He couldn’t say he completely understood it, but that didn’t stop him from trying to reach out to the idea now. Somehow his overheated mind fixated on a distant image of a wolf: black, long-legged, strong, and with luminous orange-yellow eyes that looked like harvest moons.
It looks lonely, Case thought at first, before he reminded himself that he was imagining it.
But it didn’tfeellike he was imagining it. It felt like it was right there, an idea that had somehow taken on a life of its own. It wasn’t in the room—he had the weird idea that it was standing on some kind of snowy plain, its breath freezing in front of it—but it still felt as real as the bright colors of Lydia’s braided rug.
Hi, Case said inside his head. He imagined stretching his hand out towards it.If you’re mine, if you’re whatever I was supposed to become after Lydia bit me, please come with me.
Lydia?
Its voice sounded a little like his, but hearing recordings of himself always struck some sour note for him, and hearing this didn’t. It was a little lower-pitched, maybe. Or ... somehow truer, unfiltered by intermediary things like human vocal cords.
I want to help Lydia, the wolf said.
Yeah. Of course you do. So come on. Help me help her.
He hadn’t been born a werewolf, and so maybe his body assumed—understandably—that anything that came along and tried to make him one was a huge mistake that needed to be corrected. But he could beat that. If he had to fight tooth and nail to get this wolf, he would.
The wolf twitched its ears, fur bristling along its neck and shoulders.
Something’s happening. She’s in trouble.
Case struggled to sit up, but pain had left his limbs stiff and unreliable, and his senses—besides whatever mind’s eye was letting him see the wolf—were still dazed from how his temperature had skyrocketed. He couldn’t hear anything worth hearing, but he trusted the wolf.
He trustedhiswolf.
Can you go to her?he asked.
It shook its head with a sense of savage frustration. Case could actually feel the emotion rolling off it in waves.
Of course it couldn’t go to Lydia on its own. It was part of him. The only time it would have a physical presence in the world was when Case shifted, and his body was actively, second by second, trying to make sure that that was impossible. He knew that if he didn’t fix this problem soon, he’d watch the wolf—hiswolf—fade away like a ghost.
Right now, this was magic. In another minute or two, it would feel like a feverish daydream. He would never see the wolf again. His chance to help Lydia was slipping away from him.
Stay. He imagined curling his fingers in his wolf’s coat, hanging on to its scruff.Stay with me. We’ll help her.
I’ll hurt you, his wolf warned, but it was nosing closer to him now.Not always, but at first ....
Case understood. He hurt like hellnow, and that was with his body doing its best to fight off the first stages of “infection” from Lydia’s bite. It wasn’t going to feel good to have the full-blown “disease” leap into him all at once—and that was what his shifter statuswasto his immune system, at least right now. But he had to believe that once his wolf settled in, his system would accept it the way his mind already had.
I don’t care, he said firmly.I want you, and Lydia needs you.
The sounds are worrying, it admitted, its ears twitching again.
Case still couldn’t hear them, but he trusted his wolf’s ears over his own, especially right now. He had to get out of bed as soon as possible. He couldn’t leave Lydia on her own like this.
Let’s do this, he said.
The wolf leapt forward.
8
“Ruth, can I have some of your morphine?”
Even in her last days, with her skin creased and yellowed and her every breath rattling, Lydia’s grandmother was sharp. She never needed much in the way of explanation. In fact, Lydia had always had the eerie sense that whenever something happened in her life, her grandmother understood it well before she did.
“So it didn’t work,” Ruth said. She slumped back against her mountain of pillows, her face freshly lined with exhaustion. “Fine. Take the morphine. He’ll need it more than I do.”
When Ruth had felt satisfied that Case was the right choice—or at least the best one Lydia could possibly make under such fraught circumstances—she had stopped her bitter fight for survival. Lydia had seen her start to give in to the inevitable.
