Page 50 of Legacy Elite

I'm face-down on top of my bed in a T-shirt and shorts with one arm hanging off the side, doing an inventory. Left hip: bad. Both shoulders: worse. Something along the right side of my ribcage that objects to breathing in but not to breathing out, which seems like a design flaw.

I hear a knock.

"It's open."

Torres comes in, shuts it behind him, and stands there looking at me for a second.

"How bad?"

"Everything hurts."

"How'd it go?"

"I almost became a direwolf."

"Almost?"

I roll onto my side, which is a mistake, and I let him hear about it.

"I felt it," I say. "For like a second and a half. All of it — the heat, the skull thing, the smell of the entire county. I had it and then I went looking for it and it left."

Torres considers that.

"You couldn't do that yesterday."

"Oh my God."

"What?"

"You're the third person to say that to me."

"Because it's true."

"Because it's true," I repeat, in a voice, and he doesn't take the bait, which is annoying of him.

He comes over and sits on the edge of the bed by my hip, and doesn't say anything else about it, and that's the reason I like him.

"Which one's worst?"

"All of them are worst."

He gets a hand on my shoulder and presses with his thumb, and I make a sound like a wounded animal.

"That one," he says.

"Yeah."

"Turn over."

I go face-down again and he gets both hands into it properly, one knee up on the bed, working the whole slab of muscle over my shoulder blade, and it hurts and it's incredible and I stop being a functional adult somewhere around the second minute.

"You're enjoying this," I mumble into the pillow.

"A little."

"Sadist."

"You spent your afternoon letting Soren throw you on the ground for fun," Torres says. "Your opinion on what's normal isn't worth much."