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หน้าหลัก / Werewolf / I Will Find You / บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

บททั้งหมดของ I Will Find You: บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

74

Split Between Teeth and Tongue

RobbieThe first thing is heat, then the kind of cold that eats the marrow, then a sound I don’t make on purpose.I’m on the floor again. Linoleum prints into my cheek. The bulb overhead hums like a gnat that knows it can’t be swatted. My hands don’t remember how to be hands. The right one has a wrist that thinks it bends in three directions; the fingers are knives trying to grow out of skin that won’t give permission. I try to breathe slow, because slow sometimes fools the pain into blinking.It doesn’t blink.Bone peels. The best I can do to describe it is this: imagine your skeleton is a shirt you’ve been wearing your whole life and somebody tells it to turn inside out while you’re still in it. There’s a ripping sound you can’t hear and a lot of little snaps you can.The Wolf loves this part. He pants happily under my ribs, tail beating at the notion of afterward. He does not acknowledge that during has teeth too.Holland sits where I put her, wingback shoved to the corner, tape si
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The House Hears

HollandThe room smells like pennies and old cabbage and the kind of sweat that doesn’t come from work. I’m in the wingback in the corner—duct tape over my mouth, cords on my wrists, ankles burning where the paracord saws. The chair’s stuffing keeps sneezing out through a tear by my hip, little yellow crumbs collecting on my thigh like stale snow. If I tilt my head just right, the bare bulb throws a pale square on the opposite wall, and I can pretend it’s a window with dawn trying to come through.I breathe like Todd taught me: in through my nose for four, hold, out for four. It keeps my head from floating away when my body wants to climb out of itself.Robbie is on the floor in front of me, and also he isn’t. Sometimes he’s the boy I used to know with shame tucked behind a grin, and sometimes he’s a moving of bones, a wrong geometry pacing the tiles. He pants and laughs and sobs in the same breath, like all his feelings got invited to the same party and none of them wanted to be poli
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Claw and Silver

RemyThe porch steps gave a warning groan; the door didn’t. I hit it shoulder-first and the frame surrendered like rot had been feeding on it for years. The smell hit harder than the wood: blood—fresh and old—cabbage boiled into wallpaper, mouse piss, cheap cologne, and under it all the thin, metallic shadow of silver.“Holland—” I didn’t mean to say her name out loud. It left my mouth anyway, a prayer in a place that didn’t deserve one.She was in the back room, exactly where Mallory’s bowl had promised: wingback wedged into a corner, duct tape at her wrists and ankles, more across her mouth. Head tipped at that angle that makes men lie to themselves—she’s sleeping—until your eyes accept the color of the floor. Red on red on red. Bite at the crook of her neck where mine should one day sit with ceremony and consent. Another at the collarbone, ragged. Four clean slash marks raked the round of her shoulder. Four more gaped across her thigh. A lake of blood had found the low places in th
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The Edge of the Room

HollandThe bulb above me hums like a gnat stuck in a jar. The room breathes out. I try to breathe in.The chair has stopped being a chair and started being a shoreline: I keep washing up and sliding off. There’s a place beneath my left collarbone that feels the way fire looks, and another at my shoulder that pulses like a mouth. My thigh is four burning wires. My boot is a cup catching what my body can’t hold.Don’t sleep.Todd’s voice, from better mornings, floats up through the noise: Breathe low. Four in, four out. Hold.I try. The numbers fall apart like wet paper. The tape on my mouth tastes like pennies. I swallow because my throat thinks that will help and it doesn’t.The wolves slam into each other five feet away and the air moves like a hand. I see fur, teeth, the slick confusion of a defective body trying to be too many things at once. I see a red coat that isn’t red so much as rust and winter and cedar, and in that color my ribs loosen, just a fraction.Remy.I can’t say i
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No Good Choices

Remy“Alpha.” Todd again, louder, bracing both knees under him like he’ll have to lift her himself if I fail. “She won’t make it to the hospital. You’re going to have to turn her or she will die.”The words land clean, like they were measured for this hour. In another life—the packhouse kitchen, the river path—I taught myself what consent sounds like. I’m not using teeth to solve a feeling. I’m asking a woman to choose a life that hurts before it heals.I step off the defective. The room makes space the way rooms do around things that know themselves. Banks shifts back a half pace; the air around me still has teeth, and not all of them are for tearing. The bond hums bright between us—live wire, safe if you put your hands where they belong.She opens her mouth. The word she wants is yes, but it breaks. “I—” A crack. Then: “I trust you.”Pierce’s ears flick. My whole body hears it.The edges of the room darken for her, like a curtain being pulled slow so a stagehand can move without bei
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The Light Between Trees

