Kept (30 page)

“If you know what’s good for you, you won’t show up.” She tapped the crowbar in her hands a few times. “Though, with that nasty break, I don’t think I’ll have to worry about you, will I?”

I didn’t look at her as I slowly shook my head. The wolf inside wanted to lash out at her. To scratch that self-serving smile from her face. But the human part of me had been broken. Erica had finally won.

She stared me down and then left. I should’ve watched her walk away, so I could glare at her, but the only thing that came to mind was my new burden. A much-deserved one.

Another sacrifice. Another price to be paid, and another secret to be kept.

My trip to my car to retrieve my backup cell phone could be better described as a shuffling, zombielike motion. Every hop hurt enough to make black dots dance in my peripheral vision.

I had to give that woman credit. She knew exactly where to hit me and how much force was necessary to break—or should I say splinter—my tibia. How studious of her!

Out of all the bones in the body, she chose to injure the one that would take the longest to heal. A break that would’ve killed a human, due to excessive blood loss. She’d made a solid hit to the largest bone in the leg—a blow that would debilitate
any
wolf for about a week.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a week to recover.

A strange laugh escaped my mouth. I never expected things to end like this. Not in this nauseating manner, as I limped to my car, barely able to breathe. I was supposed to have a fighting chance to enter the pack.

My hand shook as I fumbled the door open. My breath came out in wet gasps. A dampness I didn’t want to think about soaked my pant leg. It was just more evidence for me to clean up. Using my arms, I precariously tried to lean into my car while not touching the inside with my filth. The very thought that I’d get blood all over my seats was enough to make me start panting faster.

Normal people wouldn’t care
, I tried to tell myself. Normal people just let things go. (Especially when they were dying, damn it!) But I couldn’t reason with the rising anxiety or the painful whimper from my indecisiveness. The pain of knowing I needed serious help versus that incessant reminder of the consequences of my actions.

Do you know how much you’ll have to clean?
(Screw the cleaning!)

Are you thinking about the germs?
(I’m dying here!)

Blood draws vermin. Vermin bring disease, they cause infection
. (To hell with infection. To hell with the vermin. Pick up the damn phone.)

I closed my eyes and snatched the phone. My fingers flew over the keys to dial a number. But I stopped before I hit the CALL key. When I opened my eyes, I realized the number I’d dialed and knew what would happen if I talked to him. Nothing good.

Somehow, I cleared out the number and dialed the person I should’ve called in the first place.

“Nat?”

I could barely hear him over the sounds of music and a crowd. All the external noise bled into me, and I held
the phone away from my ear. Or maybe my grip had faltered. I wasn’t sure which.

“Help me … Please.” My voice sounded dry.

“Where are you?” The music sounded softer. His voice farther away.

My lips moved, but nothing came out.

“Don’t move,” his voice was urgent. “I will find
you
.”

My legs wobbled, and then the ground came at me fast. Face-first. The last thing I heard was Nick’s voice.

“I will find you. I promise.”

A warm hand caressed my cheek. Then it traced a curved line over my eyebrow.

I heard a voice mumbling something. A phrase on rapid repeat.

“It’s all dirty. It’s all dirty. It’s all dirty.”

The hand moved from my eyebrow down to my lips. The voice was silenced. Mine.

A sensation—like the warmth of fresh honey for bread—coursed over my leg. It was strange compared to the cold of the snow. I felt the warmth of the body that wrapped its black coat around me.

The heat turned into a smoldering fire that blanketed me until I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. I swam within it. Reveled in the comfort of forgotten pain.

“Open your eyes, Natalya.”

I blinked twice and then opened them. Nick sat next to me on the ground. His coat was over me, protecting me from the cold snow that fell. One of his hands rested on my thigh, while the other brushed against my face.

“What happened to you?” I didn’t answer. His next question came a bit later. “Who did this?”

“I was attacked. But you don’t have to worry about that—I managed to get in a few hits.” Even as I said it, my voice croaked a few times. I wasn’t fooling him.

“Was anyone else hurt?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Just me.”

“Who did this?” He said again. This time more forcefully.

