by Roxie Noir
Miles gripped the steering wheel harder, drove a little faster.
“He’s going to die,” she told Miles, staring right at the side of his face. “If what you’ve just told me is true, he’s going to die.”
Miles looked back at her, taking his eyes off the dark, twisting road for what seemed like a dangerously long time.
“Try not to let that happen,” he said, before looking forward again.
Delilah felt completely helpless. She wanted to jump out of the truck, shift, and run back to her father’s house. Her car had a full tank of gas, and she could get past Anchorage by morning, much too far for the pack to bother chasing her. But she was a doctor and she’d taken an oath.
If she went and helped William, he’d probably still die. But she knew that if she didn’t go at all, he’d definitely die.
Delilah furiously watched the forest flash by in the headlights as Miles drove much too fast.
The cabin had been built over a hundred years ago, by someone’s great-great-grandfather, back before electricity and running water had existed. Fifty years before, it had finally been upgraded.
It was barely a cabin, more like a lodge, sprawling across the mountain. Every generation seemed to add onto it, and now it was a mess of different styles. The original, in the middle, standing two stories tall, was made of thick wooden logs, easily eighteen inches in diameter, beautifully finished and put together by hand. The next wings were made of smaller logs, still well-joined and beautiful, then were the wooden planks, a small one-bedroom add-on that had vinyl siding. Although Delilah hadn’t been to the cabin in years and years, she knew that around back things got even uglier.
Miles stopped by the front door and Delilah jumped out with her bag and headed inside. Two anxious-looking younger men were in the front room, decorated in classic ugly cabin style: deer heads, an enormous unlit fireplace, and couches that had clearly been bought sometime in the 1970s.
“Where is he?” Delilah asked, hefting her emergency bag slightly, showing them what she had.
Both of them stopped pacing.
“Back here,” said one, tilting his head in a come this way gesture, and Delilah followed through another wood-paneled room, then through a swinging door to a kitchen.
In it, William laid face-down on a wooden table, the unstable legs straining under his weight — like all bear shifters, he was tall and broad. His head was turned to the side, and another man held a bottle of Jim Beam just below his face, a long straw in it. Every so often, William took a pull.
Alcohol was a blood thinner, but Delilah really didn’t think it mattered. At least he wasn’t still bleeding too much. Miles hadn’t been lying about what a wreck the man was. If he were human, he’d be dead; even as a shifter, he wasn’t far off, and she didn’t have anything like what she needed to help him.
She wished that when Miles had come, she’d climbed out of a window or something and snuck off, back to civilization, somewhere far away from Fjords. Instead, she put her emergency bag down on a counter and began pulling things out: gloves, masks, saline solution.
“Okay,” she said. “Everyone wears a mask, and everyone rolls up their sleeves and washes their hands right now.” She pointed at the big metal sink on the side of the kitchen.
The men all looked at each other. It was obvious that they weren’t used to taking orders from a woman, and especially not an outsider woman.
“If he gets an infection, he’s dead,” she said, still pulling things from the bag. “Wash your hands.”
One by one, they lined up and scrubbed themselves diligently as Delilah pulled on sterile gloves and walked to the table, looking carefully at the wounds on the man’s back.
Miles hadn’t been lying about being able to see his bones. She looked at the saline bottle in her hand and knew that it was much too small, and she felt totally helpless. Even if she managed to clean his wounds well enough, she didn’t have anything at all like what she would need to treat him properly.
Then, the door to the kitchen opened again and a middle-aged woman came in, followed closely by Miles. She was already wearing scrubs, and for the first time since Miles had knocked on her front door, Delilah felt hopeful.
“This is Emma, Jack’s mate,” said Miles, nodding at one of the men in the kitchen. “She’s going to help me break into the clinic and get whatever you need.”
“I’m a nurse,” Emma said.
