Beneath the Skin (22 page)

Then I could buy him some new damn shoes.

Shopped out and dreading the idea of a cab, I tried to find a bus, but I had no idea what route I needed to take. In the end I found a cab that cruised by as I stood indecisively by the bus stop.

This driver at least kept both hands on the wheel, but the cab was old and squeaky, and even the hint of a bump sent me flying in the air. I vowed I would never take another cab in Houston again.

The lobby smelled like roses and floor polish when I walked in. The big-haired front desk clerk wore gray pants and a tailored white blouse, and she flashed me a white, toothy smile as I headed for the elevators. I could tell she wanted to ask me about Murphy--I suspected she had a crush on him--but luckily the elevator dinged and the door opened before she had the chance.

The
Do Not Disturb
sign still hung off the knob of the door to our suite. I checked my watch and shook my head, because it was after two in the afternoon. Lazy bastard.

But I cheered myself up with the thought that an afternoon “nap” didn’t sound half bad.

There were definite perks to being bonded, that was for sure.

I smelled it the moment I walked in. Sickness. Pain. A putrid scent of something gone very bad. The bag with Murphy’s Armani shirt slipped out of my fingers and onto the floor. I barely noticed.

“Murphy?” My voice shook and I almost couldn’t walk across the rug to the bedroom

door. It was still closed.

When I opened the door and switched on the lights, the smell was twenty times worse. I could smell blood now and sweat, and faintly pulsing underneath it all--fear.

“Murphy!”

He was curled in a fetal position on the bed, shivering, yet his hair was drenched with sweat and the sheets beneath him were soaked.

Adrenalin slammed into my body, rendering me paralyzed at first, but the paralysis broke and I flew to the bed.

“Liam, talk to me!” I reached out to touch him. He was on fire he was so hot.

“Constance?” His voice was so weak, yet it had the power to rob me of the ability to breathe. “I...I...don’t feel very well. C-c-can I have some water?” He slurred his words so I could barely understand him.

“Water,” I whispered, horrified. I didn’t want to leave him to find water, but I could see how dry his lips were. His eyes were dilated, even though the room was bright with the light of both bedside lamps. I got off the bed and couldn’t remember for a moment what he wanted or what I was supposed to be doing.

“Please.” He groaned, galvanizing me into action.

I ran to the mini refrigerator and got a cold bottle of water.

I had to hold the bottle to his lips, because he couldn’t even sit up let alone hold it. He was disoriented and strangely apathetic. I supported him with my free arm and he was so hot and sweaty I didn’t know how he could stand it.

I saw his eyes again and narrowed mine. My knowledge of herbs and home remedies

awoke a deep suspicion--one that absolutely terrified me.

“What did you take?” I demanded as water dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. I took the bottle away and he slumped against my arm, his eyes fluttering wildly. “Tell me what you took, Murphy. Some kind of narcotic, right? You took something. Your eyes are dilated, you’re slurring your words, come on, tell me, goddamnit!”

“N-nothing.” He tried to focus on me but he couldn’t quite do it. “J-j-just what the gran-grandmother gave...me.”

I went rigid.

“What did she give you? Where’s the bottle? Is there anything left?” I shook him and he groaned again. I felt like shit for doing it but I had to know.

“Duh-dresser.” He tried to point but couldn’t even lift his goddamn arm.

I knocked half the shit on the dresser onto the floor before I found a bottle of aspirin, and when I opened it and shook the pills out onto my trembling hand, there was a homemade capsule in among the manufactured ones. I recognized it as of the same kind we’d used in the herbal class at the Great Gathering.

I held my breath as I unscrewed the two halves and spilled the powder contained within into my palm. A tiny taste of it told me next to nothing. I scraped as much powder back into the capsule as I could and looked back at Murphy.

He lay very still and white on the bed and I didn’t see his chest moving.

“Oh my god,” I whimpered and I ran back to him.

He was still breathing. When I touched him, he grabbed my hand with both of his and opened his eyes.

“Stanzie,” he said, his eyes very wide, and in my head I saw Grey and Rudi die, and I thought I was watching him die too.

“Liam, no!” I burst into tears and he collapsed back against the pillows.