HollandBlackness came first—thick and velvet, like someone turned the world inside out and let me sink into the lining. Voices moved through it, far away and underwater: Todd’s steady baritone, Banks clipped and sure, Remy’s voice so close to my skin it felt like warmth more than sound. They dimmed until they could have been something I dreamed on purpose.Then the black grew thin. A paler shade pressed through, the way morning edges around closed curtains.Light.Not a ceiling bulb, not hospital white—something living. I felt it before I saw it, the way you feel moonlight on a winter night: a coolness with teeth that doesn’t bite, a hand at the back of your head telling you to look up.When the light got strong enough to make a shape, it wasn’t a room at all. It was trees. Tall trunks, bark like the backs of old hands, all reaching for a sky smoothed to silver. The air smelled like pine and cold water. My shoulder didn’t feel like fire anymore. My thigh didn’t scream. Pain was there
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Waiting for the Wolf

RemyWe carried her past midnight like a vow we didn’t dare set down.The packhouse infirmary is two rooms that used to be a library: tall windows, old radiators, shelves rebuilt into cupboards full of tinctures and gauze. Tonight the healers had it dressed like winter church. Amber glass lamps burned low on every flat surface—animal-fat wicks floating in bowls of rosemary oil and yarrow, the smoke thin and clean. Threads of red twine were knotted to the headboard and footboard in the old way—protection knots, not magic, just memory with a job. A clay bowl of water sat under the bed to “catch the nightmare,” as Kerri likes to say. I let people I trust keep their rituals. We need all the steady we can get.They took her from my arms with hands that didn’t waste time. Saline, sutures where sutures would help, honey packed into the ugly places a scalpel would only anger. Comfrey paste. Fever cloths. Todd stayed at her feet, one palm cupping her ankle like it was a pulse he could pull bac
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Something Else Entirely

HollandThe first thing I knew was a song.Low and round, no words—just a tone that made the air softer where it touched my skin. I was already breathing in time with it before I realized I was awake. Awake… and not in pain.I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t have to. The room told me what it was. Oil lamps breathed rosemary and yarrow. Linen whispered when someone shifted their weight. A radiator ticked in a corner like a steady old heart. Farther off, a car idled and then gave up. Closer, two heartbeats kept an easy pattern—one heavy and calm (Todd), one tired and threadbare at the edges, holding anyway (Remy). There were others, too: Kerri’s steady healer-pulse, Banks coiled like a spring disguised as a woman.And under all of that, something new: a presence tucked at the base of my spine, quiet and alert. Not a voice, a prescence. Like a warm animal pressed to the inside of my ribs, watching with me. When the song lifted a half step, she flicked an ear. Mine. Ours. We were both here.
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The Vow That Stays

RemyWe chose evening, because some decisions deserve a sky with a memory.The great room wasn’t dressed like a wedding; it was dressed like a promise. Lamps in amber glass burned low on the mantle, and someone—Kerri, of course—had set bowls of rosemary and yarrow under the windows so the drafts would carry the right kind of stories around the walls. Red twine knots hung at the four corners, protection in a language older than writ. In the center, we laid a small table with the plain things that keep a house alive: bread, salt, honey, a clay cup of water. Markings are teeth and oath, yes—but a Luna’s first duty is to make sure people eat.Only our closest came. Jacek stood to my right, easy and iron, the way a river looks just before it decides to move faster. Todd took the left, jaw tight only because he hadn’t yet let himself smile big enough to fit what the night was. Banks and Sharlotte flanked the hearth; Sean had positioned himself near the porch door like good news waiting to r
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A House That Knows My Name

HollandThe great room kept its beauty simple—warmth over spectacle. No flower walls, no rented chandeliers. Just the kind of lovely that lives in things that work. Amber lamps glowed along the mantle. Bowls of rosemary and yarrow waited in the window wells so drafts would carry steadiness instead of gossip. Someone had braided red twine into the corner posts—neat protection knots like little birds at rest. On the center table: bread, salt, honey, a clay cup of water. A house’s heart, laid out where anyone could see it.I came in on my own feet. The mark at my neck hummed like a small, good secret under fresh gauze. Heads turned; quiet fell—warm quiet, not the kind that says “prove it.” Jacek straightened in the doorframe. Banks’s mouth did a rare soft thing. Todd’s eyes were already glassy, which he’d deny all night.A human ceremony is simple if you let it be: witness, vow, food. We stood where the carpet has been worn by other nights and other feet. Remy took my hands, palms up. He
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