An hour and a half later, the two of them came back from the clinic with everything Delilah had requested. She’d had the men in the kitchen boiling water, doing her best to clean William’s ragged wounds, but it made her nervous. Who knew what hostile microbes lived in the groundwater out here?
As Delilah went through the box, setting its contents out on the kitchen counters, Emma shooed the men out of the kitchen.
“Just like Thanksgiving,” she joked. “Always useless.”
They went to work on William, who’d passed out by now. Normally, Delilah would have been concerned by that, but he wasn’t dead yet, and her job was made easier if the patient wasn’t screaming with every stitch she made in him.
“He’s going to be in bad shape for a long time,” she told Emma. “These deep muscles might not mend right.”
“Do you know what happened?” Emma asked.
“They won’t tell me.”
Emma shook her head. “Those boys,” she said, a smile in her voice that Delilah found a little nauseating. She looked up for a moment, only to find that Emma was shaking her head like William had been a naughty toddler.
Delilah stopped. She felt like she was talking to an alien.
“He nearly died,” she said. “This wasn’t roughhousing.”
“They get out of hand sometimes,” Emma said. “William’s got strong shifter blood. He’ll be right as rain in a few months.”
Delilah just closed her eyes for a second, then went back to stitching. She was doing the best she could, given the circumstances, but what he really needed was the hospital in Anchorage — William needed heavy antibiotics for one thing, and probably a drain for another. There was no way he wouldn’t get an infection.
“Emma,” she said, slowly and quietly. “He really, really needs to go to a hospital.”
Emma looked up at her, brow furrowed.
“Roy said not to take him,” Emma said doubtfully.
“I don’t—” Delilah started, and then stopped. She took a deep breath: there were a lot of them and only one of her. No matter how true it might be, calling Roy an idiot who didn’t care about his own pack wouldn’t get her very far.
“Roy isn’t a doctor,” she said quietly. “He doesn’t understand how bad this is.”
Emma stared at Delilah and blinked, once.
“Do you think you could convince him to let William at least go to the clinic in town?”
“He was very clear,” Emma said. “He’s not going to change his mind, especially not if I’m the one asking.”
Delilah closed her eyes and flexed her blood-covered hands. She was sweating inside her latex gloves, and she had the very beginning of a headache. The stitches that she’d been able to give William didn’t look very good. The table he was on was too low, and even though they’d brought in every lamp they could find, it was no operating lamp.
“Okay,” she said. “Then you’ve got to send them all away on an errand, except Miles.”
“Why?”
Delilah began to think that Emma might be kind of dumb.
“So we can sneak him out and to the hospital.”
“But Roy said—“
“This man is going to die,” Delilah hissed, leaning over him and toward the other woman. “I don’t give a flying fuck what Roy said. My job is to keep William alive, and I can’t do that here.”
Emma looked at William again, still utterly passed out on the table. She still didn’t seem nearly as concerned as the situation warranted.
“Tell them I need a better light,” Delilah suggested. “
Have them break into the clinic again, doctors’ offices, dentists’ offices, I don’t know, I don’t care. Just get them out and get Miles in here so he can help us carry William.”
Emma sighed, then looked doubtfully at Delilah.
Finally, she left the room, and Delilah exhaled into her mask, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. Then she started taping up William to transport him to the hospital.
It seemed to take Emma a very, very long time, and Delilah was finished taping up William’s back. He was covered in white gauze, a little bit of blood still seeping through.
I should tell Emma to disinfect this kitchen after we leave, Delilah thought. God knows they won’t do it without prompting.
The kitchen door swung open again and Delilah looked up.
It was Emma, followed immediately by Roy. Emma wouldn’t even look at Delilah.
“Emma says you’re finished,” Roy said, his deep, low voice thundering through the kitchen.
“We need to take him to the hospital,” Delilah said again.
She looked again at Emma, but Emma was just looking at William, asleep or passed out on the table.
“Looks fine to me,” said Roy.
