“Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff in the living room that doesn’t belong to us.”
“I’ll bet someone at reception made a mistake when they handed out cabin keys. At least he’s starting to come around, and I don’t smell any blood, though I did feel a bit of a goose egg on the back of his head when I checked.”
“If the worst that comes out of all of this is that we send him on his way with a headache, then I can more than work with that.”
“Hopefully he can too.”
He was kneeling next to the stranger, who was moaning, and held out his hand for his phone, which I happily handed to him before nudging the stranger with my toe. All that did was prompt another moan, and little else. Certainly not an explanation for what the fuck was going on here, which I was dying to hear.
While Briar waited for someone to pick up the line, I paced in between studying the stranger. He really was quite striking, with that pale skin contrasting his midnight hair. He definitely didn’t read shifter, though, not his aura or his scent, which was all human with an underlying sweetness of omega, like me. With all the things I’d seen piled up in the living room, I was startingto believe that someone had given him the key to the wrong cabin, because it definitely seemed like he’d packed for a stay.
“What the hell? It’s not even going to voicemail; it’s just ringing and ringing and ringing and…. Hi, this is Briar Mallone in cabin 55, and we’ve got a major problem up here.”
I wished he’d put it on speakerphone. I probably should have suggested it when I’d handed the phone to him, because now I was back to pacing again while he waited for the end of what seemed to be an awful lot of rambling taking place from the other end.
“Look, not to be rude or anything, but I’m not really interested in what else you’ve got going on up there right now and who’s threatening to do what with flames. I’ve got a passed-out stranger on the floor of our cabin bedroom that we absolutely did not invite in and would like to have removed immediately.”
More silence.
“No, he’s not drunk or on anything; he fainted after we shifted in front of him.”
Silence again.
“Well, it’s not like we planned to shift in front of him, but we were curled up in fur in the middle of our bed when he came in here, so shifting was pretty much the only option we had since he couldn’t understand us in our fur. Now will you please send someone to deal with this? We’re certain at this point that he’s at the wrong cabin, but if you’ve got a medic or a nurse on staff, you might want to send them up to do an assessment because he hit his head on the floor when he passed out, and it’s a bit swollen.”
Briar smacked a hand to his face and groaned as more silence followed.
“Like, I didn’t measure it or anything, but he’s got a knot on his head, and since he doesn’t smell like a shifter, I’m not surehow long it’s going to take him to wake up or for the lump to go down.”
I was getting frustrated, not being able to hear more than the occasional word here or there, and none of them made any sense when I tried to compile the fragments of conversation.
“Yes, cabin 55, Okay, good, you’ll send someone right away then, right?”
I was staring at Briar’s face when his features contorted, letting out his inner feline when he bellowed, “What! I don’t think I heard you correctly. You might want to slow down and give me a better answer than that because what you just said is completely unacceptable.”
I was seriously getting sick of these bouts of silence.
“How can you not be able to fix it! This is exactly the sort of thing that requires fixing, not your sincerest apologies, which are absolutely worthless to me. Are you really trying to tell me you’ve done this with every single cabin? How! How does that even happen? No, no, no, back up and explain it to me like I’m a five-year-old, please, because I am absolutely too frazzled right now to be able to grasp this.”
Briar went to sit on the edge of the bed, missed, and landed on the floor beside the stranger, who was finally starting to do a bit more than moan. First his hand began to flutter, fingers twitching and rubbing against the polished hardwood floor. Twice he lifted it only to drop it back onto the wood with a thud before he finally managed to muster up the strength to brush the hair back from his face.
I watched his chest rise and fall as he let out a series of long moans, muttering unintelligible phrases as he slid his hand along the side of his head, wincing when he reached the lump.
“Yeah. I’ll get back to you after I’ve had the chance to talk it over with my partner, but don’t be surprised if he calls you and gives you an earful once he hears what you’ve just told me, andI’m sure our human guest will want you on the line once he’s fully conscious again.”
This time the silence was much briefer.
“Yes, he is starting to come around now, but I still think you need to send up a medic.”
Nodding, Briar just pressed his head against the side of the bed while looking utterly flabbergasted. While it wasn’t rare to see him look that way, the fact that he wasn’t in an absolute frenzy and shredding the curtains right now had my flabbers gasted, knowing him the way I did. He actually sounded resolved, and he didn’t do resolved; that was too much like conceding, and he absolutely hated to lose.
“Oh good, thank you, we’ll listen for their knock,” Briar said before hitting the red phone icon to end the call and dropping the phone in his lap. “Unfuckingbelievable.”
“What?”
“This is the biggest clusterfuck I’ve ever heard of in my entire life,” he groaned.
“What is?”
