Laura's Wolf (Werewolf Marines) (41 page)

“Thanks,” Roy managed.

Miguel laid him back down and pulled the blankets up over him. “You’re welcome, Roy. You did the same for me.”

Roy wanted to say more, but he was drifting off again. For an endless time, he was caught between states, neither asleep nor awake, chilled and confused and vainly trying to wake. His back ached, his head was splitting, his throat was raw, and he felt like the slightest movement would make him throw up.

When he did manage to open his eyes, Keisha was frowning over him. He was too sick to talk, but apparently he didn’t need to; she filled a syringe and stuck a needle in his arm.

Laura asked her a question, and Keisha nodded. Laura reached into a cup, then slipped something into his mouth. A sliver of cold, a piece of ice, melting slowly, drop by drop easing the nausea and the pain in his throat.

Then he was running with DJ in his arms, trying to get to cover that always blew up right before he reached it. Charcoal cracked off under his hands. The air was rank with the smell of chemicals and charring, smoke and blood.

The scent changed to the freshness of rain and earth and new grass. Nicolette sat on the edge of his bed, her arm out of the sling, with one hand on his shoulder and the other on the pistol she had holstered at her side.

“You’re safe, Roy,” she told him. “I’ve got your back.”

“Thanks,” he said, when he’d caught his breath enough to speak.

Nicolette’s posture was upright but relaxed, alert rather than vibrating with tension. He reached out with the pack sense, only belatedly remembering that he was too weak to open it himself, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he was strong enough after all. There she was, all steely determination and fierce discipline and smoldering rage. But she no longer felt like a ticking bomb; her anger pre-dated Gregor, even if she’d built up a lot of it since him.

She sent him an image of her dragging him off a battlefield, his face bloody and pale. It wasn’t exactly the picture he wanted in his head just then, but he appreciated her intent:
I’ll never leave you behind.

He wiped a trickle of sweat out of his eyes, then took a closer look at her pistol. “Is that a 1911?”

She nodded. “There’s a gun store in town. I could take you there when you’re better. I assume you don’t normally carry that cheap gangster gun.”

“Took it off Donnie,” Roy said. “Lost my Beretta.”

“Was that your sidearm? Would you want to get another one, or something else?” Nicolette asked. “Or another one
and
something else?”

Roy was still contemplating pistols when he fell asleep.

Finally, he woke; not woke from a nightmare, but simply woke with the dawn. He found Laura asleep under the covers beside him, Keisha’s silvery wolf stretched out on top of the blankets on the other side, Miguel’s gray wolf curled up at the foot of the bed, Nicolette sleeping in a chair with her feet propped up on Laura’s ankles, and Russell in another chair with his head down on Keisha’s front paws.

Roy was reminded first of puppies in a basket, then of Marines racked out on an airport floor. No wonder he’d slept so well. He sat up slowly, trying not to disturb them. They didn’t stir. He supposed they must finally feel safe. Certainly Nicolette did, to let herself sleep with no one on guard.

He checked himself before he tried to get out of bed. He wasn’t dizzy. He wasn’t sick to his stomach. His back ached from lying down for so long, and he felt a little weak. But it was the “recently recovered from being badly wounded or very sick” type of weakness, not the “running on fumes for the last three days/four months/two years and about to collapse” type. Roy was familiar enough with both states to know the difference.

He swung his leg over Laura, careful not to kick Nicolette in the face, and padded to the shower. As the hot water ran over him, he remembered how he’d stood in an icy spray and wished to be nothing more than a weapon.

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other…

He’d learned the Rifleman’s Creed in boot camp and recited to himself as he marched, as he cleaned his weapons, as he exercised, as he did every tiring or repetitive thing that became that little bit easier if it was done to a rhythm.

I learned my rifle better than I learned myself,
Roy thought.

If he’d done nothing else since he’d come to Yosemite, he’d gotten a crash course in his own weaknesses and strengths, and how some weaknesses were also strengths, and some strengths were also weaknesses.

He peeled off the bandages on his side and hip and arm. The skin had grown back new and pink, slightly sensitive to the touch. His shrapnel scars were starting to fade from pink to white. He wondered if some of the scars on his mind were also starting to fade. He was definitely in better shape than when he’d gotten out of the aid station after three days’ rest and with a pocket full of pills, spotted DJ cleaning his rifle, and walked past him as if he wasn’t even there.

