Chapter Twenty-six
The Morning of December 29th - 2012 - Patrick
As soon as the moon began it’s descent towards the horizon, Pat turned south around the Sound, heading back towards where they’d parked the cars. He sensed Vector turning to follow him, wuffling softly in a sort of wordless question. Pat couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt restless. Not the sort of restless that came with his wolf craving to run and howl, but like something forgotten tugging at your memory, and you know it’s important and you’ll regret ignoring it later.
He shook of his wolf skin and dug out his ruined clothes from the Camero.
“What’s up?” Vector asked, following his lead.
Pat shrugged. “We’ve got work to do.”
His cousin squinted up at the sky, still mostly dark. “I guess.”
“You can stay out with the pack if you want.”
“You’re my ride, remember?”
“I’m sure Grace or Mal would be willing to—”
“It’s fine. You’re right. You want to go pick up Mallory?”
Pat snarled at the smell wafting off his jeans. “I think I need to find something clean to wear first.”
Vector smirked and climbed into the car. Back at Pat’s townhouse, there was no sign of Ethan and his scent was just stale enough to indicate that he hadn’t returned the night before. Pat sighed and shoved his doubts to one side while he went upstairs to clean up and change, offering the downstairs bathroom for Vector’s use.
As he stood in his bedroom a little later, drying his hair, he heard Vector’s heartbeat speed up, drawing him downstairs to the living room. His cousin had showered and changed back into his clothes from the night before, hair wet, arrested in the act of buttoning his shirt by Ethan’s mess, which seemed to have drawn his attention.
“What?” Pat demanded. He saw his phone lying on the hall table, but when he tried it the battery was dead.
“You said you hadn’t found anything!” Vector accused him.
“Found what?” Pat threw his towel over the back of the couch and dropped onto the cushion next to his cousin. There was an outlet behind the sofa and a charging cord ran underneath it, allowing him to plug in his phone. With that done, he looked at the papers: “This stuff isn’t mine. It’s Ethan’s.”
“He’s got Lachlan’s SPD file. Where the hell did he get this?”
Pat frowned and started sifting through a stack of photos, standard size for crime scene photos and showing industrial buildings and then a dozen with pictures of dead bodies who had had their throats ripped out followed by candids of people smiling—the sort of picture you’d put on a missing person flier, with names written on the back in a familiar hand. Not Ethan’s.
Pat felt his stomach lurch.
“There’s a journal too.” Vector offered it to him.
The same handwriting inside, and he didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was right there in front of his face. A couple of evidence bags had been discarded under the table itself. Pat grabbed them, hands shaking, and sniffed the plastic. After so many years, they smelled musty and like Ethan from where he’d broken the seals, but under that…
“This is Adam’s investigation.”
Vector looked up sharply. “Did you tell Ethan you were looking for his research?”
Pat shook his head, trying to press back on the numb sensation spreading through his body. On the floor, his phone beeped as it went through the stages of powering back on. Across the house, the landline started ringing and both wolves jumped.
“I’ll get it,” Vector said. He returned a minute later, face pale, and held it out to Pat. “It’s Mallory.”
There were two dozen missed call notifications on his home screen, a few of them from Mallory, but others matched the number for Dispatch, and that sense of dread had swelled up inside him. There must have been another victim.
Pat took the receiver. “What happened?” he asked putting it to his ear.
“Clanahan—Pat,” Mallory sounded unsure.
He frowned.
“They’ve been trying to get a hold of you for hours, fucking Dispatch, they didn’t think about it being the full moon. They only just got a hold of me—”
“What?” he cut her off; it was strange to hear Mallory babble.
“Patrol found Ethan just after midnight. He’s in the hospital. You really need to get over there.”
Someone—Vector, he supposed—took the phone from his hands before he dropped it or crushed it or threw into the nearest wall. He heard the wolf talking to Mallory in a low voice, but the words all sounded like static. Pat sat on the couch, frozen, trying to think back over the last couple of hours, certain that he should have noticed something was wrong. Surely.
“Hey, no, Patty, give me your keys,” Vector said intercepting him at the door. He’d hung up the landline and planted himself between Pat and—he needed to get out of the house. He needed to get to Ethan. “We’re going, but you’re going to let me drive us there,” his cousin said, implacable.
Vector wasn’t a small wolf, he’d always been tall and lithe, whipcord agile and fast, but still considerably less intimidating that Pat himself. But now he didn’t hesitate when Pat tried to bully past him, grabbing Pat’s arm and wrestling him into the wall that he’d kissed Ethan against just the other night. Pat had to swallow against his empty stomach, bile bitter in the back of his throat. He let Vector take his keys and lead him to the car.
The drive passed in a flash and then they were parked outside—well, he didn’t know what hospital, hadn’t payed close enough attention, didn’t really fucking care at that point. Pat was out of the Camero and headed inside as Vector hustled to keep up.
“You should let me—”
He shrugged off the other wolf’s hand and made a beeline for the emergency entrance, nose working to catch a whiff of his mate. He need hardly have relied on his sense of smell, now that he knew what to be worried about, that sense of unease from earlier had crested into full blown anxiety that tugged at his attention, drawing him into the hospital, down uniform white hallways, past a see of faceless humans—none of them the right human—and past a busy nurses station to an ordinary looking door, room number 402.
Through the pane of safety glass he could see the edge of a bed, dim lights, a scene not entirely unfamiliar for them. And inside: Ethan, lying beneath a worn hospital blanket, his arms straight at his sides with one hooked up to a clear IV line and the other a red bag that had to have been blood. His face was nearly as white as the pillow under his head, hair shockingly blond by comparison. The mage had his eyes closed, deep purple bruises blooming around his eyes and over his cheekbones, not the sort you got from being tired but real fucking bruises where it looked like someone had pounded their fists into his face. Pat couldn’t tell much more because his neck was wrapped in thick gauze.
His neck.
It was a familiar scene, the way their story always seemed to cycle back around to this: one of them lying still and ghostly in a hospital bed.
“He’s been unconscious since they brought him in,” Mallory said behind him. She looked drawn and tired, which was to be expected since she’d been up most of the night with the younger McClanahan children before this.
“He lost a lot of blood. They’re doing transfusions.”
Pat nodded mutely and stepped inside, closing the door before she or Vector tried to follow him.
They had been here before, yes, Ethan nearly dead at the hands of a werewolf born wrong and made worse by his family. And now, unlike then, Pat didn’t hesitate; he carefully moved Ethan’s arm—the right since he could see now that the left was in a cast—out of the way and slid onto the narrow bed beside him. He brought one hand up to cup the side of the mage’s face and tried to breath through the panic thundering through him, tried to will his own life through the places their skin touched. He wished that he could tuck his nose in against Ethan’s pulse, but was thwarted by the bandages.
Unlike before, he did this sure with ever cell in his being that it would work, that unconscious or not Ethan was his mate, and that was enough for Pat to bring him back from whatever brink he teetered on.
“One of these days, we’ve got to stop doing this to each other,” he murmured into the mage’s hospital gown.
And then he waited for Ethan to open his eyes.
Waited.
Waited.
…Waited.
And then, there, an uptick in the sluggish heart beating under his ear. Pat curled himself tighter around his mate’s body and whispered into the silence between them, “We’ve got to stop doing this to one another.”
“‘Kay,” a rough voice answered him.