"It wasn't like that. She was safe enough; she left with Samuel. There's nothing I could do that would protect her better than Samuel could."
"So why didn't you stop the arsonists?"
Arsonists? There had been arsonists?
"I wasn't ordered to protect her place. She wasn't in there."
Ben smiled in such satisfaction that I realized he hadn't known there were arsonists either. "Who were they, Mary Jo?"
"Fae," she said. "No one I knew. Just more trouble she's bringing to my pack's door. If they wanted to burn down Mercy's house, what did I care?" She looked at me, and said viciously, "I wish they'd burned it up with you in it."
"Ben!"
How he managed to stop his hand before it hit her face, I don't know. But he did. She'd have wiped the floor with him afterward. She might be nominally below him in the pack hierarchy, but that was only because unmated women were at the bottom of the pack.
She wanted to fight him. I could see it in her face.
I couldn't move with Adam mostly on my lap. "That's enough." I kept my voice soft.
Ben was panting, his hands shaking in rage . . . or pain. His hands were really damaged.
"He could have died," Ben said to me, his voice rough with the wolf. "He could have died because this - " He stopped himself.
And the violence was gone from Mary Jo's posture as quickly as if someone had hit a switch. Her eyes brightened with tears. "Don't you think I know that? He came running from the house, calling her name. I tried to tell him it was too late, but he just pulled the wall apart and jumped through the hole he'd made. He didn't even hear me."
"He'd have heard you if you told him she wasn't in there," said Ben, unaffected by the tears. "I was right behind him. You didn't even try. You could have just told him she was alive."
"Enough," I said. Adam's change was nearly finished. "Adam can settle this himself later."
I looked over at Sam. "Two changes is bad when there's tissue damage, right? It heals wrong." The human ear I could see was scarred, and the top half of Adam's head from his eyebrows up seemed to be as well. He must have had a wet towel or something over his head to cover his face, but it had fallen down at some point and hadn't protected his scalp.
Sam sighed.
The doctor had been listening to Mary Jo's story with fascination - I bet he watched soap operas, too. "I'm sorry," he told me, sounding it. "Unless you have some means of effectively restraining him, I cannot treat him here. I won't risk my staff."
"Can we have a room, then?" I asked.
Time wasn't our friend. We could take him back to his house and take care of him . . . but once Mary Jo had reminded me of the danger he'd be in wounded, in the middle of his pack, I really didn't want to take him back there and hurt him.
Sam caught my eye and looked down the line of curtained rooms to the one I'd retrieved him from.
I looked back at the doctor. "A real room would be best. Could we use the X-ray storage room?"
The doctor frowned, but Jody came to my rescue. "This is Doc Cornick's Mercy," she said. "She's dating Adam Hauptman, the pack Alpha."
"Who is lying in my lap," I told them. "I'm sorry. If it were anyone except for Adam who was hurt, we could make sure your personnel were safe - but Adam's the only one who could keep a lid on it reliably. You are right not to risk your people. But I've got a couple of wolves here - Mary Jo's an EMT - and we can manage on our own. If it weren't urgent that we get started, I'd just take him home. But if we don't do something soon, the scars will be permanent."
His feet were the worst. Wholly human and . . . I could see bone under blackened skin. He was unconscious, sweaty, and four shades paler than usual.
"What can we get you?" Fournier asked.
"A stretcher," said Mary Jo. She looked at Sam, waiting for him to take over. Then she realized that in this place he couldn't possibly show them he was a werewolf. I don't think she had noticed the full extent of Samuel's problem yet. She just turned to the doctor and started speaking medical gibberish.
A gurney appeared, and Ben lifted Adam out of my lap and onto it. A host of hospital personnel showed up and emptied the X-ray storage room of boxes - with very little respect for the existing organization. Someone was going to be upset about that. Dr. Fournier was paged to the third floor and left with the same brisk efficiency with which he seemed to manage everything - including werewolves in his ER.
With everything out, there was room, if only just, for all of us, the gurney, and the tray of tools Jody brought in.
"Fournier isn't as good as Doc Cornick when things go bad." Jody gave me a sharp look as Mary Jo and Ben maneuvered Adam to the center of the little room, and I wondered if she was thinking about how many werewolves I seemed to know and connecting it to the fact that I was Samuel's roommate. If so, she didn't seem to be hysterical at the thought of all the werewolves who were here at the moment, so maybe she'd keep quiet about her suspicions.
"Fournier didn't get hurt," I said. "He didn't make anything worse. That's good enough for me."
"Do you need help?" she asked bravely.
I smiled at her. "No. I think that Mary Jo can handle it." I'd have rather had Jody and the doctor, but Adam wouldn't thank me for putting humans at risk. Like Jody, I'd really rather have had Samuel . . . who had disappeared from my side.
"It's not a sterile environment, but it sounds like that's not important."
"No," I told Jody distractedly. Where had Sam gotten to? "Werewolves deal with germs better than people do. Looks like they're ready to go."
I closed the door, took a deep breath, and turned to Mary Jo. "Do you know what to do? I have to find Sam."
"I'm here." Samuel was naked as the day he was born, and sweating freely from the speed of his change. His skin was filthy with dust and fae blood - a condition he was remedying with a bucket of water and a towel that must have been among the things Mary Jo had required. His eyes were gray, a shade or two lighter than normal, but the other wolves would doubtless put it to changing. "I'll take care of it."
"Samuel," I said.
But he looked away and took up something that looked like a scrub brush, with stiff bristles. "I need you to hold him down. Ben, lie across his hips. Mary Jo, I'll tell you where I need you. Hands will be the worst, so we'll start with them."
"What about me?" I asked.
"You talk to him. Keep telling him we're helping him with this torture. If he hears you and believes you, he won't fight us as hard. I'll give him some morphine. It won't help much or for long, so we'll need to move fast."