Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            “And of course, there’s the matter of her father. I’ll have to inform Councilman Lark about what happened. He might see this as an act of aggression, even a war declaration against the Vampyres . . .”

            Dr. Averill’s voice fades, and I fall back inside myself.



* * *





            “. . . need to rest.”

            “No.”

            “Come on, Lowe. You need to sleep. I’ll watch over her while you—”

            “No.”



* * *





            “—take Ana away.”

            “We cannot be sure that Ana was the real target,” Mick protests. “The intended victim could have been Misery.”

            “But what if Ana was?” Juno points out. “We shouldn’t risk it.”

            “Agreed,” Cal says. “Let’s move Ana to a safe place until we find out who did this.”

            “We all know it was Emery.” Mick.

            “I know no such thing, and I’m done assuming.” Lowe is icily, murderously angry. “My wife was on the brink of death until hours ago. I’m going to move Ana to a safe place. This is not up for discussion.”

            “Where will you move her?” Mick asks.

            “That’s for me to know.”



* * *





            Cool lips press a soft kiss into my feverish palm.

            “Misery, I . . .”



* * *





            I come out of the healing trance all at once, like a salmon bursting from a stream.

            I sit up in bed, clammy and breathless and utterly disoriented, and wait for the pain to make itself known. I expect it to follow its usual roads: start from my stomach, irradiate out to my limbs, rake through my nerves like an army of knives. When nothing happens, I look down at my body in bafflement, wondering where it’s gone. But there it is: colder than usual, perhaps; paler, definitely; intact, ultimately.

            Healed? I pull back the covers to test that theory. The large white T-shirt I’m wearing doesn’t belong to me, but the pretty lace underwear is mine—courtesy of the wedding stylist. I haven’t worn it since the ceremony, and I refuse to wonder how it ended up on me. Instead I stand. Even though I’m wobblier than a newborn calf, my legs are functional. I push through the exhaustion and force myself to walk.

            The clock on the wall says one thirty in the morning, and the house is dead silent, but I’m fairly sure that more than a few hours have passed since I first lost consciousness. Did I skip a day? I have no phone to check, so I do the pre-technology thing: head outside to ask someone.

            Hopefully not the person who poisoned my peanut butter.

            I open the door to a dimly lit hallway and almost stumble on the pile of clothes right outside—Ana giving her dolls another makeover, I bet. I hold on to the wall and weakly step around it, but the pile moves.

            It uncurls. Then gets up. Then stretches, very much like a cat would. Then it opens its eyes, which happen to be a very beautiful, very pale, very familiar green.

            Because it’s not a pile at all. It’s a wolf. Curled outside my room. Guarding my door.

            A huge white wolf.

            A fucking gigantic white wolf.

            “Lowe?” My voice is unused and rusty. I may have been out more than just one day. “Is that you?”

            The wolf blinks at me, still enjoying his stretch. I blink back, hopefully stumbling on the Morse code for pls pls pls don’t eat me.

            “I don’t want to assume, but the eyes look like yours, and . . .”

            He trots to me, and I scurry back in a blast of panic, plastering myself to the wall. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. He’s just so much larger than Cal, so much larger than I thought wolves could be. I squeeze my eyes shut, not wanting a high-def view of my duodenum getting ripped out of my abdominal cavity and then eaten.