She shook her head, tried to force herself to focus. All she really wanted to do was run. Destroy something. Eat until she burst. Scream. All at the same time, and all because of Migisi’s stupid curse. She let out a frustrated, angry shout, then took several deep breaths, trying to get herself under control. She’d never felt so close to the edge, barely holding onto reality and what she knew she was supposed to do.
“Not now,” she pleaded. “Not now,” she said, more strongly, more to herself. Through the insanity and fear, a glimmer of sense: her fear was making her crazy. She needed to focus on something other than the fear. She made herself take a slow, deep breath, still feeling completely nuts. Another deep breath.
“Take care of Calder,” she muttered to herself. “Focus on that, you crazy bitch.”
She kept one hand on the towel on Calder’s side and reached around him, trying to gently feel his other side. There was no blood coming from that side that she was able to see, so she took that as a good sign that the worst of his injuries were the ones she could see: the cuts in his side, on his shoulder, and another on his chest. She grabbed another towel and tied it tightly over and around his shoulder, putting pressure on the cut there. The one on his chest was not as deep as the others, and it was already bleeding less. Sophie held a washcloth to that in one hand while she kept pressure on his side with the other. After a while, the towels were soaked with less and less blood, though large, angry red gashes still marred the side of his body. Sophie rooted through the cabinet under his bathroom sink, and found a first aid kit. She rubbed antiseptic ointment gently over the cuts, feeling the rough, raised edges of his wounds under her fingertips. That done, she placed gauze pads over the cuts, then wound a roll of Ace bandages around his body, keeping the gauze pads in place and pressure on the wounds.
As she worked, she felt the insanity of the curse receding. She noted it thankfully, but didn’t really give it much thought. She was just grateful that he wasn’t dying.
She placed another gauze pad on his chest and taped it down. She left the towel tied around his shoulder. It seemed to be working well enough.
“I’m supposed to keep you warm,” she said to Calder, noting the occasional shiver. There was no chance in hell of moving him into a bed or anywhere else; he outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, and she was no lightweight herself. She grabbed a clean towel and dried him off, then wiped out the tub, trying to get the tub as dry as she could under his body as well. She quickly went to his bedroom and grabbed the thick blue comforter off of his bed and brought it back to the bathroom with her.
He was shivering violently now, and she knew that though the worst of it was over, he would need time to recover. She was exhausted.
Sophie kicked her shoes off and climbed into the clawfoot tub beside Calder, wrapping herself around his body. She pulled the comforter over both of them, making sure he was covered. She put her arms around him, and tried to get comfortable.
“Not our sexiest night, Calder,” she murmured. She rested her face against the firm muscles of his back and closed her eyes.
She came awake with a start what may have been seconds later when she felt Calder moving. She sat up with a grimace. Her neck was stiff from sleeping in the tub with him.
“Hey,” she said quietly, patting his hip. He started to stand, and she stopped him. “Hold on. You lost a lot of blood.”
“You can’t sleep in the bathtub,” he said stiffly.
“I had to keep you warm,” she said. His face had been like stone, and his expression softened just a little.
“You did. Thank you. I can walk to bed now.”
He gently pushed her hand away and stood up, carefully, and though he tried to hide his grimace from her, she saw it. He stepped out of the tub and held a hand out to her. She took it, and he pulled her up. She stepped out of the tub, and he let go of her and removed the towel from his shoulder. The cut there was still red, but looked like it had scabbed over.
“Leave the others on. They were deeper,” Sophie said, and he nodded. He wouldn’t look at her, and Sophie’s heart ached. “Calder…”
“I’m tired, kitten,” he said.
“Then let’s sleep. Can I stay with you, or do you want to be alone?” she asked, hoping like hell he would ask her to stay.
“Don’t leave me, Sophie,’ he said, finally meeting her eyes.
“Never,” she promised. He took her hand and led her down the hallway to his bedroom. She took her bloody clothing off, and settled herself into bed beside him. Calder pulled the comforter over them and gathered her into his arms.
Sophie sighed contentedly and snuggled closer to Calder. She could barely keep her eyes open.
“What happened, Calder?” she asked sleepily.
“We’re both exhausted. We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said, and she rubbed his back and kissed his chest.
“I love you,” she murmured.
After a moment, he squeezed her tightly against him. “I love you too, Sophie. There aren’t enough words to tell you how much.”
Calder lay awake for a long time, long after Sophie’s breathing slowed and her body became relaxed and still in his arms. He held her, and admired her as she slept. Everything he’d put her through since he’d come back into her life, and she still held him like she never wanted to let him go, still looked at him like he was the best thing she’d ever seen. And what had he done to deserve it? Blackmailed her, terrorized her, stressed her out. She carried his curse, for fuck’s sake.
Yeah, some catch he’d turned out to be, he thought with disgust. How this gorgeous, sweet, sexy, warm woman could look at him the way she did was still a mystery to him. Every second he spent with her, he felt like it was a precious moment stolen, because one day she’d wake up and realize that she could do so much better. Sophie Turner had always been too good for him. Had been when they were kids, and still was, as far as he was concerned.
