Chain Me Up

“What,” Caelum gritted out, “have I said about the hospital?” 

Ronan didn’t answer right away. His list of possible responses was pretty limited, but that made choosing right even more crucial. Sarcasm was right out: only the bittens got away with that, and only when Caelum was in a far better mood than he currently was. He could try going straight for the ‘apologize and grovel’ portion of the event, but that was barely safer than mouthing off: an apology offered too quickly and easily could read as insincere, and in his inexperience, Caelum believed sincerity was something that you could physically beat into a person. Finally, he said, as contritely as possible, “to not go there unless I had a very good reason.” Before he could stop himself, he added, “which I did! I had a very, very good reason.” 

Caelum grimaced. Drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, each strike making Ronan cringe just a little. They were in Caelum’s office, on opposite sides of the massive slab of white oak he called a desk. Blinding 3pm sunlight glared in through the window, the shaft falling directly across Ronan’s chair, which both smaller and more rickety than the one Caelum was looming in. “Legitimate, Ro. I said only go there if you have a legitimate reason, which you should have known meant only go there if I tell you to!” When Ronan said nothing, he huffed, eyes hard and bright with unspoken reprimands. “What was this very good reason? I’m absolutely dying to know what was important enough to disobey me over–”

Ronan sucked his teeth and scratched restlessly at the knee of his pants. “I did not,” he said, voice heavy with objection. “Not on purpose, Alpha, I didn’t know I was breaking a rule! I didn’t know legitimate meant that! How was I supposed to?” He resisted the urge to sulk. Not yet, at least. Save it for something really worth pitching a fit over. Kase was free to sulk over things as minor as the weather or a bad dream he had, and Asher existed in a state of permanent semi-sulk, but the rest of them had to be choosier about their forays into brattiness. So he kept his tone appeasing and innocent, tried to make his eyes look like windows into an empty house: no thoughts in here, boss, just a bunch of dead moths and dusty closets. Why attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity? 

Caelum shook his head, expression somewhere between sour and stormy. “Did I ask you to defend your actions, or did I ask you to explain your motives? My head is throbbing too much for me to recall!” 

Once again, his options for possible responses were limited. Obviously, Caelum wanted the truth. But the truth wouldn’t exactly make him happy. Nor would he understand it. After all, Ronan had never met Sam before he died. Had never gotten far enough along in his ritual to make contact, let alone feel his body or touch his soul. Three weeks into following Sam to and from work, an accidental exposure to cashews had killed him in the middle of a parking garage. The one afternoon Ronan hadn’t been tailing him, and now he was gone, as was any potential future they might have had together. 

Ronan had just wanted to see his body. Read his autopsy report. Maybe steal him, if he seemed like he could be eaten. That, at least, would have given him some comfort, maybe even soothed the sharp new ache in his heart. 

But he’d been caught, which was rare for him. Exceptionally rare. Forced to flee before the human police arrived, he’d taken a goblin path out of the basement. Shaken by the near-miss with the pathologist and the security guard, Ronan had been running through the half-real, twilit pathways far more blindly than usual, and found himself dumped out three counties away. Unable to find another path, he’d been forced to hike back, and had come home in the wee hours of the morning to find Jasper pacing in the front hall and Pike throwing a tantrum in the basement. That later issue was thankfully unrelated to Ronan’s night, but it hadn’t really helped Jasper’s mood, or Caelum’s. 

“Well?” Caelum ground out, and Ronan fought the urge to shrug. Like his mother before him, Caelum Harrowick despised shrugging in the place of an answer, and might lose his temper and simply give Ronan the back of his hand. Last time Caelum had slapped him, the blow had been hard enough to earn a heavy gush of blood from his nose; in the present, it was hard not to glance at the faint stain it had left from dripping onto the olive-green carpet. “Were you following someone?” Caelum asked, in a tone that encouraged the answer to be No, absolutely not, why would I be doing that, Alpha? 

