Darren didn’t seem to believe me. “Tell me where she is, or I’m going to start cutting.” He placed the tip of his blade against my left breast. “Five seconds.” The metal point bit at my skin through the thin sports bra, and my pulse rushed fast enough to make me dizzy.
“I left her in a closet,” I said, trying not to move beneath his knife.
“I checked all the closets.” He pressed harder, and I gasped when the blade pierced my skin, just hard enough to draw blood.
“Room 304,” I said. I’d actually left her in 312, but all my toes were wiggling behind him by then, and Ineededhim to leave the room. “Maybe she crawled into the bathroom. Or under the bed. Maybe she got out before you checked that room. I swear she’s here somewhere.”
“I checked everywhere!” Darren shouted, and his blade bit deeper. I whimpered, my heart pounding. If he lost his temper, he might forget about the rules.
He might kill me without a second thought.
Someone hissed, and he stumbled backward, cursing. A form shot out from under my bed and knocked Darren over. I didn’t realize I could move my neck until my head turned to follow the hissing blur, and I found my roommate perched on his chest in human form, growling like a cat facing down a large rat.
“Robyn!” She’d been under my bed the whole time. Darren hadn’t looked, and I hadn’t realized I could smell her, because the entire room already smelled like Robyn.
She turned when I called her name, and Darren’s grip on his knife tightened.
“No!” I shouted, and my arm flopped, but I couldn’t pick myself up. I couldn’t defend her.
Robyn stood as he swung his knife. The blade sank into her thigh instead of her chest, and she hissed. Blood poured from her leg and she collapsed onto one hip. Darren turned back to me, knife high, but already arching toward me.
I screamed as his blade swung, still dripping Robyn’s blood.
A dark blur lunged through the open doorway, and a terrifying snarl filled the room. Jace’s front paws hit Darren square in the chest and drove him to the floor. Hard.
Jace’s snarl ended in a satisfied note, followed by the gurgle of blood I could smell but couldn’t see.
Darren’s blood.
I burst into tears of shock and relief as Jace dropped a bloody hunk of flesh onto the floor. I wanted to sit up and hug him, but my arms wouldn’t cooperate.
Robyn hissed again and pushed herself into one corner of the room, her hands pressed to the gash in her thigh. Before I could tell her not to worry or tell Jace not to kill her, Lucas and Mateo burst into the room in human form, having followed Jace up both flights of stairs in their inferior bipedal bodies.
They stared at the bloody scene in silence. Then my brother blinked, and his gaze found me. When he saw that I was still breathing and only barely cut, he exhaled and found a grin. Then he turned to offer my roommate a hand. “You must be the new girl. I’m Lucas, Abby’s brother.” She glanced at me, and when I nodded, she let him pull her up, while Teo pulled the case from the nearest pillow, to use as a tourniquet. “And you…” Lucas turned back to me. “You aresoooogrounded.”
SEVENTEEN
Jace
I knocked on my open bedroom door, and Abby rolled over to face me. Seeing her in my bed—even though I’d hardly touched her all night—triggered a primal satisfaction, like that first deep breath after a long dive. As if having her scent on my sheets meant everything was exactly as it should be, when in reality, everything was falling apart.
She sat up in bed as I crossed the room toward her.
“How’d you sleep?”
Abby shrugged and pushed a mass of red curls back from her face. “You could probably answer that better than I can. How many times did I wake up?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and she scooted closer, dragging the blankets along. “Seven.” The nightmares were back, triggered by Darren and his damn paralytic drug. “But I would have had to wake you up once an hour anyway because of the concussion.” From the looks of it, she’d hit her head when the drug knocked her out. “Doctor’s orders.”
As near as I could tell, her dreams were some fucked-up amalgamation of her abduction at age seventeen, the assault on her campsite during fall break, and what went down in her dorm room sixteen hours before. The recurring theme seemed to be helplessness and an inability to protect herself.
I would gladly have killed everyone who’d ever laid a finger on her, if they weren’t all already dead, but I couldn’t fight her demons. All I could do was rub her back and remind her of where she was when she woke up screaming, and that mademefeel helpless.
It made me want to rip someone apart, then lick the blood from my claws while the body cooled.
But I’d already done that.
“Did you get any sleep?” Abby straightened her nightshirt, then pulled her hair into a poofy ponytail at the back of her neck, secured with an elastic band she’d left on my bedside table the night before.