“Gran-grandmother made a mistake?” he asked and my mouth dropped open as it all

came clear to me. It was as if someone had given me a pair of glasses and the whole damn world had come sharply into focus. What was once blurry was now so clear.

“You’re not going to do this, Murphy, you hear me.” I tore my hand from his and threw myself on the floor to retrieve his cellphone--one of the things I’d knocked off the dresser.

I found Allerton’s contact information and hit
talk
.

I listened to it ring, hoping like hell this was his private line and that he answered it not some goddamned lackey.

Just when I thought it was going into voicemail, which would have been worse than a lackey, Allerton came on the line, and said, “Liam?”

“No, it’s me. It’s Constance.” I sobbed. “Oh, you’ve got to help us. You’ve got to help him. I think he’s dying, Councilor, and they’ll blame me, I know they will, or the tox screen will be inconclusive only I’ve got one, I’ve got one of the pills, but I touched it and it has my fingerprints and they’ll say it was me, because I know herbology, only this isn’t an herb. It’s some kind of narcotic. Maybe a pain killer, but it’s way, way too much. He’s overdosed and it’s on purpose, because they don’t want us investigating. They don’t want us to know the truth!”

“Constance!” Allerton’s voice was loud and commanding in my ear. “Stop talking now

and listen to me. Where are you?”

“At the Magnolia Hotel in Houston.” I choked. I looked back at Murphy on the bed and he wasn’t moving, but his eyes were open. I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed on the floor with the phone stuck to my ear.

“If someone is not at your door within ten minutes, you need to call nine-one-one. You need to call nine-one-one now if he’s not breathing. Is he breathing? Is he conscious?”

Somehow I moved. Murphy was breathing, but barely. I touched his face and he took my hand and this time I didn’t pull it away.

“If at any point he stops breathing, you call nine-one-one. Do you know CPR?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m going to hang up now, but I’m going to call back in one minute when I’ve arranged things. Do you understand? Call nine-one-one if he stops breathing.”

“I understand.”

The phone went dead.

Murphy squeezed my hand and his eyes went very wide and dark.

“Sorcha!” he whispered.

“Murphy, it’s me, Stanzie,” I whispered back, squeezing his hand. He jerked it away from me.

He cried out her name again, then something in Irish that I couldn’t understand. But I understood enough to know he thought he talked to her and it killed me.

“Liam, lie back.” I pushed his thrashing body into the pillows, and he was so weak he couldn’t fight me. He lay there panting and sweating, tangled in the sheets, and I tried to straighten them as he whispered her name again and again.

Hospital chairs sucked. Plastic and hopeless, they were incapable of offering comfort and instead increased suffering. It didn’t help they were usually puke-green or garish orange.

After the mad rush to the hospital in the back of an ambulance with a paramedic working like hell over Murphy’s inert and collapsed body, they stuck me in some damn waiting room with green and orange plastic chairs from hell, and a broken vending machine.

I lost track of time after two hours. I sat in a puke-green chair with my head in my hands and thought about the Armani shirt and how the stretcher with Murphy’s body strapped to it had rolled over it on the way out the door.

If Murphy died, maybe he could be buried in the shirt--if it weren’t ruined by the

stretcher’s wheels. Maybe they’d let me do that much.

The ghosts of Grey, Elena and now Rudi haunted me. I kept seeing them die on me.

Elena’s broken neck and vacant stare from the backseat of the Mustang. Grey trying so hard to tell me it was okay, blood running out of his mouth as he stared into my eyes and died. Rudi, clutching at my hand, slumped against the expensive gold-flecked wallpaper in the ballroom of a French chateau, saying my name before dying. And now Murphy, pushing my hands away and calling out for his dead bond mate.

I’d been shopping and he’d been dying. He’d tried to show me how to be a proper wolf and I’d bitten him, and because of that, he was dying.

These people, these beautiful, vibrant, wonderful people, gone. I’d have to pick up the broken pieces of myself and try to put them back together again. Only each time it happened, more pieces went missing, and I’d never be whole.

