Bride

Whoever did this will pay.

Slowly.

Painfully.

The next few hours are sheer, concentrated agony.

The mere act of breathing is an ordeal. My stomach hurts like it’s about to digest itself, bruised from the inside out by a thousand wild creatures who are having way too much fun carving their name in its lining with a rusty knife. There are several moments—and then a single one, long, protracted—when I’m sure, just sure, that this is the end. No living being can sustain this level of torment, and I’m going to die.

Which is just fine. Nothing can be worse than what I’m experiencing. I welcome the blissful release of nothingness and all that good shit, but just when I’m about to tip into the void, something pulls me back.

First there’s someone—okay, Lowe, yes, Lowe—giving orders. Barking orders. Growling orders. Or perhaps not Lowe, because I’ve never seen him any way but in control. He sounds desperate, which makes me want to crawl out of my corner of pain and reassure him that it’ll be okay—maybe not me, but everything else.

And yet, I’m unable to speak for eons. Many, many times I drift right up to the edge of consciousness, only to sink back into sweaty, suffocating darkness. And when I finally manage to drag my eyes open . . .

“There she is.”

Dr. Averill? I try to say, but my tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth.

I know him. The Collateral’s official physician. With diplomatic passage into Human territory, where he’d give me annual checkups to ensure that I remained healthy enough to . . . be killed if the alliance dissolved, I guess? His duties must have expanded, which is a shame, because he looks as ancient now as he did when I was ten. Except that there’s something weird about him. Is he experimenting with facial hair?

“Little Misery Lark. It’s been a while.”

“Not the mustache,” I slur, delirious, unable to keep my eyelids up.

He clucks his tongue. “If you have the energy to question my appearance, maybe you don’t need this painkiller,” he mutters in the Tongue, ornery as always. I would beg my apologies, claw that syringe out of his hands and into my body, but the needle is already pushing into my arm.

The burning quiets. There are voices, from inside the room or several miles away.

“—her organism deals with the poison. She’ll gradually slip into a healing trance. She’ll look very still, and you’ll be worried that she’s dead. But it’s simply the Vampyre way.”

“How long?” Lowe asks.

“Several hours. Days, maybe. Don’t look at me like that, young man.”

A few muttered curses. “What do I do?”

“There’s nothing to do. It’s her body’s job to combat the infection now.”

“But what do I do? For her?”

Dr. Averill sighs. “Make her comfortable. At some point after she wakes up, she’ll need to feed—more than usual, in quantity and in frequency. Make sure that you have blood at her disposal, the fresher the better.”

A long pause. I picture Lowe running a hand over his jaw. His worried gesture.

“And of course, there’s the matter of her father. I’ll have to inform Councilman Lark about what happened. He might see this as an act of aggression, even a war declaration against the Vampyres . . .”

Dr. Averill’s voice fades, and I fall back inside myself.

“. . . need to rest.”

“No.”

“Come on, Lowe. You need to sleep. I’ll watch over her while you—”

“No.”

“—take Ana away.”

“We cannot be sure that Ana was the real target,” Mick protests. “The intended victim could have been Misery.”

“But what if Ana was?” Juno points out. “We shouldn’t risk it.”

“Agreed,” Cal says. “Let’s move Ana to a safe place until we find out who did this.”

“We all know it was Emery.” Mick.

“I know no such thing, and I’m done assuming.” Lowe is icily, murderously angry. “My wife was on the brink of death until hours ago. I’m going to move Ana to a safe place. This is not up for discussion.”

“Where will you move her?” Mick asks.

“That’s for me to know.”

Cool lips press a soft kiss into my feverish palm.

“Misery, I . . .”

I come out of the healing trance all at once, like a salmon bursting from a stream.

I sit up in bed, clammy and breathless and utterly disoriented, and wait for the pain to make itself known. I expect it to follow its usual roads: start from my stomach, irradiate out to my limbs, rake through my nerves like an army of knives. When nothing happens, I look down at my body in bafflement, wondering where it’s gone. But there it is: colder than usual, perhaps; paler, definitely; intact, ultimately.