“He’s not. He needs surgery, he needs something to drain the pus once the infection sets in. I don’t have the equipment for that here, and I can’t do it in a lodge kitchen,” she said.
Roy just looked at William, breathing evenly, obviously skeptical of her.
Delilah could tell it was a losing battle, though. She took her rubber gloves and mask off and tossed them into the kitchen trash, taking a sidelong look at William.
She had to get home and then leave. When she was in Anchorage, maybe further, she’d call the state police and tell them what was happening here. It wasn’t illegal to refuse medical treatment, sure, but it was illegal to refuse it to someone else.
“Bandaged nicely,” said Roy, then he turned and addressed himself to someone else.
“Brock,” he said. “Show Miss Silver to her room?”
“I’m all right to drive,” Delilah said, going through the things on the counter.
“We need you here while he recovers,” said Roy in the tone of a man clearly used to giving orders.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” Delilah said. The skin on her back began to crawl, and she looked up Roy again, meeting his steely gray eyes.
“Brock, please show her to her room and make sure she stays quite comfortable there,” he said.
Over his shoulder, she could see Brock over his shoulder. They weren’t related, but they had the same serious stare, the same look of total devotion to the cause. Brock was younger and skinnier, maybe in his early twenties, and had the look of a bear who hadn’t filled out quite yet.
There was still no way Delilah could fight him, though, let alone the two of them.
“Are you holding me hostage?” she said, quietly.
“We would just prefer you not leave,” Roy said. “We’re making sure of that. You’ve got a history of it, you know.”
Pure rage flooded through Delilah. She clenched her fists and felt the angry tears spring into her eyes, but what could she do? Even if Miles had been there, she knew it would be the two of them against the entire pack, and they didn’t stand a chance.
She turned to Emma, blatantly ignoring Roy.
“Do you know how to start an antibiotic drip?” she asked. One of the things she’d had them take from the clinic was an IV bag, antibiotic solution, and a hanger. It was possibly the only one that the clinic had, and though Delilah felt bad about that, she was certain that William needed it.
Emma nodded.
Delilah turned back to Roy and stepped right up to him. Her eyes were at his collarbones and she had to look up, but she wasn’t afraid of him.
“If he dies, this is on you,” she said. “You could have taken him to a hospital and you didn’t. You could have let me do it, and you didn’t.”
Her gaze flicked to Emma.
“You disgust me,” she said, and then followed Brock out of the kitchen, through the main room, and down a hall to a large bedroom.
She stepped in and Brock closed the door behind her, leaving her totally alone. Delilah looked down at herself: she had blood on her clothes, blood up her arms, on her jeans. She wanted to sit down and cry, but instead she dragged herself into the bathroom and took a long, hot shower.
Chapter Twelve
Miles
Miles’s own snoring woke him up, and he sat up with a start. His head had flopped over the back of the uncomfortable chair and his neck had a crick in it. He turned his head from side to side, and then realized: the whole lodge was dead quiet. No movement, no one talking. Totally silent.
He stood, his whole body stiff and strange-feeling from falling asleep on the sofa, and crept to the kitchen. Since it was so quiet, he felt like he should follow suit, and tried not to make any noise.
Inside, William was, somehow, still sleeping on the table, face-down, blood beginning to seep through the bandages. Jack, one of Roy’s top men and Emma’s mate, was leaning against the counter, watching him, arms crossed over his chest.
“She patched him up?” Miles asked. William looked okay, actually. Sleeping, all in one piece again.
Jack shrugged. He was tall and powerful, with a long beard that wiggled when he talked.
“That girl thinks he’s still gonna die,” he said. “But he’s taped back together, got antibiotics on the IV. She’s got no faith in us. He’ll be fine.”
Miles regarded the scene quietly. He knew it had nothing to do with Delilah’s faith in the pack, and everything to do with the nature of human biology, but he didn’t argue with Jack.
