Eventually, Jaylinwas wrapped in a towel and carried inside by one of the patrols who’d arrived late to Quentin’s call. He would be bathed by the maids so that the clerics could look him over properly, and then he was due for rest. The sentinels were sent off. All but Lizzy, who—being the fastest runner, according to Quentin—was sent off to a clinic in the city to fetch the only cleric he trusted with the situation.
The wounded stayed, but the rest went home. It was strange, the silence that followed after that.
Tisper sat on the edge of the veranda, watching Imani care for the wound in Quentin’s shoulder. He’d have to be looked at by the medics as well, but it seemed Imani was all too intrigued by the injury itself to let anyone else sew it up. Matt had retreated to the couch, fallen asleep on Sadie’s shoulder—who fell asleep on Alex’s shoulder, who fell asleep on one of many of Lisa’s decorative throws.And there was only one wolf who remained wolf. Bailey. He’d been resting beside Quentin—loyal, or in love, or just cursed to think he was.
Maybe time passed her by quicker than she realized, but in the blink of an eye, Tisper was the only one still awake with nothing to bide her time. She couldn’t sleep—not after tonight. She wasn’t sure she’d ever sleep at all. She’d dream of those yellow eyes and that horrible red moon—nightmares that it would be back again tomorrow. That Jaylin would never be free of the curse. That she’d have to hear his agonizing cries again as every bone in his body bent and broke itself to the will of the lichund.
“Take this advice, yeah? Don’t think too much. It’ll drive ye mad.” She blinked up to Felix—to the emerald of his eyes, honest jewels beneath the porch light.
She took the open beer he offered and savored the cold under her fingers. “Whose advice is that?”
“That of a mad man.” Felix took a seat beside her, popped off the cap of his own with the quick bunt of his palm. “My own.”
Tisper felt too sick to drink, but she held the bottle in her palms. “Who was she? That woman with the black hair?”
“Qamar. Our queen.”
“That was your queen? That girl? She looked like she was maybe sixteen. That was who we’ve spent all this time trying to locate? But she didn’t do anything. She didn’t give us any kind of resolve. I don’t understand—”
“Do admit she’s strange,” Felix said, “not much for words, but she’ll take care of it all.”
“And if she doesn’t? If Ziya comes back—tomorrow or the next day?”
“Comes back for what? A boy? Because that’s all he’ll be then.”
Tisper inhaled deeply and exhaled louder than she meant to. A thick exhaust of uncertainty.
“Ay,” Felix nipped. “Kid’s one of us now. Quentin always takes care of his own.”
Tisper nodded, though she wasn’t sure if it was enough to convince her. If that promise alone would help her sleep tonight. “What about the body?” she asked.
Felix’s eyes rose to the mound, hidden beneath a tarp at the far corner of the house. “Men are coming. She’ll be gone by morning.” Then he tipped back his bottle, and after a deep swig, laughed out a somewhat-drunken chuckle. “That bloody shot you made. A true Hail Mary, by the way.” He rose, the bottle dangling from his fingertips. “Remind me never to test you.”
And as he left, Tisper couldn’t help her smile. She reached for the quill by her feet and plucked an arrow from its basket—the wooden ones Quentin had given her. Traditional, weighty arrows. They felt so right under her grip, and she brought the fletching to her mouth, relished in the ghostly way the feathers kissed her lips.
The bad moon was disappearing behind the sharp cuts of the treetops. The world was waking, a faint orange blazing brilliantly on the other side of the earth, where the sun swelled behind the mountain’s snowy cap.
Fear was a strange thing, a horrible thing. Fear was a lichund in the night. But she lingered in the shape of the footsteps fear had left behind, because it was the feeling of raw survival that sweetened her veins now.
She wanted to be better. Stronger. Smarter.
“Tisper,” Quentin’s gentle voice said. “We’re going inside. Come in and rest soon.”
She smiled and nodded, and Imani—adorned in one of Lisa’s robes—helped Quentin to his feet, and they made their way into the warmth of the house. Tisper waited until they were gone, until the doors had shut behind them. Then she dropped her arrow back in its quill.
With her bow in her arms and her quill on her back, Tisper turned from the dying moon and made her way to the garden.
Tonight had told her what it was to be helpless. Fear had put a mirror to her face—shown her all her shallow weaknesses.