When Roy left the bathroom, he found Miguel in the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator.

“Morning,” Roy said. “Want to make some breakfast?”

Miguel jumped, nearly dropping a carton of eggs. “Roy! Wow, you look a lot better.”

Roy rescued the eggs and put them on the counter. “How long has it been?”

“Three days… Four? I lost track.”

“Looks like I wore everyone out,” Roy said, glancing at the puppy pile on and around the sofa bed. “Thanks for taking care of me, Miguel. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome.” Miguel frowned at the chili peppers on the counter. “What did you want to make? I mean, what could you eat? Maybe some toast?”

Roy tried to squelch his embarrassment, informing himself that this was entirely his own fault. If he hadn’t hidden what was going on until he dramatically collapsed and was sick for days, anything wrong with him would have been much less of a big deal and wouldn’t have made everyone treat him like an invalid.

“Anything is fine,” Roy said. “If I don’t feel sick, I won’t get sick. I don’t normally have a touchy stomach. It’s… um… stress-related. What were you planning to make?”

Miguel opened a package of tortillas. “Migas. It’s a Mexican breakfast dish.”

“I know migas. I’m from New Mexico. Want me to tear up the tortillas?” Roy took the tortillas and started shredding them.

“Not so thin,” Miguel said, peering over his shoulder. “Like a purse strap, not like a pencil.”

Roy corrected his technique, tossing them into a bowl as Miguel started chopping tomatoes.

“Something I wanted to tell you, Roy…” Miguel began, glancing into the living room. “Before everyone else wakes up.”

“Sure.”

“I always felt like I was the weak link of the pack. Even before Gregor did this to me.” Miguel touched his scarred cheek. “After that, I felt like he’d broken me for good. Nicolette and Keisha are so strong, and I was waking up screaming every night. They did their best to protect me, but I couldn’t do anything for anyone.”

“You did a lot. You participated in an escape plan, you were the only person who actually made it out, you got reinforcements, and you personally carried out several essential and dangerous parts of the rescue mission,” Roy reminded him. “If it wasn’t for you, Gregor would have killed all your buddies.”

“I see that now. But when I got here, what I mostly noticed was that nothing had changed for me other than that you were taking care of me too.” Miguel looked at Roy earnestly. “Don’t take this the wrong way—I appreciate what you did. But you seemed like everything a man should be, and I kept comparing myself and coming up short. When you ran out and picked up Russell—

“Yeah, about that…” Roy fished for a way to explain without setting himself off all over again. “Listen, Miguel, I don’t want to tell this whole awful war story right now. But I bolted out like that because I saw something similar once, and it reminded me. I thought he’d been blown up by an IED and people were shooting at us and I had to get him to cover.”

Miguel stopped chopping, looking at Roy in surprise. “You were having a flashback?”

Roy began making coffee, unable to have this conversation while he was looking into Miguel’s eyes. “I guess. It was only for a few seconds.”

“I didn’t realize,” Miguel said. “At the time, it just looked heroic. It
was
heroic. Especially after what Gregor did to you. He did the same thing to me, and it took me apart. You seemed to shake it off in an hour. I thought you’d never had a nightmare in your life.”

“I was having nightmares long before Gregor.” Roy didn’t want to get into details, but he couldn’t let Miguel go on hero-worshipping Roy and putting himself down. “And I didn’t shake off what he did. Obviously. These last couple days—that was unusually bad. But it’s not the first time that sort of thing has happened to me. Not by a long shot.”

“I figured that out,” Miguel replied. “I don’t know if you remember, but I was with you when you were in a pretty bad way.”

“I remember. You don’t have to describe it,” Roy said hastily. “But if I didn’t say so before… Thank you.”

“You did say so. And you’re welcome. I won’t say it was nothing, because it was hard to watch. I wish you
had
shaken everything off. But once I realized what you were going through, I felt better about myself. I figured if a guy like you could break, maybe I shouldn’t be so ashamed of being broken myself.”