“Please don’t ask anymore.”

His mouth formed a thin line. “I could force you to tell me.”

“You could, but you’d hate yourself afterward.”

Should I feel bad that I’d used his valor against him? Perhaps so. Perhaps not.

Nick was silent for a while, and I assumed I’d won. Then he ended my happy moment by saying, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to heal this break.”

He’d healed me over and over again. Just like the other times, beyond the feelings of healing and protection, he always made me feel like I was the most important thing in the world. Even after I’d turned him away on Christmas, he’d come for me. My mind flashed to our time in the truck when he’d held my hand. How he’d always found a way to make the impossible … possible.

“Can’t you just use more magic? Another wand?” Wasn’t that what those spellcasters used when they were in a bind? It wasn’t as if he could use me to boost his magic. I was as useful as a broken can opener.

I sort of knew the answer to my question, but he gave it to me anyway, “Magic doesn’t work that way.”

“So how does it work?” I whispered. Every time I’d whispered the spell from Grandma, I’d wondered what the trigger was. What did the spell do and how could I make it happen?

“Magic comes from within or from another source. If it’s from another source, they must be touched by magic as well—like the transformation magic that shape-shifters have.”

I nodded. “So my source of power lies in my ability to transform.”

“Yes, but even if you do have that ability, you must understand that to harness it, you have to put in what you expect to get out. An equal exchange.” He sighed. “I don’t have any staffs and what I need from inside of me isn’t enough.”

Inside of him? What was he sacrificing?

“What are you saying, Nick?”

“I’m saying that magic isn’t a simple formula. It isn’t like a chemistry set you can put together and expect the same results every time you combine ingredients. It comes from here.” He placed his free hand on my heart. “When you have the right tools—the right words—and you believe without a doubt, magic can happen.”

But I’d said the words. I’d chanted until I felt like I could say them backward, forward. Hell, I could’ve been saying “I like cheeseburgers” in ancient Sumerian all day. But if nothing happened and I didn’t know what to expect, what good would the words do me?

I settled for something I could see ahead of me. Something I couldn’t avoid. “Is there any way I can be ready tomorrow? For the trials?”

“There’s only so much I can do. Whoever did this to you messed up your leg pretty bad.”

So my celebration for how well she’d hit me hadn’t been mistaken.

“I want to know who did this to you.”

I sensed the bitterness behind his words. He wanted to take my pain away and satisfy his anger by finding out who’d hurt me.

Silence was my answer, so he resumed healing me. When he spoke again, he sounded cheerful, as if he was trying to distract me. “Hey, do you remember our first exercise together?”

A small laugh snuck out of my mouth. “The drunken satyr—I mean, shape-shifter.”

“I ran into the fellow over a week ago.”

Memories of our first exercise from Dr. Frank made me feel good. I hadn’t expected to learn this white wizard had an affinity for fine furniture, or that he had the messiest home I’d ever seen in my life. (He even had my brother beat.)

“What form was he in this time? Or maybe I should ask if he was sober?”

“He was only
slightly
drunk, and he was in the shape of a dwarf … and a pack mule. But I was at a bar at the time.”

I giggled at the thought of a dwarf sitting slumped at a counter—barely able to hold his form between the two. But then another thought came to mind: Who ordered the drinks, the dwarf or the pack mule?

“Did Mike and his Supernatural Drunk Bus service have to come and pick him up?”

“Oh, I think the shape-shifter put in a call somewhere else when a female centaur came by to show him a good time.”

The very thought of it made me want to scrub my mind with bleach to rid me of the awful image of a mule/dwarf/shape-shifter doing the nasty with a half-horse, half-human creature.

When the laughter dwindled, I closed my eyes and clenched the seashell. It never worked, but I guess giving up on its magic was rather difficult.

I lay quietly, thinking about the spell Grandma had taught me. Eventually the words emerged from my lips.

Nick chuckled softly beside me. “You did it.”

“Did what?”

“I felt it.”

My eyebrows lowered.

“Do you feel any different now?” He had a knowing look on his face. Almost like a smug teacher.

“How did you know I did something?”

