Perigee - Chapter 30: Chapter 30

"It belongs to Ziya."
Imani had gathered everyone into the dining room that night. Those who couldn't sit, stood in any corner they could squeeze themselves into. Jaylin watched the coffee in his hands ripple with the vibrations of the table.
"Why would Ziya's blood be on the bullets?" Sadie asked.
"Better yet," said Tisper, "why is it..."
Obviously, she didn't want to say it. No one wanted to say it.
"Killing him," Jaylin finished for her.
Some of the wolves around seemed to accept the news in silence, but others were just as lost as the humans who invaded their space.
"Queens are absolute in our society," Imani explained. "There is no mutiny, no impeachment of a queen. They exist until their bodies give away to time. If wolves have issue with the queen in power, we have the option to bring forward a grievance or to wait out her ruling. Physically, we can not kill a queen."
Leo made a surly grunting sound into his palm.
"What she's saying is it's like a self-defense mechanism," said Izzy. "Like monarch butterflies. They eat poisonous milkweed as larva, and the poison what keeps predators from feeding on them."
"So her blood's poison?" Matt deduced, minding his battered knuckles. "Or—wait. Are you guys the butterflies? Who's what in this analogy?"
Imani raised her chin—that defiant, jerk to the heavens that made her seem so wise and empowered. "Yes. Her blood is poisonous. A single bite would be the death of us."
"Ain't just that," Leo grumbled. "Queens heal too fast. Hundred times faster than we do. Even guns'd be useless on her."
"And they can turn us." Izzy frowned. "Whenever they want. Just like Qamar did to you, Jay. From wolf to man, or the other way around."
"So how do we cure him of Ziya's blood?" Alex asked, his nose a canvas to all the plum-pink colors of a lilac field.
"I don't know."
Jaylin had to look up from his mug to be sure Imani was the one that said it. Hearing something so uncertain from her was a lot like warm rain. Snow in July. Those words didn't belong with that voice; they shouldn't be coming from that body.
"Nicon has the witches under his care as we speak," Imani said. "I've asked him to bring Devi. The witches have an elaborate past with our kind, and Nicon is well educated about our society and Ziya's ways. Perhaps They'll have more answers for us."
It was difficult to sleep that night. Every second Jaylin tried, he was denying himself the will to sneak into Quentin's room and curl up beside him. But his wounds had gotten worse. Jaylin feared touching him at all.
He slept on the couch, for whatever sparse minutes of sleep he could find. And when he woke the next morning, it was to Quentin's voice. Distant and soft, but somehow within his deep sleep, Jaylin's ears found that sound and latched onto it tight.
He shoved himself to his feet before he was even fully awake, and hurried to the bedroom door. Just inside, Imani sat in a chair to the right of the bed, a bowl of something white in her lap. When she saw Jaylin, she set it aside.
"Good, your monster's awake." There was a breath of distress to her words that made the edges a bit harder. She moved briskly past Jaylin, muttering as she went, "You try to feed him."
And when the door shut behind her, Jaylin only had to look back to that grin on Quentin's face to dissect the situation.
"You shouldn't make her so mad," he said. "She's been working hard to take care of you."
"She'll get over it. That or she'll sink her claws into me, but that's nothing I'm not used to." Quentin urged him closer with the relaxed wave of his fingers. "Come here."
Jaylin obeyed, but every floorboard was like a land mine. He knew he didn't have the strength for this sort of thing. Even on a day like this, when Quentin almost seemed as if he was getting better... Jaylin knew better. Being close to Quentin, hearing his heartbeat—watching his lifeline slide across the monitor. He remembered the sound it made when his mother died, he saw the line go flat. He felt his heart break.
He stood beside the bed and Quentin's hand was a sudden thing on his chest, splayed out wide, right over the pain in him. It was feeling for a heartbeat that Jaylin wasn't quite sure existed anymore.
Don't, he wanted to say. Don't.
But he loved his hand too much to shun it away, so he squeezed it against his chest, and he tried not to imagine a world where Quentin's heart stopped beating and his own broke for a second time.
With all he had, Jaylin gathered himself and removed Quentin's hand from his heart. He pulled out the chair and sat down beside the bed, scrutinizing the contents in the bowl.
