Chapter 8: Will

Chapter 8: Will

My wound not healing itself was humiliating but not as humiliating as the beating I had taken in front of Alexis. But those were not the wounds that were the cause of my pain at this moment.

It was seeing her like this, intently staring at my naked torso with no interest in my physicality except for the mechanical impulse to sew up my wound. It seemed to me that to her, I did not exist as her mate any longer. What worsened this emotional injury was the knowledge that she had sought another man. As opposed to before, when I felt wrong for having said Ariana’s name in my death throes, now I felt wronged. But I did not know how to broach this subject, at least not without causing another fight. A fight that I didn’t want to have.

“You know I can hear your thoughts, right?” she asked, putting the final sutures on my chest.

“Then you should know that I’m hurting,” I said.

“It’s not even that bad of a scratch. It’s going to heal in a few hours,” she said, now putting the needles and stitches back in the kit.

“If you can truly hear my thoughts, you know that’s not the pain I’m talking about,” I said.

“I was hoping you’d not put me on the spot about this.” There was an aching in her eyes. She looked at me like she was a helpless, injured bird fallen out of its nest. This was not a façade that she was putting up. It was genuine agony.

“I was hoping that you’d mourn me a little longer before going out with some guy,” I said, my eyes reflecting the same pain. There it was, that unsaid thing that had been lying heavy in the air like some pungent smell, making it impossible for us to look each other in the eyes. But not anymore. Now we were looking into the abyss of each other’s creation, unflinching.

“The reason I went out with him was because I was mourning you,” she said. “You think I am like this? Drunk? Reckless? A mess? I have always toed the line, even when it felt like the world around me was going to hell. I abided by the rules. I never did anything with him. We just talked. Now I realize how foolish that was. He was just trying to get me to lower my defenses.”

This time around, I said nothing in response. I was searching myself for the rage that had possessed my body ever since I had escaped from Edward’s prison. It was simply not there. This was a different emotion. This was some distant relative of betrayal and pain.

“Jealousy,” Alexis said.

“Huh?”

“That emotion that you’re thinking of…it’s jealousy. It’s what I have been feeling ever since you died in front of me, taking her name. Now you know how that feels. And that’s when I didn’t even do anything with him. Imagine how I must have felt,” she said.

“And what do you think I did with Ariana? I never so much as touched her either,” I said calmly. “Nothing happened with her, either. Do you at least understand that now, having had your own similar experience?”

“I guess I do,” Alexis said, her face deep in thought. “For all it’s worth, I’m telling the truth. Lawrence, the drinking, moving to Bangor—I was mourning you, Will. All of that was my way of processing the pain.”

“I don’t want to hurt you anymore,” I said. “Not with any thoughts of retroactive jealousy, not with any jealousy of my own, and most of all, not with any of my issues. Just as you can read my thoughts, I can read yours. I can see the traumatic footprint of my behavior etched on your psyche.”

“Being with you was like being underwater,” Alexis said. She was not looking at me. Her attention was on all the mess created by the fight between Lawrence and me. The room was in shambles. Broken glass lay scattered everywhere. The cabinet and the bed were broken, with splintered wood jutting out of them. The dressing table mirror bore massive cracks. “When I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t have any surface to escape to. But there were things that you made me see, beautiful things like coral reefs and underwater cities like Atlantis, that made me treasure our relationship. And then a storm would arrive without warning, and I’d find myself in the middle of a maelstrom, drowning. And right when I felt like I was drowning, you’d serenade me with the cold blueness that’s so characteristic of the sea. I’d feel like I was floating, with not a single worry in my mind. It was the wildest thing but also the most viscerally wonderful experience. You never stopped giving me that strange combination of emotions, even when you were dying.”

“What are you trying to say, Alexis?” I was not one for long-winded metaphors, and the one that she used was so ambiguous to my already tired mind that I felt like I was grasping at straws.

“I’m saying, you being alive and you saving me from Lawrence doesn’t change things. At least not for now. I’m still hurt, and I’m still mourning. The trauma needs processing. I need to know who I am, which direction my life is headed, and what values I embody. All these things are very crucial to my existence right now. Most of all, I just want to feel safe. That cannot happen when I am with you. There’s always danger wherever you are,” she said quite calmly.

“You’re right,” I replied in kind. “For what it’s worth, I agree with you. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you. The worst thing we can do is be careless with each other. Let’s not do that. Let’s give each other space and remove the obligation from the equation.”

She gave me a reproachful look, then said, “You’re just being fake-nice.”

