Silver Claws

16. Weakened is one who mourns

Not good. I am definitely not feeling good.

The bond withered, but it was almost drowned out by the results of last night's escapade, a monkey banging symbols in my brain, marching his own little trail in a one man parade. A horrible taste was in my mouth, like rotten grapes and paint thinner.

I sit up in my bed, and hear the voice outside the door. It's Trevor on the phone.

"No it's about the same here... that's not good. At least she isn't trying to poison herself... no he's eating."

A long silence.

"Still? Shouldn't she have healed already?"

The words make my heart stop so suddenly its painful. Unrelenting panic. She's hurt. The idea makes in wolf in me rise up, he wants to fight. He wants to see his mate now. Her mark took so long to heal, apparently shifters weren't so durable. Then again silver didn't make burns on their skin like cattle brands.

He chuckles. How can he laugh at this? "That doesn't suprise me. She's practically a tank." He says goodbye. The tank comment had to mean she was okay. I tried to calm down, vertigo made a vengeful return.

He walks in, fully dressed and holding a red air horn. I grimace at it.

"You got another one." I grumble.

"Yep. Glad to see you up." His voice is downright cheerful, but theres tension around his mouth.

"What happened?" I don't care, I don't care.

Trevor looks disgusted, an expression I've gotten used to so it doesn't offend me as much as it first did. "Oh now you want to act like you care about your mate?"

I narrow my eyes and he relents. "There was an incident a few days ago. Nothing too serious, she's just a slower healer than what we're used to. Is that a shifter thing or an Akela thing?"

I wince at the word shifter. He may as well said demon. "I don't know, I never asked."

"Of course you didn't."

"Get out of my face, I'm not in the mood."

He walks out shaking his head like I'm the biggest disappointment in his life. He didn't know real disappointment, he didn't find out that his mate was straight out of hell.

The crushing depression hit me again, like it did every time I wasn't drunk. My whole life I'd thought about how my mate would be, that she would comfort me when my day had been long and hard. She would be motherly like every Luna I'd ever known. She would have passions, her and I would talk for hours every night. We would be inseparable.

My heart mourned for something I didn't have.

Instead I had Akela. During our first weeks together I handled her outright hostility. I thought for sure she would bolt at some point but she didn't, and I'd started to hope. She was so still and quiet, she would follow me like a phantom. Sometimes I'd forget she was there, until I would see her examining her surroundings, studying how the pack operated and how I moved. After the second week she stopped threatening to rip my limbs off and I had hope that there was a personality underneath it all.

Maybe I had misread her, but it felt like we were connecting. It was slow and we didn't touch each other at all, but I trusted her enough to be around Ryan. I started to believe she couldn't have been like other shifters, she wasn't trying to kill every wolf she met. I let her become that big bird without complaining. We weren't in love, not even close, but there was enough for me to hope.

There was the other horrible feeling that haunted me the same, that it had been my fault. I'd set a standard that she couldn't reach. I made it harder by expecting her to change so quickly. There was a part of me angry at myself too, I knew I wasn't being fair. But it didn't change what I wanted. I wanted her to be something that she should be, something she clearly wasn't. I saw in her head and it scared me. My mate was gone and in her place was a siren ready to lure my pack and I to our death.