CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“If you people don’t settle down, I’m going to make you all get the hell out of my emergency room,” Ellery Foye shouted.

The din ebbed momentarily, but the silence had also given certain people an avenue to edge into the carrel that housed Lily’s gurney.

Lance put his body between the curtain opening and Mr. Baxter, and called to the witch with the stethoscope, “I’m her husband. I’m next of kin.”

“And I made her,” Mr. Baxter said.

The din kicked up again with various opinions springing up from the masses. Everyone was taking different sides.

Lance had known from the start that Ellery wasn’t having it. “Yo! We don’t need half the town here,” she said. “You can go. She’s stable and we’re going to move her to a room. You can leave.”

Of the ten or so people huddled in the triage area—some of whom had been cleared for minor injuries of their own—only one peeled off. It was Diana. She arced around to Lance, patted his shoulder, and said, “I’ll come back after she’s been moved. I’m going to see if I can chase down Tarik and ask some questions before he gets too far. He vanished with those Jaguars and I don’t know where he took them.”

Lance let out a quiet growl through clenched teeth. For the time being, he was going to pretend that Diana hadn’t been responsible for the Coyote pile-on that kept him from getting to his wife. She’d obviously assumed that Lance would lose his shit in the way she knew he could. At that moment, he might have thought that killing was a reasonable option. Diana tended to be more forward thinking as far as strategy went. If he’d seriously hurt one of those Jaguars, there was no telling what kind of new conflicts they’d been dealing with in the near future.

On the bright side, if he could even call it that, Lance was coming to understand how Blue felt when people disturbed his wife’s peace.

“See if Ma needs anything while you’re out there?” Lance said to Diana.

“Yep.”

Ellery folded her arms over her chest. “Still too many people here. Get the hell out or I’m going to sic the fire extinguisher on you.

The collection of Coyotes scattered at that threat. Belle stayed put. Lance didn’t really expect her to go anywhere and doubted Ellery would make her sister-in-law leave, anyway. Everyone knew Belle did what she wanted.

Ellery let out a breath and smoothed some loose hair back from her temples. “All right. Now I can hear myself think.”

“You said she needed some blood?” Mr. Baxter asked. “I’m a universal donor. Just tell me where to go.”

“Thanks for the offer. We gave her a pint already and some fluids. Might need a couple more, but we held back for the time being.”

“What the hell for? Give it to her!”

Lance could tell by the twitching of Ellery’s jaw hinges that she didn’t appreciate the older man’s tone, but he figured better Mr. Baxter than him. The woman was married to the Cougar alpha. A woman who could wrangle that hard-ass Mason Foye wasn’t going to be anyone’s pushover.

Lance looked over his shoulder and through the partially drawn curtains at the woman in the bed. Unconscious and so pale.

It was all his fault. He should have never left her side. She wasn’t built for shifter bullshit, and he’d dragged her right into the murk of it.

“We held back,” Ellery said tightly and in a quiet voice that wouldn’t be overheard by the humans in the emergency area, “because we don’t know if Jaguars can turn people the same way other shifters can. We don’t know if human blood is what she needs yet.”

Mr. Baxter went almost as pale as Lily.

Lance was in a semi-forgiving mood so he held out an arm to break the man’s fall in case he needed to pass out.

He’d already had his surge of panic over the potential that Lily might be made a shifter from the wound she got during the fight. The only reason he wasn’t tearing his hair out at the moment was that a certain cranky nurse had threatened to stab him with a triple dose of some kind of sedative five minutes after he’d arrived. He needed to have his wits about him so he’d shaped up fast after the threat.

“I asked Blanca and Guadalupe, but they didn’t know,” Belle said. “They’ve never tried to turn anyone and they’ve never seen anyone do it.”

“I’ve got to ask,” Ellery said. “Before we go too far down this rabbit hole, is there any chance that Lily would want to be a Jaguar? Because in that case, we’d just wait and see and not do anything to intervene. If she doesn’t want to, we’d give her a bag of some other kind of shifter’s blood. In theory, the two different strains should battle it out and her immune system would eliminate whatever’s left of both.”

Mr. Baxter said no emphatically.

Belle gave a more half-hearted no.

Lance, though, didn’t say anything.

He stared at the mint-and-blue linoleum on the floor and rubbed a scuff with the toe of his sneaker.

He wished he knew. A week ago, he would have said, “No fucking way,” but he hadn’t really understood her then. He hadn’t understood a lot of things.