He was a selfish asshole. He hoped the day never came when her face didn’t light up when he entered a room, when she didn't realize how much better she could do. But it was coming. He knew it. And for her own safety and sanity, it would probably be better if it was sooner rather than later. Tonight’s insanity had proven what he’d suspected for a couple of weeks now.
His curse wasn’t gone.
It felt like it was coming back. It felt the same way it had the first time he had started feeling the effects of his family’s curse. The hunger, the thirst, the need to keep moving. The need for the satisfaction only Sophie’s body could give him. And then what had happened earlier that night…
He looked at Sophie again, wishing he could drift off to sleep for a while. He had just closed his eyes when he heard a soft knock at the front door. He gently pulled away from Sophie and got out of bed, tucking the blankets around her to keep out the cool night air.
Calder pulled on some pants and headed downstairs, and the knock at the front door sounded again. He scented the air, and groaned.
He pulled the front door open. “What in the hell are you doing here in the middle of the night?” he asked Jon, who stood there, bleary-eyed.
“You’re welcome. It was totally worth driving from Iron Mountain for,” Jon said, shoving past him. “Glad to see you’re okay.”
“What?”
“Sophie called me. She was in a panic. She wanted to know if she should call 911.”
Calder groaned and rubbed his hands over his face. Jon closed the front door behind him.
“So you’re okay?”
“Shh.” Calder said.
Jon raised an eyebrow, and Calder pointed up the stairs.
“Sophie’s asleep now.”
Jon nodded, and they went into the kitchen where they could talk without waking Sophie up. There was a lot he wanted to say to his brother, and he wasn’t ready for her to hear any of it.
Chapter Sixteen
In the kitchen, Jon grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He held one up, wordlessly asking if C
alder wanted one, and Calder shook his head and sat at the small, scuffed table.
“What happened to your window?” Jon asked as he dug the bottle opener out of the kitchen drawer. Calder glanced that way.
“Sophie must have broken it getting in earlier,” Calder said, hating himself again for what he’d put her through.
“She doesn’t have a key?”
“I keep forgetting to make one for her.”
“She can have mine,” Jon said, pulling out the other chair at the kitchen table and settling into it.
“You might need yours. I’ll have one made for her,” Calder said. He got up and started pacing across the kitchen. “The curse isn’t gone. It’s coming back,” he said quietly as he paced. He glanced at his brother out of the corner of his eye. Jon had been about to take a gulp of beer, and he froze with the bottle lifted partway to his mouth.
“What?” Jon finally asked. “What the hell are you talking about? Soph took it.”
“She took it,” Calder agreed woodenly. “But it’s coming back.”
The look on Jon’s face was enough to make Calder want to storm into the woods and fight something. A mix of fear, confusion, and anger. Helplessness. “So, she doesn’t have it anymore?” Jon finally asked.
Calder looked away. “She does. She’s getting worse, man. I look at her sometimes, and I know she’s not really there, you know? She gets this blank, weird look in her eyes. She wanders, and she doesn’t know she’s doing it. Mostly at night. I’ll wake up and she’s gone, and I’ll find her pacing crazily in the woods.”
“That must have her freaked out,” Jon said.
“She doesn’t know about it. Doesn’t remember it happening. She blacks out completely when it’s going on, and she has no idea it even happened. I’m this close to tying our wrists together or something before we go to sleep at night, because most nights, now, she’s wandering. I’m losing her,” he said, and the words hurt more than he thought they could.
“But you said the curse is coming back for you, too,” Jon said, watching him closely.
“It is. Constant thirst, hunger. I can’t sit still. I want to fight all the time, unless Sophie’s around, then all I can think about is doing something else.”
“What happened tonight?” Jon asked quietly, resignation in his voice. They’d both known, it seemed, that it was too good to be true. That the Turcotte curse could just be taken, transferred to someone else. It would have been all right, if Sophie was improving, if the curse was just transferring itself back to Calder, to its rightful prisoner. But that didn’t seem to be what was happening.
Calder sighed. “I was working and waiting for Sophie to get home. And I just got more and more edgy. Couldn’t be still, couldn’t calm down. So I decided to go for a run. I didn’t trust my bear, so I ran in my human form,” Calder said. Jon waited, and after a few moments, Calder continued. “I could smell that fucking warlock in Sophie’s woods. Strong, like he’d just been there. It was like that was all it took. I must have shifted. I don’t remember doing it or deciding to do it. All I knew was, the next time I was coherent enough to focus on anything other than my rage, I wasn’t in my human form.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Anyway, I was running then as my bear, and clearly, I was in a fighting mood. I stumbled into the path of a great big, pretty pissed off black bear. I think I was a little too close to its den.”
“So you fought,” Jon said, putting it together.
Calder nodded. “At first it was all instinct. Male bullshit. I felt all bear. Saw things like a bear.”
“Fuck,” Jon said, scraping his fingers through his hair.