Now might be the time to skip to the “apologize and grovel” part. “It won’t happen again,” he said, mostly truthfully. Up until Sam’s death, he’d been avoiding the squat, yellowish-gray box altogether. This had been his first time venturing into the morgue, and could easily be his last. Other than as food, corpses didn’t hold much interest for him, and that only really included ones the pack had hunted. Hadn’t ever prowled the halls to terrorize patients, either. He wasn’t some stinking vampire, hunting weak prey out of laziness or for the perverse pleasure of feeding on the nearly-dead. His previous field trips there had been for other reasons: tailing Dr. Tinubu, for example, but that was only a few times before Ronan had been forced to end that particular romance. Yes, something similar had happened with that ambulance driver, but that was exactly once. Ronan had lost interest, which was also rare thing for him: but Pike had just gotten there, and he’d somehow needed even more attention than Kase had. Asher had already had to stop him from running away twice–

Caelum snapped his fingers, and Ronan blinked himself back to the conversation. “Who was it this time?” He demanded, and Ronan fidgeted with his own thumbs, weighing his answers just as carefully as before. Someone I saw in a dream would not go over well. I thought this one was different wouldn’t either: Caelum would probably shout at him, and spend a long time reminding him that he always thought this one was different. 

The truth of those statements wouldn’t make it any nicer to hear, so he choose to shift focus to Caelum’s actual concerns. “He’s already dead, but not because of me,” he said, and Caelum growled through his teeth, a wordless but perfectly clear warning. “No, no, really, I didn’t DO anything! He was killed by a nut allergy. That’s why I didn’t HAVE his body, that’s why I had to go visit him!” By the time Ronan had gotten to him, Sam had no longer been fit to eat, and seeing him like that, rigid and waxy and oddly sterile, empty of whatever used to fill him up, had brought Ronan no comfort. 

Despite this perfectly good explanation, Caelum remained pissed. “Stay away from the hospital!” He ordered in his loudest, sharpest bark, and planted both of his round, pillowy hands on the glossy surface of his desk. One pale eyebrow was twitching, as was a prominent vein in his left temple, and Ronan tried to look extra sorry as he nodded. 

“I will only go to the hospital if I have a legitimate reason!” He agreed, and Caelum heaved a sigh. 

“This cannot keep happening,” he said, as though Ronan had any real control over how fate unfolded day-to-day. “That pathologist saw you standing over an open drawer, caressing a corpse! She also knows there’s no earthly explanation for you vanishing from a room you were cornered in–when she was talking to the police, she called you a demon!” 

“I already said I’d–” 

“Ronan. It is not just the hospital. I think we’re past that, frankly.” 

Unease rippled at the back of his mind. “What? What do you mean past that?”  

Shaking his head, Caelum leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over the curve of stomach, too-green eyes skeptical and unsympathetic. Guts going cold, Ronan moved his hands to the arms of his chair and gripped them hard enough to make the old wood creak. “Every time, Ro,” Caelum said, voice as stern as his face, and Ronan felt his own eyes trying to roll over into hard, black mirrors, felt his own fingertips trying to sprout claws. “Every single time you, as you put it, follow that exceptionally slutty heart of yours, we end up with a corpse–” 

If he got angry, he’d start hissing and whining like a cub, which wouldn’t help him at all. Shutting up and letting Caelum lecture him as much as he liked was the only good option in front of him. But swallowing down the urge to pitch a fit was harder than he’d expected it to be, and he couldn’t fully stop himself from talking back. “A corpse that we almost always EAT,” he said, voice barely above a defiant mumble. Caelum growled, eyes brightening like they’d had their dying bulbs replaced, but Ronan refused to be cowed the warning. Sitting up straighter, he raised his voice enough to be heard clearly but not nearly high enough to be called shouting. “It’s not that big of a deal! WE’re right by a big city, a big city with crime, a lot of crime! Alpha, nobody is going to notice what I’m doing, so who cares about a few more dead humans?” Caelum still wouldn’t budge, and kept staring at him like he’d just suggested they painted WE’RE WEREWOLVES, PLEASE KILL US WITH SILVER on the side of their mailbox. “Aren’t we predators?” Ronan half-asked, half-pleaded. “I’m not doing anything wrong, Alpha, I’m just hunting!” 

