Wounded

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  We all turned and looked at him. "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Doctors told you that you might lose the use of your arm, but you hit the gym harder than ever and were fine."

  I glanced down at my arm as if I'd forgotten it was there, because I knew exactly the injury he meant. The bend of my left arm was a mound of white scar tissue. It worked just fine, but it was the worst scar I had, and the one that had made the doctors talk about permanent disability.

  Mercedes said, "Anita is almost a shapeshifter herself, without all the metaphysics. We've talked about her healing abilities; it's not human normal."

  "Tomas asked if becoming a shapeshifter would heal him," Micah said.

  "He's too young to make that call," I said.

  "Yes, it's illegal to contaminate anyone with lycanthropy who's below the age of eighteen, even with their permission, but Tomas is asking, and I thought his family should know," Micah said.

  "I wasn't all vampire and shapeshifter super-healing when I got my arm torn up, Mercedes. In fact, they thought I would probably lose at least some use of my arm. I healed like a normal human back in the day."

  "What did you do to heal?" she asked.

  "Physical therapy like it was my new religion, and I hit the weight room really seriously for the first time. I lifted in college a little for judo, but putting muscle around my elbow . . . one of the doctors told me that it could make all the difference. PT was strength and flexibility, and the weights helped keep the scar tissue from foreshortening the ligaments and tendons as they healed."

  "You're like a walking example of what Frankie and I do, and how much it can help people. Frankie likes working with the pro athletes, and I do, too, but I really like helping ordinary people be more athletic, healthier, especially after an injury. It's like they don't know what their bodies can do until after the accident."

  "It's more that after you come so close to losing the use of your body, you want to use it more," I said.

  She nodded. "That makes sense."

  "Anita could talk to Tomas," Micah said.

  "Only if you're there to help me communicate the message," I said.

  "I'll help, too," Nathaniel said.

  "I appreciate the moral support," I said, smiling.

  "It's not just that, Anita. I've been the victim as a child and a teenager, and survived. I know what's it like to be hurt, bad, and not know if your body is going to come back." I didn't know every injury that Nathaniel had endured before I met him, but I knew that he'd run away from home after he'd witnessed his stepfather beat his older brother to death with a baseball bat. Nathaniel had been seven when it happened; by ten he'd been on the streets selling the only thing he had--himself. Saying Nathaniel had had a hard childhood was like calling the Titanic a boating accident.

  "You weren't a lycanthrope as a child," Mercedes said.

  "No, I was just human."

  "How old were you when you became a shapeshifter?" she asked.

  "Eighteen."

  I'd met Nathaniel when he was nineteen, only a year after he became a wereleopard. I hadn't really done that math in my head. He'd always seemed so controlled, like he'd had years of practice with his beast when I met him. Enough control that he was already stripping and changing shape on stage at Guilty Pleasures with nothing between him and the audience but his self-control and club security, though that was more to keep the customers off the dancers than the other way around.

  "God, not even twenty; you were just a kid, too," she said.

  "Everyone's a kid once, Mercedes," I said.

  She glanced at me. "You were about my age when you started working with Papa. I thought you were all grown up, but you're only what, eight years older than me?"

  "I'm six years older than Connie, so I guess that's about right."

  "You're my age," Nathaniel said.

  She looked at him then. "I didn't know you were that much younger than Anita, or maybe it's just that she so doesn't look thirty."

  "Thirty-one," I said.

  Micah took my hand, smiling. "Anita and I are the same age."

  "Neither of you looks thirty," she said, and she studied our faces as she said it.

