Derek lay encaged in wire. An angry band of magenta swelling marked the flesh over his broken bones, where the abused muscle refused to heal. His right leg was shattered beneath the knee, the shin one continuous misshapen mess of purple ringed with bands of dark gray. Another purple stain marked his left thigh—the femur, the toughest bone in the body, broken right in the middle, snapped like a toothpick.
Two fractures scarred Derek’s right arm, above the elbow and at the wrist. Identical breaks marked his left arm. The inhuman precision of the mind that would conceive the need for breaking both arms in exactly the same places made me grind my teeth.
My heartbeat slowed. My head grew hot, my fingertips cold. Breath rolled around my lungs like a clump of ice. This wasn’t just a beating. This was an exhibition. A purposeful demonstration of cruelty and hate. They had mangled him, broken him so completely, as if they sought to obliterate what he was. It made me furious and I clenched my hands until my nails dug into my palms.
Deep purple streaked with gray stained Derek’s chest, outlining his rib cage and creeping up to his throat, where gray pooled at the base of the neck caught in a brace. An open gash sliced across his torso from his left side up onto his chest, to his right shoulder. The wound was black. Not gray, not bloody—black.
I looked at his face. He no longer had one. A mishmash of broken bones stared back at me, the flesh raw and seeded with gray, as if someone had attempted to sculpt a face out of ground beef and left it in the open air to rot.
Rage shook me.
All rational thought fled from my head. The room shrank, as though I’d gone blind, while inside me fury built and howled. I wanted to scream, to kick, to punch something, but my body refused to move. I felt helpless. It was a most terrible feeling.
Minutes stretched by, long and viscous like honey dripping from a spoon. Derek still lay there, dying quietly in the vat of green liquid. His chest rose ever so slightly, but aside from that small movement, he might as well have been dead already. If he were a normal human, he would’ve departed long before his beating had been finished. Sometimes greater regeneration just meant greater suffering.
Someone’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. I looked up. Doolittle’s kind face greeted me.
“Come on now,” he murmured and pulled me up. “Come on up. Let’s have some tea.”
CHAPTER 13
WE WERE IN A SMALL KITCHEN. DOOLITTLE TOOK a plastic ice tray from the freezer, twisted it with his dark hands, and sent the cubes clattering into a glass. He poured iced tea from a pitcher and set the glass in front of me.
“Tea will help,” he said.
I drank out of respect for him. It was shockingly sweet, more syrup than drink. Ice crunched between my teeth.
“Why isn’t he healing?” My voice came out flat, a one-note gathering of words with no inflection.
Doolittle sat opposite me. He had a genteel manner about him that instantly put one at ease. Usually I found myself relaxing slowly in his company. Merely being in the presence of the Pack’s physician proved soothing. Not today. I searched his eyes for reassurance of Derek’s survival, but they offered me no comfort: dark and mournful, they contained none of the humor I was accustomed to seeing. Today he just seemed tired, an old black man bent over his glass of iced tea.
“Lyc-V can do many miraculous things,” Doolittle said. “But it has its limits. The gray color on his body shows the places where the virus died in great numbers. There isn’t enough Lyc-V left in his tissues to heal him. What little remains is keeping him alive, but for how long nobody can say.” He looked into his cup. “They beat him very badly. The bones are shattered and crushed in so many places, I can’t remember them all. And when they were done breaking him, they poured molten silver onto his body. Into his chest.”
I clenched my hands.
“And on his face. And then they dumped him to die in the middle of the street from a moving cart, four blocks from our southern office.”
Doolittle reached behind him and handed me a cotton kitchen towel.
I took it and looked at him.
He gave me a small, kind smile. “It helps to wipe them off,” he said.
I touched my cheek and realized it was wet. I pressed the towel against my face.
“It’s good to cry. No shame in it.”
“Can he be helped?” My voice sounded normal. I just couldn’t stop crying. The pain kept leaking out of my eyes.
Doolittle shook his head.
My brain started slowly, like an old clock after years of disrepair. The Reapers had discovered Derek at the Red Roof Inn, beaten him, and dumped him by the Pack’s office. Jim’s crew found him and tracked the scent back to the location where the beating had taken place.
“He hasn’t turned,” I said.
Doolittle’s face voiced a silent question.
“There were no signs of a wolf at the scene. Pints of blood, too many for one person, so he had to have fought and injured them, but no fur. No claw scratches. He killed a vamp in a warrior form. He should’ve shifted forms the moment they jumped him, but he didn’t. How is that possible?”
“We don’t know,” Jim said.
He leaned against the doorframe like a bleak shadow knitted from anger. I hadn’t heard him approach.
“Regeneration and change of shape are irrevocably linked.” Doolittle drank his tea. “There are things that can be done to induce a change in one of us. We’ve tried them all, trying to break him from the coma. Something is blocking him.”
They were so calm about it. “Why aren’t you surprised?”
Doolittle sighed.
“He isn’t the first,” Jim said.
THE FIRST PICTURE SHOWED A CORPSE OF A MAN. His face was crushed, the skull indented with such tremendous force, his head resembled a shovel. His chest bone had been cut out of his body. His ribs jutted from the wet mush, the pale cage of bone slick with dark blood.
The black-and-white photograph looked absurdly out of place on a red-and-white-plaid tablecloth. Like a hole into some horrific gray world.
Jim drank a bit of his tea. “Doc, this stuff is pure honey.”
“A little sweet never hurt nobody.” Doolittle looked offended and poured more syrup into my glass.
Jim shook his head. “The Midnight Games. Sixteen years ago a championship fight went all to shit. A big dumb sonovabitch of a bear lost his way and went wild. Killed a crowd of civilians.”
I didn’t interrupt. He was talking and I didn’t want to do anything to make him stop.
“A lot of people should’ve stepped up to bring the bear down and didn’t. Curran took ownership of it and got it done. That’s what an alpha does. It was damn clear after that who was in charge.”
Jim leaned forward, his arms on the table. “An alpha’s first law must be solid. It shows what the alpha stands for. No matter what other shit happens, the alpha has got to uphold that law, because once he lets somebody question it, his whole rule comes into doubt. Curran’s first law is ‘Don’t touch the Games.’ ”
“It’s a good law,” Jim continued. “We don’t need to be messing around with a place that’s interested in making us dead in a pretty way. Even the People stay the hell away from it since it’s gone underground.”
He fell silent. Like Curran, Jim mostly hid his emotions, but his eyes betrayed him this time. Dark and troubled, they brimmed with anxiety. He was keeping it in check, but I could sense it. Jim was uneasy. Haunted.
“So what made you mess with the Games, Jim?” I prompted.