“Do not play that card with me,” Caelum snapped, and for a half second he sounded raw and upset in a completely different way; across from him, Ronan felt his own mouth twisting up with something that was too moldy and brittle to be grief. Taking a second to collect himself, Caelum cleared his throat and then pressed his fingertips to the throbbing vein in his temple. “I am the last person you ever need to lecture about our nature and our position in the food chain!” 

And don’t change the damn subject either, Ro. It is more than a few, and you know that!” He said it like few was a fixed, objective number that Ronan had long since surpassed, and a vague measurement that was mostly up to personal interpretation. The Harrowick family crested flashed on Caelum’s heavy signet ring as he rapped one finger on the desk’s surface, nail clicking harshly off the varnished wood. “There are investigations being launched. Not exclusively local ones, either.” Eyebrows quirking, Ronan tried to ask what he meant, but Caelum talked past him. “Sasha warned me! The police think they have a…I think she said they call it a “serial”? As in, serial killer, as in, they are speaking to other nearby departments to compare notes!” 

Layers of implications were lying beneath Caelum’s concerns. Implications that were threatening to piss him off even more, but he couldn’t lose his temper, didn’t have that luxury just then. Still, he leaned on it to help even out the odd, mind-clouding sorrow of decades-old loss and grief. “Boss,” he said, voice full of brightly colored, tangy sauces to mask the metallic tang of hidden razorblades, “I promise, you really don’t have to worry. I’m not being sloppy!” Not that he should even have had to say that. Never, not once in his whole life had he ever been sloppy, and it hurt more than a little to find out that Caelum doubted this. “You know how much practice I’ve had at this. You know how seriously I take our safety. I’m covering every single track and hiding every trace–” 

“Not. Possible.” Caelum said, because passing up a chance to twist the knife might physically kill him. “No one in this reality or any other can cover themselves that well, not once the FBI gets involved.” 

Good thing I’m not No One sat expectantly behind his gritted teeth, waiting to be spat into the air between them. Kase would have said it. Asher, too: more sardonically, delivered in a deadpan instead of a snarl, and Avery would have flat-out sneered it. But he wasn’t them. He was Ronan, so, he couldn’t answer like them and expect the same result. “...FBI, huh?” Cool. At least they thought he warranted calling in federal resources, like he was a terrorist or a natural disaster or something. Better to focus on that than his alpha’s unfair criticism or the jumpy, edgy energy that was now crawling around under his skin like an army of pissy, defensive worms.   

When said alpha once again snapped his fingers to pull him back to the real world, he only briefly thought about biting Caelum’s hand hard enough to hit bone. “Yes, the FBI! They’re not directly involved yet, but it’s possible that will change in the next few weeks. Do I need to explain why that is bad?” No, he did not. Federal law enforcement, implied compliment or not, weren’t the sort of people you wanted around when you were of a non-human persuasion. “Seeing as you basically admitted to not being able to control yourself, I have to control you instead! Time for a break, Ro!”

“No!” He whined, the word coming out sharp and childish, like he was twelve years old and threatening to tattle. “No, Caelum, that isn’t–” This particular prohibition was something Caelum had threatened to enforce a few times before, but he’d never once followed through. Maybe he’d known there was no point, that Ronan would disobey any such order if he did try to issue it, which in turn would cause even more tension and arguing.“I had a crush. It was one rough night, I made one mistake! Don’t tell me not to follow my heart! Please?” 

