Chapter 5

Beth’s POV.

I don’t know how long it is before the pain becomes too much, but it feels like years, pain searing through me with every second, every movement. The knife digs deeper every time I breathe, making me light headed and intensifying my screams.

Just when I think that I can’t take enough, that I surely can’t handle any more, the pain stops. Slowly, the bodies beside me draw away, and I can faintly hear them spitting curses at me. I’m too tired, and in too much pain, to pay any attention to them, allowing myself to succumb to the darkness flitting around the corners of my vision.

With that, I fall asleep alone on the floor, wishing that I don’t wake up, blood still streaming from me and tears still falling.

When I wake up, I’m still laying across the floor, my torso feeling sticky and aching like hell. I blink in the darkness, my body stiff from lying on the ground. All of the lights are out – at least, as far as I can tell – and the pack house is quiet. The tiny clock perched on one of the tables is glowing, showing the time to be 1:43 am. I groan, shifting so that I can sit up.

"Damn it," I curse quietly, as I peel back my shirt even higher, tearing open some of my cuts in the process. It’s too dark for me to see properly, even with my wolf abilities, but I can tell that it’s bad. Really bad. I gingerly bring my left hand to my rib cage, leaning back on my right. I touch my cuts with one finger, whimpering as tears spring to my eyes again. They’ve begun the slow process of healing already; the edges of the cuts are puckered, pink, and extremely tender. And they’re infected.

I blink away the tears as hard as I can, pressing one hand tightly into my stomach and shifting myself with the other one, before gritting my teeth and lurching to my feet.

I let a small shriek pass through my lips as the cuts all tear open at once, straightening myself out of the curled position my torso was in all night.

Don’t scream, Beth, don’t scream, I scold myself mentally, glancing around the house wearily. I don’t think I woke anyone up with that little squeal, but I don’t want to push my luck. God only knows what they would do to me if I woke them up, I think, shuddering as several possibilities fill my mind.

I breathe in deeply, gasping and biting down on my lip when it sends pain rocketing through me. I resign myself to quick, shallow breaths, and keep my right hand tight to my stomach, trying to hold myself together.

Every breath I take sends spasms of pain across my chest, tears streaming down my face in useless torrents I couldn’t stop if I tried. Just get up stairs, Beth. Just get upstairs, and clean out these cuts, and then you can go back to sleep. Just get upstairs.

Shivering, I reach the bottom of the stairs. Damn it all to hell, it is freezing in here. At least, it is to me. A ghost of hope glimmers in me, as I begin my long way to the third floor.

My vision is blurry, and my steps are shaky, my body swaying a bit as I climb. I shrug, deciding that my blood loss from before, no matter how small it was, must be affecting me.

I make it to the second floor, remembering that the mini doctor’s office is located here, and deciding to grab some supplies before I clean out the cuts. I cross the dark hallway, blinking and trying to see properly, and hardly dare to breathe as I pass the several bedrooms that fill this hall on both sides.

Finally, I make it to the office, and I grab the door handle, pushing the door open just enough for me to slide into. I slip into the room, shutting the door as quietly as possible behind me. Stay quiet, stay quiet, stay quiet. I pound the words through my head, willing my steps to be light.

I hesitantly take off my sweater, leaving only my worn tank top, and shiver as the cold air hits my arms. I bend, pressing my sweater into the crack between the door and the floor. I don’t want any light to escape the room. Someone might wake up, and, if they see that the light is on, they’ll come to see who it is. I don’t know what a member of the pack might do to me if they found me awake and in the doctor’s office so late at night, but I’m sure that it wouldn’t be good.

With that in mind, I flick on the light, blinking in the sudden brightness. The room is tiny, with white walls and cold, gray tiled floor. There is a hospital bed set up in the far corner, and a long desk covered in papers and bottles of pills to my right. Cabinets and a large sink take up the far wall, and a couch is pressed against the remaining wall.

Maps are hanging everywhere over the couch, and I vaguely recall that Tom and Joe sometimes use this room to hold meetings with visiting Alphas.

All of the paperwork must be theirs, I think to myself. The pack as a whole doesn’t use this room much – they call on me if they’re injured or sick, and the pack doctor has his own house somewhere on the edge of our territory, so I’m the only one who frequents this room. The last time that the office was open to the whole pack was when we had a healer come visit. Healers are rare, and much more powerful than doctors. They have the skill to overcome any sickness or injury that can happen to a werewolf – if the pack allows it, that is. When the healer came to visit, he checked over and healed every werewolf in the pack. Other than me, that is. I don’t think Joe would allow it.

When I heard the healer was coming, I had dared to hope that he could fix me. Renew the spirits of both me and my wolf… Hell, I thought he could remove my scars. I thought that, maybe, he’d be able to give my body a second chance at being beautiful.

I was naïve to think that, I know. As if Joe would ever allow that to happen to me. I’m the daughter of Dylan Ewing, THE Dylan Ewing. I’m not allowed any kind of ordinary treatment.

So, when it came time for me to get checked over by the healer, he didn’t say a word. Not one single thing to me. And while he looked sad, scared even, while he looked at my frail, scarred body, he sent me out without a word. No miraculous healing powers. No ancient chants as he powered all of his energy into my body, removing all of the pain and wounds.

Nothing.

