Caged (24 page)

I locked my mouth back around Lanky’s neck to rip him off. That’s when I heard the shot. By heard I mean my eardrums virtually exploded from the volume and vibration of it. It rang through the foyer for an eternity, making the nightmare that was unfolding in front of me seem never ending.

It was the only sound.

Both men lay still. Nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody breathed. Not even me.

And the blood was everywhere.

31

I stood frozen, staring at the pile of bodies. In that moment I was convinced that not seeing Cooper dead would make him less so. He died trying to get me out, someone he didn’t even know.

The color was returning to my vision, and I looked away. Not seeing the red of blood somehow made it less real, however, the ever-increasing mass of liquid surrounding them could only be denied for so long. I looked down to see my naked body, human and fully intact. I had shifted back without passing out, and again, without any pain. I wondered if being RB made many things different for me.

Though I wanted to contemplate the wonders of my Change, my attention quickly returned to the issue at hand. I looked down at the two men lying motionless, both coated in blood. The thought of Cooper lying dead under that animal sickened me into action. I prowled over to him and pulled the guard off of Cooper and onto his back. He looked up into the ceiling, his face contorted with pain and fear. I couldn’t bear the sight of him and turned to see Cooper, lying still, with eyes closed, curled on his right side into a semi-fetal position. My stomach jumped into my throat. Just below his sternum was a circular, thick, black smudge with a stream flowing down his trunk to the floor.

Instinctively I reached for him, slipping in the blood, landing sprawled out on top of him. Finding my voice, I hysterically called his name while trying violently to shake the life back into him.

“COOPER! Don’t you fucking die on me,” I screamed over and over again until my throat burned of rawness and my eyes stung with tears flowing so uncontrollably they streamed off of my chin, pooling on his face. I carried this on until my voice threatened to give out. Tiring from my efforts and emotionally exhausted, I fell back onto his chest and laid my head gently on his shoulder.

“Please…Cooper. Please don’t leave me,” I whispered to no one but myself. I closed my eyes and gave into my emotions further, allowing myself this one and only good cry.

After a few minutes my shaking lessened, though it was still intense enough to almost miss the fraction of movement under my chest that was out of sync of my own breathing. I stopped immediately. Again, a faint rise and fall occurred below me. I pressed into a plank position above him to take my weight off and see his face. His eyelids fluttered rapidly, and slowly, his respiration increased in speed. I could actually hear the rushing of air in and out of his nose.

“Cooper? Can you hear me?” I asked softly, afraid to disturb his recovery. I looked down at his chest to see where to apply pressure and stop the bleeding, now that he was alive, only to find a perfect torso with not so much as a scar or scratch on it, only a lot of blood.
Not possible…so not possible.

I stared open-mouthed in utter disbelief. The wound I thought I had seen earlier was gone. No bleeding. No gaping hole. No nothing.

I slowly scanned his body for an injury I’d missed earlier in my distress. Still nothing. I thought I was going crazy, that this was the result of little food, lots of stress and entirely too much trauma. I squeezed my eyes shut, counted to ten, and snapped them open to Cooper’s face, staring up at mine.

My rational mind was not able to easily accept what I was seeing. Dead people didn’t breathe. Dead people didn’t blink. Dead people didn’t smile at you like nothing in the world was wrong.

Screw my rational mind.

I dropped myself back down on to him and threw my arms violently around his neck. I hugged him so hard that he was in jeopardy of losing his new-found ability to breathe. He coughed a bit in my ear, and then I felt his arms slowly slide around the small of my back, then he hugged me back.

“Any chance of you letting me up? This floor isn’t exactly downy soft on my back, you know?” he said with a smile in his voice. “How long was I out for?”

“Out for? Cooper, you were
dead
!” True to form, he found me amusing when I
so
wasn’t trying to be.

“I wasn’t dead, crazy girl. I was healing. Gunshot wounds aren’t exactly a walk in the park you know. Thank God it wasn’t silver or we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all right now,” he said soberly. “Glad to see that the Alpha hasn’t taken things to that level yet.”

So many questions ran through my mind that it was like an Amtrak on a runaway course.
How is this possible? Why can’t I do that? Is he completely back to normal? Why couldn’t he hear me? Can silver really kill you? Can it kill me too? What do you mean the Alpha hasn’t taken it to that level? Is this guy completely…

“Earth to Ruby…,” he said, waving a hand in my face and smiling. His smile faded a bit, unearthing a much more serious expression. “I’m fine, I promise. I’ll explain it later and answer the questions I can see running through your mind, but we have to go now. This is getting more complicated by the moment.”

“About ten minutes maybe…I’m not sure exactly. It all happened so fast,” I replied.

“What? Oh! Ten minutes? Are you sure?” he asked, seriously. “That can’t be right.”

“Listen, I didn’t bust out a stopwatch and time your death for you. That’s my best guess, ten minutes.”

He looked at me disbelievingly for a minute, then appeared to blow it off entirely like it was never of consequence.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s time to go.”

Captain Serious was back again. I wanted to know what he was hiding from me so badly that I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I was so frustrated by my lack of info, as well as those who insisted upon withholding said useful information from me. My inner five-year-old wanted to fight fire with fire. The unfortunate part was that I didn’t have any information of my own to withhold. I felt like I was always showing up to a gunfight without any ammo. It was beginning to be the story of my life.

We cleaned up as much blood as we could off of ourselves, using the other dead guard’s shirts and socks. Cooper took the man’s pants, trading them for his blood-soaked ones and I was left with the same tattered shreds of a shirt that I had before. We looked disastrous but I didn’t think a shower was factored into our escape plan. I hoped for a stream or something to dunk myself in if we ever made it to the woods.