"Don't make me eat that," Quentin said. "Imani's a terrible cook."
Jaylin lifted the spoon, watching all the thick white rice chunks drip from the end of it. "What the hell is it?"
"Torture," Quentin said.
"She's trying to help," Jaylin urged him again. "Imani knows what's good for you. Just think of her as a nurse."
"I don't need a nurse. I need fresh air, and sunlight. And I need a shower. How long do you think she'll be gone?"
"I don't know—"
Jaylin couldn't finish before Quentin was gripping the railings and heaving himself upright. His breath stifled from the obvious pain of it all, and Jaylin couldn't decide if he wanted to help him sit up, or force him back down again.
"What are you doing?" he asked, watching Quentin pull the wires from his arms. He ripped the clip from his finger and shut off the monitor before it could squeal its death knell to the entire house.
"Quentin," Jaylin pleaded. "Wait for Imani to come back."
But Quentin was pulling himself up from the edge of his bed, gripping the pain in his middle as he found some kind of balance on both feet. "She feeds me like a child, she dresses me like a child. I don't want to be bathed like a child." He took a step, but it was difficult. And the moment he started to slouch, Jaylin slipped in beneath his arm and heaved him upright.
He was so scared to touch him—so afraid to put an arm around his waist. So Jaylin placed a hand on his back instead, and carried the weight of his left side toward a bathroom that couldn't possibly fit more than two people.
There was no tub inside, but instead a walk-in shower—which at least made getting him in a bit easier. Jaylin shifted Quentin's weight to the bathroom counter and fussed with either faucet until he found a decent balance in the water. When he turned back around, his face was cupped with a sudden warmth.
He knew Quentin's hands from any other. He knew that touch like he knew the smell of him and the sound of his heartbeat. Quentin's thumb swept over the tender place below his eyes, where the skin hurt from all the crying he did when he was alone at night. The rubbing during the day didn't help and Jaylin was sure he looked as awful as he felt. The weight sat so heavy in him.
He stayed there in that place, cherishing the warmth of Quentin's hands. Touching the bandage on his middle was like touching hot coals. Jaylin wanted only to take his hand away. Anything to keep from hurting him.
"Can you keep them from getting wet?" he asked.
Quentin shook his head honestly. "They can be redone."
So Jaylin peeled back the bandage, and what once was a small bullet hole had become a sizable gape in the flesh of his skin. Everything raw beneath—fresh blood on the bandage. He didn't know he'd been staring at the blackened wound until Quentin turned him up by the chin.
"It doesn't hurt," he said. "Don't mind them." And he tore off the other bandages himself.
The showerhead was tall enough that Jaylin could stand beneath it without risking more than a few sprinkles. If he had let him, Quentin would have gone through the entire process alone—but Jaylin recalled horror stories about his mother's best friend from high school—the one just recovering from illness, who'd slipped in the shower and died a day before he was to be released from the hospital.
He wasn't losing Quentin to something so preventable.
So he let the water wet his shirt just a bit as he ran his fingers through the soap in Quentin's hair—those brown eyes so warm as they rested on him. Eventually, Quentin gave up on the idea of bathing himself. He let Jaylin wash him down with a bar of soap—his back and his arms and around all of the holes in him.
"Where were you that night?" Jaylin asked. It had gone quiet—quiet enough that his thoughts were chewing him up inside. "Where did you go on Perigee?"
Quentin's eyes escaped him. "The Den."
"Why?"
"I was diffusing a... situation."
"A situation with Bailey?" Jaylin asked.
He'd been running soap over the round of Quentin's shoulder when the alpha reached up and caught Jaylin by the wrist. "Jaylin."
"I just want to know," Jaylin said, finding his eyes and holding onto them with everything he had. "I want to know who's responsible for this."
"Ziya," Quentin said. "Didn't Imani tell you?"
Jaylin lowered his gaze—not to the wounds, but to Quentin's chest. To all the smooth shapes of him that Jaylin loved so much. Marred by three simple bullets. "Did she tell you?" he asked.
"I overheard," Quentin said. "If she hadn't wanted me to know, she would have been more subtle about it."
"Why did he have Ziya's blood?" Jaylin asked. "That man..."
"My father."
That's right. Alex had told them all about his relationship to Andre.
