Robyn hissed again and pushed herself into one corner of the room, her hands pressed to the gash in her thigh. Before I could tell her not to worry or tell Jace not to kill her, Lucas and Mateo burst into the room in human form, having followed Jace up both flights of stairs in their inferior bipedal bodies.
They stared at the bloody scene in silence. Then my brother blinked, and his gaze found me. When he saw that I was still breathing and only barely cut, he exhaled and found a grin. Then he turned to offer my roommate a hand. “You must be the new girl. I’m Lucas, Abby’s brother.” She glanced at me, and when I nodded, she let him pull her up, while Teo pulled the case from the nearest pillow, to use as a tourniquet. “And you…” Lucas turned back to me. “You are soooo grounded.”
SEVENTEEN
Jace
I knocked on my open bedroom door, and Abby rolled over to face me. Seeing her in my bed—even though I’d hardly touched her all night—triggered a primal satisfaction, like that first deep breath after a long dive. As if having her scent on my sheets meant everything was exactly as it should be, when in reality, everything was falling apart.
She sat up in bed as I crossed the room toward her.
“How’d you sleep?”
Abby shrugged and pushed a mass of red curls back from her face. “You could probably answer that better than I can. How many times did I wake up?”
I sat on the edge of the bed and she scooted closer, dragging the blankets along. “Seven.” The nightmares were back, triggered by Darren and his damn paralytic drug. “But I would have had to wake you up once an hour anyway because of the concussion.” From the looks of it, she’d hit her head when the drug knocked her out. “Doctor’s orders.”
As near as I could tell, her dreams were some fucked-up amalgamation of her abduction at age seventeen, the assault on her campsite during fall break, and what went down in her dorm room sixteen hours before. The recurring theme seemed to be helplessness and an inability to protect herself.
I would gladly have killed everyone who’d ever laid a finger on her, if they weren’t all already dead, but I couldn’t fight her demons. All I could do was rub her back and remind her of where she was when she woke up screaming, and that made me feel helpless.
It made me want to rip someone apart, then lick the blood from my claws while the body cooled.
But I’d already done that.
“Did you get any sleep?” Abby straightened her nightshirt, then pulled her hair into a poofy ponytail at the back of her neck, secured with an elastic band she’d left on my bedside table the night before.
“I got enough.” Wherein “enough” was defined as almost none. But there’d be time to sleep later, when the chaos had settled. When I was sure she was going to be okay.
My gaze fell to the bedside table again, where her ruined phone lay next to an extra ponytail holder—they were always snapping beneath the pressure of her hair—and a tube of scented lip balm. Strawberry. Seeing her things on my nightstand… That felt right. Normal. Completely at odds with the fact that her parents were on their way from South Carolina, an emergency meeting of the Territorial Council had been called, and two of my men had spent half the night moving the body of a cop whose death would definitely be both noticed and investigated.
Mateo and Lucas had left Darren’s body in a field behind his home. With any luck, his death would look like exactly what it was—a mauling by a large cat. But even if they’d gone unseen by the only neighbor within viewing distance, the lack of blood at the scene would tell even a bad forensic investigator that Darren had been killed elsewhere, then dumped in the field.
But there was nothing we could do about that.
“Where’s Robyn?” Abby glanced at the other side of the bed, where her roommate had slept. Robyn had refused to be separated from Abby, even while her leg was being sewn up, and only hunger had driven her out of bed alone in a house full of strange scents and faces.
“She’s having breakfast and probably developing a deep-seated reluctant tolerance for my sister.” Melody was fascinated by Robyn. Almost as fascinated as she was with herself, which was a miracle all on its own. “Dr. Carver got here early this morning. Melody was going to keep her secret, but when she saw all the attention Robyn was getting, she practically demanded a prenatal exam.”
Dr. Danny Carver had driven all night to get from Oklahoma to Kentucky. He was actually a medical examiner, but as the only shifter physician in the eastern half of the country, he was constantly on call for injuries beyond the scope of an enforcer’s ability to suture.
And for pregnancies.
“So, no problems?” Abby said.
“Well, he didn’t come packing stirrups, but he said that as far as he can tell without doing an ultrasound, all is well.”
Since we hadn’t previously announced Melody’s news and my mother had done a pretty good job on Robyn’s leg, I could only assume our new tabby herself was the reason for the doctor’s long drive. Carver wanted to examine the first confirmed female stray.