  I looked back at her and wondered for the first time, Did we look younger than Mercedes? Lycanthropes age slower than human normal anyway, and thanks to surviving several attacks by rogue shapeshifters I carried several strains of lycanthropy in my bloodstream. I shouldn't have been able to "catch" more than one strain of lycanthropy, because it protects its host body from almost all illness and injury, including other kinds of lycanthropy. I was a medical miracle because I didn't change shape either. That might change someday, but so far I was a first for the medical journals, or so a few doctors had told me. We thought that my ties to the vampires, both metaphysically and romantically, had protected me from changing shape somehow, because vampires couldn't catch lycanthropy, just like a lycanthrope couldn't become a vampire. The two supernatural medical conditions canceled each other for modern lycanthropy and vampirism. Thousands of years ago, lycanthropes could catch vampirism and be both, but something about one of the two conditions had changed enough over the millennia that it didn't work that way now.

  I'd met a few vampires who were old enough to carry both, and they'd all been either scary as hell or not human at all, ever. Humanoid, but not Homo sapiens, which had been a surprise--okay, a shock. Most of the scientific literature had thought that vampires didn't even exist as a disease/condition until Homo sapiens. Some scientists thought maybe it went back to the Cro-Magnons, or the Neanderthals, but that was seriously disputed. I knew that vampires went back further than that, but I kept having to kill any vampire I met that old, because they were all crazy as hatters and more evil than Hitler's plan to "better" the human race. They were also so powerful it could make my bones ache just standing close to them. Dead was better for them, and safer for the rest of us, but it would be nice to find a sane one who could talk to the paleobiologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and all the other "ists."

  Mercedes and Micah talked to Tomas out in the reception area before Nathaniel and I went over. We didn't want him to feel like we were ganging up on him. He agreed almost right away, which I hadn't expected, but as Nathaniel pointed out, I had just saved his life. That might give me more street cred with anyone.

  We went back into the break room. Mercedes wheeled Tomas beside the couch, so we had a conversation grouping, though I got one of the chairs from the table, so I could sit on the other side of Tomas, rather than on the couch. It was too low for me to sit and have good eye contact with Tomas without one of us turning our heads oddly. I liked eye contact, and for important talks I liked it even more. Micah sat on the arm of the couch, Nathaniel beside him. Mercedes took the far corner of the couch, not sure Tomas would talk in front of her, since he hadn't talked to any of his family much yet. She'd already told Micah that if the boy wouldn't talk in front of her, she'd leave us to it.

  Tomas had been the smallest kid in school for years, taking after Manny, but he was all arms and legs in his tuxedo now. He had to be at least his mother's five-eight, but since her brothers had all turned out to be six-five, except for one who was six-three, nicknamed Bambino not for his birth order but for being "short," Tomas would probably hit at least six feet someday. The brothers looked like a defensive line on the edges of the dance floor, until their wives dragged them onto the floor, and then they were surprisingly graceful, like watching bulls pirouette through a china shop.

  His black hair was short, but with enough length so someone had used hair gel to style it back from his face in one of those careless wavy hairdos that some men can pull off. In a few years, when he filled out to his new height, the hair would be a serious selling point, but his face still looked like a little boy's face, so that the combination made him look pretty in a way that most thirteen-year-old boys don't want, but he seemed to be fine with all that hair framing his face. It probably meant the hairdo wasn't just
for the wedding, but something he did regularly, which meant he cared about his hair more than my own little brother had at the same age, a lot more. I remembered Manny telling me that Tomas was already starting to cut quite a swath through the girls in school, so he probably cared about a lot of things that I didn't associate with thirteen. I'd been hopelessly backward at the same age.

  He sat slightly crooked, favoring one side heavily. There was a tightness around his eyes, even on the baby face, that said pain. He was hurting, but the kind of meds he was probably getting for pain would have drugged him up or made him sleepy. He was going to hold out from pride. I'd have done the same thing, so I couldn't really throw stones.

  Tomas gave me a look out of big, brown eyes, the nice hair spilling forward a little so it framed his face on one side. The gesture reminded me of how Asher used his golden hair to frame his face to such good effect. That let me know that it was on purpose for Tomas, too. He knew he was pretty. It was a level of self-awareness that I didn't associate with most boys his age.

  "Hey, Tomas, I won't ask how you're feeling."

