MY THROAT HURT. MY THIGH BURNED - EITHER someone had scalded me with boiling grease while I was out or a werewolf had bitten me. The rest of me felt broken, like I'd been passed through a laundry wringer. I opened my eyes and saw Jim sitting in a chair.
"Fuck you," I said and sat up.
Jim rubbed his face with his hand, as if trying to wipe away what bothered him.
My whole body ached, but nothing seemed permanently out of commission. My mouth tasted of blood. I ran my tongue along my teeth. All there.
"Did I kill anybody?"
"No. But two of my people are out until their bones heal."
We looked at each other.
"I stood there with my hands up, Jim. Like this." I raised my hands. "I didn't pull my sword. I didn't make any threats. I just stood there like a submissive bitch and asked them to please let me speak to you. And this is what I got?"
Jim said nothing. Asshole.
"Show me an Atlanta shapeshifter who doesn't know me. Your crew, they recognized me.
They know who I am, they know what I do, and they still fucked me up. You've worked with me for four years, Jim. I fought with the Pack and for the Pack. I fought with you. I'm an ally, who should have earned the trust by now. And you and yours treat me like an enemy."
Jim's eyes went ice-cold. "Here you have trust when you grow fur."
"I see. So if a loup bites me tomorrow, it will mean more to you than everything I've done up to this point." I rose. Fire laced my thigh. "Is Derek okay?"
Stone wall.
"God fucking damn it, Jim, is the kid okay?"
Nothing. After all the shit we'd gone through together, he shut me out. Just like that. The loyalty that bound me to Derek meant nothing. The years I'd spent looking out for Jim while he looked out for me as we teamed up on Guild gigs meant nothing. With one executive decision, Jim had cast aside the slender standing I had clawed and fought for with the Pack for the last six months. He just sat there, silent and cold, a complete stranger.
The words dropped from Jim's lips like a brick. "You should go."
I had had just about enough. "Fine. You won't tell me why your crew worked me over. You won't let me see Derek. That's your prerogative. We'll do it your way. James Damael Shrapshire, in your capacity as the Pack's chief security officer, you have permitted Pack members under your command to deliberately injure an employee of the Order. At least three individuals involved in the assault wore the shapeshifter warrior form. Under the Georgia Code, a shapeshifter in a warrior form is equivalent to being armed with a deadly weapon.
Therefore, your actions fall under O.C.G.A. Section 16-5-21(c), aggravated assault on a peace officer engaged in the performance of her duties, which is punishable by mandatory imprisonment of no less than five and no more than twenty years. A formal complaint will be filed with the Order within twenty-four hours. I advise you to seek the assistance of counsel."
Jim stared at me. The hardness drained from his eyes, and in their depths I saw astonishment.
I held his stare for a long moment. "Don't call; don't stop by. You need something done, go through official channels. And the next time you meet me, mind your p's and q's, because I'll fuck you over in a heartbeat the second you step over the line. Now return my sword, because I'm walking out of here, and I dare any of your idiots to try and stop me."
I went to the door.
Jim stood up. "On behalf of the Pack, I extend an apology . . ."
"No. The Pack didn't do that. You did that." I reached for the door. "I'm so mad at you, I can't even speak."
"Kate . . . wait."
Jim walked to me, took the door, and held it open. Outside three shapeshifters sat on the floor in a hallway: a petite woman with short dark hair, one of the Latino men, and the older bodybuilder who had stopped me at the first murder scene. A short, dark gray line marked the woman's neck, where Lyc-V had died from the contact with silver. Hello, Brenna. They probably had to cut her throat to get the needle out. The cut had sealed but it would take the body a couple of days to absorb the gray discoloration - the evidence of dead virus.
Shapeshifters had trouble with all coinage metals - that was why most of their jewelry was steel or platinum - but when it came to toxicity to Lyc-V, silver beat out gold and copper by a mile.
The shapeshifters looked at Jim.
Muscles played along his jaw. His shoulders tensed under the black T-shirt. He was pushing against a wall only he could see. "My bad."
"My bad?" That was all he had? That was it?
