None of that matters if I don’t save her.
“She’s out,” Mindy says. “Start the clock.”
“I love you,” I whisper as I slice away the hospital gown.
My scalpel slices cleanly from her lowest rib to her belly button. The layers of pink muscle gape open…and turn black at the edges. It hits me through my mask.
Sugar.
How?
The sugary scent of Fae reaches my nose and scrambles my brain.
“No! No! No!” I scream. “Close her up! Close her up!”
I reach for her but stop at the last second. My fingers. My lifesaving fingers are instruments of death. If I touch her insides, they will rot instantly because I’m made of metal. I flex and retract my robotic hands over her as powerlessness washes over me in waves. What can I do? The veins inside her belly turn black, stretching under her skin like necrotic spider webs.
“What’s happening!” Drake yells in my face to wake me from my stupor. We meet gazes. My mouth moves, but there’s nothing to say.
“Move! You can’t block the way! Move!” Landyn says as his elbow hits me in the ribs. I stumble to the side like a discarded glove. My arms hang lifelessly at my sides as I watch the only woman I thought I could love slip away. Her happy pink toenails sit atop ashen, grey feet. Black pools in the heels as rot claims her limbs.
I killed her.
“Dammit! She’s Fae!” Bracken yells. His hands hover over her body without a plan. “Get Stein out of the way! Don’t let him touch her again!”
Don’t let him touch her again because his touch kills her.
“How is she a Fae? How did we miss it?”
“I’ve got compressions! Mindy, bag her!”
“Why are her insides turning black? It’s so fast! What do we do?” Landyn’s yelling mirrors my thoughts as if he’s the dummy and I’m the ventriloquist.
They found her in the forest. She’s not a were. She’s adopted into the pack.
“She’s a changeling,” I murmur. “The glow of her skin in the moonlight. The magic in her hugs and laughter. Her tiny stature. Her love of sweets. She’d never belong in the werepack or the human world—because she’s a changeling.”
“Shewasa changeling,” Bracken says. “Time of death, 11:15 am.”
Chapter 9
Frank
I hate this. Not just the stiff black suit and the rainy weather outside, but the veil of grief that has fallen over Haunted Health. I lean on the window of my office and glare at the muddy earth below. The fresh grave, the empty chairs, and the collection of flowers offend me. They shouldn’t be in the butterfly garden, but the pack allowed her to be buried here.She shouldn’t be buried at all. I guess her emails home told tales of finding a place where she belonged…her greatest wish granted in the days leading to her death. Is that why she was taken from me? When you get your heart’s desire, your time is up? What about my desire to love her? Why shouldn’t she experience that too?
She deserved the world…not to die young.
Yet what she wanted ends with her burial place. My office is stuffed to the walls with her family, her pack leadership, and the four owners of Haunted Health. She wouldn’t want us pretending to play nice. While Bracken and Leader Grant exchange pleasantries, her family glares daggers at me. I accept every one of them. If the roles were reversed, I’d hate me too. My ego took the woman we loved…because I was convinced I could save everyone…except the Fae.
Why didn’t I suspect she was Fae? Why didn’t all the super werewolf noses in her family smell her magic? We scoped her for lesions to verify her colitis. Why didn’t we perform a microarray to verify the genes involved? That one genetic test would have indicated she wasn’t human and started her on a better path to recovery.
A path where I would have thrown her out on day one…
“Just so you know, it is the official stance of the pack that Haunted Health isn’t to blame for the death of Alette Werebrown,” announces Leader Grant. The massive bear shifter tests the limit of my office chair as he leans backward enough to take the front legs off the ground.
“What? But—” the protest dies on Alette’s sister’s lips.
“The pack thanks you for all your efforts in saving her life. She was quite ill in mind, body, and spirit before she arrived. What happened couldn’t have been avoided,” Leader Grant says with a wave of his massive hand.