A gruff, wordless bark silenced him, and he slumped in his chair. “My mind is made up! No crushes, no stalking anyone, no late night mourning pilgrimages to public buildings! You’re going to take some time to, I don’t know, focus on yourself, or whatever people say to–” He paused, one hand frozen mid-gesture as he searched for the word he wanted. Giving up, he snapped, “–to people with your particular problem! And don’t give me that about-to-be-hanged look! I obviously don’t mean forever! What am I to you, the Devil Incarnate? Just, give it a year–” 

“A YEAR?” Ronan shot to his feet, so obviously Caelum did too. Trembling with tightly restrained anger, but knowing he was expected to remain appropriately meek and obedient, Ronan sank back into his chair. Even hunched his shoulders down, and forced his eyes away from Caelum’s, trying to be the very picture of remorse. Not good enough, apparently. Looming over him, Caelum glowered, and impatiently snapped his fingers, beckoned him to share every syllable of his insolent little thought. A terribly efficient judge, he had a policy of handing his pack members just enough rope to hang themselves with. “Boss,” Ronan pleaded, as if the noose wasn’t already looped under his chin and tightening fast. “Please, come on, that’s not just unfair, that’s impossible!” Unfair was Caelum’s middle name, but he was desperate enough to keep trying, keep grasping for any possible reprieve. “You’re right, you’re absolutely right, I don’t control what I feel or when I feel it! Turning my heart off for a YEAR?” Both of his hands went to his own chest, folding over his thumping heart almost protectively. “How can I possibly do that?!” As far as he could tell, his heart relied on this beautiful, painful cycle every bit as much as it relied on blood and salt and oxygen: without it, he might just keel over dead. But Caelum wouldn’t believe him if he said that, and wasn’t in a good enough mood to humor him, so he kept it to himself and settled for looking miserable and sorry. 

Something that wasn’t really sympathy flickered in those chilly green eyes, but it didn’t stay there long; Caelum was rubbing his temple again, now in slower, former circles, and the effort it took to unclench his jaw was visible. “Do you think I enjoy making these kinds of INSANE rules?” Caelum hissed, but Ronan wasn’t sure how much of his tone was annoyance and how much was discomfort. “In case you’ve gotten the wrong impression, I don’t! I am, in fact, very aware of how much trouble these ultimatums can cause! For god’s sake, do you remember how Avery reacted when I had to forbid him from starting a literal gang war?!” 

“You didn’t answer my question!” With more emphasis, Ronan slapped the left side of his chest. Under his ribs, his heart pattered away, kept printing out stacks and stacks of longing, stacks that Caelum wanted to ignore and allow to pile up until they caught fire and burned him down to ash. Fingers digging painfully into his left pec, he almost whined again when he spoke. “How am I supposed to–to–it’s not a switch, Caelum! I can’t just stop!” 

Maybe the re-appearance of that pubescent snivelling triggered some moldy, brittle feelings in Caelum’s sterile, automated heart: for half a second, his expression softened, shifted into something that was more sad and weary than judgemental. “Oh, Ro…” On impulse, Ronan lowered himself to his knees, folded his arms on Caelum’s desk and stared up him, plead his case again, and it seemed like Caelum was tempted to waver. The hand rubbing his temple dropped to the top of Ronan’s head, scratched his scalp in a way that was more reassuring than anything verbal could have been. “Your happiness is something that’s very important to me; don’t you know how much it pains me when your heart gets broken? I know how much you want a…a mate…but…” When he trailed off, he also took his hand back, looked away from Ronan to stare at the corner of desk, where afternoon sun bounced off of the facets of cut-glass bowl and the polished, colorfully dyed surfaces on the stones it held. After a few heartbeats of silence, he looked back at Ronan, most of the tenderness scrubbed away. “Can we agree you change your mind a lot? None of these targets of yours have turned out to be the one–” 

“Don’t give me this speech again,” he groaned, feeling more and more of his own anger ebbing away, replaced bit by bit with despair. “Please, Alpha. We have the same argument every time you do.” Basically, Caelum thought Ronan’s lack of success in finding a mate was–somehow–his own fault. That Ronan needed to do something differently, other than stay optimistic and keep trying. That his many, many heartbreaks were the harvest of seeds he himself had sown, not the natural stumbles of a life still being lived. 