And maybe it wasn’t her calling. Maybe she wasn’t born to shoot an arrow, maybe she would never be the hero Quentin was, never a fighter like Imani.
But Tisper knew two things: She craved the feeling of her bow beneath her fingers. And the next time Ziya—or anyone else for that matter—came for someone she loved, she would be the one to bring fear.
–
Jaylin woke to the mid-afternoon sunlight, squeezing through the slits of the curtains. He recognized the smell of Quentin before he realized those curtains didn’t belong to him—didn’t exist in his room. That the sheets on him were made of cold silk, that the bed was much too large.
He turned his head to look around, but something pulled at his cheek and he felt for the bandages, stuck firmly to his face and neck. He could smell the clay beneath them—the same muddy medicine Quentin had used to treat the scrapes on his feet.
Before he could make sense of it, there was a shout on the floor below, a concerning thud that felt to rock the whole house, and Jaylin pushed himself up from the enticing comfort of Quentin’s bed, a deep emptiness gnarling in his stomach.
His feet felt strange as they touched the ground—so light, it took a moment to adjust before he could walk forward on his own. It was odd to have his hands back, too—no longer grotesque and gargantuan and weighing heavy on his shoulders, but light and free and normal.
He moved to the door and the moment he opened it, the raucous below became so much louder.
“For fuck’s sake, get off me!”
As he rounded the corner, Jaylin lingered at the top step of the stairs. A dizziness drafted through him and he clasped onto the ornate top of the baluster, trying to make sense of the situation below.
Quentin had Felix pinned to the ground, nearly seated on his chest. Felix’s arms were trapped beneath his knees, and Quentin knelt there with a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other. “You need iron, Felix. How else are you going to get it?”
“Pills,” Felix spat, wrenching his shoulder to free his arms from beneath Quentin. “Get that shite away from me.”
“It’s just spinach,” Quentin said. “Be a man, open your mouth.”
“Twenty bucks it’s not the first time you’ve said that.” Felix stopped his struggles to chortle at his own humor, but as Quentin neared with a spoonful of soggy spinach, Felix thrashed again. “I’m not eating it. Fuck off me!” When he finally wedged a hand free, Felix swatted at the bowl in his hands and Quentin lifted it just out of reach before the spinach went flying.
Felix snarled. “Is this how you fight too, y’pussy?”
The grin on Quentin wore was something otherworldly and Jaylin felt himself wobble as he watched it bloom. He stared because it was the only thing he could think of to do. His head was filled with a deafening buzz of nothing and all of the nothingness made no sense at all. It was like a hive of honeybees roaming around between his ears. But that smile—that smile made sense.
Then Quentin caught sight of him and his grin was slipping away just like that. Jaylin felt so sad to see it go. Then the others in the room started to notice him—the maids, who smiled and whispered. Imani, who watched him from beneath her brow, and Lisa, who peeked up from her laptop and started to her feet with a shimmer in her eyes.
“Jaylin! We weren’t expecting you awake so soon.”
Quentin set the bowl aside and rose to his feet, and Felix scrambled out from beneath him while he had the chance.
The alpha took a step closer, stopping feet from the stairs. “Do you remember what happened, Jaylin?”
He rubbed at his face with one hand, the other gripping the banister as he slid down the staircase one slow step at a time. “Yeah…I think. Everything’s blurry. Maybe I’m just tired.”
“As you should be,” Lisa brushed down the thighs of her dress and stood straight as a pencil—characteristics that he’d come to find were normal of such a prim and proper woman like herself. But the way she fumbled with her hands seemed strangely out of place.
In fact, they all seemed strange. There was something off, something forged in the faces that filled the room. Even Imani—with her long, limber body slung out across the sofa, and a magazine in her hands—tightened as if a single nerve within her was still alert and on edge.
Quentin too seemed tighter than usual, not daring to near the staircase. Quentin, who had so confidently stripped down in front of him, just for the pleasure of watching him squirm. He stood there now, too afraid to take another step, like Jaylin was a timid doe, and a single movement would have him breaking for the trees.
Every single one of them was waiting for something from him, and it was suffocating.
Jaylin ran a hand up through his hair and let out a stiff laugh. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
“Don’t remember anything,” Felix said, strung out along the love seat, “do ye?”