He thought about it for a second and nodded. "My bad. I owe you one."
"Your attempt at damage control is duly noted." I shook my head and headed out.
"Kate, I'm sorry. I fucked up. It didn't go down right."
He finally sounded like he meant it. Part of me wanted to kick him in the head, walk away, and just keep walking until I got the hell out of there. I considered the situation: Jim had apologized in front of his crew. That was all I would get. He wouldn't get down on his knees and beg my forgiveness. In the end it wasn't about Jim and me. It was about the kid.
Jim must've sensed what I was thinking. "I'll take you to him."
That cinched it. As we walked past the shapeshifters, he paused, looked at them, and said,
"She's in."
I followed him along the gloomy hallway and down a rickety flight of stairs. The air smelled musty. The stairs accepted our weight with shrill creaks of protest. This wasn't one of the Pack's regular offices, or at least I didn't recognize it. It was hard to forget a place plastered with panda wallpaper. Jim's face grew grimmer with each step.
I was still pissed. "What kind of shapeshifter has orange fur anyway?"
"Weredingo."
Now I'd seen everything. Well, at least he didn't steal my baby.
The stairs terminated in a heavy door. Jim halted. His gaze bored into the door with hate reserved for mortal enemies.
"They broke him," Jim said suddenly, a barely contained growl clawing at his words. "They broke the boy. Even if he survives, he'll never be the same."
THE ROOM WAS DIM. A SMALL FLOOR LAMP spilled light onto the rectangular glass box filled with swamp-green fluid. The box was shallow - only two feet tall, and at first, I mistook it for a casket.
I'd seen it before. The shapeshifters called it the tank. A restorative device, invented by Dr.
Doolittle, self-proclaimed physician to all things Pack and wild.
A nude body rested in the green liquid, connected to life-support equipment by thin capillaries of IV tubes.
In all my twenty-five years I had never seen a shapeshifter on life support.
I knelt by the box. Breath caught in my throat.
Derek lay encaged in wire. An angry band of magenta swelling marked the flesh over his broken bones, where the abused muscle refused to heal. His right leg was shattered beneath the knee, the shin one continuous misshapen mess of purple ringed with bands of dark gray.
Another purple stain marked his left thigh - the femur, the toughest bone in the body, broken right in the middle, snapped like a toothpick.
Two fractures scarred Derek's right arm, above the elbow and at the wrist. Identical breaks marked his left arm. The inhuman precision of the mind that would conceive the need for breaking both arms in exactly the same places made me grind my teeth.
My heartbeat slowed. My head grew hot, my fingertips cold. Breath rolled around my lungs like a clump of ice. This wasn't just a beating. This was an exhibition. A purposeful demonstration of cruelty and hate. They had mangled him, broken him so completely, as if they sought to obliterate what he was. It made me furious and I clenched my hands until my nails dug into my palms.
Deep purple streaked with gray stained Derek's chest, outlining his rib cage and creeping up to his throat, where gray pooled at the base of the neck caught in a brace. An open gash sliced across his torso from his left side up onto his chest, to his right shoulder. The wound was black. Not gray, not bloody - black.
I looked at his face. He no longer had one. A mishmash of broken bones stared back at me, the flesh raw and seeded with gray, as if someone had attempted to sculpt a face out of ground beef and left it in the open air to rot.
Rage shook me. I'll find you. I'll find you, you fucker, and I'll make you pay. I'll rip you apart with my bare hands.
All rational thought fled from my head. The room shrank, as though I'd gone blind, while inside me fury built and howled. I wanted to scream, to kick, to punch something, but my body refused to move. I felt helpless. It was a most terrible feeling.
Minutes stretched by, long and viscous like honey dripping from a spoon. Derek still lay there, dying quietly in the vat of green liquid. His chest rose ever so slightly, but aside from that small movement, he might as well have been dead already. If he were a normal human, he would've departed long before his beating had been finished. Sometimes greater regeneration just meant greater suffering.
Someone's hand came to rest on my shoulder. I looked up. Doolittle's kind face greeted me.
"Come on now," he murmured and pulled me up. "Come on up. Let's have some tea."