Haywire (Steven's POV)

Her dress had torn at the seams when she changed. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around her with one arm while the other held her weight. Nobody was going to get her face. None of them was going to get a second of her.

A boy near the door lifted his phone. I glared at him until he put it down.

The silver thread was still there, tugging in my chest toward the girl in my arms. At the same moment, the mark on my wrist burned Angeline's name. Both hurt. I could not tell which one hurt more, and that told me something I did not want to know.

She is burning from the inside, Steven, Steion said. That is not the candle.

I know.

Then walk faster.

The little silver moon I had given her had slid out of the jacket and lay warm against my sleeve. Somebody behind me whispered bedtime story, like it was the answer to something. She was more than just an empty myth. She was someone I knew personally. Someone who had long carved her way into my heart and let it stay there.

I carried her out.

When we got there, the infirmary was white and quiet. Healer Odile had been the academy's senior healer since before my father was a student. When she saw me, she did not ask me to leave. She only looked at my face, then at the girl on the bed. She pointed me to the wall where visitors were supposed to stay.

Adrian came in first, still in his funeral suit. He stopped at the foot of the bed. Calix came in a few seconds later and did not speak at all.

Three of us stood around a single bed. I couldn't tell what their exact intentions were, but I knew we each had a different reason to be there. Nobody sat or mentioned her name. The only sound was Odile's hands moving over a sleeping girl's wrist, and the faint, steady tick of the clock above the door.

"How long until she wakes?" Calix asked. It was the first thing he'd said all day.

"By morning," Odile said.

He nodded. He had one hand shoved in his pocket. When he took it out to push his hair back, he pulled his cuff down over his wrist, quickly.

I saw it. A faint silver glow at the edge of the fabric, rising and falling in time with Melica's pulse.

I looked up and found Adrian looking at it too. Neither of us said a word. Calix must have known we had seen it, because he turned and left without explanation.

He is hiding something, Steion said.

So am I.

I did not ask. I had no right to, and right now my priority was Melica.

Odile finished at the washbasin and dried her hands slowly. "Her mana is nearly spent. She is feverish and dehydrated, but she will live." She said it to the room. "The candle held violet resin."

Adrian frowned. "From where?"

"That is the question." Odile folded the towel. "Violet resin is carried only by senior healers of the highest rank. They swear an oath over moonlit water before they are allowed to touch it. I have held it twice in forty years, and I did not enjoy either time." She looked at the girl on the bed. "It is meant to ease the dying. In a living girl it should have burned her mind to the ground."

"But it didn't," I said.

"No." Odile's eyes narrowed. "Its effect was muted. Someone with a healer's training dulled it on purpose, and did it well."

Something moved in the doorway. I turned my head.

Angeline stood there with her satchel in both hands. She had gone completely still. Her nails were green at the edges, and she smelled faintly of ginger and thyme.

I looked at her hands for a long time.

I had heard the plan. I had stood outside a bathroom door and heard it. I ran for it, but I was late. Now I was standing in a clean white room beside a girl who was burned because I arrived at the wrong time. If I had run three minutes earlier, Melica would have walked into that room and found me waiting. Instead, she had found nobody.

Odile gathered her instruments and went to find water.

Adrian stayed. He did not take off his jacket. He just stood at the foot of the bed with his hands behind his back. Something about the calmness in his face grated on me.

"Why did no one protect her?" I said.

"I didn't know." He said it flatly. The worst part was that I believed him. If I hadn't overheard it outside the girls' bathroom, I wouldn't have known either. Still, I expected more from someone who grew up with Melica. Yet Adrian had always been close enough to know, but too impassive to act.

"This morning she walked from the service lane. Fifty meters, alone, with three bags."

"Angeline asked."

"And you let her." My tone seethed with accusation. How could a soon-to-be Alpha act as nonchalant as he did?

"It's her call." He said it like I should take it as a matter of fact. "I thought it was about the bullying."

It was about the bullying. It was also about something else, and I knew what, and I did not say it. I saw the walk and the party for what they were, then. Two links in one chain.

"You will soon be their Alpha. Is this how you're going to act when someone from your pack gets hurt?"

"Don't you start with me, Steven."

Adrian looked at Melica again. I couldn't tell if he was already acknowledging how much of a failure he was, or if there was something more.

"Go," I said.

He went outside, and I caught a glimpse of Angeline by the doorway, clutching her hands together.

"Come in," I said, "and close the door."

Angeline came in. She set her satchel on the counter very carefully, and folded her hands in front of her. She was pale.

"Where were you during the party?"

"By the door." Her voice was small. "You saw me."

"Before that."

"The powder room. You know that. You walked me there."

"Before that."

"I was getting hot water."

"Where?"

"Near the dining hall kitchen."

"The freezer is in the kitchen."

She said nothing. I looked at her hands. The green under her nails. The faint smell of the herb shelf, ginger and thyme and something like crushed leaves.

"Angeline."

"I heard them," she broke. "In the stall. They were laughing. They said the candle was in the cake and that she would take her clothes off, and they said somebody would film it, and they said I'd just cry in a bathroom stall for an hour, and I was in a bathroom stall, Steven."

"I heard it too. Outside the door." My voice was steady, and I hated that it was. "I ran. You stayed."

"I stayed." She laughed, a horrible, wet sound. "I did something small. I followed them. I found the cake. I couldn't take the candle out, they'd have known, and I couldn't tell anyone. Mother says healers who get dragged into scandals stop being trusted with the dying. I thought if I made it weaker, if I just made it weaker, then nobody would be hurt."

"You told her to go."

Her face broke.

"I said people can change." She was shaking, yet I couldn't be bothered to hold her shoulder to comfort her. Not this time. "She asked me. I said, you should go. I said it, Steven. I stood there, and I said it. Happy now?!"

She wasn't defending herself. That was what I couldn't stand. She was asking me to hate her so she wouldn't have to do it alone, and I could see it. I could see all of it, and I went on anyway.

"I knew about the walk," I said. "On the steps. I knew you lied. She was in my car, and she told me the same lie, and I knew whose idea it was. But I let you."

She stopped breathing.

"I watched you tell it, and I said nothing." I heard my own voice go lower. "Do you understand? I let you lie, and you let her walk, and you let her go to that party, and I let all of it happen, because I thought that was what being good looked like."

"Steven, please."

"You shouldn't have decided that alone."

I hit the bedside cabinet. The glass in it rattled like something had gone through it, and I stood there with my hand stinging. My whole body was shaking, and I realized I was not angry at her. I had never been angry at her. I was angry at the man standing in front of her who had said nothing for three years. I was as complicit as Adrian and Angeline.

Angeline stared at my hand.

"Why does it matter this much to you?" she asked, tears pooling in her eyes.

Say it, Steion said.

"Because she could have been killed," I said.

It was true, but it wasn't the answer. We both knew it. I watched her face close, one careful inch at a time.

She picked up her satchel and left in defeat. Somehow, instead of a wash of relief, I felt like another burden had been placed on my shoulders. I had taken something from her just now that I could not give back.

The clock above the door ticked. The fever was breaking. The color came back to her face, and her breathing evened out.

I pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat down.

Say it, Steion said again.

I'm not going to.

You have said it to yourself for three years. Isn't now a better time to confess?

That was duty.

Was it?

I looked at the girl on the bed. Her hair had come loose, and there was still a smear of frosting along her wrist. I wiped it tenderly. There, I saw the silver thread again.

Her wrist glowed faintly in the dark. On my own wrist, the mark burned Angeline's name.