Jaylin shrugged as he slipped down the bottom step. He hated the feeling—all these eyes on him, trying to read something so unwritten. “I—I don’t know. I remember things. The rain, the moon. I remember hearing you call.” He didn’t look at Quentin, but to the patterns in the floor beneath him. “And Tisper—I remember telling her we had to go. But it was like she couldn’t hear me. Couldn’t understand me.”
“That’s all you remember?” Lisa asked.
It was all he remembered. Visions of red, cold rain pelting his back. And Quentin. He remembered Quentin. He wore the same face from his dream—God, that terrified expression.
“It’ll likely resurface in bits,” Imani said, sounding somewhat bored. She flipped to the next page in her magazine and sighed deeply. “The first time is always rough.”
“Where are the others?” Jaylin glanced around the room. “My friends?”
“Your friends went home,” Lisa said. “They’ll be returning for dinner. We’ll be having a few guests over.” She shut her laptop screen and tucked it under her arms, wiggling a finger to Felix. “Speaking of, I need your help replacing the broken boards in the fence.”
And she gave one last smile to Jaylin as she drifted in through the kitchen, and Felix hauled himself up from his chair to follow her out.
Quentin was a glaring presence, despite how Jaylin refused to look his way. There was something about being near him that brought chills to his arms. Something new and strange. Something he wanted to avoid with every fiber of his being.
But Quentin took a step into his eye line, and ignoring him became an obstacle. Jaylin met his eyes finally, dark and gentle as ever. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but whatever thought was climbing its way up was silenced by a beeping in the kitchen.
He withdrew into himself and disappeared to his precious oven, and Jaylin was alone with Imani, who was flicking between pages too quickly to have actually read a single word.
“You frighten him,” she mused. “It’s not every day the alpha of the great emerald quivers in his boots.”
Jaylin wandered closer and took the seat that Felix had vacated. “What happened last night, Imani?”
She lowered her magazine and gave him a smirk, dense with amusement. There was always something that bothered him about the way she stared. The way she always looked perpetually humored, like a wise cat, watching a dog snarl at its own shadow.
When she said nothing, Jaylin felt along the bandages on his neck and frowned. “Everyone’s looking at me like I’m made of glass. You’re the only one who will tell me, aren’t you?”
“Something like that,” she hummed, turning to the next page.
“Please,” Jaylin said, quietly now, “I need to know if I hurt anyone.”
It was with a second deep sigh that Imani tossed her magazine aside and stood. “You were a frightening thing, I’ll admit. Teeth like knives and what have you.” And as she spoke, she reached to the coffee table and took something from beneath a pile of Vogue magazines. Jaylin felt his fingers go numb as she passed the manilla envelope to him. “One of the medics from last night asked me to give this to you. He said it was from a friend. That you’d dropped it.”
There was no mistaking it. Anna’s name still printed at the top, the corners crumpled, the paper battered from the efforts of his escape. He held it in his hands—that was all he could do. Hold it and stare and wait for a squall of anxieties to flood into him. He’d been so devastated to lose it, but to have it in his hands. To know he’d have to give it to Quentin….
“By the way,” Imani said, “I only offer you this information because your memory will indefinitely return to you. And when it does, save yourself the horrors or reliving the moment it happened. Because you did take a life, lichund.”
It felt like his bones had gone to ice. The breath he’d been taking froze there in his chest, and Jaylin’s eyes slid up to meet dark focus in her own. “I killed someone?”
For the first time, perhaps ever, there was a softness in Imani’s face. She reached up with a fast hand and cupped Jaylin beneath the jaw. He could feel her long nails press against his skin, the claw of her pewter ring tap against his cheekbone. She leaned in close and brought him up to look her in the eye.
“You killed someone,” she said. “And you did so defending your alpha and your pack and your family—and your friends who so valiantly fought by your side. You did kill someone, little monster.” She smiled—the gentle look so foreign to her stoic features. So soft on the sharp, full, beautiful face of a truly dangerous woman. “But you saved many.”
Jaylin didn’t know what to say. He gazed up at her, hoping to understand why she sounded so gracious. Why she suddenly seemed human, Imani. But she only gave him a touch on the shoulder as she passed him by. And like the others Imani drifted from the room like she’d been nothing more permanent than a passing breeze.
And Jaylin was left alone to himself. The last place he wanted to be.
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