Chapter Twenty-Nine
Miranda
I’m dying.
I can feel it. Each breath is a struggle, and blood is pooling in my mouth. My ribs are broken, and one of the bones has pierced my lungs. It’s an excruciating type of pain, but I force myself to think past it.
I have to get to Ethan.
My fingers scrape the ground. Derek is no longer on me. I don’t know when he moved, but the weight is gone, and I’m alone on the cold floor with a small, pale shape ten feet away that’s whimpering, a corpse against the back wall, and the bright copper smell of my own blood strong in my nose. I drag myself forward six inches, then another foot.
A wolf hits the wall on the other side of the room hard enough to shake the plaster. Then comes a snarl, a tangle of fur and teeth and limbs, two bodies hitting the concrete in a heap I can’t focus on. My vision is going dark at the edges.
Coach is here. I see his face above me as he kneels, his hands on my throat checking my pulse, his other hand on Ethan, nowtwo feet from my shoulder. The boy’s small body has partially shifted back to human inside the torn pajamas. Coach’s mouth is moving, but the words don’t reach me, the world gone very far away. Relief floods me. They’re here. They’ll protect Ethan.
Then a different face comes into the dimness above mine.
Grayson.
His mouth moves, his hands frame my face, and his amber eyes are wet, the gold burning at the edges of them. His thumb traces the line of my jaw while he says my name over and over, calling me back through a door that’s closing. I want to tell him so many things at once, and my mouth won’t form any of them. I’m not leaving him by choice. I love him. Ethan is the best thing I have known, Grayson the second, and he must take care of our boy. I want to thank him for the months he gave me. None of it comes out.
I feel his palm slide behind my neck, feel him say something sharp to someone behind him, a healer maybe, a voice arguing. Coach says something low. Grayson is angry. He’s shouting. Then there is a bright pain in the side of my neck, sharper than the rest, and the world goes white.
The white doesn’t stop. It moves through me in waves I can’t measure. The bones inside me are wrong, all of them at once, and something is climbing through my marrow and rewriting it slow then fast then slow. The pain is not pain so much as a complete loss of the place where pain ends and I begin. I am screaming. I think I’m screaming. There are hands on me, many hands at the shoulders, the hips, the knees, voices low and steady around me, a smell I don’t recognize. A new hand wipes my face, and after it, something cold presses against the inside of my elbow.
A woman’s voice I don’t know is murmuring in a steady rhythm at my ear, calm and even. I think it’s in a language I don’t speak, but I’m wrong because some of the words are comingthrough. Stay with us, you are doing well, breathe, breathe, that is right. My hand is being held, the grip large and warm, and it shakes once.
Grayson. I can’t see him, but I can feel his hand.
I slip down into the white again, and this time it is dark.
The first thingI become aware of is a ceiling, white, with the hairline crack across the upper left corner I have stared at every morning for the past two months because it sits directly above my side of the bed.
I am in our bedroom.
Why is it so loud? The whole house is making noise, all of it audible at once, every floorboard creaking, a tap running somewhere downstairs, the soft fall of Linda’s slippers in the hallway. I close my eyes for a second and cover my ears. The sound dims, but it makes me realize something else.
My body doesn’t hurt.
I sit up slowly, and the blanket falls off my chest. I’m in one of Grayson’s old T-shirts, my hair brushed and braided by someone who was not me, and my left shoulder where the bullet went through feels exactly the same as my right. There is no ache, no stiffness. I roll the joint experimentally, and it moves without complaint. The skin where the entry wound was is smooth and pink and new. My ribs don’t hurt, either, and when I draw a deep breath in, the rib cage moves around it without snagging on anything.
I lift one hand to the side of my neck. The pad of my fingertips finds a small, raised place above my collarbone, four indentations in a soft curve, the skin around them tender. My heart stutters in my chest. Did Grayson give me the mark?
A footstep on the carpet outside the bedroom door has my head turning before the sound has finished. Four-year-old footsteps, light and fast. The door inches open, and Ethan’s face appears around the edge, lighting up when he sees me sitting.
“DADDY!”
The shout is enormous. He launches himself across the room before I have finished processing how loud he is for a child, and the entire small weight of him lands in my lap with both arms around my neck.
“DADDY DADDY DADDY SHE’S AWAKE SHE’S AWAKE—”
“Ethan, slow down,” I beg, my head splitting from his voice.
My arms close around him on autopilot. He smells like Linda’s strawberry shampoo and the laundry detergent she uses and the small, clean scent under both of those that’s just him.
“Sorry,” he whispers, eyes wide. “Daddy said you’re like a baby right now.”
He said what?
