Wolf Called
Page 5
“Oh, I know, I know. It’s dangerous. That’s what I get for falling in love with you, but believe me, it’s way too late to change that.” She pressed a kiss to his lips then wrapped his arm around her waist, turning in his arms so she had her back pressed to his front. Her gaze took all of us in, landing on me last. Her face softened, showing both the sweetness and strength that lived inside her. “You’ll stay until you’re healed up, Alexis. And that’s all there is to it.”
Chapter Eight
After all my years at Strand, I probably should’ve been the perfect patient. But maybe it was because I’d spent so long following doctors’ orders and letting people fuss over me that I could hardly stand to do it now.
Molly was a great nurse, and she had four of the best, most willing assistants she could ask for—but her patient was a total pain in the ass.
Although my gunshot wound, broken arm, and bruised skull needed time to heal, I didn’t want to give them that time. I wanted to be better already, damn it.
The first few days after I woke up in Molly’s house, I didn’t have the energy to do much of anything besides rest. But by the fifth day, I felt better enough to ask her to cut back on the pain meds. I didn’t like how they messed with my system, making me feel groggy and a little out of it all the time. I was willing to accept some pain if it came with a clear head.
Unfortunately, once my mind became a little more alert, bed rest became nearly impossible. I was anxious and agitated, and no matter how well the guys took care of me, I wished I could take care of myself.
The topic of the mate bond seemed to have been silently declared off limits. I’d talked about it with Noah that first night after it happened, and the kiss we’d shared still played on an endless loop in my mind, but even he hadn’t mentioned it since then. He hadn’t kissed me again either, and I had a feeling they were all holding back because they didn’t want to hurt me. Molly and Carl disappeared for long stretches at a time, leaving the five of us alone in her house. I was impatient as hell to get moving again, but the four men didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. They threw themselves into my care wholeheartedly, following every one of Molly’s instructions to the letter.
It was its own special kind of torture having them all so close, touching me tenderly to change my bandages, helping me get dressed, feeding and washing me—yet never going further than that. It was like they’d made some kind of pact among themselves not to take things further with me.
Shit. Had they?
I hated that idea. I would’ve hated it even before my wolf was called, but now that she’d risen and claimed each of them, I absolutely loathed it. Anytime I was around the guys, I had an undeniable impulse to get closer to them. There was physical desire—good lord, was there ever—but it was more than that. It was like I ran on solar-powered batteries and their presence was the sun.
I couldn’t help but think some of their enthusiasm for my care came from the fact that as long as they stayed focused on helping me heal, on tending to my needs, they didn’t have to think about how completely and totally fucked we were. We had no plan left, no next steps laid out. The Lost Pack had scattered, and even though Val had given us the coordinates of their rendezvous point, I wasn’t sure what good it would do to travel there.
Would we really go make a home in the wilderness and spend the rest of our days living in fear of discovery like the Lost Pack shifters did? What kind of life was that? How were they any less trapped now than they had been in the Strand complex’s they’d escaped from?
Besides, our request for help from Alpha Elijah had already been denied, and I was sure the Strand ambush on his pack hadn’t changed his mind. He’d refused point-blank to assist us in finding and rescuing Sariah.
Sariah.
The name scratched at my brain every time I thought about it. She kept appearing in my dreams—a young woman with dark hair and blue eyes like Rhys’s. I’d never met her before in my life, but my imagination had formed a shape for her based on her brother’s appearance, and I’d seen visions of her so often while I slept that I almost felt like I knew her already.
In my dreams, the two of us were trapped in the ambulance with the Strand hunters. And when I escaped, hauling my naked, broken body through the woods, I would turn back just as the ambulance exploded in a ball of scorching flame and realize that somehow, Sariah had been left behind.
I usually woke from those dreams sobbing and screaming, lashing out with such primal force that I tugged at my stitches and sent pain flaring up my arm. One of the men would pull me into his arms, where I’d cower, shaking and weeping, as the vivid agony of the dream faded.
Logically, I knew Sariah hadn’t been in the ambulance with me. My memory of that day was patchy, confusing, and raw, but in all the flashes and snippets I remembered, I only ever saw four faces—three men and the woman who’d posed as my mother. Rhys’s sister hadn’t been in the vehicle. I was sure of it.
So why did she keep showing up in my dreams?
I would’ve been happy to forget the whole thing, to recall less and less of that awful day as time went by. But to my horror, the memories were sharpening instead, growing more distinct and clear. New snippets, sounds, and images assaulted me at random times, overwhelming me so completely I had to just close my eyes and breathe until they passed.
Maybe that was why I was such a bad patient to Molly. Laying still gave my brain too much time to work. Only forward movement could keep the past from catching up to me, so I did my best to keep moving forward—even at the expense of my healing.
That was exactly what I planned to do when I opened the door to the guest bedroom on my tenth day at Molly’s house.
“No! Uh uh. Girl, you get back in bed right this minute.” The sweet-faced nurse waggled her finger at me from down the hall.
