Page 29 of Bad Blood Panther

Finally he climbed to his feet, blood and dust streaking his body. “Fuck everybody,” he muttered. “I hate you all.”

He stomped off towards his trailer.

Jenny watched him for a moment, then strode after him. Flynn started to say something, and Jenny flicked her claws out and raised her hand at him, forgetting to be scared. “Shut up,” she said. “Don’t even.”

Flynn backed up, hands spread. “I’ll just let you two work this out, then.” He looked…amused? Fuck him. Fuck everybody.

Xander wanted to have this out? Fine. They’d have it out.

Xander stood in the tiny shower for a long time, just letting the water run over him. His wounds stopped bleeding and the hot water ran out, and he still stood there.

Because when he got out, he’d have to deal with the shit. He couldn’t bleed more people or throw knives or go hunting. None of that would help, because Jenny would still be right there making him remember things, ripping the wounds open all over again.

Finally the cold water made his dick shrivel and his fingers wrinkly, and he opened the door and got out. Fuck. No towels. He found some not-too-disgusting-smelling clothes draped over his hamper and yanked them on, not caring that he was still wet.

He still wanted to bleed somebody. When was this feeling going to end?

He strode into his bedroom and stopped dead. Jenny was sitting on the bed with a pile of clean towels in her lap, bunching and unbunching them as she clenched her hands over and over.

He just stood there, hair dripping, staring at her like an idiot.

“I called Lissa on your phone and asked her to bring them,” she said, holding out a towel. Her whole body was tense. “Because you’re such a damn guy that not only do you forget having sex with your best friend, you don’t even have clean towels.”

Xander grabbed the towel out of her hand, stared at it, and threw it on the floor. She was seriously coming in here and talking about fucking towels? He’d had his whole life ripped apart three years ago, and now she was doing it again, and somehow it was all about her. And towels.

“You knew!” he growled. “Tell me you didn’t know that Cindi was going to Turn me.”

“I sure as hell never thought she’d do it without telling you!”

He stared at her. “But you knew,” he whispered. He couldn’t believe it.

Jenny shoved the pile of towels to the floor. “It was supposed to be me, you asshole!” she yelled, getting to her feet, fists clenched. “You were supposed to fall in love with me, and be my mate, and then some day, when you wanted, I was going to—I hoped—”

Xander couldn’t process it. “You wanted to Turn me? Why?”

She stared at him, her face incredulous. Then she shoved him in the chest. “You. Fucking. Idiot.” She punctuated each word with another shove. “God. How dense can you possibly be? I loved you!”

She couldn’t mean what it sounded like she meant. He couldn’t have been that oblivious. “As a friend,” he said.

“As everything! Gah.” She walked around in a small circle, growling, like she didn’t know what to do with all the energy pent up in her.

Finally she turned on him. He was shocked to see tears in the corners of her eyes. “You broke my heart, Alexander Fierro,” she said. “You broke my goddamn heart, and not only didn’t you care, you were too stupid to even fucking notice!”

His brain felt like it was going to explode. “Seriously?” Xander yelled. “And for that I deserve this?” He swept his hand down his body as if to encompass everything that had happened to him. “You were so pissed off at me for not being in love with you, you couldn’t even manage a ‘hey, heads up, Cindi’s going to turn you into a monster’?”

“Would you have believed me?”

“Does it matter? At least you could have tried!”

He could feel the rage overtaking him. He was on the edge; in the mirror over the dresser, he could see his eyes beginning to go feral green.

Jenny saw it too. “Don’t you do that!” she snapped, shaking him. “Don’t you go fucking hide inside your cat. You’re furious at all of us. You’re furious at me. Fucking own it!”

“I own it every damn day!” He raged up and down the room. “This is me now. I’m angry all the time. It makes me so crazy I want to kill things—kill people—and watch them bleed and tear their flesh. I love my damn crew like family, and my cat still wants to fucking kill them half the time. Do you know how many scars they have because of me?”

He grabbed her arm, his fingers hard and bruising on her skin, and turned it to show the fading marks where he’d clawed her the night before. “And now you do too.” He flung her arm away. “And I hate that, and it hurts me, but part of me still wants to—”

He turned away and wrapped his hands around the back of his neck, crouching down as if that would keep everything inside him.