“Something’s wrong,” I said. “If I fuck up the door, I’ll pay for it.”
My claw caught on metal. There was a clink, and I could turn the knob.
The scene in the room was?—
It was something out of a nightmare.
Cash was on the floor. He’d ripped the sheets from the bed to try and stem the flow of a gory wound in his side, but all he’d managed to do was soak them a dark red.
He was leaning back against the bed, but his head had rolled onto his shoulder at such an acute angle that it looked inhuman.
He wasn’t conscious. His eyelids didn’t even flinch when I pushed the door open.
“Holy shit,” Dakota breathed as he stepped in behind me.
I was a fucking dumbass. I should’ve told him to stay in the car with Charles.
He breathed in.
“He’s a wolf,” Dakota said, his voice coming out with a broken hitch as his throat squeezed hard. “Why isn’t he healing?”
“He’s dead,” I muttered, feeling half out of my body, like I was floating away from all this.
Cash had wanted to see me, and now he was?—
He was fuckingdead.
While I stood there, dumbstruck, unsure what the fuck to do—if this was a pack matter or...shit, I couldn’t alert human authorities. With a scene like this, they’d do an autopsy, and I had no fucking clue how we were different from humans but we definitely were.
Dakota shoved past me and knelt beside Cash. He reached out to touch his neck, then shook his head.
“He isn’t,” Dakota insisted. “He’s not dead, Jax. He has a pulse.”
8
Dakota
Taking a werewolf to the hospital is a ridiculous prospect.
Most of the time, it doesn’t even come up, because we heal so fast that there’s no need, even for injuries that seem horrific. The problem here was that Jax’s old friend wasn’t healing like a werewolf. We weren’t sure he was healing at all, which might mean he was just healing at the normal human rate, which wasn’t visible to the eye, or... well, it might mean he wasn’t healing at all.
By the time we could tell, it might be too late to do anything at all to help him.
So Jax carried him out of the motel room while I grabbed his stuff—one bag that hadn’t even been unpacked and a sad little Nokia phone—and then we headed for Jax’s place while I dialed Prudence.
Not that I wasn’t at least as powerful as she was, but Prudence had what I didn’t: years of experience. She knew more magic than me, including healing spells, which was what we needed here.
Grumpy as she was at being called late at night, Prudence promised to come over and look at him.
Jillian met us at the house, the door already open, Seth and Maia inside. Seth was putting sheets on the bed in the downstairs guest room when we arrived, and I could smell something plastic in there. Rubber under-sheet, maybe? Werewolves really were good at preparing for anything.
Jax set the man down carefully, and they all started looking him over.
The injuries were... well, they would have made any movie featuring the scene rated R, for sure. He was torn open from chest to hip, someone clearly having intended to gut him.
I doubted his attacker knew he was still alive.
“Is it poison, do you think? Wolfsbane?” Maia asked, standing at the bedside with a glass of water in her hands. She looked at a loss, which... well, werewolf.