With a sigh of frustration, Caelum paced behind his desk. Outside, the forest rustled. Ronan wanted to go to the window, try to see the garden, try to see the patio where Kase was probably smoking while he listened to Avery chatter about soccer scores and underworld gossip. Anything to not be stuck in this room, choking on Caelum’s ever-deepening disappointment. “Do you know why we have the same argument every time? Because no matter how many times I ask you to make me understand, you can’t!” And no matter how much I ask you to understand, you can’t. “This, this FIXATION you have with finding someone to bite, and only considering that, instead of any other option, simply baffles me!” Of course it baffled him. From the way Caelum told it, every aspect of Ronan’s desire for a specific mate baffled him, which made sense: Caelum, upon his soul’s creation, hadn’t ever been nicked or pierced by Cupid’s arrow. Certain kinds of love didn’t come naturally to him, and he’d never experienced the sort of longing that was baked into the very foundations of Ronan’s life. 

Not that that had stopped the universe from giving Caelum a mate anyway. A mate he’d never asked for or even wanted, since apparently nothing on earth could be the slightest bit fair. Many years ago, tears might have blurred his eyes at that kind of thought, but crying had gotten harder since the night his mother had died and their whole world had burned to ash. 

“Kase is your favorite,” Ronan mumbled, as he glared at the same polished dish of stones that Caelum had. “And you’re his favorite, too.” Across the desk, Caelum fumbled to half-deny it, but gave up without forming a real sentence. “Avery and Jasper…it’s the same thing! The bite bonded you to Kase, and Jasper to Avery. It made what you have together more permanent, it made it more…real. I want that sort of real, Caelum. I want…I want a favorite, too.” And to be that person’s favorite in return. To be looked at the way Kase sometimes looked at Caelum, awe-struck and delighted, or the way Jasper sometimes looked at Avery, eyes full of soft affection. Hell, the Darrow siblings practically worshipped each other, you could see it in every movement of their bodies and every flicker of emotion on their faces. 

He’d have loved to have a sibling to mate with. At least then someone might miss his mother as much as he did. 

“And I want that for you, too! But, the bite doesn’t guarantee you’re getting a soulmate. Kase and Pike–” 

“That was different!” Ronan whined. “Like Asher and his sire were different!” He’d do it right. If it took him a hundred-thousand tries, he’d get it right. 

Leather and wheels squeaked as Caelum returned to his chair and gingerly reached across the desk to stroke the top of his wrist. Ronan looked at him sadly, and Caelum seemed genuinely sorry for a moment or two. Then he pulled a heavy shade of indifference back over his eyes and his tone, and said, “Regardless of all that, we can’t keep letting corpses pile up around you. Firstly, if you get arrested, I will need to massacre many, many law enforcement agents, and that will get the Institute’s attention. Secondly, I sincerely think you need to take a break. A deliberate, purposeful, break, and maybe…I don’t know, reflect on some things. Like your priorities, and whether or not they’re all in the correct order.” With that, he took his hand back, and gestured for Ronan to leave. 

Arguing with him was futile. Didn’t make leaving without another word any easier, and he resolved to sulk for as long as physically possible. Maybe he could keep it up for the entire year he was about to spend in emotional hell. Even if he disobeyed the order, which was far from out of the question, sneaking around on the Pack was much less fun than sneaking around on his various sweethearts. With Caelum already this upset, he was virtually guaranteed to use the whole situation as an excuse to lose his temper in a truly historic fashion. The absolute last thing Ronan needed was a beat-down at the hands of his entire pack: Pike getting the chance to bloody him up at this stage of his training would give him a very wrong idea about the power dynamic in the house. 