I shook my head. “That’s just the thing. I’m not. I, too, am processing things in my way. If you think you’ve had a rough go of it, try being injected with a serum that momentarily kills you and sends you into the afterlife, then try regaining consciousness in your grave. And to top it all off, try clawing out of that grave. When you have done that, try finding the person you love, only to discover that the person you hate is now in charge of your pack. So…yeah, I’m not being fake-nice. I’m being empathetic. But it’s not a competition of who is suffering the most. I understand we’re both suffering. The least I can do is give you your space to process things on your own. I should leave you to it and get out of your hair.”

“Wait!”

“What is it?”

“How am I going to clean this mess and the dead body outside all by myself? Any moment, someone’s going to come out of the backdoor of the bar and see Lawrence’s corpse. Before you go, can’t you help me sort this mess?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

There were no more words. Silently, I followed her down the stairs to where Lawrence’s body lay. I hoisted it on my shoulder, thankful that the blood in his body had congealed and wasn’t dripping on my clothes. Where was I going to get new clothes at this time of the night? Dumping Lawrence’s body was not a problem. As it happened, he had given us the very means to dispose of his body without anyone finding out where he was.

I took his car keys and flung them to Alexis. She nodded, then disappeared around the alley’s bend, reappearing minutes later behind the driver’s seat. She reversed the car into the alley and opened the trunk. I threw Lawrence’s body in there, then shut the trunk. A second later, I opened the trunk again, not being able to believe what I had just skipped seeing.

There was a false compartment in the back. When I opened it, I saw an array of firearms of all kinds hanging in there, ranging from concealable pistols to semi-automatic rifles. This changed my mind about what I was going to do with Lawrence’s car. Initially, I had just intended on dumping it with Lawrence’s body still in it. But this made me reconsider. I could use this car. The weapons would come in handy. For what, I didn’t know. But a man with firearms was better equipped to deal with the dangers of the world than an unarmed man. Especially now, now that I couldn’t shift into my true form.

I closed the trunk again and saw that Alexis had disappeared. I traced my way back to her apartment and found her sifting through the pile of clothes that had fallen from the cabinet. She threw me a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt from them.

“Have you taken a shower?”

I shook my head.

“There’s hot water in the bathroom. Go clean yourself, and I’ll clean the room while you’re in there. Let me know if you’re hungry. There’s a stocked kitchen below. I can get you something to eat.”

“That would be lovely,” I said, not wanting to overstay my welcome. We had defaulted to being polite strangers, so full of etiquette, and formality. It was nothing short of bizarre and hurtful, but I was careful enough not to even think it lest she read my mind again and broached that subject.

I took a towel with me and headed into the shower. The floor was slippery with grime, and the walls had fungus growing on them, but at least the water was boiling. It felt welcoming against the cold outside. Refreshing against my dirty body. I cleaned grave dirt and dried blood clots from my body and lathered my hair in shampoo, finally ridding myself of that horrendous concoction of stench I was wafting everywhere.

I did not know how long I was in the shower, just that it was probably one of the most comforting ones that I had taken, right up there with the first shower I had taken when I had emerged from Edward’s prison. How long ago that seemed and how distant, almost as if that hadn’t happened to me.

All of a sudden, the hot water stopped pouring out of the shower, leaving murky cold water in its wake. I hurried out of the steaming bathroom, barely dry, half-clothed, and saw that within the time I was in the bathroom, Alexis had done an admirable job on the room. It was spotless except for the broken wood and the broken window.

“I have been thinking,” she said. “They’re sending assassins and vampires after me. It’s never going to stop, is it? This only stops if I die or if they die. There’s no third option.”

“You can run. Run as far away as you can. These three people might have a large circle of influence and power, but even their circle has limits. They can’t find you someplace like the West Coast. Or even Europe,” I said.

“Is that what you want me to do? Flee to another country like a fugitive?” Alexis glared at me. “Where is the Will who used to tell me to stand my ground in the face of horrors?”

“I left some parts of me buried in the dirt. It seems I came out of the ground a mortal man, no longer a werewolf. Perhaps that Will who used to bolster you lies still in the grave,” I said solemnly.

It was a tense silence that followed, where neither of us hazarded a look at each other, not knowing what to say further, not knowing where to go from here.

“And where are you going to go?” she asked.

