Page 23 of Lost and Bound
I stared at him in disbelief. “We’re not criminals, Calder! We’re not—on the run. We didn’t need to break and enter, we could’ve…” I realized I didn’t know what else we could’ve done after all, since I’d been unconscious and unable to call anyone I could maybe ask for help. It wasn’t like we had any money. But apparently we’d had a car, or we wouldn’t be here. A stolen car? “How did we get here? And couldn’t you have, I don’t know, lifted the guards’ wallets or something? Get us some cash?”
“So you’re not a criminal,” he said. “So what. Now you are. Also so fucking what. I wasn’t exactly focusing on picking pockets when I ripped them limb from limb. I took one of their cars. That’s how we got here.”
“But—”
“Picture me trying to check into a hotel carrying your bloody, unconscious body, Jared,” he snapped, showing a rare moment of actual emotion. Of course that emotion had to be annoyance.
But okay. Yes. That would be a one-way trip to jail—or to a bloodbath massacre when they tried to arrest Calder—and human authorities wouldn’t be all that sympathetic to our wild-sounding story, one of several reasons why neither he nor I would have even considered going to the police in the first place.
All right. We’d broken and entered. We had shifter senses; if anyone showed up here, we’d be able to get out before we were caught.
So being a criminal, in this small sense, I could live with.
But on the run?
What the fuck had happened to Jonathan Hawthorne, anyway?
I looked up at Calder and found him examining me, a strange look in his eyes. It cleared as soon as I caught him at it, and that hard, neutral mask dropped back into place.
“Do you think anyone’s coming after us?” The thought chilled my blood, but we had to consider it. “There was another warlock. Hawthorne. I knew him before—before. He’s the one who kidnapped me and put me there. Was he the one who brought you—”
“I don’t think anyone’s after us,” he said, running over my questions like a bulldozer. Okay, message received. No questions. Although I was wildly curious. “We got away clean. No one was monitoring from a distance, I’m pretty sure. Or one of the other prisoners was pretty sure. A fairy. He seemed to know his stuff. And we didn’t leave any fucking witnesses.”
I mulled that over. “Hawthorne might still be out there, though. And he knows me. He knows where I’m from, my family.” I went still, the realization hitting me like a ton of bricks. Hawthorne knew me. He knew my family. If he went looking for me…or in the two years since I’d been gone…fuck, fuck,fuck,anythingcould’ve happened. “Oh, gods,” I choked out. “What if he—what if they—I have to call them. I have to call Ianright now.”
I scrambled off the bed, throwing the blankets aside, heedless of my nudity and that I didn’t have a phone and didn’t know where to find one.
“Easy,” I heard Calder saying from behind me, sounding startled. “You’re not up to much—”
I ignored him, barreling out of the bedroom and into a cozy living room, with plush seating and a TV and a bookshelf decorated with tchotchkes. The normality of it had me reeling, falling against the doorframe and barely catching myself with one hand.
Or maybe that was starvation, dehydration, blood loss, and the aftereffects of healing a mortal wound.
Calder’s hands landed on my waist, and I jumped a foot in the air, stumbling away from him and catching myself on the back of a floral-print couch this time.
“I’ll find a phone, if there’s a landline,” he said from behind me. Sounding more resigned this time, and maybe with an undertone of…concern? Christ. I was hallucinating now. “Wait a second.”
I didn’t have much choice, since I was leaning on my arms, head hanging down, swaying like a drunkard.
He was back a moment later, and something warm wrapped around my shoulders. “I found someone’s bathrobe,” he said. “Come on.”
I still didn’t want his hands on me, or maybe I wanted them too much, but either way they shouldn’t be there…but through the terrycloth it felt like something I could let myself bear. Or let myself have.
He guided me across the room and through a doorway into the kitchen, another bastion of middle-class kitsch. A clock shaped like a chicken dominated the wall over the sink, catching my horrified eye the second I walked in.
Calder nudged me into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, and then went off somewhere, leaving me to contemplate the salt and pepper shakers, two ducks wearing jaunty hats.
My stomach rumbled. I needed to call Ian, urgency thrumming in my veins, but…I didn’t have much else in my veins. I had to replenish my strength. Not just from what I’d been through in the past couple of days, but in general. I hadn’t had the chance to look in a mirror yet, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. At least I didn’t have a prisoner’s long straggly beard. Hawthorne had done some kind of magic to stun my hair follicles, and I hadn’t grown any facial hair in years. They’d probably done something similar to Calder, but his stubble showed that it hadn’t worked very well.
What had happened to Ian and Matt, to the pack, while I’d been gone? If anything had gone wrong, if they were… Ian and Matt could already be dead.
Nate could be dead, and that would almost certainly be partly my fault.
All of it would be my fault.
I shied away from it, shuddering. I couldn’t bear the thought. They had to be okay. They simply had to be. And if Hawthorne was coming after them, I’d warn them in time. I had to believe it, or I’d go crazy. Crazier.
Calder came back into the kitchen, and I looked up to see he’d found a pair of sweatpants, clearly meant for a much shorter and fatter man.
