I laid in bed almost the whole day. Several times, Guy came in to check on me—pressing a palm to my forehead, offering me water, coercing me to eat. Otherwise, I was completely alone.
What little sleep I had was shattered by nightmares—of a thing with steel-sharp teeth and yellow eyes bearing down upon me.
Eventually, I just gave up and simply lay there, staring at the wall, resting my eyes.
The door opened later that afternoon. Two pairs of footsteps echoed across the flat and into the bedroom just in time for me to cover myself and hide my modesty.
“Jason?” a voice asked.
I opened my eyes. The same woman who’d treated me last night stood at the end of the bed, Guy at her side. “Yuh-Yes?” I managed.
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Better, really.”
“You care if I take a look?”
I responded with a nod and rolled onto my back to give her easy access to my head. Her fingers—long, gentle, flecked with the hint of ice I once related to Guy—probed the site of my injury with careful attention to detail, nodding when she found something notable in her pursuit.
“How is it, Faith?” Guy asked.
“It’s a concussion,” the female Kaldr, named Faith, said. “But he’s doing exactly what he should be—resting.”
“Thank you for coming up here, Faith. It means a lot to me.”
“You don’t have to thank me. This whole thing was a big misunderstanding and I—”
“Who was the werewolf?” I asked.
Faith and Guy turned their eyes on me.
“The werewolf who attacked me,” I continued, struggling to push myself up. “Who was it?”
“Now’s not the time,” Guy said, starting toward me.
“I wanna know who almost killed me. Now.”
The two Kaldr looked at one another, Faith’s expression completely indicative of her position.
Finally, Guy said, “It was Missy Sue.”
“Missy Sue?” I frowned.
“The one you talked to. In Fredericksburg.”
She’d been so interested in my arm. Did that mean that she—
“She must’ve caught your scent,” Guy said when I opened my mouth to speak, “and followed you back here.”
“Does she know who you are?” Faith asked. “Or that the two of you were even together?”
“I’m not sure. Jason said she showed interest in him and that she’d been hauled off by the police after he managed to slip away.”
“It’s true,” I said when the healer’s eyes fell on me. “I swear, I would never intentionally led anyone here.”
“It’d be pretty stupid to put yourself in the line of danger if you were really intending to go after someone else,” Faith agreed. She pursed her lips and scanned the immediate area, taking in the display of princely objects around us, then settled her eyes back on me. “I’ll let Elliot know what we think happened. You get some rest, Jason. Don’t get out of bed. You took a pretty bad blow to your head and you wouldn’t want to strain yourself.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Thank you.”
Faith bade the two of us goodbye, then made her way through Guy’s flat until she left out the front doors.
“I fucked up,” I said. “Didn’t I?”
“A long time ago, there was an agreement made that the ‘Big Three’ in Texas wouldn’t interfere with each other’s dealings in the mortal realm. That meant no contact, no organized crimes, and definitely not any attacks on each other. Of course, there’s never really been anyone to enforce that rule, but none of us really gave much thought to it. We just obliged. Maybe it’s a Texas thing. Who knows? We’re all dying species. Doesn’t take an idiot to realize just how damaging a little human contact could be.”
“So what about Missy Sue then? Now that I killed her?”
“Missy Sue was a rogue agent whose alpha couldn’t control her. It was bad to even flirt with the idea of taking in a human who hadn’t been indoctrinated into their pack, but to turn someone known for tall tales? I mean, yeah—fat chance of anyone believing that she’s a Howler, but get suspicious about where she’s been and how’s she’s going there? That’s just flat-out stupid.”
“You never answered my question.”
“Which was?”
“What’ll they think now that a member of their pack’s dead?”
“Collateral. Nothing more.”
I crossed my arms over his chest and considered Guy’s face. Harshened by the severity of the confrontation, it’d lost much of its boyish youth and instead replaced it with fine lines. I could always tell when Guy was angry, or at least unsettled by something. He looked like a completely different person.
“You’re not lying to me,” I said, unsure if I was treading on solid ground, “are you?”
“No. Why would I be?”
“To protect me, I mean. From… this.” I spread my arm about the room.
“Come on—you’ve seen me freeze a guy to death and form a crystal of ice out of thin air.”
“Not out of thin air,” I corrected. “I saw the water droplets crystalizing as we were falling toward the fountain.”
“Either way, you’ve seen shit that’d blow most people’s minds—and get ninety-five-percent of them thrown into a hospital.”
I chuckled. “I guess human ignorance is an easy cover for your kind, huh?”
“Trust me,” Guy smirked. “You have no idea.”