It’s something we used to say as kids. We both grew up as only children and wanted siblings so bad we decided to start calling each othersisterin the hopes it would come true.
“Sister,” I said, my tears rolling onto her cheeks.
Brayden’s wolf leaned forward and started to lick her blood off my fingers, which I kept pressed to her wound. “Go away,” I snapped at him, pissed that he wouldn’t save her. He was a freaking trauma surgeon! Who else was more qualified? But even with his qualifications I knew he needed an OR and tools and she wouldn’t make it to the hospital. Even now her eyes were rolling in her head.
God, please don’t take her, I pleaded with the big man upstairs.
“Averly…” Maddy stepped forward. “He’s trying to give her a fighting chance. To change her.”
Oh.
Yes! She was bitten, so if Brayden’s saliva got in her system, then…
“Quickly, Averly, you’re losing her,” Maddy warned.
Leah’s eyes closed and she went limp as I yanked my hands away from her neck. Brayden’s wolf shot forward, lapping at the wound as it bled freely and covered my legs and knees.
This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.
It felt like my soul left my body then. Everything felt so numb; time moved slow and fast at the same time. I barely remembered full scenes; it was all choppy. I was in shock.
Brayden carried Leah into the house holding pressure to her neck and Maddy walked me to the shower. Maddy scrubbed my legs and fingers of blood as I stood naked and catatonic under the water. She dressed me and I walked out to the living room, stopping in my tracks to stare at Leah’s still chest.
Everything felt far away and not real.
“She’s dead,” I croaked, and then fell into sobs on the floor. Brayden and Maddy surrounded me, one on either side as they held me, and I grieved. I might have completely lost my mind and floated away had they not been there to hold me as I broke apart.
“There’s still a chance. It’s slight, but…” Brayden told me as I sobbed harder into his chest.
“I’ve seen a bitten wolf come back from having no pulse before. Only one time, but itispossible,” Maddy said as she stroked my hair.
No pulse. She said no pulse.
Right then I learned what it meant to be in a pack. It was deeper than family. It was life, it was everything. I couldn’t exist without them; they were the only thing tethering me to this world in that moment. We sat there for over an hour. Maddy stroking my hair like a beloved elder sister, Brayden tracing circles at the small of my back in a soothing gesture.
Leah was dead. I’d stared at the frozen unmoving chest of my best friend for a full hour. Now it was time to accept reality.
“I have to call her mother and—”
Leah gasped, which turned into a hacking cough and her eyelids flew open. One second I was in my Maddy and Brayden bundle, and the next I was sitting before Leah, cradling her face in my hands. “You’re alive!” I whimpered.
She moaned. “Water.”
Maddy bolted into the kitchen and started to fill a glass of water as Leah looked at me with her deep green eyes.
“How?” she said, and then reaching up she slipped her fingers up to feel the scab at her neck and froze.
I swallowed hard, knowing that exact feeling. I quickly untied the knot and took off the wrapped cloth, exposing her blood-crusted but fully healed neck. Leah sat up and looked from me to Brayden to Maddy.
“Am I freaking werewolf?” she said with a mild excitement that I hadn’t expected.
All I could do was nod. “But you still have to shift and it’s really painful and only…” I decided to not talk about the exact odds Brayden had told me. “Not everyone makes it. The shift can kill you.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “Well, then let’s delay that as long as we can.”
Her gaze kept flicking to Brayden. “I know you from somewhere.”
“The bar,” I told her. “Leah, I just told you that you were a werewolf. You’re taking thisverywell.”
