by Jenn Burke
Hudson smiled widely. “You’re always welcome, Lex. You know that.”
My mate’s enthusiasm made me happy—as happy as I could be in this situation. The whole reason we’d bought this monster of a house was so that our friends—our family, our band—could spend as much time with us as possible. It amused me to no end that reticent Hudson had transformed into...well, not a social butterfly, by any means, but a guy who was tuned in to his family and happy beyond words to have those connections.
Dr. Kozlow went off to check on Iskander. Evan was up there too—he’d hardly left Isk’s side since he arrived in the parking lot to find Iskander on the ground. The windows of the apartment over the garage were dark, so I assumed Priya was asleep. Thankfully. If she’d been around when we got home it would have opened up a huge number of questions that none of us were prepared to answer.
My phone chirped with an incoming call. Ren, finally. His timing could have been better, but I’d take it. “Hey,” I answered.
“Wes.” He sounded more brusque than usual, but his bar out of town, the Night Life, was probably demanding his attention. “You called?”
“Yeah. Sorry to bother you.” I paused, because normally a statement like that would nudge a flirty response from Ren—which drove Hudson nuts—but not this time. Okay. “We got some disturbing news last night.” Briefly, I laid out the details of what we’d discussed with Kat. “Any thoughts?”
“Off the top of my head? No. I’m not as connected to the vampires in Toronto as you seem to think I am.”
Oh, yeah, someone had definitely pissed in Ren’s cornflakes this morning. “Okay then.”
“Tell Hudson to start playing nice with our brethren. I don’t have time to be your single resource.” The line went dead.
“That wasn’t very nice.” Hudson, of course, had heard every word.
“No shit. Something must be stressing him out at the bar.” My phone buzzed with a text and I thought for a second it was Ren offering an apology. But no. “Evan,” I announced to Lexi and Hudson. “Iskander wants us to hear what the doctor has to say.”
When we got upstairs to the guest bedroom, Iskander sat on the edge of the queen-sized bed, sort of slouched, his usually brisk and primly styled pompadour messy and out of shape. Evan sat next to him, leaning into him and rubbing a hand over Isk’s back, while Dr. Kozlow sat on the guest chair next to the bed.
The mood of the room was somber. It blanketed everything and tried to choke the air from me, but I fought through it. “So?”
Dr. Kozlow gave Iskander a sympathetic smile. “Do you want to explain it?”
Iskander gave a quick shake of his head and gestured for her to speak.
“All right,” she said gently, then shifted her gaze to regard the rest of us, who had crowded into the room around the bed. “Mr. Hassan is in the early transformative stages of becoming a shifter. Sam’s bite transferred the magic to him. His body has to decide now to either accept the magic...or not.”
“Which means what?” Hudson demanded.
Lexi put a hand on Hud’s arm. “But his wound healed—that’s a good sign, right?”
“At this stage, accelerated healing is not an indicator of acceptance,” Dr. Kozlow said. “I’m sorry.”
I blinked. “Wait—‘sorry’? Are you saying—Is he—”
“Still here, Wes,” Iskander said, his voice barely above a whisper. “She’s saying she doesn’t know yet.”
“Well, when will we know?” Hudson was loud, his words booming through the room, but he didn’t apologize. “How do we help his body accept it? Is there a spell, or some ritual, or—”
“Time,” Dr. Kozlow said. “That’s it. It helps that his brain isn’t overwhelmed with all of this knowledge at the same time. Him knowing about paranormals is an advantage.”
“How much time?” Lexi’s soft tone cut through everything else.
“Eight to twelve hours. Maybe a little sooner, or a little longer. It’s not—” She cut herself off with a humorless chuckle. “It’s not science.”
At the proclamation of time, Evan leaned harder against Iskander. “I’ll stay with him.”
Iskander shook his head. “No, Ev, you should get some rest—”
“I’m staying with you,” Evan insisted.
“What do we need to watch for?” Lexi had her nurse face on.
“He’ll probably spike a fever soon. Try to keep him cool and hydrated. If he starts vomiting, bleeding, or has a seizure, call me immediately. He’s going to be very uncomfortable, but don’t let him scratch his skin.”
“Can we sedate him?”
“He’ll burn it out right now—part of the accelerated healing.”
“Okay.” Lexi heaved out a breath. “Guys, let’s leave Isk and Evan alone. Evan—you shout the walls down if you need us.”
“Or, you know, text,” I suggested.
Evan’s lips twitched. “Shout if emergency, text if not. Got it.”
We stepped out of the room and closed the door. Lexi glanced at Dr. Kozlow more than once, and I knew her well enough to know she wanted to ask something. But she held her tongue until we were downstairs.
I kind of wished she’d held it longer.
“What are his odds?”
Dr. Kozlow looked at me and Hudson before turning her attention back to Lexi. “Not good,” she admitted quietly. “Humans typically have a thirty percent survival rate when it’s not a mating bite. It’s one thing to want to be a shifter so you can be with your mate—it’s something else entirely to have it forced on you.”
My hand sought out Hudson’s and I squeezed his fingers. Thirty percent...thirty percent was low. Really, really low. My breath caught in my throat as I realized this might be Iskander’s last night.
