Julie choked, the sound half gasp, half sob. He went for her immediately, but she flinched back and he froze. She didn’t even look at him, but stared at Carl. “Did I hit my head?” she asked.
“No,” the alpha said gently. “It really happened. You’re not crazy.”
She stared, her body starkly rigid. It was the stance of a woman trying not to vomit.
“You’re in shock right now,” Mark said gently, hating the way her shoulder hunched when he spoke. “Give it some time. It’s not a scary as it seems. Some people might even think it’s fun. You know, like Hogwarts fun.”
She took a couple deep breaths, both loud and unsteady. But then she knotted her hand into a fist and stared at the tree line. “Hogwarts? That’s Harry Potter, right? Or was that a Twilight reference?”
Mark gaped at her. He knew what she was doing. Focus on trivialities rather than deal with the big shit. But seriously, who didn’t know the difference between Harry Potter and Twilight? “Damn, do I have a movie list for you,” he growled.
“Nah,” Tonya inserted. “Read the books. Way better.”
He would have said a lot more except the wail of a siren cut through their conversation. It was the ambulance, coming for Carl.
“Look, I know this is coming at you pretty fast,” Carl said.
“Ya think?” Julie answered with her first show of temper since the danger had passed. Mark counted that as a good thing.
Then Carl cut in. “Normally, we reveal ourselves in a more controlled manner.” He shot Mark a glare, but Mark just shrugged. So he broke protocol. What was Carl going to do? Shoot him? “We need you to not talk about this just yet. There are a lot of people who don’t know.”
“Like Stevie,” Tonya said.
“And the ME,” Mark added. Damned if he knew how they were going to get around the woman now.
Carl shook his head. “No, I brought her in when we found Theo. Had to.”
Oh, right. And completely off point.
“In short,” Tonya cut in, her gaze cutting to the front where Stevie was running around the corner with two paramedics in tow, “we’d really like you to confine your freak-out to us. For now.”
Julie shot the woman a glare. “Do I look like I’m freaking out?”
“Yes, you do,” Tonya said. “Though in a quiet way, which I really appreciate.”
Julie looked at them one by one, ending with Mark. “On a scale from one to ten, I’m about twenty-seven on the freak-out scale. I start screaming at twenty-eight, so don’t push it.” Then she paused, and her body tightened as if bracing herself. “Any other surprises in store for me?”
“A ton, actually,” Mark said and both Carl and Tonya shot him a glare. “But the worst is over. The rest will come once your logical mind comes back on line. It’ll have doubts and questions and whatnot, but that’s all perfectly normal.” He shrugged. “At least as normal as this thing gets.”
She looked at him then, holding his gaze while her eyes seemed to fill with all sorts of things he couldn’t read. But she didn’t speak because the paramedics had finally made it around the scattered body parts to start futzing with Carl.
Mark refused help. That was his norm. Nothing any doctor could do to help him. But he did stand around trying not to hover as they checked out Julie. She was good, but it was reassuring to hear them say it. As for Carl, his shifter healing had kicked in to stop the blood loss, but he still needed stitches. Not to mention a gallon of hydrogen peroxide.
Tonya had to go to the hospital with Carl. That was her job as beta to his alpha. She covered by claiming she’d take his statement. Stevie tried to grasp the opportunity to interview Julie, but Mark forestalled him.
“Tonya already took our statements. We can come by later to give more detailed information if you like, but for now, she’s been through enough.”
Stevie didn’t like it, but it was hard for anyone to fight Mark when he used his don’t-mess-with-the-dying-bear gaze. It was cold, hard, and filled with the subliminal threat to tear the guy limb from limb if he got annoying. The poor newbie caved, though it took him an impressive amount of time to give in.
So Mark turned to Julie as if he were going to escort her back to her house. Even a grizzly could be chivalrous, right? But she was already halfway up the backyard, her face carefully turned away from the body beside her back door.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled, then jogged to her side. Only, once there, he wasn’t exactly sure what to do. He settled for a lame, “I’m so sorry, Julie?—”
She held up her hand. They’d made it inside her house, but he was still a couple steps behind her. He desperately wanted to touch her, but her muscles were rigid, and her shoulders hunched. The body’s way of screaming Back off! even if she was too polite to say it out loud.
He released a sigh. How quickly they’d fallen from where they’d started this morning. Pointless to pretend it didn’t gouge a deep hole in his chest. Dying men didn’t have the luxury of denying their feelings.
“I…I guess I’ll just grab my clothes and go home,” he said. Then he looked at his filthy hands. “Though, maybe I could take a shower first? If you don’t mind?”
