Chapter 4
The lamp on his desk was still warm. I could feel the heat on the side of my face while he held my wrist under it.
He hadn't let go since the light faded. His thumb rested just below the faint line the glow left behind, not pressing, just there. His other hand kept mine palm-up. The dark strap of his watch cut across his left wrist, the gold bezel catching the amber light. It was 11:47. I stared at the numbers because it was easier than looking at his glasses.
"You felt that, right?" he said.
I nodded. The skin looked smooth again, but underneath it ached, a low throb that hadn't been there before he healed it.
"That shouldn't still hurt," I said. "If you fixed it."
"I didn't fix it," he said. "Not the way your body would if you had one."
He said it plainly, like he was explaining a dosage. "If you had a wolf spirit, that cut would have started closing on its own. White cells, clotting, the boost. You'd still need stitches for something that deep, but you wouldn't be fighting infection with nothing. Without it, you have no internal backup. All you have is regular healing. Slow."
I pulled a little, and he let me. The scar was thin and pink, still too new. The gauze from earlier was wadded on the corner of his desk, faintly pink where it had stuck.
"And when I push light into it," he said, "it's external. I'm not triggering anything inside you. I'm doing the work for you. That costs me, it doesn't give you anything to work with after. So it looks closed, but underneath it's still open. Understand? Without a wolf, you're not healing fast. You're just covered."
That was the word that got me. Covered. Not healed. I had heard it before.
In sophomore year I'd sprained my ankle at pack drills. I was on the turf with my sock off and the coach looked down and said, "Omegas without wolves always make a big deal of a twist." He told me to walk it off. I walked it off for two weeks until my mom took me to urgent care and they told me it was a grade-two sprain I'd been limping on. Last spring I had a sinus infection that sat for a month because the nurse at school said, "You don't run fevers like the others, it's probably allergies." I learned not to say anything until I couldn't hide it.
"It doesn't matter what it is," I said. My voice was lower than I wanted it to be. "If I go to the nurse, they write it down. They put omega, no wolf spirit, self-inflicted question mark. Then every time I need anything they look at me like I'm either lying or looking for attention."
He listened without moving. His glasses had slipped a fraction and he didn't push them up.
"They don't look at you like that when you're cut?" he asked.
"They do," I said. "That's why I said I fell. If I say someone cut me, they ask why someone would cut someone with no wolf. Like I must have done something to make someone mad enough to bother. Or they pity me. I'd rather they think I'm clumsy."
He turned my hand over gently and ran his fingertip along the edge of the scar, not touching it. The lamp made his watch face gleam.
"So you rewrap it and hope," he said.
"So I rewrap it," I said.
He reached for the fresh roll of gauze on his desk and stopped with his hand over it. "You have two choices. I check it every few hours and change the bandage, you take the antibiotics anyway. Or you hide it, it stays covered, bacteria gets under that pretty line I made and you end up with an infection you can't heal from. No wolf means no fever spike to warn you early. By the time you feel sick, you're really sick."
He wasn't threatening me. He was tired. I could see it now in his shoulders, the way he held himself upright like it took effort. The light had taken something out of him.
"It drains you," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "It does."
He picked up the gauze. "So. Monitored care. Or you hide it and risk it. Which one?"
I looked at my wrist in his hands, at the thin line that made it look like nothing had happened. It would be easy to pull my sleeve down and pretend. It would be easier to be pitied later than questioned now.
"I hid it because they blame us or they feel sorry for us," I said. My throat was tight and I swallowed. "There is no third way they look at an omega without a wolf. I didn't want either tonight."
He nodded, like I'd finally said the true thing he'd been waiting for. He didn't argue with it.
May you like
"Okay," he said quietly. "No third way. Then we make one. But you don't hide this."
He started wrapping again, slower this time, the white gauze going around thickly, carefully, not too tight. I didn't stop him.
