I was trying to get control back by then, but it was a losing battle. Will stayed behind me, minding my privacy, and I felt him slip clothing over my head. I let him put the oversized Hair of the Dog T-shirt on me, and I didn’t move or struggle as he knelt in the glass to cut off my jeans and underpants. I didn’t feel the pain of the scratches or the sting of the glass being pulled out. The moment should have been creepy, but Will was being so gentle, and I was crying so hard that it didn’t even occur to me. When he finally stood up, I was wearing only the T-shirt, which reached my midthighs, and my knee-high boots. It was a weird look.
By then I was working on breathing deeply, trying to calm down. When he saw me finally coming back to myself, Will handed me a clean pair of men’s boxer shorts, a bar towel that smelled like detergent, and a glass of water. He turned away while I put the shorts on under the huge bar T-shirt. I drank deeply, and then dipped the towel into the glass and washed my face. Will pulled out a chair from the table next to Eli and brushed it off, then made me sit down and take my boots off to shake out any glass fragments. There were some in my socks, so I took them off, and Will gave me a clean pair from the stash of spare clothing he keeps around for the werewolves, which was probably where the T-shirt and boxers had come from too. The leather boots had held out against the glass, God bless ’em, so I put them back on over the new socks. There were bloodstains on the leather, so they would have to be tossed by the end of the night, but for the moment it was comforting to have them. I gulped in air, completely spent.
Will sat down in the chair across from mine, looking as exhausted as I felt. Neither of us had said a word since I’d thanked him for giving Eli the sedative. I don’t know how long we sat there—time seemed to fuzz away from me for a long moment, and then suddenly someone was knocking on the back door at the end of the little hallway. I looked a question at Will.
“The doctor,” he assured me. “He always comes to the back door.”
Will went back there to let him in, and I stared at the floor, absently tracing a circle in the glass with my boot. The shock was beginning to fade again, and I realized I had no idea what to do now. I checked my watch: 10:50 p.m. And Olivia was still out there. Jesse was safe, surrounded by a legion of police. Molly and Jack were hiding. Kirsten was in the hospital. Dashiell was busy taking care of cleanup—doing my job, I supposed—at Kirsten’s and then here. I had no one left to lose, but I also had no one left to help me. And whatever Olivia and Mallory were going to do, they were going to do it in just over an hour.
I was alone.
Will and the doctor returned from the back door. I had been picturing someone older, maybe a guy in his late fifties with nefarious horn-rimmed glasses, like the evil Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I was wrong again. The guy who followed Will back toward Eli and me was forty at the most, carried a briefcase, and was movie-star handsome, with a perfect cleft chin and warm eyes that were almost as green as my own. He was wearing navy-blue scrubs, and he looked for all the world like one of those doctors on prime-time soaps, the ones who spend more time sleeping around than practicing medicine. “You’re the doctor?” I said, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of my voice.
He grinned and eyed my T-shirt-and-boots ensemble. “You’re the null?” he countered.
I glanced down at the outfit and shrugged. “Touché.”
“Scarlett, this is Matthias. Matthias, Scarlett.”
I considered a comment on his ridiculous name, but I didn’t exactly have a leg to stand on there, either. “Can you help him?” I said instead.
“Yes.” Matthias squatted down next to Eli, checking his pulse. He opened his briefcase, rummaged around, and pulled out the biggest needle I’d ever seen. Syrupy-looking pink fluid sloshed inside. “This is going to take a little finesse, though.”
He directed me to walk away from Eli, to whatever I thought the edge of my radius might be. I complied, and he got the mammoth needle into position at the vein on Eli’s arm. When he nodded, I took the last two steps away from Eli and felt him leave my radius. Matthias quickly drove in the needle’s plunger, injecting the pinkish fluid into the vein. I hovered, half-expecting it to not work. I wanted to be ready to leap back toward Eli. But the unconscious man didn’t even stir, and Matthias checked his pulse and nodded to himself. “Keep him out of your range for the next four hours or so,” he said to me. “These drugs would kill a human pretty quickly.”
I nodded and took a few steps back, just to be sure. “Mind if I sit in your office a minute?” I asked Will. I wanted to be away from the carnage, and I had no interest in seeing Will and Matthias handle the doctor’s payment. Will nodded. I leaned down and carefully extracted my wallet, Jesse’s keys, and my phone from the bloody pile that used to be my jeans, hoping to find a plastic bag or something for them in the office.
Will’s office was unpretentious and comfortable: a solid old wooden desk and matching chair, a bulletin board with pictures of Will, his family, the pack. There was some debris in here too, from when Caroline had first changed: papers and office supplies scattered over the floor, trash cans upturned. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the bar, though. Her first instinct had probably been to get to a more open space.
Caroline. Caroline was gone.
I pulled back the chair, which seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. I was so tired. Before I could even sit down, though, my phone buzzed in my hand, making me jump. I looked at the screen cautiously. Unlisted number. I answered it. “Bernard.”