At that, Roy stopped fiddling with the coffee maker and looked into Miguel’s soft brown eyes. “I’m not broken. And neither are you. We’re just… chipped.”

As a visual demonstration, Roy held up a coffee mug with a chip in the rim. Miguel laughed.

The smell and sound of coffee percolating roused everyone, as the conversation hadn’t.

Laura ran into the kitchen, grabbed Roy, and pulled him down into a kiss. He lost himself in her lemon-sugar scent and soft body and sweet lips, her bright presence in the pack sense and her living self in his arms.

“I love you,” Roy said, not caring who heard. “And I’m sorry. I don’t know why you stick with me, honestly.”

“Well…” She gave him such a long, thoughtful look that he began to get uneasy. Then she pulled him back down and whispered in his ear, “You’re
really
good in bed.”

Roy laughed.

“You look better, Roy,” Keisha said, having apparently been stealthily examining him while he’d been kissing Laura. “But I want to see you after breakfast. Just to be sure.”

“Sure.”

Russell inspected Miguel’s breakfast preparations. “Let me chop another onion. You minced them; they’ll get mushy.”

“No back-seat cooking,” Laura called.

“No mushy onions,” Russell retorted. He grabbed the cutting board, scraped Miguel’s onions into the trash, got another onion, and began chopping with lightning speed. Every piece came out as a perfect tiny cube.

Nicolette leaned against the wall, sucking down a mug of black coffee. Keisha crunched on a strip of raw bell pepper. Laura poured a cup of coffee for herself and another for Roy. The kitchen was filled with a symphony of scents: onions and coffee, peppers and chorizo, caramel and lemon meringue pie, earth and rain, gunsmoke and perfume.

Roy had too much experience to imagine that everyone was fixed for good. But the pack did seem a whole lot better, just like he was a whole lot better.

He touched the pack sense, not to check on them but simply to enjoy their presence. After all the agony he’d gone through since he’d been bitten, he finally had a pack. They were his family, his best friends, his fire team. They hadn’t left him alone, and he’d never leave them behind. Maybe later today, they could all go hunting as wolves. Maybe tonight, he and Laura could sneak off to the barn and get some alone time.

Roy wouldn’t have expected it after the hell that the last week had been, but standing in the kitchen, sipping his coffee with his arm around Laura’s shoulders, surrounded by his pack, he was completely happy.

Russell turned to Roy. “Will you be able to eat this? I could make you some toast. Or apple sauce.”

With a sigh, Roy began, “This is fine. If I don’t feel sick, I won’t get sick…”

Chapter Twenty-Two: Laura

DJ

Laura covertly watched Roy from across the table as the rest of the pack chatted and doctored their migas with salsa and Tabasco sauce and, in Keisha’s case and ignoring the general mockery, maple syrup.

After he’d been so sick for what felt like so long, it was startling to see him sitting at ease, pouring Russell’s homemade salsa onto a mountain of scrambled eggs with chorizo and fried tortilla strips. If she hadn’t known what had happened, she’d only have noted the dark circles under his eyes and thought that he’d had a late night.

She finally understood what Roy had meant when he’d told her that she couldn’t yet know how hard it would be to be with him. For all of Keisha’s assurances that he only needed rest and rehydration, the last few days had ranked among the most harrowing times of Laura’s life.

Roy reached across the table and clasped Laura’s hand. A light touch on their bond accompanied the gesture, letting Laura feel his strength and stability:
Don’t worry, I’m all better now.

It also let him perceive something of what Laura was feeling. He leaned in and spoke to her softly. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not used to thinking about what it does to other people if something happens to me. It’s always been the other way around.”

Not for those last few months in Afghanistan,
Laura thought.

She waved her fork in an arc, indicating the pack. “It goes both ways now.”

“I know.”

“I do too,” Laura admitted.

Hard as it had been to see Roy suffering so much, it had been almost as hard for her to step back and let the pack help care for him. She had to keep reminding herself that she wasn’t going to make the same mistake he had and run herself into the ground with exhaustion, and furthermore that Roy was bonded to the pack, was used to living in a tight-knit community, and would find their attentions comforting. Laura suspected that being part of a group fulfilled some primal longing in Roy that had nothing to do with a werewolf’s need for the pack sense.