Page 43

Elliot Crane

They let me leave you a note for when you woke up.

I love you.

E.

I stared at the piece of paper, clearly torn from a nurse’s or doctor’s personal notepad, the top decorated with a series of little dancing colorful birds. Cockatoos or budgies or something. Dance like no one’s watching , read the caption underneath the little line of birds.

I had no idea where my phone was. In my car, maybe, with the pants I’d taken off when I’d shifted and stupidly tried to take on my father in order to protect Elliot.

At least the fact that he’d written me a note—although I couldn’t help but notice that his handwriting was shakier than usual—meant that he was probably in better shape than I’d been in when I was brought here.

I’d figured out fairly quickly that I was in a hospital, given that there is something ubiquitous about the way hospitals, look, feel, and smell.

I’d nearly panicked at first, thinking for a split second that I was back in St. Cyprian’s and the last year had all been some sort of hallucination.

But then I realized that was ridiculous and I must have been brought here after having had the shit clawed and bitten out of me by shifted members of the Community—including my father.

Here, as it turns out, was the James Blair Arcane wing of Augusta Health Hospital. The same hospital where Noah had been taken when he’d first transformed. If the room was any indication, they’d updated it quite a bit in the last sixteen years.

The important thing was that I was alive.

And Elliot was alive. I hoped that he was okay.

I was assuming Hart was also alive, although I was under no illusions that he’d probably needed treatment, too.

The nurse who had come in when the machines hooked up to me had alerted them I was conscious had assured me that Elliot would come back to see me in the morning, then asked if I felt up to talking to the police. Then she’d handed me the note and told me not to worry too much and left me to wait.

The police, as it turned out, was the FBI in the person of Rajesh Parikh.

“How are you feeling?” the tiger shifter asked as he pulled up a molded plastic chair.

“Like shit,” I answered honestly. “The nurse says that I’ll have to have surgery on my knee once I’m recovered enough.” I grimaced. “Not looking forward to that.”

Raj made an appropriately sympathetic face. “Sorry to hear it,” he replied. “Are you otherwise okay?”

I almost shrugged, then stopped myself. “Nothing I won’t recover from,” I replied. Bruised and cracked ribs, lacerations and bite wounds that had required a total of fifteen stitches, which really wasn’t that bad, considering the fact that I’d tried to fight off five wolves. As a wolf, but still.

I frowned. “Do you know how I ended up human again?” I asked him. I’d definitely still been a wolf when I’d passed out.

“You sort-of came to at one point after the EMTs arrived, and Elliot somehow convinced you to shift back so they could treat you as a human instead of as a wolf.” He shrugged. “Not surprised you don’t remember—you were pretty out of it.”

“Elliot’s okay?” I asked, not bothering to hide the worry in my voice.

“A little battered, but they let him go back to the hotel last night.”

I tried to sit up, alarmed, and immediately regretted it, hissing in pain.

“Take it easy,” Raj cautioned me. “Don’t pull your stitches.” He grimaced. “I really don’t recommend it.”

I nodded, still wincing. “Did someone go with him?” I asked.

“Yeah, me. And Drew Shao took over for me this morning when he drove in from Richmond.” Raj offered me an understanding smile. “Don’t worry—we’re not going to let anything happen to him.”

I nodded again, trying to slow my pulse. Elliot was okay. “How’s Hart?” I asked, then.

Raj grimaced. “They’ll let him go today or tomorrow, I think they said,” he replied. “He needed more stitches than you, and they were a bit worried about blood loss, but, thankfully, nothing vital got hit.”

“How much blood did he lose?” I asked, alarmed again.

“Not enough to kill him,” he replied mildly, as though Hart getting a blood transfusion weren’t anything terribly unusual. “The phrase they used was ‘observation out of an abundance of caution.’”

“Is Taavi here?”

Raj nodded. “Of course.” His lips curved up in half a smile. “He wasn’t terribly happy.”

“Gee, can’t imagine why,” I remarked.

The half smile broke into a grin, Raj’s slightly too-sharp teeth vivid white against the warm brown of his skin. “Let’s just say that I’ve learned a lot of very rude words in Spanish over the last couple years.”

I smiled back. “But he’ll be okay?”

“Oh, he’s fine,” the big tiger shifter replied casually. I wasn’t fooled. I could tell from the creases around his mouth and a tightness in his jaw that he was taking Hart’s injuries seriously.

“Seriously?” I pressed.

“He’s fine,” Raj repeated. “He’s a goddamn beacon for attempted homicide, but he’s fine.”

I sighed. “Elliot did warn me that he had a tendency to get stabbed,” I remarked.

Raj snorted. “Well, he mixed it up this time and went for ‘chewed’ instead.”

“I don’t recommend it,” I told him, echoing his earlier line.

Raj laughed. “You’ll be just fine, too,” he replied. “If you’re throwing my own words back at me.”

I smiled at him. It wasn’t a good smile, but it was something.

He sighed. “I suppose we should get down to business. I know how the afternoon ended—” Raj had been the giant tiger in the doorway, of course. “—but I’m going to need you to go through your recollection of how it started.”

The nurse had just taken away the horrifying gloop that passed for some kind of chicken-and-rice thing with greyish peas and I’d downed a full glass of powdered lemonade, which was still disgusting, but at least in a palatable sort of way.

The door to my room opened, and Noah all but launched himself through it and into my arms.

Holy shit, did it hurt, but I didn’t care.

Noah cried. I cried. Lulu—who was following behind him—cried.

Humbolt and Walsh, who had also been following, did not cry, although Humbolt was grinning and Walsh looked slightly less sour than usual.

“Nono, they let you go?”

“Y-yes,” he sobbed into my shoulder. “Charges dropped. It’s over.”

