A black cat drops out of the branches and knocks Ethan to the ground. His unsheathed claws slash Ethan’s throat. Ethan reaches for me. He dies with my name on his lips….
Cat form again, and that time I couldn’t stand. I fell onto my stomach, panting, and the room refused to come into focus. The pain echoed inside me, filling the emptiness, sucking at the cold with blazing agony. My stomach was eating me alive, demanding fuel, but I wanted only the blaze. The fire.
Colin Dean aims his gun, and the flash is blinding in the dark. My father falls. Blood blooms on his shirt like a midnight rose. And then he is gone, and I’m being sucked into darkness the size of a pinprick, and the pain is…
The Shifts began to run together. Memories of loss and triumph—because Shifting was my glory; it enabled justice and was my sword and my shield—fueled them long after my energy waned, long after the buzz of power faded. The pain was all a blur—past and present, physical, and psychological. And for the past two cycles, I couldn’t even stand. Could only force my body through its paces one final time, wondering if that would be enough.
When it was over, I couldn’t sit up. I lay on the floor panting, huffing, sweating, boiling with agony. My ribs had healed. My knee had healed. My cheek looked normal at the bottom of my vision. And still there was pain. Deep, deep pain, in places I couldn’t reach.
My weight on the floor bruised my hip. My neck creaked when I lifted my head. I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. How many times? It was too much. Too fast.
Tears poured down my face, silent, because I didn’t have the energy to sob. The buzz of power had abandoned me, and part of me had gone with it. I didn’t deserve the power. Not yet. But I deserved the pain.
“Faythe?” The door creaked open, and I smelled Marc. “Faythe!” He was at my side in an instant, lifting me, and even his gentle touch bruised. A second later, Jace was there, too. “Get her some water,” Marc whispered. “And something to eat. But don’t say anything.”
“What happened?” Jace took his cue to whisper from Marc.“I think she Shifted. Look at her face.”
“But…one Shift can’t heal like that. Hell, four Shifts can’t heal like that.”
“I know. Get the water. And close the door behind you.”
Marc laid me on the bed, and I blinked up at him, but his face wouldn’t come into focus. My eyes were so dry it hurt to blink.
“What the hell are you doing? Trying to kill yourself?” His voice was thick with emotion, and his eyes were damp. “You’re stronger than that. Suicide is the coward’s way out. People are depending on you!”
“Don’t want to die,” I whispered. “I needed the pain.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” His eyes narrowed, like he wanted to understand, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t in him. Everything was black and white for Marc. Right and wrong. Good and bad. He understood the spectrum of pain—he’d certainly been through enough of it—but not what it meant to me. He didn’t understand how making myself suffer and relive so many bad memories could possibly lead to catharsis, a psychological release of emotional poison. “You weren’t in enough pain already?”
“It clears my head. I needed more.”
The door creaked open, and Jace came in with a sweating bottle of chilled water and a box of protein bars. He cracked open the bottle and handed it to me.
It took all of my concentration to manage the bottle, to keep from dribbling water all over myself, but I drained half of it before coming up for a breath.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Marc took the bottle when I lowered it, while Jace ripped open the snack box. “Even under the best of circumstances, you should eat between Shifts, and this is hardly the best of circumstances. How many times did you Shift?”
“I don’t know. Lost count.”
“In half an hour?” Marc cursed in Spanish, and I flinched. “What are you, brain-dead?”
“I’m sorry.” I swallowed thickly and took the protein bar Jace handed me. “I didn’t mean to go so far. I just…I needed to heal, and I needed it to hurt. That’s the only way I could make sense out of any of this.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” Marc demanded, forgetting to whisper that time.
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t make him understand what I could hardly understand myself.
Jace sighed. “She was punishing herself.”
“No, I…” I shook my head. That wasn’t it. That sounded crazy. Yet he was right, though I would never have put it in those words. “It just… It seemed like a failure on so massive a scale should involve more pain. Like I shouldn’t have been able to just walk away from a loss that cost everything for so many people. Like if I wasn’t hurting, I wasn’t paying for what I cost us.”