No, I couldn’t think like that. I wouldn’t. Isk had defied worse odds. He wouldn’t have survived a vampire trying to kill him just to die like this. The world wouldn’t be robbed of his solidness, his steadiness, not by a fucking shifter bite.
I refused to even consider it.
Dr. Kozlow took in our silence with an understanding look. “He’s in good physical condition, and like I said, his brain is more accepting of it than if this were his first encounter with the paranormal.” She reached for her jacket, which we’d draped over the back of the couch in the living room. “I’m going to get some rest, but I’ll be back in a few hours, if that’s all right? I’d rather be here if anything happens.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Lexi said. “We all would.”
She walked the doctor to the door. I leaned into Hudson’s side, my grip on his fingers never wavering. “You want coffee?”
He let out a sigh, a sigh that said he knew as well as I did that none of us were going to sleep tonight. “Yeah.”
I stretched up on my toes to kiss his cheek, then headed to the kitchen. Making coffee might be the only thing I could do to get us through the next few hours.
* * *
The screaming started at 3:00 a.m.
Dr. Kozlow had been and gone again, and Hudson, Lexi and I sat in the living room, quiet and unmoving—until that first unearthly shriek. Lexi took off at a flat run and I made to follow her...but Hudson grabbed my wrist.
“You can’t do anything,” he said.
“I can—”
“What? Get in the way?”
I jerked my arm out of his hold. “Fuck you, Hud. I...can...do magic. Or something. I need to do something.”
“I get it.” And from the rigidness of his shoulders, I knew he did. He looked at the hallway as another scream resonated throughout the house. “I totally fucking get it. But this is a fight Iskander’s got to get through on his own.”
I glared at Hudson, then at the hallway, and at Hudson again. Everything in me demanded I go to Iskander’s side—he was one of my first believers, one o
f my first friends, back from when I wasn’t even a god. He’d gotten caught up in the paranormal world because of me, but he’d turned to me when he needed help, and I needed to be there for him now when I couldn’t before.
Except... I didn’t want to get in the way. Lexi knew how to keep him comfortable, and Evan was there at his side to help, and...the room wasn’t big enough for all of us to be crammed inside constantly. I was about to sit back down when Hudson leaped to his feet and blurred down the hall, moving faster than I could follow.
I would’ve called him a hypocrite, except I was pretty damn sure that something bad, really bad, had happened.
When I reached Iskander’s room, I didn’t even have to ask. Evan was hunched over the bed, his shoulders shaking, and Lexi was rubbing his back, tears streaming down her cheeks. Hudson stood beside the bed, as still as a statue, his gaze on Iskander and Iskander alone.
Motionless Iskander.
“No,” I breathed.
This was not happening.
He’d survived a slit throat, for fuck’s sake. A shifter bite, a bit of foreign magic...that was nothing compared to having his throat slashed, right? So he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t die.
I wouldn’t let him.
I stepped into the otherplane, instinct driving me. I’d only been around a small number of people at the time of their deaths, and I had yet to see a newly passed ghost in the otherplane. So the chances of me finding Iskander there were...not good.
But there he was, standing beside the bed, staring down at himself and Evan.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded.
He jumped and jerked backwards, looking at me. “Wes?”
“Who the fuck else would be hunting down your ass here?” I strode forward, through Hudson’s dark, blurry figure. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hud shiver and retreat a step. “Get back in your body.”
Iskander blinked at me. “I—”
“You think I’m going to let you go that easily?”
He seemed to wilt. “It was too much. It hurt. It—”
“Oh, fuck that noise,” I growled. “Was it worse than what the vampire did to you?”
“That was—that was different.”
“Yeah, because all you got at the end of it was a fucked-up throat. At the end of this, you’ve got the chance to be a wolf. To see the world from a new perspective.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Like I didn’t want to be what I am, or like how Hudson didn’t want to be a vampire. But it’s worth it, Isk. Please.”
His gaze slid to Evan. “It’s going to be weird.”
“Dude, weird is an adjective we use on a daily basis.”
“I—”
My magic flared through me, lighting up my skin from within. “Will you stop fucking arguing with me and get back in your goddamned body?”
He narrowed his eyes at me and for a moment, I thought he was going to fight me some more. I prepared my magic to grab him and fling him back into his body—if I could—but a second later he was gone. His body on the bed went from perfectly clear—a definite indicator of death—to fuzzy and gray. He jackknifed up into a sitting position, sucking in air like he’d been underwater for five minutes.
I rematerialized.
“How...” Lexi blinked. “How the fuck...”
“Wes—” Iskander coughed “—shouted me back to life.”
Everyone turned to me.
I shrugged. “If you can’t convince a newly dead friend to give life a second chance, what’s the point of being a not-ghost god?”
Chapter Seven
I was in the kitchen the next morning—afternoon?—staring at the coffeemaker and having a “need coffee to make coffee” moment when someone knocked on the front door. I thought about ignoring it—I was a firm believer in the philosophy that someone knocking on my door did not mean I had to answer it—but it might be Priya, unsure of her welcome, or another member of the paranormal community looking for help. Not to mention that if the knocking kept on, they were likely to wake everyone else in the house. With a groan, I headed for the front door.
