I nodded. “I’m a little surprised myself, truthfully.”
His gaze had drifted down again. Olaf was crazy and mean, but he was right about one thing. Men would stare, some on purpose to be rude, but not all. Some like Peter, well, it was as if my chest were a magnet and their gaze iron; it just attracted it. I was sooo going to have to talk to Nathaniel about what clothes to pack next time. Next time I got so hurt I ended up unconscious in the hospital. I simply assumed there’d be a next time. Unless I changed jobs, there would be. The thought startled me. Was I thinking about giving up the vampire hunting? Was I really, truly considering it? Maybe, maybe I was. I shook my head and pushed the thought into that cage with all the other thoughts. The cage was getting awfully damn full.
“Anita?” Peter made it a question.
“Sorry, thinking too hard.”
“What about?” He was managing eye contact. I felt like I should pet his head and give him a cookie, good boy. God, I was in a strange mood tonight.
“Truthfully, wondering if I want to keep hunting vampires.”
His eyes went wide. “What are you talking about? This is what you do.”
“No, I raise zombies; the vampire hunting is supposed to be a sideline. Sometimes the zombie thing gets me hurt, but the vampire and rogue lycanthrope hunting are more likely to put me in the hospital. Maybe I’m just tired of waking up with new scars.”
“Waking up is good, though,” he said, and his voice sounded fragile. He wasn’t staring at my face or my chest now. He was looking into the distance, with that look on the face that says you’re seeing something unpleasant, reliving it, just a little.
“You didn’t think you were going to wake up,” I said, and kept my voice gentle.
He looked at me, eyes wide, looking lost, frightened. “No, I thought this was it. I thought…” He stopped and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“You thought you were going to die,” I finished for him.
He nodded, then winced as if the movement hurt.
“I knew I wouldn’t die, or you. Stomach wounds hurt like hell and they can take a lot of healing, but they’re rarely fatal with modern antibiotics and prompt medical attention.”
He looked at me, uncomprehending. “Were you really thinking all that as they put you under?”
I thought about it. “Not exactly, but I’ve been hurt a lot, Peter. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve lost consciousness and woken up in a hospital, or somewhere worse.”
I thought his eyes were on my chest again, but he said, “The scar on your collarbone, what did that?”
Another interesting sideline of wearing this much of my chest in full view was that some of my scars were on display. I’d been more worried about my modesty than about the scars. “Vampire.”
“I thought it was a shapeshifter bite.”
“Nope, vampire.” I showed him my arms with all their scars. “Most of these are from vampires.” I touched one on my left arm: claw marks. “This one was a shapeshifted witch, which means her shapeshifting was a spell and not a disease.”
“I didn’t know there was a difference.”
“Well, the spell isn’t contagious, and it’s not tied to the full moon at all. In fact, strong emotions don’t cause you to shift, or any of that. You don’t shift until you put on the item, usually a fur belt or something.”
“Do you have any scars from shapeshifters?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see?”
Truthfully, the most permanent scars were claw marks on my ass. They were almost delicate marks. Gabriel, the wereleopard who had done it, had considered it foreplay before he tried to rape me on film. He’d been the first person I’d ever killed with the big knife in its spine sheath. I was going to have to figure out a different way to wear the knife until I could get the shoulder rig remade. But I had new scars now, ones I was willing to show Peter.
It took a little work to get the T-shirt out of the pants, but somehow I didn’t want to unbuckle or unzip anything. I got the shirt up and raised it over my belly, exposing the new wounds.
Peter made a surprised sound. “That can’t be real.” He whispered it. He reached out as if he’d try to touch, then drew his hand back, as if he wasn’t sure what I’d say.
I stepped closer to the bed. He took it as the invitation it was, and ran his fingertips across the new pink scars. “The scars may disappear altogether, or they may stay. I won’t know for a few days, or weeks,” I said.
He drew his fingers back, then put his whole hand across the biggest wound. The one where it looked as if she had tried to take a chunk of flesh. His hand was big enough to cover the mark and leave his fingers splayed out beyond the scars. “You can’t have healed this in less than, what…twelve hours. Are you one of them?”
“You mean a shapeshifter?” I asked.
“Yes.” He whispered it as if it were a secret. He slid his hand along my stomach, tracing the ragged marks of claws.
“No.”
He ran his hand over my skin until he came to the edge of the scars where they dribbled away just past my belly button. “They just changed my dressing. I look like shit. You’re healed.” He curved his hand around to the side of my waist that wasn’t scarred. His hand cupped my waist, and his hand was big enough to do it. That one gesture caught me off guard. The only man I was dating whose hand was big enough to do that was Richard. It seemed wrong that Peter’s hand was that big. It made me move back from him and let my shirt drop over my stomach. Which embarrassed him, which wasn’t my intent. I just suddenly realized I probably shouldn’t let him touch me that much. It hadn’t moved me or made me uncomfortable until that moment.
He took his hand back, and again wasted blood that he didn’t have in blushing. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and wouldn’t look at me as he said it.
“It’s okay, Peter. No harm, no foul.”