  He grinned suddenly. It made him look years younger and more real than the careless, almost-flirting look of seconds before. "Then you'll be the only one who hasn't asked."

  I smiled back. "I know, you get sick of answering the question. When you're still in the hospital people ask the question. I always want to answer, 'I feel like shit, how are you feeling?'"

  He laughed then, and it was like the grin, younger. I liked both; it made me see the little boy I'd known since he was in kindergarten. "I like that, I like that a lot, but Mama would have a fit."

  "How many of them have asked, 'How are you doing?'"

  "A lot," he said, rolling his eyes.

  "Next time, say, 'I got shot, how you doing?' See what they say."

  "Anita," Mercedes said, "don't teach him to be a smart-ass. He's already bad enough." But she was laughing.

  "I still get stupid questions about the scars," I said.

  He gave me serious eyes as he said, "Micah said you got hurt bad once."

  "More than once, but this is the one that the doctors thought would cripple me."

  His eyes flinched, but I'd used the word deliberately. He gave me narrow eyes; it wasn't entirely a friendly look, but it wasn't unfriendly either, more a considering look, like I'd done something interesting.

  "Most people won't say the word, they talk around it, but you just say it: cripple. I'm going to be a cripple."

  "Bullshit," I said.

  He gave me wide eyes, and almost smiled. "Why'd you say that?"

  "From what I hear, if you do your physical therapy you'll be walking just fine, and if you add more weights and gym work you'll be running, too."

  His face darkened, eyes suddenly angry. "They won't promise I'll run again."

  "But if you don't do your PT, they guarantee you won't run again, right?"

  He gave me the full force of those angry eyes, his mouth set in harsh lines. He looked bitter. It didn't make him look older, really, but it did something unpleasant to him, as if his entire energy changed. I understood in that moment that this wasn't just about Tomas's body, or even his emotional recovery, but something more profound. Bitterness can spoil you for life. It eats away at all the good things and makes everything seem bad, if you let it.

  "I'll never run like I could before, so what's the use?"

  I held my arm out to him, flexing my hand downward at the wrist so the bend of my elbow was very flat and the scars were very clear. It wasn't like they were ever not visible if I wore short sleeves, but I'd had them so long that I just didn't think about them much anymore. They ran white and thick across the bend of my arm, mounding at the elbow and running in thin ropes of scar tissue away from it. I'd been told I should have asked for a plastic surgeon when it happened, but once they told me I might lose the use of my arm I hadn't really worried about scars. Now they were a part of me, like a freckle, or a mole, just something on my skin that had always been there, though of course, the scars hadn't been there always.

  Tomas's voice was almost hostile as he said, "I've seen them before in the summer."

  "I don't try to hide them, any of them."

  His gaze went lower on my arm to the cross-shaped burn scar, now a little crooked from the claw scar that a shapeshifted witch had given me. I pointed to a much smaller scar on my arm near the shoulder. "This was my first bullet wound."

  He looked at the slick, white mark. "I know you got shot this year, but you healed it, you healed all of it because you're like . . . magic"--and even to him it sounded lame, because he looked angry, eyes uncertain, as he added, "You know what I mean, you heal it all."

  "Every scar you just looked at was before I could heal it all. There's a few more, including one from the same vampire that tore up my arm. He chewed at my collarbone until he broke it."

  He gave me suspicious eyes.

  "I swear it."

  His eyes narrowed, and I wondered where he got the attitude. It couldn't be just since the kidnapping, because it took time to build a bad attitude. I should know, because I had one of my own.

  I pulled down the collar of my shirt enough to show the very edge of the collarbone scar.

  His eyes widened a little, some of the suspicion fading, but then he said, "I believe you have all the injuries, Anita. But Mercedes just wants you to tell me to be good and do my PT."

  "She's your sister, she's supposed to want you to get better, right?"

  He frowned harder.

  "Would you like it better if Mercedes didn't give a damn about you?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Then, yeah, she wants me to talk to you about what I did to keep my arm."

