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So I focus on therealissue: I’m about to burst into flames.
It could be an exaggeration— or not. Will my organs melt out of my orifices if I skip the next step? It sure feels like it. So I elbow myself into the bathtub and flick on the cold water.
The first cool splash against my sizzling skin always has me sighing in relief, but it’s ludicrously short-lived. It’ll get better, though. Once I’m neck deep, I’ll stop feeling like a small, violent mammal has crawled inside my abdomen and is gnawing at my flesh while breathing fire. For now, though, my heart hammers against my rib cage, my body arches and contracts, and I swallow the pain of a hundred bones crumbling.
And since it’s all I can do, I sit, bury my face in my knees, and wait.
CHAPTER 8
She calls him out of the blue. He hasn’t saved her number, but it’s etched into the hidden layers of his skin. “I need a favor.”
“A favor. And am I— ” He stops and briefly covers the phone’s mic with his palm to tell Jorma that yes, he did sign whatever the hell was on his desk this morning. “Am I your favor guy, now?”
“Um. Do you want to be?”
“No. I don’t like doing nice things for people.”
Her low laugh makes his bodydo things. “The thing is . . . when Ana was being targeted, Lowe said you hid her.”
“I did.”
She wets her lips. He can hear it. “He said that the Northwest is the best place to disappear.”
A pause. “Is anyone after you?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s more like . . . I really need a break.”
Two months earlier
Southwest territory
KINDA DISAPPOINTING, HOW LITTLE DIFFERENCE THERE IS BETWEENHuman and Were physicians’ offices.
I probably should have known. When I asked Lowe if the Southwest hada, um, holistic healer I could see, or something, he looked at me with his restingI must have drop-kicked a lot of puppies in my past life to deserve thisface, and said,We do. We call them doctors. They have degrees and such.
Clearly,I’mthe problem here. The first time Misery brought me into Vampyre territory, I expected capes with standing collars, scarlet velvet, a menagerie of aloof Mexican free-tailed bats. Instead, I found commercial buildings and suit-wearing finance bros who crowded the elevators and screamed into their phones as though their lives depended on cryptocurrency. Even Owen, Misery’s twin, was less like a demonic scion of darkness and more of a lost, indolent fuckboy with daddy issues.
Then again, my impression of him might be influenced by the fact that he hit on me relentlessly, from the moment I entered the Nest till the second I stepped out. I never told Misery, and I’ll bring this to my shallow grave.
Very soon, apparently.
Dr. Henshaw’s office, tragically, is a new addition in a long line of unmet expectations. The plaque on the door followed by a whole-ass MD? The lack of evolution vector concept art in which anAustralopithecustransitions to Human and then to wolf? Zero terrifying forceps? Disinfectant wipes that smellexactlylike the ones I used for my apartment?
As I said: disappointing. The settingandthe news.
“Serena,” he calls. He is a kindly older man, good at his job. My issues stump him and challenge his self-perception, which accounts for half of the urgency in his tone. The other half . . . It cannot be easy, delivering the kind of information he just did.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault,” I say, hopping off the exam table with a smile.
I stuff my top back into my jeans. The weirdest part about this is that, as far as my days go, I was having agreatone. Today I haven’t puked. Haven’t passed out. Haven’t felt like all my mucous tissues were drenched in muriatic acid.Is it my fucking birthday, or what?I wondered on my way here.
Spoiler alert: it’s not. “Please don’t feel bad about this,” I reassure him. “It’s totally okay.”
“Serena, I’m not . . .” He pauses to stroke his thick gray beard. “Like I said, cortisol surge disorder is a very common illness for Weres, and a leading cause of death.”
“But it’s very unusual for a Were as young as me to have CSD, I’m not responding to treatment, and my condition is deteriorating faster than you’ve ever seen before.” I smile to show him that yes, I’ve been listening.
When I first came to Dr. Henshaw, my biggest fear was that he would tell me that my odd hybrid biology was too much of a medical head-scratcher to give me a diagnosis. It never occurred to me that my disease might be easy to identify but untreatable.
