I sat in the chair beside her bed with my forearms on my knees, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest and trying to remember the last time I’d wanted something this badly.
I couldn’t.
She lay with her head turned slightly toward me, one hand resting open at her side on the blanket, palm up, fingers loosely curled. The hospital gown was pale blue and thin enough that it did little to hide a body I had spent an unreasonable number of the past hundred and sixty-eight hours thinking about doing things to that would have to wait until she was in good enough health to be bred. Or at least until she was conscious…
The medically induced coma had been the attending physician’s call. Something about intracranial pressure. I had sat outside the glass partition while they explained it to me and nodded with the face of a concerned friend, which was what I was pretendingto be. A concerned friend who had been hiking with her when she fell, carried her down the mountain and driven her to the nearest emergency room, and spent every possible minute I could watching over her since then.
A nurse passed the open doorway. She glanced in, recognized me by now, and moved on. I’d been here often enough that the night nurses had started leaving a cup of coffee outside the door when they did their 2:00 AM rounds.
I looked back at Katie.
Her chart said the swelling had reduced. They were going to bring her out of sedation tomorrow morning if the overnight readings held. Shifter healing ran quiet and fast, faster than any human physician would expect, and I’d watched the bruising around her temple fade in three days instead of ten. They’d attributed it to youth and good health and didn’t seem to have thought much about it.
She didn’t know what she was. I was almost sure of it. She didn’t have the telltale scent of a she-wolf who had shifted, and there was no muscle memory of a wolf body in her unconscious flinches when the nurses moved her limbs. She must have been raised entirely in the human world.
But my wolf had known she was mine the moment I’d caught her scent on the mountain.
She’d know it soon too, once she was all healed up and taking my knot.
I leaned back in the chair and rolled my neck and felt the dull ache that had been living in my bones since I’d crossed the Rio Grande. This far from my territory, holding human form required constant, exhausting effort. Every hour I sat here inthis chair cost me. My joints ached. My vision blurred at the periphery if I didn’t concentrate. I could feel the wolf straining against the imposed shape, the way it always did when I kept it too long in terrain that wasn’t mine.
I needed to be home. I needed to hunt.
But the alternative was leaving her here, unguarded.
I looked at her hand on the blanket. The knuckle of her index finger was scraped. She’d already been healing when she came in, the abrasion barely pink now. Her hands were small and delicate, but the skin on her palms was roughened in a way that indicated time spent climbing.
Her chest rose and fell. The gown had slipped slightly off her left shoulder, and I reached over and pulled the blanket up to cover her.
Tomorrow,I told myself.She’ll be awake tomorrow.
* * *
Katie
I opened my eyes, and for about three seconds I existed in that blissful state where I didn’t remember anything and the world was just a white ceiling and a beeping machine and the vague sense that I’ve been sleeping for too long.
Then it all came rushing back.
Walking in the mountains with Mark. A wolf the size of a small horse. A creature that looked like God had started sketching a coyote and then gotten angry and kept pressing harder with thepencil until the lines went wrong. The wordrun. The ground rushing up. The crack of my skull against rock.
I sat up too fast and the room tilted. I grabbed the bed rail and waited for everything to stop spinning. My head hurt, but in that distant, almost-finished way of a headache that had already done its worst and was now just hanging around out of spite. I touched my temple where I’d hit the rock and found smooth skin over a bump that felt weeks old.
The room was small and private, with white walls, blue curtains half-drawn, monitors doing their steady electronic thing. Through the window I could see a parking lot and beyond it the unmistakable sprawl of Albuquerque, strip malls and cottonwoods and the Sandias sitting on the eastern horizon like they hadn’t just been the backdrop to the most terrifying day of my life.
Well, the second most terrifying now that I’d had the chance to meet “it” in the flesh.
I looked at the date on the monitor and blinked. Seven days. I’d been out forseven days.
And I was alone.
I jabbed the call button.
The nurse who came in was young, dark-haired, and equipped with the kind of professional smile that’s designed to convey calm. She checked my vitals while I vibrated with the effort of not grabbing her by the scrubs.
“Where’s Mark?”
“Let’s just see how you’re?—”