Although I knew I wasn’t responsible for any of these deaths, they still weighed heavily on my conscience simply because I’d been there. It was the grandmothers and grandfathers--they were the ones responsible for all the deaths. It hadn’t been an accident that the pill Murphy had swallowed had contained some sort of deadly narcotic. It had been placed there on purpose to kill him. Just as everyone else had been killed on purpose. But still I felt guilty--as if I were stained to the soul with some unspeakable evil and I would never come clean.

I was crying when I felt someone’s strong arm go around my shoulders.

I lifted my face to see Councilor Jason Allerton through a haze of tears.

“Do you have it?” His voice was gentle.

I reached into my purse, which I had braced between my feet and withdrew the aspirin bottle. It contained only the homemade capsule.

“Don’t let a grandmother run the tests,” I whispered.

“I won’t,” he promised.

“The grandmothers and grandfathers, they don’t like the modern Pack, where we’re

headed. Everyone who died had a good job in the mainstream. Jobs that needed networks of Others, that brought attention. Elena developed new computer games. One was about

werewolves. They were just games. Grandfather Tobias looked over my car that day. He was a mechanic. He did something. To kill Elena, and he didn’t care if Grey and I were killed too. A grandfather worked in Sorcha’s lab, didn’t he? Or a grandmother.”

“A grandfather. He was a janitor. He found Sorcha’s body,” Allerton confirmed. He kept his arm around my shoulders and I was grateful for the contact.

“Rudi gave a lecture on something I couldn’t even understand. But he was going to make his pack rich. And that little girl’s father, the one who drowned in the hot tub. He didn’t want to tell his daughter what she was until she was sixteen. So she could go to school with Others and build a network and be mainstream when she grew up. They don’t want us to change. They say we’re soft and losing our connection with the wolf inside. They say we use that side of ourselves as a hobby, a game, an escape. And maybe they’re right, but killing us off, would we really go back to the old ways?”

“You’d be surprised what people do when they’re scared enough. There’s been a huge

cultural shift in the last hundred and fifty years, Constance. Modern things, modern times. And they’re old enough, most of them, to remember something different where most of us now are not.”

“They lied about the tox screens and the autopsies. They must have put something in the water, in Rudi’s water, and then lied or substituted the results.”

“I watched his autopsy performed. But you’re right. They could have tampered with the tox screen results. The water bottles were misplaced. No way to test now. But yes, Constance.

You’ve proved what I’ve been afraid to face or suspect.”

“They’ll say I tampered with his medicine,” I warned. “But I didn’t.”

“I believe you and I will protect you, Constance. My word as a Councilor.” He gave my shoulders a squeeze and I took a deep breath.

“He’s dead, isn’t he? Nobody’s come to talk to me, or tell me anything and it’s been hours. He’s dead and you made them wait so you could tell me, didn’t you?” My fingers went to my pendant and found the smooth perfection of the pearl Murphy had chosen for me. “Can I see him? It won’t be real for me until I see him.”

Arm around my shoulders, Allerton walked me down a long hallway, past a nurse’s

station and two orderlies lounging by a staff room door. I smelled lilies and medicine and sickness.

I waited to smell death, the black, strangling stench of death, Murphy’s death, and the last little bit of my wolf faded out of existence. I didn’t think I’d ever bring her back again.

Allerton opened the door to the room and I braced myself. I didn’t smell death, which confused me until I walked through the doorway and saw Murphy.

Allerton’s arm slipped away from my shoulders and he gave me a little shove toward the bed where Murphy sat up, pale but very much alive.

“I close my eyes for five minutes and you go and figure everything out and don’t even clue me in. That’s damned selfish, Constance, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t even begin to describe how I felt. It was a rush of emotions, but joy was predominant.

“You’re the selfish one, Liam Murphy.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry so I did a little bit of both. “Making me think you were dying. I ought to kill you for scaring me, you know that?”

“I keep telling these fools it’s jet lag, but they tell me it was a huge overdose of oxycodone. Doctors think they know every damn thing.”

A white-coated doctor with a nice smile and a very shiny stethoscope shook his head. He stood by Murphy’s bed but I hadn’t even noticed him.

I knew by his smell he was Pack.

“Severest case of jet lag I’ve ever treated.” He held out his hand for me to shake. “I’m--”