before his beating had been finished. Sometimes greater regeneration just meant greater suffering.
Someone's hand came to rest on my shoulder. I looked up. Doolittle's kind face greeted me.
"Come on now," he murmured and pulled me up. "Come on up. Let's have some tea."
Chapter 13
WE WERE IN A SMALL KITCHEN. DOOLITTLE TOOK a plastic ice tray from the freezer, twisted it with his dark hands, and sent the cubes clattering into a glass. He poured iced tea from a pitcher and set the glass in front of me.
"Tea will help," he said.
I drank out of respect for him. It was shockingly sweet, more syrup than drink. Ice crunched between my teeth.
"Why isn't he healing?" My voice came out flat, a one-note gathering of words with no inflection.
Doolittle sat opposite me. He had a genteel manner about him that instantly put one at ease.
Usually I found myself relaxing slowly in his company. Merely being in the presence of the Pack's physician proved soothing. Not today. I searched his eyes for reassurance of Derek's survival, but they offered me no comfort: dark and mournful, they contained none of the humor I was accustomed to seeing. Today he just seemed tired, an old black man bent over his glass of iced tea.
"Lyc-V can do many miraculous things," Doolittle said. "But it has its limits. The gray color on his body shows the places where the virus died in great numbers. There isn't enough Lyc-V left in his tissues to heal him. What little remains is keeping him alive, but for how long nobody can say." He looked into his cup. "They beat him very badly. The bones are shattered and crushed in so many places, I can't remember them all. And when they were done breaking him, they poured molten silver onto his body. Into his chest."
I clenched my hands.
"And on his face. And then they dumped him to die in the middle of the street from a moving cart, four blocks from our southern office."
Doolittle reached behind him and handed me a cotton kitchen towel.
I took it and looked at him.
He gave me a small, kind smile. "It helps to wipe them off," he said.
I touched my cheek and realized it was wet. I pressed the towel against my face.
"It's good to cry. No shame in it."
"Can he be helped?" My voice sounded normal. I just couldn't stop crying. The pain kept leaking out of my eyes.
Doolittle shook his head.
My brain started slowly, like an old clock after years of disrepair. The Reapers had discovered Derek at the Red Roof Inn, beaten him, and dumped him by the Pack's office. Jim's crew found him and tracked the scent back to the location where the beating had taken place.
"He hasn't turned," I said.
Doolittle's face voiced a silent question.
"There were no signs of a wolf at the scene. Pints of blood, too many for one person, so he had to have fought and injured them, but no fur. No claw scratches. He killed a vamp in a warrior form. He should've shifted forms the moment they jumped him, but he didn't. How is that possible?"
"We don't know," Jim said.
He leaned against the doorframe like a bleak shadow knitted from anger. I hadn't heard him approach.
"Regeneration and change of shape are irrevocably linked." Doolittle drank his tea. "There are things that can be done to induce a change in one of us. We've tried them all, trying to break him from the coma. Something is blocking him."
They were so calm about it. "Why aren't you surprised?"
Doolittle sighed.
"He isn't the first," Jim said.
THE FIRST PICTURE SHOWED A CORPSE OF A MAN. His face was crushed, the skull indented with such tremendous force, his head resembled a shovel. His chest bone had been cut out of his body. His ribs jutted from the wet mush, the pale cage of bone slick with dark blood.
The black-and-white photograph looked absurdly out of place on a red-and-white-plaid tablecloth. Like a hole into some horrific gray world.
Jim drank a bit of his tea. "Doc, this stuff is pure honey."
"A little sweet never hurt nobody." Doolittle looked offended and poured more syrup into my glass.
Jim shook his head. "The Midnight Games. Sixteen years ago a championship fight went all to shit. A big dumb sonovabitch of a bear lost his way and went wild. Killed a crowd of civilians."
I didn't interrupt. He was talking and I didn't want to do anything to make him stop.