"You didn't tell me he was a werewolf hunter." Jaylin took Quentin by the hand to wash the small bits of dried blood from his nails. "You said you were sent here because he was in trouble with the law."
"He was," Quentin said. "For trying to kill his son."
"But why?" Jaylin asked. "Why is he like this?"
Quentin's breath left through his nose, and Jaylin had almost forgotten how sick he was until his voice came out, hoarse and permeated with exhaustion. "Killing wolves wasn't a job for my father. It was an obsession. Killing things was..." He wiped the water from his face, his hair slung back slick. "When I was eight, he took me on one of his expeditions to the Soviet Union. I remember standing knee deep in the snow, covered in the jackets my mother made from the pelts he gamed. The snow was colder than anything I'd ever felt, and my father dug is hand in, let it fall from his fingers like sand. He said he loved the color of bloody snow. That both things meant death, and that was what made it such a beautiful contrast. He used the pelts as an excuse to hunt, but I'd seen the grin on him when he stood over the corpse of a Eurasian wolf. Death was art to my father, so when he first found out what I was, he didn't hesitate to reach for his gun."
"So you ran?" Jaylin asked.
Quentin shook his head, reached out for the wall to keep himself up right. "I was never running from Andre. I guess that's where I went wrong."
Jaylin let his eyes fall to those wounds again. He reached forward and brushed the skin beside one, the spot tender enough that Quentin's muscles flinched on contact. "Why didn't you kill him then? When he held that gun to your head, you could have stopped him."
"Death is no where near as frightening a thought as becoming my father," Quentin said. His head looked heavier then, another wave of exhaustion piercing through him. Jaylin would have to force him back to bed soon enough. "Part of me wanted to know if he'd really pull the trigger."
"You know now," Jaylin said.
"I know now."
"But how did he get Ziya's blood?" Jaylin asked a second time. He already knew the answer—and Jaylin was sure Imani knew it too. That blood had come from Ziya, it hadn't been taken from her. She wanted the lichund and it wasn't beyond her twisted, moral realm to lock arms with the enemy in order to get it.
When Quentin didn't answer or lift his head, Jaylin turned him up by the chin. "Quentin."
The look in his eyes was strange and distant—a detached, disassociate gaze that didn't set just right. It was like a link inside of Quentin had been cut.
The strength in his legs gave, his hand slipped down the tile wall. Jaylin caught him just before his knees hit. He was so heavy in his arms—a dead weight that almost dragged him down to the shower floor. But he was strong enough now to bear that weight so he held Quentin there, chin on his shoulder, careless to the wounds he feared so much before. The water soaked Jaylin down, and Quentin's only conscious presence was the hand that gripped the back of his soaked shirt.
Jaylin could hear his difficult breath, so he stayed just where he was, bearing Quentin's weight, letting him rest while the water ran over them both. "It's okay," he told Quentin. "It's okay."
But Jaylin knew what came before death. He knew that empty gaze. He felt that pin in his heart.
He wasn't ready for this. Not again.
He waited until Imani returned. Until she could help carry Quentin back to his bed, stick him with all of those tubes and needles, and whatever Imani things Imani did to keep those threads intact. And once he was back the way he'd been, Imani strode up to Jaylin, the look she wore chiseled as stone. She opened her mouth to reprimand him, but Jaylin turned mid-word and shoved his way through the the bedroom door, then out through the front with a slam.
The chill of a gray morning bit through the wet of Jaylin's clothes, flushed down against his skin. He wasn't sure what it was that drew him outside. Maybe that itch to turn, maybe the anxieties, the stuffy air inside of the Watch or the way he wanted to rip his soaked clothes from his body to breathe just a little better.
But when Jaylin saw Nicon's car, saw Devi and Aster and a third witch pull their things from the back and make their way to the Watch, he knew then what had lured him out of the house.
Nicon was a distance away, admiring the wings of a white butterfly as it rested on the smooth shape of a juniper tree. Jaylin moved toward him, his shirt sticking wet to his skin, his feet bare on the gravel. The look on Nicon's face was understandable—a flex in his high-arched brow, a befuddled little part to his lips. Jaylin didn't give him a moment to question the situation. He pulled Nicon closer by a fistful of his jacket and said, "Tell me how to kill the queen."