Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [109]
My heart did a small painful skip. She looked exhausted. I brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. Brid’s eyes popped open. Then she kissed me firmly on the lips, a kiss I returned with little hesitation.
“It’s good to see you too,” I said.
“I wanted to check on you sooner, but Daddy ordered me to rest.”
“Sounds like a good order.”
“Yeah.” She leaned on my chest, staring into my eyes. It was unsettling, like she was examining me for something.
“You’re kind of creeping me out,” I said.
She poked my rib cage. “You feel like taking a little walk?” The clinic differed from regular hospitals in several ways. One, I didn’t have to wear paper peek-a-boo pajamas. Someone with a sense of humor had stocked the place with flannel wolfman pajamas, the images resembling the monster movies from the ’40s. Very flattering. No slippers, though. Brid told me that most of the pack avoided shoes when they could, so they didn’t bother. So I got to walk around the hospital in nothing but some socks they’d dug up for me.
Another difference was that the building itself resembled a big house more than anything institutional, at least in layout. The medicinal smell remained, and most of the surfaces were easy to wash. There were a lot of fresh flowers about, and plenty of skylights. I didn’t see much staff either. And if the waffles were anything to go by, the food tasted about eight thousand times better.
The other differences ran toward the odd side of things. Some of the rooms were glorified cages. The outer rooms, like the hallways and lounge areas, had no windows. When I pointed that out, Brid said it was in case someone escaped before their release time. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that meant.
A few of the beds had metal restraints, which Brid told me were made out of silver.
“I thought silver was bad,” I said, looking into one of the rooms.
“They’re padded so the silver doesn’t scar the wrist.”
“Why use it at all, then?”
“Weres can’t break silver.” Brid shrugged, slipping an arm around me. “When werewolves grow up in this city, they have their pack to guide them through the change. It’s natural, a part of life. But not everyone has the benefits of a pack,” she said, “and some are outsiders. Everything about the process is new to them. Adult shape-shifters are strong.” She frowned, and I could tell she didn’t like what she had to say.
“Occasionally, we have to restrain them for their own safety, until they learn.”
Brid tightened her arm around me as we came to a door. I could feel the worry pouring off her. Now that I’d noticed it, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t felt it earlier. A thought seeped into my brain. It had been a tumultuous day, and I had believed that if anything was seriously wrong, someone would have told me.
“What’s wrong with Ramon?” I asked. Fear clenched my gut.
In answer, Brid opened the door.
I had to force my feet to take me into the room. Brid wouldn’t be this anxious if Ramon were okay. She also would’ve answered me. The flip side was that someone would have told me immediately if he’d died. I pushed myself past the doorway. Whatever had happened, Ramon had survived. We could get past anything else.
Ramon lay on the bed, arms and legs chained, an IV tube jutting out of his forearm. His skin looked red, flushed. Sweat drenched his sheets. He wore no shirt, so I could see the flesh roiling beneath his skin. Bran stood at his side, watching him, concern clear on his face.
“What happened?” I said. “Did he get—” I cleared my throat. “The only thing I saw was him hitting the floor.”
“He landed square on a broken glass vial,” Brid whispered. Her voice sounded hoarse and sad. “No one knew Douglas had been collecting blood samples. Or what he had planned for them.” She hugged herself. “Rare ones, too. We don’t know where he found it.”
I rubbed my sweaty palms on my pants. “What did he get exposed to?”
“Bear,” Bran said. He stood back, giving the bed a wide berth.
Brid stood back, too. They were treating him as if he