At the end of the hallway, there was a massive bay window; through it, he could see down into the eastern part of the yard, could see Asher and Kase chasing Pike through the tall, swaying grass. Black fur flashed in the sunlight, Kase shifted into a four-footed, mundane wolf’s body; Asher was upright and mostly humanoid, but was running like his claws were out, and when Pike tried scrambling up a tree to escape their bullying, he snapped at the omega’s bare foot with a mouthful of fangs. 

Pike continued climbing, and Asher sunk his finger-claws into the trunk to begin following him. Kase stayed on the ground, pacing in excited circles: Ronan guessed that the plan was for Asher to pry Pike from whatever branch he got cornered on and then toss him down for Kase to maul. A common game for cubs and particularly bored adults to play, and was mostly meant to remind somebody that they were weaker than everyone else.  

As he watched Kase howl and snap his jaws like he hadn’t been fed in days, he decided that he deserved a medal for not throwing Kase in Caelum’s face any more than he had. He’d found Kase, not Caelum. He’d loved Kase first, had wanted so badly to be the one to bring him into the pack, to bite him and change him. But Caelum had seen Kase’s picture and had gotten a look in his eyes that Ronan had never seen before, and then he’d muscled in, had stolen the privilege of taking Kase’s humanity. Sure, he no longer thought Kase was made for him: during his first years in the pack, Caelum had nursed Kase back to semi-sanity in a way Ronan didn’t think he ever could have, had helped him learn to love the rest of the pack too and accept the love they offered in return. Clearly, the bond that had formed there had been the stars’ plan from the beginning, and his heartache was mere fallout. But his acceptance of the outcome didn’t exactly erase the disappointment of how it all went down, and at times like these, the wound seemed to open back up. 

Pike hit the ground and tried to lurch to his feet: he was faster than any human could be, had better reflexes too, and could take far more physical punishment and keep right on going, but he couldn’t shift worth a damn yet, and Kase was still much quicker. Thus, Pike was tackled back to the dirt almost immediately, pinned in place by Kase’s paws and body weight; faintly, Ronan could hear Kase’s loud, angry barking. Asher leapt down from the tree, and as soon as he did, Kase sprang off Pike. Both of barked and snapped at the omega until he scrambled to his feet and started running again; the other two hung back until roughly the count of 15, and then took off after him. To Ronan’s brief delight, Asher dropped to all fours and his form rippled. For the next several yards, he ran beside Kase as a semi-accurate looking wolf, before surging back into a bipedal shape. Pretty good for Asher, given the sun was up and tonight was only a half-moon. 

FBI, he reminded himself, as the three of them rounded the end of a crumbling garden wall and were blocked from sight. Sasha’s people had told Caelum that he was being investigated, that dangerous people with dangerous weapons had caught his scent. Sasha was not in the habit of giving them false information, so he needed to assume that was real. This sort of attention could put the pack at risk. He had a duty to the frailer members of the household, and to his beta and alpha. Obedience was part of that duty. Self-control was probably another, if he really thought about it. 

So he choked down his hurt and his loneliness, and shuffled off to the stairs. With Asher playing outside, he could make himself busy in the laundry, catch up on the sheets Pike had been neglecting. Or maybe Jasper would want to wrestle with him until he felt less restless and growly and sad. Anything was better than his big, empty room, right across from the one Jasper and Avery shared full-time. 

