“Sorry!” Talley crouched down next to me. “I’m so sorry.”
I wanted to tell her it was okay, but I knew if I opened my mouth a scream would escape.
“Here,” she said, working a garment over my head. “It’s soft and thin. It’ll still hurt, but it’s the best I could do.”
She wasn’t kidding. It felt like I was attacking a sunburn with sandpaper. Once we got all my important bits covered with Talley’s old swimsuit cover-up, I was exhausted. I slumped back onto the ground, focusing all my energy on pulling oxygen into my lungs.
I must have nodded off, because the next thing I knew a hand was brushing the hair out of my face.
“Scout, can you hear me?” I nodded my head, but refused to pry my eyes open. “Do you think you can stand up if I helped you?”
“I don’t know.” The words felt odd in my mouth.
A fourth person joined our group. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll get her.”
“No, I’ve got her,” the first guy said, and suddenly I was being lifted off the ground.
He smelled like home and cinnamon.
“Dude, seriously, I think she should try to walk.”
“I’ve got her.” The sound of his voice echoed in his chest, loud and assertive. Everything was loud, but it didn’t hurt like before.
“She’s okay,” Talley assured Jase. “Let him take care of her.”
I could hear Jase’s teeth snap together even though he was a good fifteen or twenty feet behind me. Actually, if I concentrated, I could hear the air as it entered and left his lungs and the steady pounding of his heart. Somehow the ability to distinguish individual sounds out of the cacophony lingered post-Change.
The same must have held true for Charlie. “You’re hungry,” he said after my stomach gurgled for perhaps the fourth time. “Did you eat anything last night?”
“A rabbit.” The memory of the blood in my mouth, the crunch of bone between my teeth, caused me to gag. “I ate a rabbit.”
“You caught a rabbit? Good girl.”
Something in my chest fluttered pleasantly at the obvious pride in his voice. Everything was going to be okay. Charlie was here, and he was proud of me.
It took all of two seconds for my brain to catch up. My eyes flew open, revealing a familiar curve of neck and jawline. The physical pain from the Change was fading quickly, but it felt like someone slammed a fist into the solar plexus of my soul.
In my head I didn’t see the boy I had loved since before I was old enough to understand the word, but the coyote who rolled Alex to the edge of that cliff.
“Put me down,” I said suddenly, struggling against the arms holding me tight. “Dammit, Charlie. Let me go.”
He released me and I scrambled away from him, my body shaking for an entirely new reason. I barely made it to the tree line before I started retching. I grabbed onto a limb to keep from collapsing onto the ground. I looked at the contrast of my hand against the dark bark and remembered how just an hour before it was a paw. I leaned more heavily against the tree as darkness began encroaching on the outer edges of my vision.
“Scout…?” Talley stood just behind me, her hands hovering in the air behind my back, wanting to comfort, but afraid to touch.
“I’m fine,” I said, slowly pushing myself back to an erect position. It wasn’t a complete lie. Other than a throat raw from its recent acquaintance with stomach acid and some sensitive skin issues, I was physically fine. In fact…
I ran my hand over my stomach, surprised to discover my wounds completely and totally healed. I rotated the wrist which had been encased in plaster until it turned into a foreleg. It moved as if it was never broken.
“The Change repairs any bone or muscle damage,” Talley said. “It puts the cells back where they’re suppose to be, not where they were. You should be back to where you were before the accident.”
“I have scars.” I could feel the ridges through the thin material of the cover-up.
Talley’s eyebrows knitted together. “Really? That’s not supposed to happen.”
I let out a bark of laughter. “None of this is supposed to happen! Did you miss the part where I grew a tail and ran around on four legs eating rabbit tartar?”
“I know this is hard to understand —”
“Hard to understand?” I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s impossible to understand. I’m not a Shifter, Tal. I’m Scout, normal girl, remember? Unless my dad is a Shifter and you didn’t tell me,” which was exactly the sort of thing they would do, “or I’m adopted,” which I doubted, “this completely defies understanding. I mean, do you have an explanation? Can you tell me what is going on? Because if you’ve got so much as a theory, I’m all big, wolfy ears.”
Talley’s fingers were wound up in her hair. “I… I’m not sure.” She looked to Jase and Charlie for help, but they didn’t have any to provide. “We’ll figure it out, though. We’ll take you to Toby and he’ll get the answers.”
This caused another sardonic laughing fit on my end. It was nice to be able to do so without feeling like I was being split in two. “Oh, I feel all kinds of better now I know that Toby is going to figure things out for me.”
“Toby is the Pack Leader,” Jase said as though that really did make everything all better.
“So?”
“So it’s his job to protect and care for his people,” he explained. “He’ll take care of this. Promise.”
I wish I could be as confident. “I’m not part of his Pack.”
“Of course you are. You’re family.”
“Really? Whose?”
“Mine. You’re my sister, remember?”
I automatically touched my stomach, still surprised to find scars instead of stitches.
“How are going to explain this?” I asked, refusing to acknowledge Jase’s statement about our sibling bond. “What am I supposed to tell Mom when she goes to change my dressing?” The thought of her face when she lifted my shirt to find a whole stomach...
Oh crap.
“We have to call Mom! She’s going to be freaking out!” Ever since the accident Mom checked on me regularly through the night. “The police are probably looking for me.”