It was still difficult for me to stand up completely straight, so I probably looked a little like Quasimodo trying to escape from the bell tower.
Damn it. Busted already, and I didn’t even make it through the door.
“Rhys! West! Your little jailbird is escaping again,” she called toward the kitchen. “Might wanna get her back in bed. I need to leave for work in a minute.”
Double damn it. She’d called in my two bossiest caretakers.
West was still acting really strange around me and seemed physically incapable of looking me in the eyes right now, but that hadn’t stopped him from taking care of me right along with the others. And for him and Rhys, that meant making absolutely sure I didn’t break a single one of Molly’s rules.
Sure enough, the sound of heavy footfalls followed her pronouncement, and a few seconds later, Rhys and West flanked her at the end of the hall.
So busted.
I dropped my head in defeat, still clinging tenaciously to the doorknob. The honest truth was, it was hard to stand without a little bit of assistance. But I was feeling better, and I was also on the verge of going crazy.
“Can I just come out for a little while?” I asked, peering up to find Molly’s face. “I just can’t be in that room any longer. No offense! It’s nice, I just…”
Pity washed over her features, and she nodded grudgingly. “All right, all right. If these guys will help you, you can walk around for a little bit. It’ll be good to start getting your strength back. But don’t go wandering around without help! If you push it, you’ll only make your recovery take longer.”
Relief flooded me, making my knees weak. Or maybe it was because I hadn’t stood on my own for this long in days. I grimaced, tightening my grip on the door handle, and both men noticed it. In a flash, they were down the hall and at my side, holding onto my waist and my good arm to steady me.
Molly looked at the three of us, a curious expression crossing her face. She’d been watching us like that the whole time we’d been here, and I could practically feel the questions forming in her head about what exactly the deal was between me and these four men.
I was pretty sure the o
nly reason she hadn’t pressed for details was because it was so obvious to even a casual observer that the four horsemen, as she and Carl called them, cared for me and looked out for me. That they’d move heaven and earth to keep anything bad from happening to me.
“Well, I’m off to work. Be good, and don’t let her stay on her feet too long,” she instructed.
The two men nodded, and she headed out.
“You shouldn’t have gotten up on your own,” Rhys said gruffly.
The two men towered over my diminutive 5’3” frame, and with them supporting me, my legs hardly carried any of my weight. I wasn’t even sure this counted as walking. Levitating, maybe.
“It was fine. You guys were busy.”
“No, we weren’t. We’re never fucking busy.”
For the first time, I heard the same desperate impatience in Rhys’s voice that I felt. I’d grown used to it on our long journey to the Lost Pack—nothing had ever seemed to move fast enough for him, no forward progress had ever seemed like enough. And it never would until he got his sister back.
It was reassuring, in a way, to know that he was as anxious as I was to move on. But it also made guilt stab at my stomach. The only reason they weren’t moving on already was because of me. Once again, I was the one holding them back.
Maybe Rhys guessed at my thoughts, because he added in a low voice, “There’s nothing to do. We lost her trail, and I don’t know where to pick it back up again.”
The pain in his words made an answering pain settle in my own chest. “I’m sorry, Rhys.”
“Not your fault,” he said shortly.
I knew he meant it, but it didn’t make me feel much better. Whether it was my fault or not, I wanted to fix this for him, to do something to patch up the years-old hole in his heart.
But I didn’t know how.
I let the subject drop as they maneuvered awkwardly through the door and guided me slowly down the hall. When we reached the living room, Jackson and Noah looked up from where they were parked on the couch watching a cooking show. Their obsession with the Food Network was both baffling and endearing.
“Hey, look at you, walking around like a fuckin’ champ!” Jackson crowed, his amber eyes gleaming with delight.
“Yeah, right. More like being carried around like a champ.”
To prove my point, I lifted both feet off the floor. West’s hold around my waist tightened, and Rhys supported my good arm, holding me up.
Jackson grinned. “Hey, that still makes you a champ as far as I’m concerned. You’re like a superhero. You can fucking fly.”
I grinned. Jackson could be as serious as the others when the situation called for it, but he didn’t choose to live his life in that headspace. He was like the poster child for making the best of a shitty situation, and I kind of loved him for it.
“You look better.” Noah’s slightly lopsided smile made heat pool in my belly and warmth fill my chest. “How do you feel?”
I waggled my head back and forth. “Better.”
“Come on.” West spoke without looking down at me, something I was sadly becoming accustomed to. “Let’s get you a couple laps around the house and then we’ll sit you down.”
He and Rhys helped me walk at a slow pace around the small single-story house, supporting me as we went. I had to keep reminding them to let me do some of the work—then a minute later their grips would tighten and I’d have to remind them all over again.
By the time we made it back to the living room, some kind of barbecue competition was on TV. Noah and Jackson cleared a space for me between them, and the other two deposited me gently onto the couch. I leaned back against the soft cushions, more tired from the exertion than I wanted to admit.
