Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy (ARIA) novel Chapter 516

Chapter 516

ARIA

"I know," I said. "I understand why you thought that."

"My whole body just," she said, and gestured in a way that communicated the full-body response to being involuntarily returned to the worst version of a memory.

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry you had that experience. We're going to do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen again."

"The pregnant woman," said a voice from somewhere in the middle of the crowd — helpful, informational tone, the kind of voice that was sharing an update that seemed relevant — "almost went into early labor."

I looked for the source. A woman near the front, composed but with the slightly residual quality of someone who'd had their stress response fully activated recently.

"I'm alright," she said, before I could ask. "The baby is alright. We're both alright. I just—" she pressed a hand to her stomach, "—the howling. It was very specific."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Are you sure you're—"

"I'm fine," she said. "I'm also furious. But fine."

"Both are valid," I said.

"My bones," Edna said, from the back, "left my body for approximately four seconds. I want that documented. My bones evacuated and then came back and I would like that acknowledged."

"Edna," I said. "Your bones—"

"Left and came back," Edna said. "Four seconds. I was keeping count. And let me tell you, if they'd left permanently, I would have been first to the bunker regardless, because at eighty-three, bones or no bones, I know where the exit is and I know how to use it."

"Edna," Jordan said, from somewhere behind me — he'd come out of the treatment area, bandages on his hands, cuts visible, moving carefully, "are you saying that at eighty-three without bones you'd have beaten the entire pack to the bunker."

"I'm saying," Edna said, with the dignity of someone making a serious point, "that I have been in this pack for sixty-one years and I have survived every single thing this pack has thrown at me, and I was not going to let my bones stopping functioning interrupt that record."

"That would have been a miracle," Jordan said.

"It would have been indoctrinated into history," Edna agreed. "The boneless elder who outran the pack to the bunker. They'd have written songs."

The tension in the crowd had changed. Not gone — the fear was still real, the memory of the howling and the wolf form and the years of crisis still recent enough to sit just under the surface. But something lighter was sitting on top of it now. The specific thing that Shadowmere did — processing difficult things by being difficult about them, refusing to let the heavy stay entirely heavy.

Someone near the back said: "Morrison thought Kael had come for him."

The crowd went very quiet in a completely different way.

Then someone said: "Did he run."

"I did not run," Morrison's voice came from somewhere in the crowd.

"He moved quickly," the first voice said.

"I moved with purpose," Morrison said.

"He was moving very specifically toward the main building exit," someone else said.

"I was gathering the council," Morrison said. "As is procedurally appropriate in—"

"Morrison," Kael said.

"Yes," Morrison said.

"It's fine," Kael said. "I would have run too."

Morrison looked at him for a moment.

"Probably," Morrison said.

"We're going to need help tonight," I said. "With the clinic. The treatment space is intact, but the lab section is damaged. If anyone has time and is willing to help with the cleanup and the rebuilding—"

The movement started before I finished the sentence.

Pack members stepping forward, some of them already asking practical questions — what needs moving, what's salvageable, do you need anything from the supply stores — the specific organized practical love of people who showed up with their hands ready.

Amber was near the front of the group that formed. She caught my eye briefly and gave me a look that said nothing and everything, the specific look of someone who'd made a decision about where they stood and was standing there.

Martha appeared from the direction of the kitchen with a look on her face that communicated that if the people who'd done this to Ivory's lab ever appeared within arm's reach, they were going to have a culinary problem. She said nothing. She put on her working face and joined the group heading toward the clinic.

Priya was there. Andrew was there. Sam and Louis from the eastern flank were there, still in the comfortable clothes of people who'd been having a quiet Sunday evening and hadn't expected to spend it on clinic repair work.

The crowd organized itself with the efficiency that I was coming to understand as one of Shadowmere's defining characteristics — the ability to look at a situation and assign themselves to the appropriate part of it without waiting to be told. Security cleared the perimeter. Practical people went toward the clinic. The pregnant woman sat back down with someone beside her to keep her company. Edna remained in her position, which appeared to be chief observer, a role that she'd assumed and nobody was going to dispute.

Kael walked beside me into the clinic and through to the lab.