Page 74 of Wolf Bane
“Fuck,” he hissed, stepping into the loose bottoms.“We can’t leave him here.”He raked his tangle of dark hair back from his face, breathing hard.Shifting took a lot out of a were and Tyler was on the verge of collapse.As soon as that adrenaline crashed, he was going to be a heap of sweaty, exhausted, painful muscles that would be damn near impossible to move without help.
And Justin, bless him, was on the razor-thin edge of a breakdown, so asking him to help heave Tyler down and out of the world’s worst escape room wasn’t in the cards.
“Justin,” I said sternly, dragging his attention my way.“Do what Tyler said.Get everything you can.”
“I don’t have anything to save it on.It’s all on an intranet here, and there’s no way to email or anything, and they took our phones, and?—”
“And,” I interrupted, “grab a paper and pen and start writing it down.I’ll go through the desk drawers, see if there’s a flash drive or something.Tyler?—”
“We’re not alone in the building.They’re gonna find Daniel sooner rather than later, that’s if he doesn’t get out on his own.I’ll do a sweep.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.“Between the three of us, I’m most likely to survive running into another were,” he said, shrugging apologetically.“Besides, I’m already naked under here.Don’t want to mess up your nice shirt.”
I glanced down at my torn, blood-soaked work shirt and sighed.“The dry cleaner will never get this out, huh?”
Tyler’s face, so similar to Ethan’s but so markedly different, twisted in a familiar way and he forced a laugh.“Well, maybe they’ll appreciate the challenge.”He shook his limbs out and headed for the door.“Block the door when I go.Don’t let anyone in unless it’s me.”
Justin took a step towards him, half-reaching.Tyler smiled, closed the distance and didn’t kiss him like I was half-expecting, half-hoping.Instead, he grabbed Justin by the shoulders and gave him a gentle but firm shake, then leaned in and justbreathedagainst his neck.“You’ll be okay,” Tyler muttered.“I swear.”
Just made a garbled, confused sound and nodded, eyes wet.“I don’t feel like I will, but I believe you more than my brain right now.”
Tyler’s expression was stricken as he pulled away.He didn’t look at me when he passed, just tossed a reminder to block the door after him, stepped out into the corridor and pulled the doors closed behind him.
Eliza was still thumping inside the cupboard, the metal of the door dented outward now from her fist and probably knees.
“Justin—”
“Go.Find me a flash drive.Or fucking paper or something.”He sniffed.“Damn it.Okay.I got this.I survived med school and residency.My spicy brain can do this.”
“Yourwhat?”
He blushed.“Shut up.Go.”
“Yes sir.”I laughed, startled.“Okay.We got this.”
And we did, in fact, got this.
Kind of.
There was no miraculous stash of hidden flash drives or a secret laptop just waiting with all of the information on it.Instead, I found one and a half legal pads—someone had used half of the first one to doodle, play tic-tac-toe, and make a grocery list that included way too much sodium for good cardiac health—and some pens that still had ink in them.Justin was shaky, eyeing the rattling cupboard door, but nodded when I handed him the paper and pens.
“I’ll start with the highlights,” he muttered.“Some of this we already know.”
“Then write down what we don’t, or what we wouldn’t be able to find out on our own with our resources.”
I spun away, forcing myself not to tip over when my head decided to get all wobbly and wavy.Robards was breathing steadily, albeit shallowly, otherwise perfectly still.He looked, I thought, like the patients I’d seen during my training, the ones close to death.Chalky gray, face sunken, lips cracked; he wasn’t the man who’d been in my office about a week before.He wasn’t the laughing, friendly man who’d flirted with Reba and teased me on a Monday morning about the tie I’d worn.
He wasn’t even the one who’d suddenly, catastrophically, experienced his first shift in my office.
He was a husk.
Hesitantly, I reached out to touch his arm, bare atop the standard issue hospital sheet someone—Eliza, likely—had pulled up to cover his chest.
“Mr.Robards,” I whispered, “I don’t know if you can hear me.They always told us comatose patients could, so I have to assume they were right.I don’t know how to help you.I don’t know if Icanhelp you.But I’m not going to leave you here, okay?We’ll get you out of here.Get you to people who can.”
Which meant I needed to find a phone or some way to send a message.
