I appreciated it, but I also wished there was something I could do. Running to the city now was out of the question with the other packs being so near, but if they were willing to listen…
“Let me look into the files,” I said after a long moment.
“You can’t,” Fallen said with surprise. “It isn’t safe.”
“And your wolf can’t take being in the city for more than a few minutes,” Ash added. “It takes years to settle those primal nerves.”
“Which is time we don’t have.” Turning to Fallen, I said,
“You agreed to go with me to see my sister tonight. Why is this any different?”
“You did?” Ash growled. “Are you really that lovestruck that you’d risk your life and that of your mate’s?”
“It was only going to be to the border,” Fallen explained.
“I’d never agree to take her into the city alone.”
Meaning she’d have to take Ash with us. At this point, I didn’t care. So long as it got the other packs off our case, I’d take whatever wolves with me that I could.
“So we’ll all go,” I said, breaking the uneasy silence between them. “If the packs out there are willing to listen, I suggest we go into the city and get the files from my surgery along with the one from Dani’s autopsy. They have to be around there somewhere.”
“But without knowing where to look—”
“I have my ways, trust me.”
Jeremy knew his way around the hospital a lot better than I did. If someone could help me round up those files, it was him.
I was about to ask to use the phone so I could call Val and let her know I wouldn’t be able to drop by when a low growl made its way up Fallen’s chest. Her growl was joined by many others, causing my own wolf to bristle in response.
They aren’t angry at us, I assured my wolf, pushing back the panic that had started to crowd my mind.
“Stay here,” Ash ordered, her eyes on me. “You stay with her.”
Fallen opened her mouth to protest, but after looking at me, she thought better of it. With a nod, she sat to my right, her ears pinned back as Ash shifted into her human form.
Without another word, Ash opened the door and quickly slipped outside, leaving the rest of the pack behind until she needed us.
“Shouldn’t we go with her?” I asked, wincing when my panic made its way into my voice.
“Ash believes going out on her own will be far more welcoming to the other packs than taking all of us with her.
With only one wolf to face, they’ll have no choice but to focus on her.”
I guess that made sense, but it also didn’t make me feel any better. In some strange way, I felt as though this was my fault.
The one time I finally get far enough on a list for a heart and I end up with one from a wolf.
Which was still something I couldn’t understand. Even those of us who didn’t study about wolf anatomy knew about the differences between the blood and organs of a human and a wolf. I wouldn’t have noticed as the patient because no one ever told me. Whatever complications that may have happened after surgery due to a poor match would’ve been masked by my wolf’s ability to heal. Even before I took on my first shift, that heart was doing its job by keeping me alive until I got here.
Until Ash and Fallen found me.
They could’ve left me in that parking garage as my wolf tore me apart from the inside out. They could’ve let me die.
Instead, they brought me here, and because of that, I’d endangered their entire family.
My family.
My heart seized at that, at the realization that this pack was family. We were brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and friends.