“Yeah.” They both knew what it meant. Shifters keep their humanity, even in their animal forms. They think like humans, reason like humans, just in the body of a bear, or a wolf. The curse and the madness it entailed made it so that the men in Calder’s family lost their humanity. The first sign of that, they knew from generations of the first-born male dealing with the curse, was that in their bear form, they began feeling more animal than man. Eventually, that would be their default state, and they’d lose their humanity forever.
Calder and Jon had both watched it happen to their father. They both knew what it looked like, and, from his time with the curse before Sophie took it, Calder knew damn well what it felt like. And it was happening again.
“But it doesn’t make any sense. How?” Jon asked, and Calder’s stomach twisted at the desperation in his voice. He’d hoped to save his brother from having to babysit him the way he’d had to care for their father at the end.
“I don’t know,” Calder said quietly. “All I know is that Sophie’s slowly losing herself, and so am I. And she’s the only one who can save us.”
“She can’t save you, Calder,” Jon said. “Not now. Shadow,” he said, and the hatred in his voice grated on Calder.
“Shadow has nothing to do with it. The fact that she can’t remember shit she did a few minutes ago is the issue here. My curse, which she never should have taken. Migisi’s going to have the last laugh, because we’re both going to end up raging lunatics, and the fucking curse is going to go on forever.”
Neither of them spoke for a long time. The clock on the wall ticked the seconds by, echoing emptily in the dim kitchen.
“I need you to lock me up if I get too bad. The first person I’d hurt would be her, and I’d rather put a bullet through my head than do that,” Calder said quietly.
“You should break it off with her now,” Jon said. “As much as you don’t want to… it would be better for both of you.”
“I know,” Calder said. “I know.”
Jon sighed. “Look, I know there’s something between the two of you that most people can only dream of having. You two are drawn together in a way that everyone around you can see. It’s been that way since we were kids. I don’t understand it, but damn if I don’t want something like it for myself someday. I know walking away from her isn’t something you want to do. And I know that your bear makes it even harder, because it definitely doesn’t want to let her go. But you need to think, while you still can, about what’s best for Soph. We both know she won’t leave you. She’s not the type to walk away.”
Calder didn’t answer. They sat in silence, and after a while, he said, “you know what she’d say if she heard you right now?”
“What?”
“That she can decide for herself what’s best for her.”
“You’re trying to use that as an out, man, and you know it. Love is blind, and you two are more blind about one another than most.”
“That’s bullshit. She sees me better than anyone ever has. She knows me.”
“And I’ll repeat it: the two of you are blind. She knows damn well that she’d be putting herself in danger staying with you. You’re a ticking time bomb, and she’s too stubborn to walk, even once she does realize what’s happening.”
“We have a little more time.”
“So you say,” Jon said doubtfully. “You lost yourself tonight, Calder. Luckily, the only one who suffered from it was a bear. What if it’s Sophie next time?” he asked, meeting Calder’s eyes. Calder looked away. He knew Jon was right. He knew it, and the idea of breaking things off with Sophie was something he couldn’t even imagine doing.
“She could still figure it all out. I believe in her.”
“And that’s great. But she’s also losing her mind, man. How much of her is really left?”
“A lot. She’s still mostly together.”
“As far as you know. She goes to work. You don’t think things happen there? Or when she’s driving? Or when she’s alone at home?”
“Just… we’ll figure something out,” Calder said, holding his hand up to halt his brother’s speech. “She’ll do it. I know she will. This is Sophie, and she doesn’t know the meaning of the word surrender. Okay? We’ll help one another through this, and she’ll figure it out—“
“Yeah. And we’ll all live happily ever after. The end
,” Jon said. He got up and poured the rest of his beer down the kitchen drain and set his beer bottle on the counter. “Like I said, you two are blind. Or stupid.”
“Just promise me that if I get too bad you’ll take care of it so she doesn’t have to. I don’t plan on letting it get that far. If I get bad, I’ll lock my own ass up rather than put her through that.”
Jon just glared at him, then gave a terse nod. “I’ll come back tomorrow to help with the window,” he said as he walked toward the back door.
“And check on me,” Calder said. “You don’t have to.”
“I know. It’ll make me feel better, though,” Jon said, and Calder clapped him on the shoulder.
“I’ll be okay,” Calder said.
“You can put your faith in Sophie if you want to. I prefer to live in the real world,” Jon said, and without another word, he walked to his truck and drove back down the driveway. Calder watched his taillights until he turned off of the highway onto the road that led to the house they’d grown up in. He glanced at the driveway, where Jon had left the great big old Studebaker he’d gone to pick up for Calder. His next restoration project. Calder looked it over, for no other reason than because it gave him something else to think about for a minute. He made a mental list of parts he’d have to order based on what he could see at first glance. There would be more once he started pulling things apart.
“Hey, you. Aren’t you cold?”
Calder glanced up at the front porch to see Sophie there, wearing one of his ugly old sweatshirts as a nightgown. Her hair was in disarray, and she had that bleary-eyed look she got when she could use a little more sleep.
Shadow Sworn (Copper Falls Book 2) Page 16