He gave me a quick upward glance of his brown eyes. “If you’re not a shapeshifter, how could you have healed like that?”
Truthfully, it was probably because I was Jean-Claude’s human servant, but since Dolph was wanting to know that, I just didn’t want to share it with people who didn’t know. “I’m carrying four different kinds of lycanthropy. So far I don’t turn furry, but I’m carrying.”
“The doctors told me you can’t get more than one kind of lycanthropy. That’s the point of the shot. The two different kinds of lycanthropy cancel each other out.” He stopped at the end of the speech and took a deeper-than-normal breath, as if talking too much hurt.
I patted his shoulder. “Don’t talk if it hurts, Peter.”
“Everything hurts.” He seemed to try to settle into the bed, then stopped as if that had hurt, too. He looked up at me, and the angry, defiant face was like an echo of almost two years ago. The kid I’d met was still in there, he’d just grown up. It made my heart hurt. Would I ever get to see Peter when he wasn’t getting hurt? I guess I could just go visit Edward sometime, but that was just weird. We did not just visit each other. We weren’t that kind of friends.
“I know it hurts, Peter. I didn’t always heal this fast.”
“Micah and Nathaniel have been talking to me about weretigers and being a lycanthrope.”
I nodded, because I didn’t know what else to say. “They’d know.”
“Do they all heal as fast as you do?”
“Some, no. Some faster.”
“Faster,” he said. “Really?”
I nodded.
His eyes filled with something I couldn’t decipher. “Cisco didn’t heal.”
Ah. “No, he didn’t.”
“If he hadn’t thrown himself between me and the…weretiger, I’d be dead now.”
“You couldn’t have taken the damage that Cisco took, that’s true.”
“You’re not going to argue about it. Tell me it wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said.
“But he did it to save me.”
“He di
d it to keep both my guards alive longer. He did it to give us time for other guards to come and help us. He did his job.”
“But…”
“I was there, Peter. Cisco did his job. He didn’t sacrifice himself to save you.” I wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but I kept talking. “I don’t think he meant to sacrifice himself at all. Shapeshifters don’t usually die that easily.”
“Easily? He had his throat ripped out.”
“I’ve seen both vampires and wereanimals heal from wounds like that.”
He gave me a disbelieving face.
I crossed my heart and gave the Boy Scout salute.
That made him smile. “You were never a Boy Scout.”
“I wasn’t even a Girl Scout, but I’m still telling the truth.” I smiled, hoping to encourage him to keep doing it.
“Healing like that would be cool.”
I nodded. “It is cool, but it’s not all cool. There are some serious downsides to being a wereanimal.”
“Micah told me some of it. He and Nathaniel have answered a lot of questions.”
“They’re good at that.”
He glanced past me at the door. I glanced where he looked. Micah and Nathaniel had given us as much privacy as they could without leaving the room. They were talking softly together. Cherry had actually left the room. I hadn’t heard her go.
“The doctors want me to get the shot,” Peter said.
I looked at him. “They would.”
“What would you do?” he asked.
I shook my head. “If you’re old enough to have saved my life, then you’re old enough to decide this on your own.”
His face crumbled around the edges, not like he was going to cry, but as if the child was peeking out. Did all teenagers do that? One minute grown-up, the next so fragile like a dream of their younger selves? “I’m just asking your opinion.”
I shook my head. “I’d say call your mom, but Edward doesn’t want to. He says Donna will vote for the shot.”
“She would.” He sounded resentful, face sullen. He’d been pretty moody at fourteen; apparently that hadn’t changed completely. I wondered how Donna was coping with this new, more grown-up son.
“I’ll tell you what I told Edward; I won’t give an opinion on this one.”
“Micah says that I might not get the tiger lycanthropy even if I don’t get the shot.”
“He’s right.”
“He said fifty-five percent of the people who get the shot don’t get lycanthropy, but that forty-five percent get lycanthropy. They get what’s in the shot, Anita. If I get the shot and catch what’s in there, it means if I’d just left it alone I wouldn’t have gotten anything.”
“I didn’t know the stats broke down that nicely, but Micah would know.”
“He says it’s his job to know.”
I nodded. “He takes his job at the coalition as seriously as Edward and I take ours.”
“Nathaniel said he’s an exotic dancer, is that true?”
“It’s true,” I said.
He actually lowered his voice to say, “So he’s a stripper?”
“Yes,” I said and fought not to smile. With everything that was going wrong in his life, he was weirded out that my boyfriend was a stripper. Then I realized that he might not know that Nathaniel was my boyfriend. No, we’d kissed when I came through the door. But then, Cherry had joined the hug. Oh, hell, now was not the time to try to explain my love life to him.
“Micah told me some of the jobs that other lycanthropes have. Nurses, doctors, but only if they don’t find out. I might not be able to join the armed forces, any branch.”
“They consider lycanthropy a contagious disease, so probably not.” In my head I remembered a talk Micah and I had had about a rumor. A rumor about the armed forces looking into deliberate recruiting of shapeshifters. But it was a rumor. He couldn’t trace anyone who had actually been approached. It was always a friend of a friend’s cousin.
