Caspian moves to my other side. Nico crouches at my feet, one hand wrapping around my ankle, steadying me against the ground.
Julian presses both thumbs to either side of the cut on my forearm, and the pressure alone makes my vision white at the edges. Then something changes in his hands, a heat buildingunder the skin where he's pressing, something that isn't physical in any way I understand, and I feel it moving through the wound like a current running the wrong direction.
The sound I make isn't a scream. It's too involuntary for that, punched out of me before I can stop it. Knox's grip on my shoulders tightens. He says nothing but his body is solid behind mine and I focus on that instead of what Julian's hands are doing.
Dark fluid wells up from the cut, too thick to be blood, the color of oil in the moonlight. Julian works methodically, pressing and drawing, his face set in focused lines, and each pass pulls more of it out until the edges of the wound stop being black and start being red, ordinary angry red, the kind that means my body can handle it from here.
He moves to the cut on my stomach and I close my eyes.
By the time he finishes the last wound on my thigh I'm shaking so hard my teeth are clicking together, cold sweat on my face and neck. Caspian pulls me against him without a word. I press my forehead against his shoulder and just breathe.
"It's out," Julian says. His voice is tired. "Her healing will take over now. She needs warmth and sleep and she needs to stay still."
"What about him?" Nico's voice, quiet, toward where Chase's body lies.
Knox is already moving, back to the work only he seems able to approach without hesitation. Chase has shifted back to human form the way all wolves do at the moment of death, the animal retreating and leaving only the man behind. Knox crouches over him without pause, and the first thing he does isn't reach for the body. It's reach for the camera lying in the dirt where Chase dropped it when the fight started.
He picks it up, examines it for a moment, then sets it on a flat rock and brings his boot down on it. Once. The casing splinters.He crouches again, pulls the wreckage apart with his hands, finds the memory card inside and snaps it in half. Then he snaps each half again. He drops the pieces into separate pockets.
Only then does he look up at us.
"I'll handle the rest." He says it with the same flatness he uses for everything, fact without feeling. "Get her inside. I'll find you when it's done."
Caspian gets me to my feet and I lean into him more than I want to, my legs unreliable under me, the wounds aching with a deep bone-level throb that tells me the poison did damage even if Julian got most of it. We move back through the trees toward campus in silence, Caspian's arm around my waist, Julian close on my other side.
I look back once. Knox is crouched beside the body with his back to us and the trees are already closing around him in the dark.
"Don't look," Julian says quietly.
I face forward.
We reach the edge of campus and Caspian slows. "I'm walking you up."
"No." My voice comes out steadier than I expect. "Someone sees you outside my room at this hour and it becomes a story. I go alone."
He doesn't argue, but his hand stays on my waist until the last possible moment, fingers pressing once before releasing. Julian catches my chin gently and tilts my face up, checking my eyes in the low light.
"If the black veining comes back, you come to me immediately. Don't wait. Don't decide it's fine." His thumbbrushes just below the bruise on my cheekbone, barely any pressure, and his expression does something complicated that he pulls back before I can name it. "Immediately. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Nico hasn't moved from the edge of the group. He's been quiet since the forest and he stays quiet for another moment before he speaks. "The Council will send someone when Chase is reported missing. We need to be ready for that." He meets my eyes. "All of us."
The weight of it settles into my bones alongside the ache of the wounds. A man is dead. There is blood on the forest floor that Knox is dealing with right now in the dark. The Council will come and we will have to lie and hold the lie together and hope it holds.
"Tomorrow," Julian says. "We deal with all of it tomorrow. Tonight you sleep."
I nod and go.
The stairs take longer than they should. My thigh pulls with every step and I keep one hand on the wall, moving slowly. By the time I reach my floor I'm breathing through my teeth. Lily is asleep when I slip inside, facing the wall, her breathing deep and even.
I make it to the bathroom. I run the tap cold and press a wet cloth against my face and look at myself in the mirror for a long moment. The bruising across my cheekbone is already purpling. My lip is split. My eyes look like someone who has been awake for too long and felt too much.
But the cuts, when I check them, are closing. Slowly, the edges pulling together now that the poison is gone, the ugly black fading to pink. By morning they might be nothing but raised lines. My wolf is working, finally, doing what she was always meant to do.
I change into sleep clothes with movements that are careful and small, every muscle reminding me what it cost tonight. Then I get into bed and lie on my back and stare at the ceiling.
The bonds hum in my chest. Julian's is taut, still alert, still watching across whatever distance separates us. Caspian's is fierce and wound tight, the feeling of a person who has put something down they didn't want to put down. I can feel their worry moving through both threads like something with a pulse.
