Page 50 of Into the Fire: After
“Lin,” Brea whispered, her glassy eyes now turned on me. Her bottom lip quivered as her thumb ran across my tender cheekbone.
My eyes fluttered closed as I leaned into that touch. I’d not let myself consciously consider the possibility I’d never feel it again, but the fear had still lived, deep in my soul. It split open then, fracturing over and over until it evaporated into dust.
My pack was here. All of us. Alive. Safe. Together.
“Hate to break up the reunion,” Sevrin’s voice cut in from the front of the helicopter, “but there’s about a one hundred and fifty percent chance that they can track this birdie. We should get going.”
Twenty-one
Taryn
Ihadmyfirstmigraine at eleven years old. It started gradually, just a barely there burn that engulfed my whole head like a warm cap. Within a few hours, though, I was laid in bed, Gran changing out cool compresses between vomiting fits. Migraines may be ahead thing,but I’d felt that shit in my entire body. Different levels of sharp, fiery pain in every part of me. Molten nausea in my stomach; sparks in my neck whenever I moved; a million tiny elves with a million tiny daggers on fire carving their way out of my skull.
I remember crying, asking Gran why it wouldn’t stop. She gave me pills, water, turned all the lights out, rubbed my back and temple and cheek, but nothing worked. It just had to go its course. Afterwards, when the pain had finally ebbed mostly away, I’d felt like a sad, deflated balloon.
As I faded back into consciousness, I felt like that balloon, only this time I was in a street gutter, slimy and grimy and unrecognizable.
For the first time in ages, though, something like…like safety cushioned my waking.
I blinked my eyes open to a dark, blurry room.
Caine’s childhood bedroom. In the Greysmoke Cabin. Where I’d passed my heat.
The fuck?
Did—
What?
That…that happened?
Right?
“Teacup?”
Gorgeous, miraculous red waves buried me, and I overdosed on Brea’s scent as she tackled me in a hug. Lifting my arm to wrap it around her was way harder than I remembered it being.
“Careful,” Brooks murmured, catching my arm gently and placing it back down on the bed. “You’ll pull out the needle.”
Turning my head to look toward my beautiful beta felt akin to lifting a house onto my shoulders, but turn I did. Brooks—paler than I’d ever known him, shadows beneath his eyes, but with the goddamn dimples that I still wanted to dive headfirst into—was checking a fluids bag and securing the needle back in my arm.
IV fluids.
Because…I was…
Dehydrated?
I wasn’t actually laying on a pillow, but a chest. A warm, citrus-scented chest covered with soft brown hair.
Caine.
I smelled blackberry, but where…
Lin lay curled on Brea’s other side, his arm stretched over her so his hand could grasp mine.
All of them. In the room. With me. Alive. Whole.
And staring at me with stars in their eyes.
