Then he looked back at her, and she knew she’d been right. She could see the memory of those times all over him a moment before he spoke. Softly, wistfully. “It was good to have someone to be disappointed with. Someone who got it. By the time all this happened to me, you weren’t even living here anymore.”
And now she was the one who had to turn away, before he could see how glossy her eyes were no doubt getting. Because he was right: it had been good. But more than that, it reminded her powerfully of all the things they could have had. All the talks about this they could have shared. The turmoil they could have gone through together, as they realized reality was not what it seemed.
But instead, she’d had nothing.
While he’d fumbled through this torment alone.
“Well, it’s not my fault that we moved away. And definitely not my fault that you don’t have someone who gets it anymore,” she said, and hated how sour her voice sounded. But what else could she do? She couldn’t just forget it all and go back to how they’d been. Most likely he didn’t even want her to.
Though, man, he made it sound otherwise.
“I know,” he simply said in this soft, sad way.
And then she found she could look back at him, no problem.
“I bet it’s not been so good or so bad anyway. It just seems like it’s the way everything is. Only, you know. With more derangedthings attacking you, followed by weird sweating and bottom-lip-eating and all your clothes getting annihilated.”
“Yeah. It’s really more okay than anything else.”
“Right. You just go about your business. Like the castle-less vampires.”
“I do. Heck, most of the time I wouldn’t even know anything was going on.”
“Youlooklike nothing else is going on right now.”
“Well, sure—I mean, apart from the fact that my arm is inside out.”
He held it up when he said it. Almost like a joke, she thought.
But then the fabric of the nightdress fell away, and honestly she almost screamed again. She had to grit her teeth to stop it happening, and even so a groan leaked out. Understandably so, becausegod in heaventhe look of it.
It was like his elbow was caught in his sleeve.
Only the sleeve wasskin. It wasflesh.
And it was surrounded on all sides by bones that weren’t supposed to be there. Honestly, she had no idea how she hadn’t seen it before, because even under the nightdress it should have been clear. It was the wrong shape, the wrong everything; it was horrendous in ways she couldn’t process.
Clearly transformation isn’t straightforward, her logical side was saying. But the rest of her was just screaming about the supernatural being real and bodies turning into entirely other things and the fact that he wasn’t somehow dead. It should have killed him, the state he was in. He should have been sprawled on the floor.
So it wasn’t a surprise when he sagged.
And then did just that.
CHAPTER SIX
There were a lot of things wrong with having your werewolf mortal enemy pass out in your hallway. But top of the list had to be the fact that werewolves should not exist. That to most people, they absolutely didn’t. And so there wasn’t really much she could do about it. There was no first aid book to quickly skim that told you how best to solve his medical problems.
And she couldn’t call 911.
But despite this—and the fact that she’d vowed only five seconds earlier to not get invested in his problems—the urge to fix this was getting hold of her anyway. Something clenched in her chest whenever she glanced at him all spread out on her floor, looking pale and sweat-slicked and sort of crumpled. Not to mention more like her friend than she could remember him being in years.
His face seemed almost soft and sweet—and young, too.
Put some glasses on him, and he’d almost be the boy she’d known.
And that really helped her do what she had to do next. She took some deep breaths and knelt beside his gargantuan body. Then she just reached out to him. She touched him, somewhere incredibly innocuous like his arm. Shakily, gingerly, but she managed. She got to a point where she could push him into the recovery position.
No big deal, she thought.