  His eyes widened just a touch, the sullen teenager slipping around the edges. "Papa didn't tell me you almost lost your arm."

  "They weren't going to cut it off or anything, but the doc told me I could lose fifty to seventy-five percent mobility from the joint, which meant I'd basically be down an arm."

  His eyes stayed big, face serious, not sullen as he stared at the scars. "What did you do?"

  "What the doctors told me to do, physical therapy, and hit the gym like it was my new church. I'd never lifted weights or worked out so hard in my life, because I was saving my arm. Screw skinny jeans, or looking good in a bikini. I wanted this." I made a fist for him and flexed the muscles of my forearm, even the ones underneath the scars.

  "You have more muscles than any girl I know." He was sincere, eyes still wide as he stared at all the scars on my arm. Then he grinned suddenly. "I bet you look great in a bikini, too." His eyes swept up to my face briefly and then down to my breasts, which was a little disconcerting coming from someone I'd known since he was six years old.

  "Eyes up here," I said, motioning with my other hand.

  He had the decency to blush.

  Mercedes said, "Anita!" like I'd done something bad.

  "If he's old enough to look, he's old enough to get called on it, and he's old enough to start learning how to do it without being pervy about it."

  "Anita's right," Micah said.

  Nathaniel nodded, and added, "You can look without being creepy, it just takes practice."

  Tomas raised his hands in front of his face to hide the blush, or because he didn't know what else to do. It was like a holdover gesture from when he was a much younger kid. He brought his hands down and his eyes were angry again, as he tried to rebuild the sullen too-cool-for-school attitude.

  "I'm sorry I stared."

  I liked that he didn't ignore it all, and even more that he apologized. "I appreciate the apology, Tomas."

  He shrugged, the potentially pretty face not pretty at all as he let the attitude take over. Maybe I'd embarrassed him and maybe that wouldn't make him want to listen to me, but screw it, he'd had it coming.

  "If you apologize for something, you don't get to keep giving someone attitude about it after the apology," Micah said.

&nbs
p; Tomas looked at him. I think it was supposed to be a hard look, but he was a suburban teenager who'd had his first violent experience less than a month ago; his hard look wasn't that hard.

  Micah gave him calm eyes. "An apology means you're sorry you did something; continuing to be a shit after the apology means you aren't sorry."

  "So which is it?" I said. "Are you sorry you stared, or was the apology just something to say because you thought you should?"

  Tomas looked from one to the other of us, then said, "You guys are weird."

  "We're preternaturals," Micah said.

  "That's not what I mean." He still looked sullen, but there was something in his face beside it. He was looking at us as if we'd done something interesting, or at least something unexpected. He looked at me finally. "I'm sorry I stared and that it was creepy. I didn't mean to be creepy."

  "Apology accepted."

  "Were you able to lift as much after your arm got better as you did before?"

  "More," I said.

  He gave me those suspicious eyes again.

  "I could lift more because I worked harder in the gym than I ever had before, so I got better and stronger than ever before."

  He nodded then, eyes thoughtful. "I get that."

  "If I'd just given up, then my arm wouldn't be working, and I wouldn't have all these muscles, and I would have stopped hunting vampires about eight years ago."

  "Anita would never have met either of us," Nathaniel said.

  Tomas looked at him then. "What do you mean?"

  "Anita met us through her connections with Jean-Claude. She had just met him when she got attacked, and if she'd given up hunting vampires, she might never have seen him again. If she'd never dated him, she'd have never met us."

  "Are you saying that if I do all the stuff my doctors want me to do, I'll find true love?" He rolled his eyes and was suddenly very much a thirteen-year-old boy in his reaction, as if "true love" meant girl cooties.

  "Are you saying you don't want to be as happy as Mama and Papa?" Mercedes asked, one hand on her hip and her face matching the serious attitude.

  He rolled eyes at her, too. "Everyone wants to be as happy as they are."

  "Everyone, but not you?" Micah asked.

  "It's embarrassing the way they're all over each other like they're my sisters' age."