“You didn’t walk away from it,” Marc pointed out, ever helpful with the literal interpretation. “Jace carried you. And damn, Faythe, Dean nearly killed you. How is that not enough pain?”
“It just…wasn’t.”
“You’re not making any sense. You did the best you could, and what happened wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes, it was.” I bit into the snack bar and avoided his eyes. “My best wasn’t good enough, and that’s not an option for an Alpha.”
Marc stared at me for nearly a minute, and I could almost hear the gears whirring in his head. Grinding. But he didn’t really get it, and he hated that. Finally he stood and stomped toward the door. “Make sure she eats the whole box,” he growled. Then the door closed behind him, and I was alone with Jace.
I should have called out to Marc. I should have called him back and figured out a way to explain myself to him. But I was too tired to think, and beyond frustrated.
“He doesn’t get it,” I whispered, wadding the first empty wrapper into a cellophane ball. “Why can’t he get it?”
Jace laid back on the bed next to me, one arm propping up the pillow beneath his head. “Because he’s never failed to measure up. Failure has never ripped a hole in his gut so deep and wide that physical pain is a mercy and a punishment all at the same time.”
“But you have?”
Jace sat up and met my eyes with a gaze so intense my next breath caught in my throat and refused to budge. “I left Ethan in the woods, and he died. We were partners, and I left him, Faythe.” He glanced down at his hands, and I started to argue. He’d only left because Ethan told him to get Kaci to safety. He hadn’t abandoned his partner. But before I could put my argument into words, he looked up again, and something deep in my stomach clenched. “And every time Cal hurts you, and I can’t kill him, I feel the same way. Like I’m not worth the air I breathe if I can’t protect you.”
Twenty-seven
“Wow. It feels insane to be coming back here so soon.” I pulled my duffel higher on my shoulders and glanced around the Roswell airport and the small crowd of morning commuters.
Marc veered toward a row of waiting-room chairs within sight of the car rental place, where Jace was at the front of a short line. Marc sank into the first chair, dropping his bag at his feet. “Considering what happened last time, and everything that’s happened since then, I’d say ‘insane’ is putting it mildly.”
I collapsed onto the seat beside him and stared at my bag in my lap. I had no idea what to say. Things had gotten quiet between us since he’d walked out after my frenetic Shifting extravaganza, and every time I looked at him, it felt like someone was sinking claws through my chest. It felt even worse when he looked at me, and yet worse still when he didn’t.
But I was thankful for my mostly healed body, even after what it had cost me, physically—I’d been practically comatose for nearly another twelve hours after I’d fallen asleep.
“You okay?” he asked, and in my peripheral vision, I could see him watching me.
“Are you?” I wanted to take his hand. I stared at it, lying all alone on the chair arm between us. But I was afraid that would make me look needy. Weak.
“Right now? Yeah.” He twisted in his chair to look at me with unbearable, heartbreaking longing in his eyes. “Because it’s just the two of us.” He glanced around at the harried morning commuters and shrugged. “Relatively speaking. But in a few minutes, it’ll be me, you, and him…” He nodded to the rental counter, where Jace was now talking to a clerk with really poofy hair. “And there’s only so much of that I can take.”“Marc…”
“Just let me finish,” he said, and I nodded. I didn’t know how to complete my aborted thought, anyway, and I welcomed words from him, when he spoke so often with his fists lately. “I can see how connected you are to each other, and I know that it’s not just physical, which means it’s not just going to blow over. But sharing you with him is like being asked to cut out my own heart and hand half of it over to someone else. It fucking hurts, Faythe. Like I’m dying.”
“So…I’m killing you.” It wasn’t a question; I already recognized it as the truth. Marc wasn’t himself because he couldn’t have all of me, and that was killing both of us.