“Did you get the shot?”
“They didn’t offer. It’s too late for me, Peter. I’m carrying already.”
“But you’re not a shapeshifter?” He made it a question.
“I don’t turn furry once a month, or at all, so no.”
“But you’re carrying four different kinds at once. The whole shot thing is based on the idea that that’s impossible.”
I nodded and shrugged. “I’m a medical miracle, what can I say?”
“If I could heal like that and not turn furry, that would be amazing.”
“You still wouldn’t pass blood screenings for some jobs. You’d still hit the radar as a lycanthrope.”
He frowned. “I guess so.” Then he gave me that young face again, that echo of before, and it was a frightened face. “Why won’t you help me decide?”
I leaned closer. “This is what it means to be grown-up, Peter. This is the bitch of it. If you’re playing eighteen, then you have to decide. If you want to fess up to your real age, then everyone will treat you like a kid. They’ll make decisions for you.”
“I’m not a kid,” he said, and he frowned, going sullen on me.
“I know that.”
His frown slipped to puzzlement. “What do you mean?”
“You stood your ground today. You didn’t panic, or lose it. I’ve seen grown men lose it around lycanthropes when the situation wasn’t as desperate. Most people are afraid of them.”
“I was afraid,” he said softly. “I’ve been afraid since I was a kid.”
I had one of those moments of, shit and aha. “The attack on your father,” I said. How could I have forgotten that this wasn’t the first lycanthropy attack he’d survived?
He gave a small nod.
“You were what, eight?”
“Yes.” His voice was soft, his eyes staring into the distance again.
I didn’t know what to say. I cursed Edward for not being here. In that moment I might have traded a talk with Olaf for this talk with Peter. I could always shoot Olaf, but no weapon would help me deal with Peter’s pain.
“Anita,” he said.
I looked at him, met his eyes. His eyes reminded me of Nathaniel’s eyes when I first met him. Eyes that were older than they should have been. Eyes that had seen things that older men would never see.
“I’m here, Peter,” I said, because I couldn’t think what else to say. I met his gaze and fought my face not to show how much it hurt me to see his eyes like that. Maybe they’d been that way years ago, but it took dating Nathaniel to teach me what eyes like that meant in a face that hadn’t seen twenty yet.
“I thought if I trained with Edward that I wouldn’t be so scared, but I was. I was scared just like last time. It was like I was little and watching my dad die again.”
I wanted to touch his shoulder, take his hand, but wasn’t sure it was what he needed me to do, so I kept my hands still. “I lost my mom when I was eight to a car wreck.”
His eyes changed, lost a little of that awful look. “Were you there? Did you see?”
I shook my head. “No. She drove away and just never came back.”
“I saw my dad die. I used to dream about it.”
“Me, too.”
“But you weren’t there; what did you dream about?”
“Some well-meaning relative took me to see the car she died in. I used to dream about touching the bloodstains.” I realized I’d never told anyone that.
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
I could have said so many things, many of them sarcastic, like I’m talking about my mother’s death, why wouldn’t something be wrong? I settled for the truth, which crosses the lips like jagged glass, as if you should bleed when you say it. “Just realizing I’ve never told anyone about that dream.”
“Not even Micah and Nathaniel?”
Apparently, he did know they were my boyfriends. “No, not even them.”
“Mom made me go to therapy afterward. I talked about it a lot.”
“Good
for Donna,” I said.
“Why didn’t your dad send you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it occurred to him.”
“I thought I could face my fears, and I wouldn’t be so afraid, but I was afraid.” He looked away from me again. “I was so scared.” He whispered the last.
“So was I,” I said.
He gave me a startled look. “You didn’t look it.”
“Neither did you.”
It took him a moment, but he finally smiled and looked down in that pleased way that young men do. They seem to grow out of it, but it was strangely charming. “You really think so?”
“Peter, you saved me today when you jumped on us in the hallway. She was going to kill me as soon as she was out of sight of you guys.”
“Edward told me that if a bad guy wants to remove you from the scene, and is already threatening or has a weapon, that most of the time they mean to kill you, but if you go with them, you die slower and more painfully.”
I nodded. “I thought that’s what you meant when you repeated the rule in the hallway.”
“You understood,” he said.
“I encouraged you, remember?”
He searched my face, as if trying to read something there. “You did, didn’t you?”
“Edward and I know a lot of the same rules.”
“He said you think like him.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Not always,” Peter said.
“Not always,” I said.
“I won’t get the shot,” he said, and his voice sounded firm.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Do you think I should get it?”
“I didn’t say that, I just want your reasoning.”
“If I don’t get it, and I turn into a weretiger, well, then I did it saving you. If I don’t get the shot, and I don’t turn into a weretiger, then it’s good. If I get the shot and I wasn’t going to be a weretiger, I’ll get whatever’s in the shot, and I’ll have turned into a shapeshifter because I was scared to be a shapeshifter. That sounds stupid.”
“But if you are going to be a weretiger, then the shot would stop it from happening.”
“You think I should take it,” he said.
I sighed. “Honest?”
“Honest would be good,” he said.
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