"Kate, I'm sorry. I fucked up. It didn't go down right."
He finally sounded like he meant it. Part of me wanted to kick him in the head, walk away, and just keep walking until I got the hell out of there. I considered the situation: Jim had apologized in front of his crew. That was all I would get. He wouldn't get down on his knees and beg my forgiveness. In the end it wasn't about Jim and me. It was about the kid.
Jim must've sensed what I was thinking. "I'll take you to him."
That cinched it. As we walked past the shapeshifters, he paused, looked at them, and said,
"She's in."
I followed him along the gloomy hallway and down a rickety flight of stairs. The air smelled musty. The stairs accepted our weight with shrill creaks of protest. This wasn't one of the Pack's regular offices, or at least I didn't recognize it. It was hard to forget a place plastered with panda wallpaper. Jim's face grew grimmer with each step.
I was still pissed. "What kind of shapeshifter has orange fur anyway?"
"Weredingo."
Now I'd seen everything. Well, at least he didn't steal my baby.
The stairs terminated in a heavy door. Jim halted. His gaze bored into the door with hate reserved for mortal enemies.
"They broke him," Jim said suddenly, a barely contained growl clawing at his words. "They broke the boy. Even if he survives, he'll never be the same."
THE ROOM WAS DIM. A SMALL FLOOR LAMP spilled light onto the rectangular glass box filled with swamp-green fluid. The box was shallow - only two feet tall, and at first, I mistook it for a casket.
I'd seen it before. The shapeshifters called it the tank. A restorative device, invented by Dr.
Doolittle, self-proclaimed physician to all things Pack and wild.
A nude body rested in the green liquid, connected to life-support equipment by thin capillaries of IV tubes.
In all my twenty-five years I had never seen a shapeshifter on life support.
I knelt by the box. Breath caught in my throat.
Derek lay encaged in wire. An angry band of magenta swelling marked the flesh over his broken bones, where the abused muscle refused to heal. His right leg was shattered beneath the knee, the shin one continuous misshapen mess of purple ringed with bands of dark gray.
Another purple stain marked his left thigh - the femur, the toughest bone in the body, broken right in the middle, snapped like a toothpick.
Two fractures scarred Derek's right arm, above the elbow and at the wrist. Identical breaks marked his left arm. The inhuman precision of the mind that would conceive the need for breaking both arms in exactly the same places made me grind my teeth.
My heartbeat slowed. My head grew hot, my fingertips cold. Breath rolled around my lungs like a clump of ice. This wasn't just a beating. This was an exhibition. A purposeful demonstration of cruelty and hate. They had mangled him, broken him so completely, as if they sought to obliterate what he was. It made me furious and I clenched my hands until my nails dug into my palms.
Deep purple streaked with gray stained Derek's chest, outlining his rib cage and creeping up to his throat, where gray pooled at the base of the neck caught in a brace. An open gash sliced across his torso from his left side up onto his chest, to his right shoulder. The wound was black. Not gray, not bloody - black.
I looked at his face. He no longer had one. A mishmash of broken bones stared back at me, the flesh raw and seeded with gray, as if someone had attempted to sculpt a face out of ground beef and left it in the open air to rot.
Rage shook me. I'll find you. I'll find you, you fucker, and I'll make you pay. I'll rip you apart with my bare hands.
All rational thought fled from my head. The room shrank, as though I'd gone blind, while inside me fury built and howled. I wanted to scream, to kick, to punch something, but my body refused to move. I felt helpless. It was a most terrible feeling.
Minutes stretched by, long and viscous like honey dripping from a spoon. Derek still lay there, dying quietly in the vat of green liquid. His chest rose ever so slightly, but aside from that small movement, he might as well have been dead already. If he were a normal human, he would've departed long