Healed? I pull back the covers to test that theory. The large white T-shirt I’m wearing doesn’t belong to me, but the pretty lace underwear is mine—courtesy of the wedding stylist. I haven’t worn it since the ceremony, and I refuse to wonder how it ended up on me. Instead I stand. Even though I’m wobblier than a newborn calf, my legs are functional. I push through the exhaustion and force myself to walk.

The clock on the wall says one thirty in the morning, and the house is dead silent, but I’m fairly sure that more than a few hours have passed since I first lost consciousness. Did I skip a day? I have no phone to check, so I do the pre-technology thing: head outside to ask someone.

Hopefully not the person who poisoned my peanut butter.

I open the door to a dimly lit hallway and almost stumble on the pile of clothes right outside—Ana giving her dolls another makeover, I bet. I hold on to the wall and weakly step around it, but the pile moves.

It uncurls. Then gets up. Then stretches, very much like a cat would. Then it opens its eyes, which happen to be a very beautiful, very pale, very familiar green.

Because it’s not a pile at all. It’s a wolf. Curled outside my room. Guarding my door.

A huge white wolf.

A fucking gigantic white wolf.

“Lowe?” My voice is unused and rusty. I may have been out more than just one day. “Is that you?”

The wolf blinks at me, still enjoying his stretch. I blink back, hopefully stumbling on the Morse code for pls pls pls don’t eat me.

“I don’t want to assume, but the eyes look like yours, and . . .”

He trots to me, and I scurry back in a blast of panic, plastering myself to the wall. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. He’s just so much larger than Cal, so much larger than I thought wolves could be. I squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting a high-def view of my duodenum getting ripped out of my abdominal cavity and then eaten.

And then something soft and damp pokes me in the hip. I crack one eyelid open, and there it is: a muzzle, pressing against my skin. Pushing gently, but firmly. Like he’s herding me. Back inside the room.

“You want me to . . . ?” He doesn’t reply, but he radiates satisfaction when I take a few steps back, and when I stop, he nudges me again, even more insistent. “Okay. I’m going.”

I march back where I came from. The wolf follows at my heels, and once we’re both in the room, angles his body and closes the door with more ease than anyone without opposable thumbs should display.

“Lowe?” I just want to be sure. The eyes seem proof enough, but . . . God, I’m exhausted. “It is you, right?”

He pads to me.

“You’re not Juno? Or Mick. Please, tell me you’re not Ken Doll.”

A soft, rumbly noise rises from the back of his throat.

“I guess I expected your fur would be dark. Because your hair is.” I let him prod me toward the bed. “Yes, I’m going back to sleep. I feel like total shit, but not the bed, please. The closet.”

He understands, because he closes his very impressive jaws around a pillow and carries it to the closet. And then does the same with a blanket, under my bemused stare.

“God, you’re just so fluffy. And . . . sorry, but you’re kinda cute. I know you could murder me in less time than it takes to stick a straw in a blood bag. But you’re soft. And your coat is not even sparkly pink. I don’t know what you were embarrassed about, you majestic fluffball—yes, fine, I’m going.”

He all but drags me to the closet, and doesn’t stop bossing me around until I’m lying down in my favorite spot. I wonder how he managed to find it. Might be a scent thing.

“FYI, your Alpha tendencies are even worse in this form.”

His tongue darts out and licks at my neck.

“Ew, gross,” I giggle. His teeth close around my arm. A joking, playful warning that could shatter my ulna. But won’t.

“Can I pet you?”

His head turns to butt under my hand. Yes, please.

“Well, then,” I half laugh, half yawn, scratching him behind the ears, luxuriating in the beautiful, comforting feeling of his coat. It’s not hard to ask, not when he’s in this form, a fierce hunter who loves a cuddle: “Do you want to stay? Sleep with me?”

Apparently, it’s not hard to say yes, either. Lowe doesn’t hesitate before curling right next to me.

And when I inhale deeply, the smell of his heartbeat is all it’s always been: familiar, spicy, rich.

I fall asleep twined with him, feeling safer than ever before.