Born of Blood

Chapter 15

He couldn't help her.

The rain fell steadily outside the window he stood next to, the Sitka Spruce large and towering outside enduring the shower with the ease of giants. The sound of the falling rain should have been soothing, as it so typically was over the Sendöw pack land, but for Jacob Novache it was sad, that day. The woosh of the wind was typically a relief, bringing the reminder of a fresh evening, and now it blew her scent of death to his nose.

He slowly moved closer to the window, and pulled the pane closed, and drew the curtains.

The rain was muted now, it didn't help him feel better as he had hoped it would. Jacob ran his hand through his remaining hair, and sighed as he rested his weight against his arm on the windowsill, staring at her relaxed body resting underneath the blanket. His stethoscope rested around his neck, the cold metal laying on top of his baby blue button up shirt, it seemed so normal it almost mocked the situation he stood in front of.

Her poor, battered, body was anything but normal.

He almost couldn't bear to look at it, but as her radiographs stayed illuminated above the right hand side of her bed, he couldn't help it.

All those fractures, all the effected tissue.

Her brain had been too damaged, skull fragments could be seen lodged in the tissue of her brain in the x-ray, and the injury was so old anything that could have been done would have needed to be completed as soon as it had occurred. The window of time was long gone, he could see brain matter from where her head had been bashed in. Her hair was stuck to the visible infection, the smell of decay heavy in the air. The skin of her face and scalp was black and purple, necrotic tissue pulling away from her skull and oozing bodily fluid that showed just how correct the doctor was in his analysis.

And there was her whip injury's.

Jacob moved to the wall, pulling on the purple gloves and a face mask as he moved over the hard wood floor to get a closer look at his patient. Using his thumbs and the gentlest touch he could manage, he slowly peeled open the woman's eye, the milky blue organ stared back, dead. Her eye was necrotic, he could see where it had swollen past capacity at one point, then, almost pooled, back into socket from its inflammation. He wished his mask could block out the smell of all the dead tissue, but it didn't.

Her scent was like the rain outside the window he had just shut. He knew if she were healthy, she would smell beautiful, almost certainly the reason Jacobs Alpha was so easily able to identify her as his mate. Now she just smelled like a carcass rotting in the Alaskan forest, that the rain was attempting to wash away.

He stepped back, pulling his mask down and sighing heavily while he stared at the slumped girl in the hospital bed. Jacobs grey eyes moved back to her radiographs and, as a medical professional with decades of work behind him, he recognized what he was looking at, he just couldn't justify how it was possible.

His eyes stayed on the radiograph as he moved his fingers to her neck. His fingers counted her pulse, the almost nonexistent pulse, before they slowly traveled over the smooth part of her skin to the back of her neck. As his fingers traveled from her carotid the back of her neck became bubbling, thick with scar tissue, and unfortunately, Jacob recognized these wounds.

It was the same wound that caused her eye to rot in her socket.

Whips.