“Lance?” Ellery was beside him, hands in the pockets of her scrubs, brown eyes soft with concern.

“I…I don’t know. I don’t want to answer for her.”

“Neither do I,” Belle admitted. “But I’m thinking about Hannah and how she got turned and how she didn’t have a say. Maybe she would have chosen to be a Cougar one day anyway, but not turned by some stranger. She had her choice taken away. I just want to give Lily hers back.”

Ellery huffed. “And if she decides she wants it, there are plenty of people around who’ll do the job.”

“No,” Mr. Baxter said.

“Gods, shut up,” came an impatient voice from the bank of chairs near the hall.

Lance hadn’t even noticed Glenda sitting there, legs stretched out, head laid back tiredly against the wall.

Her sideways glare to her older brother was incinerating. It was probably a good thing Ellery knew how to work that fire extinguisher.

“Glenda! W-what are you doing here?” Mr. Baxter sputtered.

Lance used the momentary distraction to peek into the carrel. He was hoping Lily would perk up and move a little, but she hadn’t. Her blood pressure was way too low. The thought that she’d been like that twice in three months and she hadn’t wanted to tell him about the first time practically took his legs out from under him. He could blame himself for both. That wasn’t supposed to happen—mates weren’t supposed to hurt each other.

“Belle called me. I came to make sure no one made any rash decisions,” Glenda said. She got slowly to her feet and strolled over to the carrel. She gave the end of Belle’s ponytail a playful flick. “Floyd had a rule when he was running the Cougars. No one got changed unless they asked to be, with his exception being for his wife, who would never, ever, ever get changed under any circumstances.” She chuckled and added in a whisper, “Oh, Floyd.”

“I never knew you wanted it,” Belle said.

“Well, I didn’t, really.” Glenda shrugged. “But I’d waver every so often and do the what-if thing. Floyd knew better. Becoming a shifter isn’t something one should waver about.”

“I thought he wanted you to—” Mr. Baxter pinched off the words and gave his head a confused shake. “I assumed that…”

“Even after all these years, you still want to cling to the old misconceptions. I thought we were beyond that. I thought when you let Lily into our lives that you understood, but you don’t, do you? You assumed that Floyd’s goal from the time we were children was to corrupt me and to make me what he was, but you never asked, did you?”

He grimaced, and, slowly, admitted, “Even if I had, I may not have believed you.”

She shrugged. “Because that’s convenient, right? To just believe what you want because it suits your narrative? It was easier for you to just think of them as those people like our parents and grandparents always did instead of listening to me when I tried to offer a different perspective.”

The conversation was veering toward the realm of uncomfortably personal, so Lance slipped back into the carrel with Lily. He was about to pull the curtains together when Ellery shimmied in through them.

She set about checking Lily’s vitals and IV drip. “I prefer to excuse myself from Foye- flavored drama whenever I can,” she said quietly. “I’d always thought witches were dramatic, but the shifters here go above and beyond.” She pivoted the stand holding the bag of donor blood and peered at the nearly depleted thing. “What’s your blood type, anyway?”

“B positive. Why?”

“Want to give up a couple of pints?” She eyed him up and down. “I’m sure you can cope with a few fewer red blood cells for a while.”

“You mean, for Lily?”

“Yeah.” Grim-faced, she pressed her palms to the edge of the bed and looked at him dead-on. “I’m not going to wait to find out what Tarik knows or doesn’t know. If Jaguarism is communicable, I want to do whatever I can immediately to make her body fight it off. Tell me that’s what she wants, and I’ll send you up to the blood lab.”

“I—”

“Lance,” she snarled. “All you’re doing is giving her a choice.”

“But if you give her my blood, isn’t there a risk the Coyote DNA will assert itself too forcefully and she ends up being a dog instead of what she was before?” He shook his head. “I can’t risk that. I don’t want that for her.”

Ellery smirked. “Sounds like you’ve already made a choice.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

Perhaps he had. It just didn’t feel right.

“Can’t you ask her when she wakes up?”

“I don’t know when that’ll be,” Ellery said, “and we could be losing precious time keeping that shifter DNA from finding a foothold. We know a hell of a lot more about how this works now than we did when Hannah got mauled. There are no guarantees, but I do think you need to be smart about this.”

She was right, but so was Glenda. They didn’t want to do anything rash. It was Lily’s decision. He knew what he wanted, and everyone else probably knew what they wanted, too, but it was up to her. They’d spent so much of their time together doing reckless things. Now came the time to be careful. It wasn’t a decision that could be easily reversed.