I don’t know what I expected, but it definitely wasn’t that.

I shiver absentmindedly, and, when I do so, my arm jerks and rubs against my side. It ignites fiery pain along the already aching cuts once more, and I snap out of my thoughts.

"Damn it."

I grit my teeth together against the pain, and head over to one of the large cupboards, throwing open the double doors. There are shelves upon shelves of different medicine. Finally, I find what I want, in a large bin on the bottom shelf. White gauze and a slew of bottles of disinfectant sit all together. I grab a bottle, a large bandage, and a few towels.

Heading over to the sink, I roughly shove the bunched-up end of one towel in my mouth. This is gonna hurt, and I need to keep quiet.

I dump my armful of supplies on the counter beside the sink, before jumping up and sitting beside them. The aching pain intensifies with the movement, and I bite down into the fluffy material in my mouth. Don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream. I make it into a mantra, repeating it over and over in my head.

I lay across the counter, and pull my tank top back higher, so that it only covers my bra, giving me full access to the cuts. I push a towel under my head, propping it up, and then grab the disinfectant. I tear the cap off with shaky hands, dropping it to the floor.

Okay, Beth, it’s ok. You can do this. You’ve done it before, and you’ll do it again. You can get through it.

I shake my head a tiny bit, and then tip the bottle pouring a bit of the disinfectant into the first section of the twirling cuts.

Immediately, the intensity of the pain skyrockets. Everything feels like it’s on fire, and I scream out, only to have it muffled, thankfully, by the towel. Tears flow freely down my face and into the towel, but I don’t care. It takes all of my will to keep from writhing around the counter, twisting my body to try and get away from the pain.

My breath is coming in choked little sobs, and blood begins to run from the wounds again, this time accompanied by yellow-ish pus. I was right; the wounds are infected. Damn it. That’s going to make it worse.

I clench my free hand into a fist, wriggling a little. In what feels like years, the stinging pain recedes, leaving my whole ribcage aching. Without stopping to talk myself out of it, I dump more disinfectant into the next part of the cut.

Everything begins to burn again, and I choke on the towel, desperately trying to scream. It hurts, it hurts! Everything hurts! I scream again and again in my mouth, but the only noise I make is the sound of my sobbing.

‘Calm down,’ my wolf tries to soothe me, even though I know she feels my pain. She’s just able to fight it better than I can. ‘Distract yourself.’

So, I try and do what she says. I blink through my tears, my body bucking up in an attempt to curl into fetal position as a new wave of pain hits. Damn it, this hurts! I smack my clenched fist into the counter, and look around again. I need a distraction, and I need it now.

My eyes land on the maps, and I do my best to focus on them while waiting for the pain to begin to fade again. The largest map is from a satellite, and the different territory divisions are outlined in red. Ours is in the center of the map, taking up half of the area. Our houses are grouped together in the middle, and then we have acres of forest surrounding us on all sides.

Beyond us, there is a tiny pack called the Fire Storm Pack. Then there’s the Blue Rain Pack, the Crystal Moon Pack, and the Yellow Rock Pack. Finally, on the farthest corner of our map, is the beginnings of the large Blue Moon Pack.

I wonder what it would be like to live there, I think idly, as my body rocks again.

‘We could run away, you know,’ my wolf hastily pipes up, and I frown. The pain must be really getting to her; that’s like a death-wish.

‘No, we couldn’t.

‘And why not?’

‘Because, you know how weak we both are. You wouldn’t be able to run fast enough; the pack would catch us before we could make it into a new territory, and kill us on the spot. And if we did ever make it, we’d be rogues, and the first pack we’d stumble across would kill us without a second thought. We’d be dead either way.’

‘We’re going to die anyway! And you don’t know that, maybe they’d let us explain!’

‘They’d never do that. What with all of the rogue attacks lately, they’d think I’m a spy and kill us! And they wouldn’t be merciful and quick with it, either. It would be a lot more painful than just waiting until our bodies give out.’

At that, my wolf shuts up. She knows I’m right.

During all of this, the pain has managed to subside again. I squint my eyes and bite into the towel, putting more disinfectant in my wounds, and starting the whole process of the agonizing pain over again.

This happens over and over again for an hour and a half, and my whole body is aching by the time the last of the pain dies down. Everything stings, and my whole torso is sore. I sit up, moaning as my chest screams in protest, and reach for the bandages. I had managed to clean up the pus and blood in-between every dose of disinfectant, and, while the cuts are bright pink and tender, everything is now clean. I wrap the bandages around my body tightly, wincing and gasping as I go, and finally knot them off, making sure that my blood can still circulate. I am dizzy and my whole body is tired to the core, and all I want to do is go to my room and get some sleep.

I don’t bother putting away my supplies, guessing that no one will come in here before I have another chance to, and tenderly tug my tank top back down. Heading for the door, my body sways and I grab onto the nearest thing for support. I glance down, realizing that I grabbed the edge of the desk, and quickly pull my hand away. I take a deep breath, determined to shake my dizziness and get up to my room, when I notice something.

Sitting next to a particularly big bottle of pills, is a couple of pages of paper. From the way they’re folded, it looks like a letter. But, that’s not what has my attention.

Instead, I’m staring at the top of the first page, where ‘In regards to Beth Ewing’ is scrawled in bold.