“I just think that with no future in Fiddler’s Green and no prospects with my mate, I need to go on a journey—a long voyage across the continents. Maybe I can go back to Germany and see what became of my old village if any descendants survived. Most importantly, though, I need to find purpose. Revenge is a purpose, I agree. But as you can see, I have no fight left in me, not at this moment. How can I be expected to fight the powers that be if I can’t even take down one assassin without getting beaten up to a pulp?”

Alexis walked across the room, staring intently at my face. There was an intensity of emotions rising in her eyes, and I felt like maybe she would cry. But she did not cry. She put her hand on my shoulder and said, “This is not you speaking. I never knew the Alpha wolf to be a coward. The words you are saying are riddled with fear. Do you not want revenge? First, you’re telling me to flee, and then you’re talking about fleeing yourself? What utter nonsense is this, Will?”

“It’s not nonsense but the ramblings of a man who has grown weary of fighting. At some point, one must stop fighting everything. He must let his love go, let his enemies live, and loosen his grip on what he had previously thought was his purpose. It is not just you who desperately require a new lease on life through a new purpose. I need it too. You’ve made it clear that this reunion of ours hasn’t changed a thing between us. It’s time I stop fighting that, too,” I said, gently taking her hand and pulling it off my body.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“…goodbye, Will,” she said.

While I was preparing to leave, a phone rang out of nowhere. I cast a look confusedly at the clothes that I’d thrown off. Rushing to that pile of dirt coat, pants, and shirt, I fished out a rather bricky old phone. On the minute screen, it said, “Vincent.”

“I didn’t know you got a phone,” Alexis said.

“Neither did I. It’s Vince. He must have slipped it into my coat when I went to meet him. That’s quite sneaky of him,” I said. “How does one answer a call?”

Alexis took the phone from me, hurriedly pressed a couple of buttons, then handed it to me.

“Vincent?” I asked. When Vince responded, his voice came out quite loud from the phone.

“Will. Thank God you picked up the phone. I thought you wouldn’t notice. I put it in your coat pocket when you came by my home. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it, but the thing is, it’s extremely urgent,” Vince panted. There was panic in his voice, and all of his syllables were jumbled up as if he was trying to speak too fast in too little time.

“What is it, man?” I asked. “Where are you? Are you safe?”

“I’m safe, but the pack isn’t. It’s Maurice. He’s doing something drastic. I fear that he’s going to kill all the pack members. I spied on him after you left. He was talking about taking the entire pack somewhere. The culling fields, he called it,” Vince whispered.

“Do you know who he was talking to?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm.

“No. He was on the phone, Will. I don’t know who was on the other end,” Vince said.

At that moment, Alexis started waving at me, signaling to her phone that she was holding in her hand. She mouthed Maurice’s name and then signaled to her phone again. I didn’t understand what she was saying.

“What do you think that means, Vincent?” I asked confusedly.

“What else do you think it means? With you gone and Alexis nowhere to be found, he’s in charge with no one to stand up to him. He’s just said to the entire pack at this hour of the night that he wants to take us somewhere in the woods where he’s going to have an initiation ceremony to usher in the new days of the pack. A dawn of a new era, he said. I call bullshit. There’s something rotten going on here, Will. If you’re nearby, you should come. Please. Save us…”

With that, Vince hung up the call.

“What were you saying, Alexis?” I asked distractedly as I wondered what fresh hell Maurice was going to unleash.

“This is the phone that Maliha cloned Maurice’s phone on. I still have it. It was on me when we were about to attack Beckett Pharma. I never turned it on afterward. I can find out what Maurice has been doing,” she said.

“I don’t even need to find out what he’s doing. His intentions are clear as day to me. He means to end the Grimm pack and then hand the commune to the vampires. With no more werewolves and with that much land available to them, the vampires will move inland and start their operation anew on our land with Maurice’s blessing. He’s been planning this for a long time. This time, he means to follow through. I can feel it in my bones,” I said.

“The pack’s not blind. They’re not going to just follow him to their deaths,” Alexis said. Sometimes, she let her naiveté get the better of her. This was one of those times. Of course, she hadn’t been an Alpha in her life and thus was unaware of the unsaid rules that came with alpha-hood.

“You can’t just disobey your Alpha. If you do, it can have negative physical and psychological consequences. The wolves know it. There’s a reason the Alpha wolf has so much power, to begin with. His word is the law. Knowing that, I can’t have my pack members follow him into the culling fields,” I said.

I took one last look at Alexis, not knowing whether I’d see her again, and waited for a brief moment for her to say something or for the courage to say something to her, but when neither thing transpired, I left abruptly, realizing that time was not my side.