Zheng throws on his leather jacket and swipes his keys off the table, heading for the front door.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” he assures me, but we both know that’s a lie.
“You heard what the doc—”
His jaw clenches. “I’m going to live my life. Okay? Can you get on board with that, man?”
I grind my teeth together. This is a bad idea, and he knows it. His beast is fighting for control and going out right now is a bad fucking idea, but I can see by the look in his eyes I don’t have a shot in hell of talking him out of it. I never do. Not when he gets like this.
Liu is a walking, talking stick of dynamite just waiting to explode. When we were kids, he was always a self-destructive shit, but adult Zheng is on a whole ‘nother level. We’ve all got baggage, but the shit Zheng needs to unpack is traumatic as fuck, and I only know the half of it. But we made a deal. I’m not about to let him weasel out of it.
“When you stop being a lying sack of shit, maybe.” I shrug and wait to see how he responds. It can go one of two ways. Brotherhood will get the better of him and he’ll back down. Nine and a half times out of ten, he’s true to his word, and he hates being called a liar. Addicts are liars, and Zheng refuses to be one of them like his human father.
I see the flicker in his eyes. The moment of hesitation at my words and then…fuck.There’s that other half. The times when he decides not to give a fuck because he’s too far up his own ass to think straight and his beast is riding him too hard that he can’t even hear the voice of reason.
“Zheng—”
“You know me,” he says, and there’s a plea in his voice, so I nod. “You know I’ve been clean. For two years I’ve stayed clean. No missteps. I’ve stayed on the fucking wagon, man.”
“I know.” Which is why what he’s doing now is pissing me off. Drugs shouldn’t affect shifters, but fae ones do and Zheng had a tumble with them none of us wants a repeat of. He nearly went rogue while on the stuff, and if he had, we would have lost him to his beast. There’s no coming back from that, not when you give in to your animal so completely that you lose your humanity in the process.
It’s like he forgot what the first year getting clean was like. The depression. The withdrawals. He was so fucking sick back then he had to take a full semester off. It was dangerous as fuck getting on the stuff to begin with, and doubly so getting off.
And now he wants to risk it all for a party and a piece of ass. I shake my head. This was a mistake.
“It’s a pool party. There will be magicked brews, but no drugs, and we both know brews were never my problem.”
No. It wasn’t. Zheng’s issue started as a little recreational elderflower until he fucked up. Got behind the wheel while high as a kite on supernatural drugs and wrapped his car around a tree, injuring his passengers—Rafael, Jordy, and me. Shit got ugly after the accident, and we didn’t speak for close to a year after that. It shouldn’t have been as bad as it was. We’re all shifters, able to heal at an accelerated rate, thanks to our animals, but we all experienced several breaks, and by the time help arrived, our bones had healed at wrong angles and our injuries needed to be rebroken and set to prevent permanent damage. It fucking sucked.
What none of us knew at the time though, was that Zheng was almost kicked out of the Pack for it. He was a minor driving while under the magical influence and had over forty grams of elderflower on him when Pack healers picked us up. We don’t mess with Fae drugs. Or any drugs, for that matter. It’s strictly forbidden because of the risk of going rogue. We have to stay in control of our beasts at all times.
The accident also took place on human streets outside of Pack territory, so the HPED got involved and wanted to charge Zheng with a class C felony. Our Alpha couldn’t make it go away. Not entirely. So the HPED offered Zheng a deal, and our Alpha accepted it on his behalf.
It was a shit deal, if you ask me. It required Zheng to become an informant for the HPED on all things supernatural, so long as they didn’t pertain to shifter secrets or the Pack.
Big fucking mistake.
Rafael’s dad was Alpha back then and made the arrangements. If Rafael ever found out, there’d be hell to pay, which is why even after shit was smoothed out between us all, Zheng never mentioned it.
Shit should have been straightforward. On paper, Zheng was supposed to tip the HPED off about corner dealers selling magicked drugs to kids at our school, but what really happened was they forced him into the deep end. They had a sixteen-year-old shifter worming his way into the paranormal underworld, and shit got messy.
I don’t know all the details of everything that went down. But I know shit escalated with drugs. Elderflower turned into Fae Fires and that turned into Bloom Crystal. There was a girl Zheng refuses to talk about. And a drug deal that went south that he got caught up in. He hasn’t shared the full story, but on top of the addiction, he got a nice case of PTSD. When he’s having an episode things get heavy. The way he reacts, you’d think he’d been to war. I guess in a roundabout way he has. But it’s dangerous as fuck for anyone around him when he drops into one of those spells.
Zheng worked on getting clean before we moved in together, and I helped get him out of the informant program as soon as I learned he was in it. Fuckers didn’t want to let him go, but I made sure they realized they didn't have a choice. Sometimes it pays to be a Pierce. This was one of those times.
But the road to recovery is a long one, and staying clean isn’t the only thing Zheng needs to worry about. “Access to drugs isn’t what I’m worried about. I know you’re good.” The first six months were rough, but the next year and a half were solid.
Zheng lets out an exasperated sigh. “I’ll be fine.”
“You jumped me when I slammed the back door earlier.”
He closes his eyes, hands fisted at his sides and skin rippling with the urge to shift. Something he better not fucking do right now. “You caught me off guard.”
Yeah. I've been doing that a lot lately. It’s why I’ve made it a point to be around as much as possible. I go to class, the field, and then straight home. I've met up with Zheng for lunch between classes all week, and when he’s feeling up for it, he kicks it at the field and catches up on his schoolwork while he waits for me to finish up with Infernum practice.
It’s not ideal. We don’t do secrets in our crew. But this … this is Zheng’s damage. It’s not my place to tell the others. Zheng will do that when he’s good and ready, so for now, this is what works.
But part of why it works is because we avoid scenes like what Zheng is about to put himself in. Parties are loud. Rowdy. And shit is never clean when other factions are involved. People get into stupid shit and no, I don’t think Zheng will slip up when it comes to drugs. He’s worked too fucking hard for his sobriety. But this week he’s been off, and I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. I can sense how restless his beast is and it has me worried.