Two men wearing bright smiles and sunglasses stood on the front step. My bleary eyes took in their appearance automatically—they both had brown hair, cut short, and wore jeans and T-shirts with autumn-weight jackets, a typical outfit for a sunny late-October day. “Yes?” I said.
“Hi!” the fellow on the left said cheerfully. “We’re looking for Priya Rojas.”
I raised a brow. “Oh?”
“We’re friends of hers,” the other man said. His voice was deeper, and had a different accent than the first man—not that I could place either of them other than to say they weren’t Canadian or American, or even French Canadian. “She emailed us that she was visiting her uncle in Toronto and since we were here too, we thought we could catch up! Is she in?”
Something about them was making my hair stand on end. Slowly, I realized what it was—they were too stiff. Their T-shirt sleeves had iron creases. Their jeans looked brand-new and unwashed. Their hair was too perfectly styled—short and utilitarian—and their sneakers were white and unscuffed. Even their enthusiasm to see Priya struck me as practiced and refined. If Priya had emailed them, why not email her back to set up a meeting directly?
“Sorry, she left yesterday,” I said. “She wanted to continue touring Canada.”
Their smiles fell. “Oh, that’s...disappointing.”
I shrugged. “Sorry,” I said again.
“Do you happen to have her number?”
Friends who have her email address, but not her phone number? “No. Have a good day.”
And with that, I closed the door in their faces. Then I faded into the otherplane and stepped onto the porch to see what they’d do.
Their congenial demeanor was completely gone. The one on the left lifted his arm to knock again, but the one on the right grabbed his wrist and prevented him from doing so. They shared a few words in a language I couldn’t identify. Lefty definitely wasn’t happy, and neither was Righty, but they trotted down the steps to the nondescript Ford sedan in the driveway and drove off without any further complaints.
Weird. So weird.
I rematerialized and started for the apartment above the detached garage where Priya was staying. We hadn’t seen her since before we’d gone out to the park the night before—and honestly, at the time, I’d been thankful for it. I didn’t have the energy to come up with a plausible lie for bringing home a teenage girl and a bloodied Iskander.
Tapping on the door, I said, “Priya? It’s Wes.” When there was no response, I tried the doorknob.
It was unlocked.
I pushed open the door, afraid of what I’d find. But all that greeted me was an immaculate room with a nicely made bed and absolutely no sign of Priya...except for a folded-up note on the pillow.
* * *
“‘Thank you for your hospitality’?” Hudson tossed the note onto the island in the kitchen. “That’s it?”
There was a little more than that in the note, stuff like “it was nice seeing you again” and “nice meeting you, Wes” but yeah, the contents were generally innocuous and vague. There was no indication of why she’d left or where she’d gone.
“Why would she take off without saying goodbye?” He slouched on the barstool. “Did I fuck up somehow? I fucked up, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know.”
He scowled. “Thanks, Wes.”
“What do you want me to say? I don’t know why she left. I don’t know if it’s because you did something or I did something, or if it was because the moon looked strange or she didn’t like the weather or what.”
“We’ve been having nice weather.”
“Maybe she was expecting snow. But that’s not the point.”
“Then what is?�
�
I blinked at him. My mouth opened...then closed. “I don’t know.” As I tried to reorder my thoughts, I noticed a pair of brown eyes watching me from the hallway near the stairs.
“Hi, Sam. Everything okay?”
She nodded quickly.
“Do you want some breakfast?”
Another nod.
“Come sit down, then, and we’ll get you something.”
She hesitated for a second before darting around the island and hopping up onto the stool next to me. Her red hair gleamed in a straight waterfall down her back—clearly Lexi had spent some time teasing out all of the mats and debris from it. She wore an oversized T-shirt that looked like more of a dress, and I added another thing to the never-ending to-do list: a trip to get her some appropriately sized clothes.
Hudson was scrambling eggs and I was finally enjoying a coffee when Lexi appeared in the kitchen, rubbing her eyes like she was the teenager instead of Sam. Hudson inserted a coffee pod into the machine, then served up a plate of eggs and toast for Sam. Sam immediately shoved her face into the plate and began scarfing down the food as fast as she could.
Lexi placed a hand on her shoulder and Sam stopped, growling, still hunched over her plate.
“Hey, enough of that,” Lexi said sharply. “Human form means human manners. Use your fork.”
Sam eyed the utensil next to her plate as though it might bite her, but she picked it up and held it awkwardly in her right hand. Lexi repositioned her fingers and helped her scoop up her first mouthful. We both watched as Sam continued to use the fork—in what appeared to be the most uncomfortable way possible, but she was using it.
“There you go,” I said.
She turned to me and smiled, showing a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
As Sam worked her way through breakfast—using the fork on her toast—I said to Lexi, “Priya’s gone.”
“What?”
I explained about the guys at the door and the empty room with the note while Lexi downed half her coffee. “Do you think she’s on the run from something?” she asked when I was done.