I begrudgingly followed him through the formerly guarded door. As soon as we stepped through we nearly tripped on the stairway that went straight up for God only knew how long. Funny how I didn’t remember any mention of an Alpine climb on our trip. He was a good twelve steps ahead of me when I let go of a huge, melodramatic sigh and started to make my way up the stairway-not-to-heaven.

“Your huffing and puffing won’t make this go any more smoothly, dear,” he said.

“No, I don’t suppose it will, but it gives me such satisfaction, especially if it’s annoying you,” I retorted. If he wanted to be an information-hoarding pain in my ass, I’d do everything I could to return the favor. Bitterness and grudge-holding were two of my finer qualities.

“So tell me something, Ruby. Why were you so upset by my death?” He was totally baiting me with that question and I knew it, but embarrassment and anger got the better of me and I walked right into his little interrogation. By the tone of his voice he was already enjoying it.

“I wasn’t upset that you died, you arrogant ass. I was freaking out because my ticket out of here checked out, leaving me totally bent over, so to speak,” I responded as calmly as I was capable of, which sadly wasn’t nearly as impressive as I’d have like it to be. He laughed. I was really starting to hate that response to my bullshit.

“Ruby, honey, you can go sell that shit somewhere else because I’m not buying it. What was the
real
reason you were so upset?”

I was getting horribly embarrassed at that point. At an early age I learned that excessive emotions were totally inappropriate, and that crying was simply unproductive and a complete waste of time. The fact that I had allowed myself the indulgence of a breakdown was gnawing at my pride, but to have someone witness it was far more unforgivable.

My parents never liked me having Nibbles in the first place, but it was one of the few concessions they made in my life. Just before my eighth birthday I begged, pleaded, threatened and blackmailed my parents into buying me an albino rabbit. My parents thought it was a hideous rodent, but I loved her dearly. She was my best friend. She was so soft, and loved to be cuddled; I slept with her in my bed every night unbeknownst to my parents. She’d sit in my lap while I did my schoolwork. I always felt like she knew I was different, that I needed more attention. We were completely inseparable, much to my parents chagrin.

Three years later, I woke up one morning to find that Nibbles was not in bed with me. I searched the house on hands and knees, frantically patting everything in my path to find her. When I started hysterically calling for her, my father came to me from the living room. He informed me that they had given her away because my mother was developing an allergy to her. I sat where I was and started to cry so hard I was certain I’d pass out from lack of oxygen. My father yelled at me, trying to get me to stop, but it was impossible. My mother stepped in by giving me a firm, open-handed smack to the face. When she seemed satisfied that she had my hysterics under control she proceeded to tell me that crying over anything, especially a pet, was stupid and embarrassing. My father chimed in to inform me that he was disappointed in my weakness and never wanted to see it again, that the Dee’s were not emotionally unstable pansies and I needed to learn to deal with the harshness of life and move on.

From that day forward I never really cried. Occasionally I teared up, maybe even shed a few, but never really cried.

Not even when I buried my parents.

“Why do you even care?” I screamed. I knew my anger was inappropriately directed, but that knowledge did nothing to cage the rage inside of me. “You think I care about you? Let me explain something to you so you understand clearly. I’ve cared about two people in my life and they’re dead. What makes you think you’re so fucking special?”

I’d said it just to hurt him and I knew it. It wasn’t even true - close, but not really. I’d cared for four people in my life to be exact: two were dead, one betrayed me and one was going to have to kill me. Relationships 4, Ruby 0.

Cooper stopped and turned to look at me with genuinely wounded eyes. He pushed me too far without knowing it, and I lashed back so painfully that he felt the full brunt of it. I was instantly ashamed of myself for being so ruthless, but was too prideful to apologize. I stared back defiantly, remorselessly. He finally dropped his head and turned, picking up his pace. I figured he couldn’t wait to get away from me.

I couldn’t wait to get away from me either.

32

As we neared what appeared to be the end of the unending staircase, I saw another ominous door. I was getting really tired of finding out the hard way what was behind door number two. Cooper stopped before opening it and bent over slowly to whisper in my ear.

“This is the main house. This is where the poo could really start to hit the fan.”

Against every shred of will in my body, a smile squeezed out onto my face.
The poo? Who says poo?
He mirrored my response with a grin that even the most devilish of children would have been envious of. I took this to mean that things were cautiously comfortable between us for the time being, making up for the ten minutes of unaltered silence we just shared. With our uneasy bond renewed, I felt much more ready to face what lay behind the massive oak barrier. He explained briefly the immediate layout of where we’d enter into. Absorbing great verbal detail had never been my forte, and doing so under duress rendered me basically useless. I nodded when appropriate, and crossed my fingers for luck. The main thing I’d gotten from his instruction was which way not to run in case of emergency. That one stuck out soundly and I was determined not to screw that up if need be.

The plan was to get inside undetected, sneak through the major common areas undetected, and then out the main back door undetected. It was a lot of
undetecteds
for my liking. It was like standing on a brightly lit stage in the middle of Times Square hoping to go unnoticed - not promising by any means. We had no disguise for me so anyone who saw me would know who I was in a flash and would alarm the entire pack, which at Cooper’s best guess tallied at five hundred or more. I was never a gambler, but I knew shitty odds when I saw them.

Without time to ponder our imminent demise further, he opened the door and peeked around the corner.

“Ah…feeding time. Good thing for us the kitchen isn’t on the tour,” he said soberly.
Feeding time. What in the hell is that?

“So…it’s lunch time?” I asked, trying to get a feel for what time of day it was.