“Magic’s a part of me as much as it’s in you.”

“So what did I do to you?”

“The spell wasn’t meant to affect me.”

I was calm. Blissfully, wonderfully calm. The kind of calm I only got from my pills. I laughed. The perfect gift from my grandmother for an anxious human and her wolf.

“Can you move the leg?” he asked.

I shifted slightly—only to feel pain sharp enough for me to inhale with a hiss.

“Like I said before, I can only do so much.”

The pain radiated up my leg. How long had I lain here on the cold ground? My hand crawled along my leg until it encountered the tear. The bones weren’t protruding anymore, but even the slightest touch spoke volumes: I wouldn’t be 100 percent tomorrow.

“Can you help me stand up?”

“You need more time.”

“Vulnerable wolves just lie there. I need to get up, Nick.” I shifted to show I was serious, and he finally got the idea.

With the amount of pain I felt, standing wasn’t the smartest idea. But the gesture had a point. Erica may have beaten me down, but I could still stand. The whole thing didn’t have that “Here’s my middle finger” kind of feeling, but it was close enough.

With Nick’s help, I walked a few steps toward the house. Even though we were outside in the cold, I was drenched in sweat. Every step was another nail sealing my coffin. When I cried out, Nick stopped me.

“Just rest for a second.”

A half hour later, I’d made it to my porch. By then I was walking on my own.

Nick laughed. “Do you have a high tolerance for pain or a death wish?”

“Both.” I ran my hands through my hair. It was filthy from the ground—I tried not to care. The urge to cry suddenly came out of nowhere. Maybe it finally hit me that I wouldn’t be able to rejoin the pack. Maybe it was pain from the price I’d paid to put the pack before myself—for Thorn.

I cried quietly.

Nick didn’t speak, nor did he reach for me. He simply let me get it out, like a good friend.

When I composed myself and cleaned up my bloody leg in the house, I returned to him. “I want to feel happy right now.”

“Huh?” was all he said.

“We’re going to the store to do our post-Christmas sale exercise.”

“This isn’t exactly the right time.”

“Yes it is.” I had money, and my fingers were itching to spend it on useless post-Christmas crap. “I need to maintain mobility to keep my body healing.”

“That’s a lame excuse.”

“Just shut up and drive.”

The post-Christmas sale at the local shopping center looked like the North Pole had blown up and left the remains of Santa’s cheery innards scattered everywhere. Discount signs had been hung here and there, hoping to draw in shoppers to pick up decorations for next year.

I didn’t need the signs to make me feel less guilty tonight.

Nick had offered to get me one of those motorized chairs when we went in, but I’d ignored him and grabbed a cart.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked while I browsed the aisle.

“They have really nice fake Victorian lamps here. You might find one you really like.”

“Trying to tempt me won’t help. I have a lot more self-control than you do, apparently.” He watched me toss a Santa hat filled with candy into my cart. It was followed by Christmas coloring books. Sveta was
far
too young for them, but I’d kindly hold on to them for her for the next two to three years, like a good auntie.

Nick’s cell phone buzzed. “I’ll let you get off on shopping for a bit while I answer this. Once I get back, though, you’re done with your little binge.”

He stalked off and left me to my cart of goodies. I continued down the aisle, examining anything that caught my eye. When I reached for an ornament in a torn box, I paused. Where was the pleasure? That feeling of unadulterated excitement that I felt when I shopped for my treasures? I patted down my pockets as if the excitement were something I possessed in physical form. I picked up the box and waited for the bubbling feeling, but it didn’t come. The box was like others at home. The contents, a golden Rudolph ornament, promised something pretty to hang on a tree. But when I fingered the box’s smooth surface, I felt … 
nothing
.

“Are you gonna keep that, honey?”

I turned to see an old lady staring at the box in my hands. She wore a heavy brown overcoat that smothered her tiny frame. She smiled at me, wearing a shade of red lipstick on lips that were far too thin for it. A golden stocking cap completed her post-holiday ensemble.

“It’s seventy percent off,” she said. “That’s a good deal. Are you gonna keep it?”