***

Even late at night, when the majority of the pack was asleep, the mansion wasn’t ever silent. A relic of the Gilded Age, Highbriar Hall was host to a healthy population of creaks and moans and twangs. Pipes rumbled and tiny cracks in the walls hissed, and the windows gossiped in warbly whispers. Plus, there were the mice in the walls and the birds in the attics (all three of them) and rabbits breeding in warrens beside the basement. Finally, you had the sounds of the pack sleeping: Kase’s teeth grinding and Caelum’s muttering and Asher’s deep, heavy breaths; Avery jerking awake every few hours from dreams or sleep paralysis, only to sag back asleep; all sounds that Ronan subconsciously listened for as he slept. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Asher to guard the den. Compared to Kase and Avery, he’d done great so far. His traps were brilliant: Pike’s repeated failure to escape the manor grounds were evidence of that. And he’d strong-armed Caelum into coughing up the money necessary for the local Cunning Woman to cook up nearly thirty charmbags to scatter around and ward off any invasion from the less-than-physical, which Ronan himself had failed to do multiple times. He just couldn’t help listening: it was an old habit, from back when his mother was flesh and blood. No matter how late it was, or deeply asleep he was, the sound of her coming home from a bonfire or a night singing in the nearest human town would snap him awake and send him careening down the stairs, into her arms. 

He was dreaming about his mother, in fact. Not fully lucidly, but most of the way there. She was stringing a cláirseach that kept breaking itself out of spite. “Ro,” she said abruptly, and he blinked up at her from his hiding place under the sofa. “Yes, I can see you down there.” She chuckled, and the sound made all the glass things in their house break. Made his heart break too, and he crawled partway out to hear what she wanted to tell him. “There’s somebody in your room,” she said, and told the clairsearch to get with the program, or she’d burn its frame to ash and start over from scratch. 

“Don’t bother,” he told her, not rising from the floor, preferring instead to look up at her. From this angle, he couldn’t see the hole the bullets had blown in the side of her head. “It gets burnt, mama, but not by you. I couldn’t get anything out of our house before the humans burned it down.” He’d been so surprised by how loud it was. Their house burning, that is. Sharp, almost spiteful pops had come from the wood as it was warped and blackened beyond all repair or salvage. When the windows blew apart, it had made the strangest noise, one he hadn’t heard replicated since. “No one’s in my room,” he assured her, as she scolded the harp again. The wires had cut her fingers, and blood drooled from the slashes in her flesh. Ronan stared at the dark red drops pattering onto the surface of her worktable, noted the lack of salt and copper in the air. He couldn’t smell in dreams, and that was how he usually got himself fully lucid. “My room’s gone, mama. Everything is.”  

“Not that room,” she said, voice distracted. Her uninjured hand had found a sewing needle, and she threaded it with a length of the clairsearch’s wire. As casual as could be, she stitched her wounds with the wire. More blood rained onto her ankle-length skirt, not all of it falling from her fingers. “Your new one. With the tall window and the dresser full treasures.” Gore dripped from the far side of her face, mercifully unscented. “The one Mayflower’s boy got for you, with his father’s money. There’s someone there; do you hear the creaking?” 

Yes. He did. Fingers tightening against the carpet whose color he was starting to forget, he asked, “is that really you? Or did I just need help noticing the creak?” 

In answer, she turned her head to look him head-on, instead of from one side. “If I was really me, would my face look the way it does?” Asked the half-pulverized, brain-splattered remains of his mother. Broken teeth and a bloody tongue showed past her maimed, blackened cheek. 

Ronan sighed heavily. No, he supposed not. His real mother would be a shade, glittering and fluid, at peace to the point of near euphoria. Or, if not, she’d be in another body by now, living a new childhood. She might not even be a werewolf anymore: she’d told him once or twice that she longed to know what sea urchins thought about, and aimed to find out firsthand. “Who’s in my room?” He asked the part of himself pretending to be her. It couldn’t be a member of the pack: why would his subconscious wake him over that? 

“I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Sam.” 

The next creak of the floor was loud enough to fully wake him, and he sat bolt upright in bed. Moonlight poured in through his window, and he blinked his real eyes into place, flat black replacing garnet-brown. Between the moonlight and the gift of his real vision, he could see the entire room clearly.