Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Alexis

I didn’t go back to Will’s house. Instead, I went back to mine, choosing to sulk in my old room. It felt like I’d stepped back in time. As bitter as this feeling was, it made me reminisce about the time when I’d just met Will for the first time. It had been an onerous challenge to come to terms with him back then. After he had learned to tame himself down, there came a time when I had entirely forgotten that Will had been capable of anger.

Until tonight.

Tonight was a reminder that Will had been holding back his anger all this time.

Knowing that did not lessen the pain I was feeling. I’d thought that after all this time, after everything that had happened between us, Will would respect me enough not to lose his cool with me.

There was a knock at the door. I already knew who it was going to be. I had no plans to open the door. Being alone felt like the better option. It wasn’t just Will who had been rattled by recent events. I was quite shaken as well. After all, I’d gone and faced Blair on my own. It was akin to walking into the open maws of death itself.

“Alexis, please open up,” Will said from the other side of the door. I remembered that Will had never asked for the keys to my home. We had never sought it fit to live in both houses. We were engaged, after all. If I didn’t go and open the door for him, he’d be stuck out there all night.

“Go away, Will,” I said, not really wanting to talk to him right now. I needed some time to process everything that had happened.

“I have to talk to you. It’s important,” Will said.

I groaned and got to my feet, dragging myself from my room to the main door. I unlocked it and opened it to find him standing there, his face looking strained and pained.

“Jesus Christ, what happened to you? Why are you so pale?” I asked. In the blueish light of the moon, Will looked like a sick man. I could see veins popping under his skin. His eyes had huge bags underneath. He winced when he moved.

“I’ll get to that in a bit,” Will said, holding onto the doorpost for support. “But first, I want to apologize. It was not right for me to snap at you the way I did. For that, I am sorry. I will not make any excuses for what happened, but I want you to know that all that anger came from a place of love. I love you, Lexie, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. When I learned that you’d gone to Blair by yourself, all reason abandoned me, and I was left with one tragic image in my mind. You, dead, lying at Blair’s feet. I am not afraid of dying, but the thought of you dying before your time, when you’re so young and have your whole life in front of you, scares me as it should. A mate is nothing without his fated partner.”

“Will,” I said, keeping myself strong against the barrage of emotions that were bursting from inside. “I am sorry, too. I should have trusted you. But you have to know; I did what I did because I could see no other option. Maybe we could have communicated better about it.”

“In any case, I am sorry for letting go of my rage,” Will said.

The way he stood there, all vulnerable, in the doorway, his eyes bearing sincerity, his face morose, I had no other choice but to forgive him. Tonight was just a one-off in a long series of nights that had been fruitful, full of love, and filled with compassion. It was nothing that I could not forgive.

“Will,” I whispered, reaching out and holding him in my arms. As I closed my hands around his back, Will fell on me, barely able to hold his weight. “Oh, dear Lord, what’s happening to you?”

I helped him inside the house as he winced and groaned, holding his midriff against the pain he was feeling.

“I’ve just come from the doctor. The new guy, he’s quite an upgrade from the last one,” Will said, then shared with me what the doctor had told him. By the end of his retelling, I had the most horrified expression on my face. To make matters worse, he took off his shirt and showed me the bruises and gashes on his body. They were not very deep, but the very fact that they were there and hadn’t healed yet did not bode well for Will.

“What does this mean?” I asked, feeling scared and guilty. This had only happened because I had gone to seek out Blair. If I had stayed put like Will had told me to, he wouldn’t have come after me, he wouldn’t have fought those soldiers, and he wouldn’t have been inflicted with these injuries. This was all my fault.

“This means that it might be time for me to consider retirement from this Alpha business,” Will said. “But like every cop in every ‘80s movie, I’ll retire only after I’ve finished my last case. In my case, it’s Blair.”

“Will, let me help you,” I said. “Lie down. I have some balm in my cabinets that will close those wounds at the very least.”

Will lay down on the sofa, all his wounds red and festering. He winced when he adjusted himself. I immediately darted to the cabinet where I kept my first aid supplies. I took out the balm, uncapped it, and went back to Will, gently applying it to his bruised skin.

He winced more as the balm stung him but quickly steadied himself. As I finished applying it to the rest of his body, Will braced himself for any pain from those injuries.

The balm was fast acting, and the relief that he received from it made him fall asleep on my sofa. Seeing him like that, sleeping so innocently, so deeply, made me forgive and forget that he had misbehaved with me earlier tonight. Here, in the commune, people looked after each other. Will took care of me constantly. But who was there to take care of him? Underneath the anger at his earlier statement, I retroactively understood that the caring component of his personality had made him lash out at me.

He was right. I needed to be more careful, not just for my sake but for the sake of my mate and the future we had planned together.

***

It was late, and everybody in the commune who was not on active patrol duty was asleep. Vince was sitting outside his house, keeping a watchful eye on the gates of the commune with a gun in his hand. I walked over to him, watching him polish his rifle in the light of the moon.

“That gun’s way too big for you,” I said.

“Lexie, what are you doing up?” Vince asked. “I heard from the pack what happened. You went out to meet Blair?”

“Vince, I really don’t have the energy to get into that right now. But there is something I need your help with,” I said.

I told him of what had happened to Will as we both walked over briskly to the healer’s clinic. When I was finished, my chest felt lighter, as if a great burden had been lifted off. Vince was my confidante, and as such, I relied upon his wisdom when my own intellect failed me.

“You needn’t worry about Will. He’s not the same person who appeared all lost and haggard from Edward Beckett’s manor. Will’s resilient. If bullets and poisonous serums couldn’t kill him, then some basic as fuck injuries are not going to be the cause of his demise. I have known death. I have seen it with my eyes. I saw it take my father and my grandfather. I know you know death in your own way as well. Your parents died before your eyes. From what we know of death, the one thing that can be said with certainty is people like Will are powerful enough to look death in the eye.”

“You speak like an old man. When did you ever get so wise?” I asked, feeling even lighter now that he had addressed my unsaid concern.

“I was always this wise,” Vince laughed.

“Well, we’ll still find something to cure him, okay?”

“We will, Lexie.”

Once inside the healer’s clinic, I met Dr. Monroe for the first time in my life. Although he was a member of the pack, he had been absent from Fiddler’s Green for most of his life on account of studying at medical school.

“You must be Will’s partner,” Dr. Monroe said. “Is he doing better?”

“He’s asleep. I applied some herbal balm on his wounds to make them heal faster, doctor, but we’re going to have to come up with something new, a more potent remedy, if we want him to recover fully,” I said.

Dr. Monroe took off his glasses, then looked at me first and then at Vince. There was a joyfulness in his eyes that made him seem friendly.

“Will is by far the strongest werewolf I have ever come across, Alexis,” he said. “He will recover in time. Those injuries are special. His body will need a while to adjust to this new paradigm shift. White blood cells, antigens, antibodies, all those healing components are already present within him.”

“But surely there must be something we can do,” I said. I liked having contingency plans in case things went south. It was one of the downsides of being a classic over-preparer.

“There is nothing in all these books as well as in medical research all over the world, that covers the topic of genetic mutation-based supernatural injuries. It’s not an exact science. Hell, it’s not even a science at all. Blair’s meddling with forces beyond anyone’s understanding. You want an antidote? Get me one of those soldiers alive so I can take samples from them. That’s the best I can promise yet.”

At least that was something tangible, something achievable.

“You’ve got it,” I said.

“Are you sure, Lexie?” Vince asked.

“Yes. And I know what you’re afraid of. Don’t worry. I will trust Will this time and tell him before doing anything,” I said.