He rolled up his sleeve. “I’ll give you the blood, but let her decide if she wants it when she wakes up. Explain to her the stakes. That she could do nothing and risk being a Jaguar in a month’s time. She could take the blood in the hopes the strains neutralize each other, knowing that she could just as well end up being a Coyote. Or the crazy scheme might just fucking work and she’d walk away from the mess, perfectly human.”

He didn’t think he was being too selfish in hoping that he’d get to take home the same Lily he’d had that morning, and he actually didn’t care much if he was.

“Hopefully she’ll be awake soon, yeah?” he asked Ellery.

“Hopefully.” She gestured to the curtain opening. “I’ll show you where to go.”

“If I’m not back soon and she wakes, tell her I’m checking on Martha.”

“What are you really going to be doing?”

“What makes you think I’m lying?”

Ellery gave him a slow blink.

He shoved his hand through his hair and shifted his weight. “Okay. I’m going to find out about the Jaguars. See if Estela and Josefina left town.”

“Don’t do anything dangerous.”

“You my alpha now?”

“Honey, in this emergency room, I’m everyone’s alpha.”

*

“We’ve really got to stop meeting up like this,” Ellery said as Lily forced her eyelids up.

“Ugh.”

“Yeah. You look like shit, girlie.”

“Don’t wanna talk about it,” Lily said hoarsely.

“I don’t want to upset you, but I figure that given your frighteningly low blood pressure, you could handle the stress.” Ellery counted off on her fingers, “Belle, Glenda, and your pop are outside.”

Lily reached weakly for the bed rails and tried to sit up, but all she managed to do was put a painful strain on the side of her body and make her light head feel spinny. She immediately made herself horizontal. “Oh God. That’s right. I had chunks taken off me by a Jaguar. Where’s Lance, Ellery? Is he here? I remember him getting piled on. He was—”

“Hey,” Ellery snapped.

Lily shut up. Ellery knew when to get to the point. Lily hadn’t given her the chance.

“Your wounds aren’t as bad as they feel, probably,” Ellery said. “They’re deep but reparable and pretty clean. Plastic surgeon’s going to take a look at them tomorrow.”

“Where’s Lance? Why isn’t he here? Is he okay?” Maybe he was in the bed in the next stall. Lily reached left as far as she could to try to grasp the curtain but barely managed to fling her arm over the rail.

“He’s fine, honey. A couple of bruises. No big deal for a shifter of his strength.”

“Where is he? And where’s Martha?”

“Calm down, ’kay? Martha’s with Cheryl and Blanca. Lance was here a while ago. Left you some blood and went out to see what shook out with the Jaguars.”

“Ugh.” Lily settled down low and wished for a bedpan. IV fluids went straight through her. “I hope he doesn’t hurt them.”

“You’re a mess. You know that?”

“I think we both know that I already know that. You said he left me blood?”

Ellery nodded. “You want it?”

“Why didn’t you give it to me?”

“Because he wanted me to ask you as soon as you woke.”

“Why?” Lily hated feeling so useless and slow on the draw.

“Do you want to be a Jaguar? We don’t know if a bite and scratch will get you turned.”

“Dear lord, no,” she said emphatically. Unfortunately, emphatic hurt, but she lacked the energy to even muster up a good cringe. “Why would I want to be the only Jaguar in a town of pack animals?”

Ellery’s lips quirked up at the corner. “Hey. Good logic, there. Hadn’t thought of that. Well, listen. The Coyote component of his blood may help stave off the Jaguarism Josefina may have transmitted to you, but there’s a risk.”

“Of me becoming a Coyote, right?”

“Exactly. My hope is that your white blood cells notice the commotion between the warring foreign bits and eradicates all of it. There obviously isn’t any medical literature about this. We’re doing the best we can, using what we know and word of mouth from other recent shifter attacks, and applying common sense. I can tell you for sure that human blood isn’t going to be enough.”

“Do it,” Lily said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I know the risks.” She didn’t want to be a Coyote—and certainly not before she’d given Lance a few babies—but she was going to go with the flow. She was glad she could muster up any optimism at all after the very interesting past few months she’d had.

“I’ll get the blood and inform your bickering relatives of your decision. We’re going to admit you and move you up into a room.”

“Great. Great.” Lily squirmed uncomfortably and pressed her thighs together as tight as she could. “Get me a bedpan first, ’kay?”