I’d have to make a point to keep doing that as often as Molly would let me. I wasn’t used to feeling so physically weak, and I didn’t like it. I knew now that I wasn’t sick, that I never had been—but it was hard to wipe away ten years of worrying about my health just like that. I’d probably always carry some of that fear with me.
Rhys and West settled into chairs on either side of the couch, and we lapsed into a comfortable silence. The guys would occasionally comment on someone’s knife skills or cooking technique, making me wonder if they were all secretly master chefs or something.
My mind wandered as I watched the show through half-lidded eyes, the heaviness of sleep tugging at me. On the screen, a man was cutting up a large piece of meat. It was thick and red, and little rivulets of pink spread across the white surface of his cutting board like bloody cracks.
Acid churned in my stomach, a burst of adrenaline inexplicably shooting through me. My heart picked up speed, and I swallowed.
The man on the show picked up the pieces to dump them in a bowl, red drops spilling out from between his fingers. He grabbed another large slab of red muscle, and I clenched my jaw, trying to keep my stomach from revolting.
Red.
So much red.
It was everywhere.
In my fur. In my mouth. Spattering the inside of the ambulance like some sick Pollock painting.
It poured from my wounds, the fresh red blood mixing with the pools that had gathered underneath the dead bodies, already turning thick and almost black.
My hand reached out. No longer a massive paw, just a small human hand that shook with pain and shock. My palm and fingers were soaked in blood, and they slipped over the sheafs of paper leaving long, wet streaks in their wake.
As if I were finger-painting with my own blood, I left trails across the names printed neatly on the page, searching for one.
One name.
Sariah.
Patient #298. Salt Lake City, Utah.
“Alexis?” Jackson’s concerned voice sounded like it came from a mile away. “You okay?”
I blinked, staring at the bloody meat being hacked up on the screen as my stomach churned violently. I squeezed my eyes shut, sucking in a breath as I let the memory wash over me again and again.
It was true.
It was right there. I wasn’t imagining it.
“Shit. Turn it off, turn it off!” Noah cursed again under his breath as the sound from the TV suddenly cut out. Then he put a gentle hand on my knee. “Fuck, I’m sorry, Scrubs. I didn’t even think. It’s over now. No more blood.”
“It’s… not that,” I choked out, finally forcing my eyes open to gaze at the concerned faces around me. Horror overwhelmed me as more vivid memories of the fight in the ambulance filtered through my mind, but a fierce hope rose up in me too.
“Then what’s wrong?”
I licked my lips. “It’s… Sariah. I remember. I know where she is.”
Chapter Nine
Absolute silence stole over the room, so complete I knew everyone had stopped breathing.
“What do you mean, Scrubs?” West asked carefully. “How do you know that?”
“In the ambulance, I saw a… a roster of some kind. Like a spreadsheet of the Strand test subjects. Sariah was on it.” I dug my fingers into the soft cushions of the couch, fighting to sort through the new memories. “That’s why I kept having dreams that she was there. Only, it wasn’t her in the ambulance—it was just her name. That’s what my dreams were trying to tell me.”
“Holy fuck,” Noah murmured, sliding a hand through his tousled blond hair.
“She’s in a facility in Salt Lake City,” I said, my voice gaining confidence.
I couldn’t believe my mind had let such an important detail slip through the cracks, although so much of that awful event had been repressed by trauma and shock. But Sariah’s name, her location—I was sure those memories were real. The images became stronger and stronger each time they cycled through my mind’s eye.
Unbidden, my gaze shifted to Rhys. He sat straight and stiff in the large easy chair, barely breathing, his face frozen in an unreadable mask.
He blinked, rousing himself. His burning blue eyes met mine, and I saw a dozen emotions filter through them.
He stayed like that, kneeling before me like I was his queen, his idol, his salvation, as emotions that had been pent up inside him for days—weeks, years—finally escaped. His pack mates watched us solemnly as I whispered soothing words to Rhys, stroking his hair and running my hands over his shaking shoulders.
“I’ll help you get her back, Rhys. We all will.”
“Always, brother,” West promised, his voice thick.
Noah and Jackson nodded, but I was sure Rhys didn’t need to hear them speak to know they were with him too. We were all in this together.
A pack.
A family.
Finally, Rhys lifted his head from my lap, his sky-blue eyes lit with a fire I’d never seen in them before. He grabbed both my hands, devouring me with his gaze as he kissed my knuckles, his lips firm and wet from his tears. Each kiss he pressed to my skin was like a stamp, a promise. When he released my shaking fingers and cupped my face with his rough palms, the air suspended in my lungs.
Still gazing at me like he could never get enough, he brought his face close to mine. His breath wafted over my cheek, my nose, my lips, already claiming a part of me.
And then he kissed me.
In front of all his pack mates, as if he didn’t give a flying fuck whether they saw, as if he’d die if he didn’t, he kissed me.
His lips moved over mine, their touch so perfect and familiar already, although we’d only done this once before. But this was different than our previous kiss. The last time he’d pressed his lips to mine, he’d been taking something, claiming something.
In this kiss, he gave himself to me.