Chapter 2 Why His Eyes Opened

I set the phone back in its cradle and did not move for a moment. The front desk clerk was still talking, her voice tinny and far away, asking if I wanted her to send the man up or have him wait in the lobby.

"Tell him to wait," I said. "Tell him the patient is not stable."

I hung up before she could answer and walked back down the corridor toward room seven. The growl had stopped. The door was closed and the light above it was steady, and I stood outside with my hand on the handle and counted my breaths, one two three four, the way I counted everything.

The truth was that I had known something was wrong with room seven for years. I had known it the way you know a storm is coming from the pressure behind your eyes, without being able to point at the sky and say there. I had known it every time I hung an IV bag and felt my wolf turn away from the smell of it, every time I walked past the door and caught that pine and rain scent and had to press my palm flat against my thigh to keep from reaching for it. I had told myself it was nothing. I had told myself a lot of things.

I opened the door.

Caleb was sitting up in bed with his back against the headboard and his hands flat on the blanket, and the amber of his eyes had gone darker, closer to brown, like a lamp turned down low. His dark gold hair was a mess against the pillow, and the hospital gown hung open at the collar, and I could see the pale line of the scar above his heart, the one the surgeons had never been able to explain.

"You came back," he said.

"I have questions."

"Then ask them quickly. My brother is in the building."

I stepped inside and let the door close behind me. "Silas Rourke."

"You know him."

"I know the name on the supply orders." I crossed my arms over my chest, mostly so I would not keep looking at my wrist. "I know that every bag that has hung on that pole for seven years was prepared in an office with his signature on the paper. I know that I have been the one hanging them."

Caleb's jaw worked. "Then you understand why I cannot walk out of this room and have a conversation with him in the lobby."

"Then tell me what you are."

"I am an Alpha." He said it plainly, without pride. "Of the Rourke pack. My territory is the hollows east of here, the ridge and the old mine road and the stretch of forest the county maps call Miller's Ridge. My brother has been running it since I fell."

"And the bullet?"

"Silver. It went in here." He touched the scar. "It has not moved since. It will not move until the curse is broken, and the curse will not break while I am lying in this bed being fed wolfsbane through a tube."

I had heard the word curse before. My husband had used it once, late at night, when he thought I was asleep. He had said it to someone on the phone in a low voice, and when I asked him about it the next morning he had told me it was nothing, a story from the old country, and he had kissed my forehead and gone to work and never mentioned it again.

"What does the curse do?" I asked.

Caleb looked at me for a long moment. His eyes had that strange amber light in them again, and I could feel it on my skin, a warmth that had no business being there.

"It keeps me between forms," he said. "I cannot shift back. I cannot walk. I have been a wolf in a man's body for seven years, and every time I try to move the silver pushes back. Your husband knew that. He was the one who found me after the bullet went in."

The room went very still. I could hear the IV pump click, one two three four, and I could hear my own heart in my ears.

My husband had been dead for seven years. He had been a quiet man with a wide smile and hands that smelled of engine oil, and he had worked nights too, and one morning he had not come home. The police had found his truck on the old mine road and nothing else. I had buried an empty coffin and told my son that his father was in the ground, and I had moved into a small apartment near the hospital and taken every night shift I could get, because nights were the only hours where the grief did not catch me.

"You are lying," I said.

"I am not."

"My husband was a mechanic. He fixed trucks and he came home smelling of grease and he never once told me he was a wolf."

"Then he lied to you too." Caleb's voice was not unkind. "But he was my Gamma, and he was the best of us, and on the night I fell he pulled me out of the rain and put a hand on my chest and swore he would find a way to break the curse. He went looking for the heir. He never came back."

I thought of the way my husband used to stand at the kitchen window at night with his hand against the glass, looking east. I thought of the way he had said my name sometimes, as if he were checking that I was still in the room. I thought of the last morning, when he had kissed Eli on the top of the head and said something in a language I did not know, and I had asked him what it meant and he had said, nothing, just something my mother used to say.

"Why did your eyes open tonight?" I asked.

Caleb was quiet for a while. Then he said, "Because you touched me."

"I touch you every night. I take your pulse every two hours."

"You take my pulse with two fingers and you do not linger. Tonight you straightened the sheet. You put your hand on my chest to check the line, and you left it there for a moment longer than you meant to, and I smelled you through the wolfsbane for the first time in seven years." He tilted his head. "You smell like my Gamma, but you are not my Gamma. You smell like the place he came from. You smell like the person he was protecting."

The mark on my wrist had begun to ache, a dull warmth that spread up my arm and into my shoulder. I pressed my other hand over it.

"There is something on my wrist," I said. "It was not there before tonight."

Caleb closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the amber had gone bright and hard, and his voice was lower.

"The mark," he said. "That is the bond. It means the moon has chosen you for me, and it means my brother will kill you the moment he learns of it."

I stepped back toward the door. "I want nothing to do with your bond or your brother or your pack. I have a son. I have a life."

"Your son." Caleb's eyes did not move from mine. "The boy with the champagne hair who leaves the drawings on your desk. The one who dreams of the ridge."

I stopped with my hand on the door handle, and the whole corridor outside seemed to go silent.

"How do you know about my son?" I said.

Caleb did not answer. He was looking past me at the door, and his face had changed, the way a man's face changes when he hears the first crack of thunder far off.

Then the door opened behind me, and a voice I had never heard before said, "Well. Look at this. The sleeper wakes, and the night nurse is holding his hand."

I turned. The man in the doorway had black hair and grey eyes, and he was smiling, and he was wearing a coat that cost more than my car. He looked past me at the bed and his smile widened.

"Hello, brother," Silas said. "I brought you flowers."

In his hand was a small glass vase, and in the vase were seven white flowers, and every one of them was wolfsbane.