motion with his hands, and the nurses leave the room slowly, but not before glaring at Jaxon again.
I can tell that Jaxon is about to change his mind. I jog over to him and he meets me halfway. He wraps his arms around me and buries his head in my neck. I close my eyes and rub his back in a soothing way. The longer I hold him, the more his muscles relax.
He turns to look at the platinum warlock, but he keeps my body close to his as he lifts his head off my shoulder.
“I told you I would kill you if I saw you again.”
Felix lets out a laugh without any feelings. “Go ahead, Wolfie. Kill me when I can’t fight back. I know Calla would really like that.
I don’t want to leave Jaxon, but he growls at me when I do. I stand between the two of them to try to calm things down.
“Felix, Jaxon won’t hurt you.” “Jaxon, don’t kill Felix,” I say in a voice that is a little higher than normal. I never thought I would have to tell my werewolf boyfriend not to kill my magical friend. If I were anyone else, I would think I was crazy.
Jaxon breathes heavily but doesn’t go to Felix, which I’m glad about. Instead, he looks at me and asks in a low voice, “Where have you been?”
“Well, I was—”
“Because Graham mindlinked me that a warlock he couldn’t name had taken you.”
That’s Thing 1’s name. “I try to call you and you don’t answer. I can see where you are on my phone and it’s an empty warehouse. You’re probably being tortured or worse. “I run over there without any backup, only to find out that you’re not there—my phone says you’re at the F*****G HOSPITAL.” The more he talks, the angrier he gets. I feel bad for putting him through that, but Felix needed me. I didn’t have time to text Jaxon an update.
“What the hell should I think? What? I thought you were going to die. Again. I knew you weren’t dead because I would have felt it, but I didn’t know what to expect. “I followed your scent up here only to find you taking care of him.” He spits out the word “him” like it’s a bad word.
“I’m sorry, but what was I supposed to do?”I ask, “Felix had something important to tell me, and apparently, you wouldn’t let him near me and blocked his number on my phone.” I cross my arms and shift all my weight onto my right foot as I send my meanest glare toward Jaxon. I want him to know that what he did wasn’t okay and that I’m allowed to be mad at him too. He doesn’t get to keep all the anger to himself.
His eyes soften a little, but they are still hard. “I did that to protect you.”
“Really? Felix must have put his life on the line to tell me something very important. He was just about to when you came in here like a bull in a china shop.
“How was I supposed to know that?””Jaxon laughs. He acts like he didn’t do anything wrong, but he did. “The last time you two were alone, he almost killed you and-”
Felix coughs, which makes Jaxon and me stop fighting and look at him.
“I really don’t want to break up this fight between lovers, but I have important things to say and not a lot of time to say them.”
I walk over to Felix’s bed and sit down on the edge. Jaxon growls at how close I am to Felix, but one look from me makes him stop. Good. He’s learning his place.
Felix looks at me, then at Jaxon, and when his eyes finally settle on me, he tells me something I’ve been dreading.
“The coven wants to kill you.”
When I say those words, Jaxon growls loudly and runs around me to grab Felix’s neck tightly. Felix gasps for air as Jaxon’s arms tense from the harshness of his actions. I scream and put my hands on his shoulders as I push him back as hard as I can. Looking back, that probably isn’t the best thing to do when facing an Alpha who is blinded by rage, but Jaxon is literally strangling Felix and I’m not thinking about my own safety.
It seems like hours, but it must only be seconds, before Jaxon reluctantly lets go of Felix and steps back. Jaxon’s steel eyes turn to me, and instead of the anger going away, it stays.
“Never, ever, get in front of a werewolf that is angry! You would be dead if you were anyone else.”
I stepped back from him because I was a little scared of his black eyes and long teeth. I don’t often see this threatening side of him directing anger at me like this. He’s been angry at Felix and Elliot (the werewolf he attacked for disrespecting me) but never at me before. I don’t want to get used to the way his veins strain in his neck and the anger I feel directed at me.
I stay strong even though Jaxon’s dangerous form is right in front of me. I cross my arms in front of my chest to protect myself from Felix. I don’t care that I’m talking to “Alpha Jaxon” instead of “my Jaxon.” I’m not going to sit here and put up with his behavior.
The heart monitor attached to Felix slows down from its faster speed, but he keeps breathing in a ragged way. I feel like I have some blame for what Jaxon did. I shouldn’t feel this way because we’re friends, but I feel like a lot of the time, our actions are linked, and I should apologize to him. But I’m not going to act like this aggressive side of Jaxon’s is okay.
“I hope you don’t kill your mate, Alpha,” I said the word like an insult. When his werewolf side is acting possessive and crazy, he doesn’t deserve to be called by his first name. Jaxon’s eyes slowly change back to their usual icy blue color, and I can see that he feels bad now that his anger has gone away.
“I’m sorry, baby. My wolf side—”
He tries to touch me, but I move back even more and glare at him, cutting off his apology.
“No, you don’t get to be forgiven that easily. Felix just told us that his coven was planning to kill me, not him! He obviously doesn’t agree! So why would you hurt him, especially when you know that hurting him will hurt me?”
He tries to explain, “You don’t know warlocks like I do.” “They’re loyal to their own and betray anyone who isn’t one of them. This is probably just a big plan to get you to trust him, and then he’ll kill you when you least expect it!”
I shake my head and turn around to see Felix’s hand gripping his neck, which is now turning a reddish-purple color to match the rest of his bruised body. I gently hold Felix’s broken hand in mine and rub my thumb back and forth over it. This is the best I can do to hug him right now.
“Felix wouldn’t do that.”
Jaxon’s sarcastic laugh cuts through the air, making the room even more tense. He is trying to calm down by breathing heavily through his nose, but his jaw is tight.
“You don’t know that.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Felix says, his voice sounding rough and tired. He looks like he’s about to fall asleep because of the medicines and the pain he’s been in before, but he still looks Jaxon right in the eyes. “You can hear my heart beating. You know I’m not lying to you. And let’s be honest, I’m too weak to use magic to trick you.”
I look at Jaxon with wide eyes. He can tell if you’re lying. Has he always known when I’m lying? That’s too bad…