He heard a snort from the doorway and turned. It was Brock, in bear form, big and honey-colored. Miles raised his eyebrows and looked at Jack.
“Patrolling,” Jack said. “We got a couple around. She tried to sneak him out, but Emma knew better.”
Shit, Miles thought. If Delilah was trying to get past Roy — trying hard enough that Roy had put guard bears on William — then it must be really bad. Of course Emma had betrayed her. She couldn’t think for herself if she got a million dollars for it.
“Delilah go home?” he asked.
“She’s down the hall,” said Michael, gesturing at an exit.
She was probably tired and wanted to keep an eye on William, Miles thought.
As he walked down the hall, Brock followed him. There was another bear, this one darker brown, lying right outside the door, his head on his paws.
That was odd. It was almost like he was guarding that room.
“She awake?” Miles asked, quietly.
The bear seemed to shrug.
Miles put an ear to the door. He could distinctly hear her walking around inside, so he knocked, softly.
“Fuck off!” Delilah shouted.
Miles frowned and looked at bear-Brock. He was starting to get suspicious.
“It’s me,” he said.
“I don’t care if you’re the goddamn Sultan of goddamn Persia!” Delilah shouted. “Fuck off!”
Miles opened the door and peeked in. More than anything, he was bewildered — she was mad at him? What for?
She was standing in the middle of a large bedroom, wrapped cloak-like in a comforter, staring at him coldly.
“Did I wake you up?” Miles asked. She sure looked awake, and he’d heard her walking around, but why didn’t she have clothes?
“How the fuck am I supposed to sleep?” she hissed. “I’ve been kidnapped by a — by a goddamn cult.”
“Kidnapped?”
Delilah froze for a moment and looked at Miles. “They’re not letting me leave,” she said, slowly.
Miles swiveled his head and looked at the shut door.
Suddenly, it clicked together, why there were bears patrolling everywhere.
Delilah was their prisoner.
He didn’t even think, he just let his bear out, shif
ting as he tore the door back open, slamming it against the wall with the force.
The bear who’d been resting outside lumbered up and ducked, just as Miles’s paw raked across his shoulder, his thick fur and skin deflecting Miles’s claws.
Then, he saw Brock charging him from down the hall and he turned, baring his teeth and growling. Brock was no problem, he thought.
He could take Brock, but as Brock neared, the bear Miles had just swiped barreled into him as well, from the side, and then both bears were on top of him, rolling him over and biting his neck, clawing at him, but Miles was better.
With one gigantic shove, he threw them both off and stood on all fours, roaring, daring anyone else to come for him.
Michael, in bear form, came out of the kitchen, and two others came into the hallway, one on either side, all snarling and baring their teeth.
It was five to one. As much as he wanted to run into the middle of them and rip out as many throats as he could, Miles forced himself to calm down. Getting himself shredded to pieces wasn’t going to help Delilah.
He shifted back, slowly, still staring the other men down.
“Close the door,” Delilah commanded. His heart was pounding and sweat poured off of him. He still felt jittery from the fight, but he obeyed, stepping inside and shutting it after him.
“There’s too many of them,” he said, pacing back and forth.
“There wouldn’t be any of them if you hadn’t called me here,” she said. She pulled the comforter even tighter around herself, a tall, curvy column of blanket and anger.
“I’m sorry,” he said, helplessly. “It was the only thing I could think of to do.”
Delilah’s jaw flexed beneath her skin, and she didn’t say anything. Miles was still breathing hard, useless fury pumping through his veins. He knew that he wasn’t good at scenarios like this: his first reaction was always shift and tear someone apart, but he’d already tried that and it hadn’t gone well.
“I didn’t think they were going to kidnap you,” he said, desperately trying to tamp down his rage.
“Sure, you just thought, ‘Let’s put Delilah back into the middle of this crazy pack that hates her,’” she said, her tone biting and sarcastic. “No possible problems there.”