Walsh’s face soured again.

“Hun, there’s still the civil case,” Lulu reminded Noah. The case Walsh was building for wrongful imprisonment.

“I don’t care about that,” Noah retorted, nuzzling into my shoulder. I ignored the pain of the bandaged bite he was pushing against.

“You will,” I told him gently. “Besides, it will help keep them from doing it to anyone else.”

“I just want to go home,” he whispered. “Forget all of it.”

“You can go home,” I replied. “As soon as you want. But don’t forget .” I hugged him tighter. “Don’t let them make you forget what they did.” There was more venom in that than even I was expecting, and that’s saying a lot.

He let out a sigh, leaning his weight into me. I ignored the pain.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” I said into his blond hair—the same shade as mine. “And out.”

“Me, too,” he mumbled into my shoulder, then pulled back. “ Are you okay?” he asked, then, worried.

I tried my best smile. “I’ll be fine, Nono.”

“ Be fine,” he repeated, blue eyes narrowing. “What does that mean?”

“My knee needs surgery,” I told him, hoping I’d be able to keep going before he blew up.

“ Surgery?! What do you mean surgery ?!”

No such luck.

“It’ll be okay,” I reassured him. “They’re just giving me a couple days to recover before they do it. But it’s pretty routine.”

It wasn’t, exactly. What the nurse had said was that they were bringing in an orthopedic surgeon from Charlottesville who did emergency knee surgeries for car accidents and that sort of thing all the time. I was paraphrasing that to routine .

“What happened?” Noah demanded, still staring at me with some amount of skepticism. “Why are you even here?”

I sighed. “Nono, don’t freak out…”

He totally freaked out.

I’d managed to convince Lulu to take Noah back to Charlottesville around dinnertime, which left me with both Elliot, who was refusing to leave my side now that he’d gotten here, and Hart, who definitely looked the worse for wear, as well as Taavi, who was monitoring Hart like a very annoyed guard dog.

I didn’t blame him. I hadn’t known that elves could actually physically get any paler than they already were naturally, but Hart’s bordering-on-ivory skin tone was white . Like bone-china white.

He was also still attached to an IV and was seriously pissed off about having to wear the little hospital gown we were both sporting, although Taavi had brought him sweatpants.

I was not allowed to put on pants, because I’d have to take off the massive thing holding my leg completely immobile to do it.

“So what the fuck happened to Seth’s pathetic excuse for a father?

” Elliot asked, once Noah and Lulu had left and Hart had begged Taavi to go pick up Thai food for all of us so that he and I didn’t have to suffer through yet another hospital meal.

Taavi had insisted on getting permission from the doctors first—and thank God they’d given it, because I didn’t think I could actually choke down enough of the shit that passed for food here to meet my daily caloric intake requirements.

Hart shot him a look. “You know damn fucking well I’m not supposed to talk about ongoing federal cases.”

“Fuck that,” was Elliot’s response. “At least tell me if the shithead’s in jail right now.”

Another sigh. “Yes.”

“Here?” Elliot demanded.

Hart glared.

“Look, the asshats here tried to kill us once. Forgive me if I’m not terribly inclined to trust them to not accidentally let out the murderous werewolf.” Elliot wasn’t being unreasonable.

“Fine, dickhead. And he’s not staying here for long.”

“I don’t like it,” Elliot told him.

“He’s under federal guard,” Hart replied.

“Because I don’t trust these fuckheads as far as I can throw them, either, and right now, that’s not very fucking far.

” Among Hart’s collection of injuries was some tendon damage to one shoulder from somebody-or-other’s teeth.

He was expected to make a full recovery, but for now, the arm was in a hinged brace and sling.

“As long as he’s not going to break out or be broken out,” Elliot replied, his voice tense. “When are they moving him? I don’t want him within a hundred miles of Seth.”

I didn’t particularly want him within a hundred miles of me, either. Or a thousand, but I didn’t think restraining orders reached that far.

Hart grunted. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

Elliot scowled.

“And you know you’re not going to get it out of me,” the elf remarked.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try,” Elliot retorted. “At least tell me the fuckhead’s in pain.”

Hart smirked. “Oh, he’s in pain. Not just from you, either,” he remarked.

Elliot’s eyebrows rose. “Do tell.”

“He’s got an older injury—a few weeks old, by the looks of it—that was a bit infected. Testing confirms the blood on the knife was his .” Hart looked over at me. “Seems like your mother got in a good stab to the shoulder that’s going to cause him some problems for a while.”

“Serves that fucking fucker right,” Elliot grumbled. “I don’t supposed you can withhold medical treatment.”

Hart rolled his lavender eyes. “Jesus fuck, you’re vicious, you feral rodent.”

Elliot bared his teeth.

I smothered a smile, knowing that neither of them would appreciate it.

But, despite the circumstances, there was something that was just weirdly endearing about the way the two of them went after each other—not in a mean way, but the way that Noah and I did.

Like brothers, which I suppose they were, despite the lack of genetic connection.

Not all family is blood.

And not all blood was family.

I knew that better than pretty much anybody.

Elliot had returned to the subject of my father.

“They’re charging him with Seth’s mom’s murder, too, right?

” Too , as in, in addition to the attempted homicide of both Elliot and myself, assaulting a federal officer (Hart), and resisting arrest. Raj was currently working on figuring out of there were any other charges that could be laid at his feet, something the tiger shifter probably shouldn’t have told me, but had.

“You bet your furry ass they are,” came the answer.

“Good,” Elliot replied. “But I still don’t like that he’s still here.”

“Unfortunately, you not liking it will not make the federal government move its monumental ass any faster,” Hart informed him.

Elliot made a face.