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Olaf shrugged. “I do not know.”
“Open the damn cell, Duke,” Newman said, and the anger was back. I couldn’t really blame him. We were working so hard to save Bobby, and now it might all have been for nothing.
“Who goes inside with him?” Duke asked.
“I will,” I said.
“You’ll need backup,” Livingston said.
“No,” Newman said. “He’s not a danger to anyone like this.”
“If he wakes up suddenly and sees you bending over him—” Duke started to say, but Newman cut him off.
“Open the fucking cell, Duke!”
Livingston got his shotgun again, and once he had it ready to aim, Duke opened the cell.
“It’s your funeral,” Duke said again as Newman pushed past him.
I followed him into the cell. He’d called me for backup, so I’d have his back. Olaf stayed in the cell doorway so that Leduc couldn’t close it behind us. Good, I was tired of being locked in this damn cell.
27
LIVINGSTON HAD HIS shotgun to his shoulder, though it was aimed at the ceiling while Newman knelt to check Bobby’s pulse on the side of his neck. I stood on the other side of Bobby from him. Bobby looked so pale and so still. I held my breath as if that would help Newman find a pulse. Bobby’s face was a bloody mess, and I’d done that to him. Had I done more? Had he died while we tried to call the judge, slowly bleeding to death inside his head? Or maybe I’d broken his spine badly enough that the trauma had acted like a decapitation. Yeah, Olaf said Bobby’s heart was still beating, but I couldn’t hear it. In all the years I’d been hunting, fighting, and dating people with lycanthropy, I’d never heard of one of them dying from a spinal injury or a concussion. I thought you had to see brains on the outside of the skull for the brain to be injured enough to kill. It was going to be a hell of a time to be wrong.
“Pulse seems slow, but it’s there.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding, but the tightness in my chest wasn’t fooled. It knew that a pulse just meant Bobby wasn’t dead yet.
“I told you he was not dead,” Olaf said from the door, where the sheriff was still trying to get him to move so he could lock the door again.
“If that monster comes to and rushes the door, he could kill us all before we get him,” Leduc said.
“No,” Olaf said.
“You hunt these things. You know how fast they can be,” Leduc said.
Newman was opening one of Bobby’s eyes. I prayed that the pupils weren’t uneven and fixed, because if either of those things was true, then I’d killed him. It was just going to take him longer than normal to die.
“Anita would slow him down until I could join the fight. He would never reach you and the others,” Olaf said.
“You can’t know that.”
“Blake beat him without help last time, Duke. I think we’re safe to leave the cell open,” Livingston said.
“Pupils are even and reacting to light,” Newman said.
The tightness in my chest loosened. “Good,” I managed to say, and I sounded breathless, as if I still couldn’t get enough air. Killing someone on purpose was one thing; doing it by accident was something else. It’s funny how you don’t know what will bother you until it does.
Newman looked up at me. “I still want to call an ambulance.”
“If we can get some paramedics that are willing to look at him, I’m good with that,” I said.
“They have to do their job if we call them,” Newman said.
I shook my head. “Not if it will endanger them. Legally they can refuse.”
“They’d just let him die because they’re afraid?” he asked, sounding outraged. He suddenly seemed years younger than I knew he was, or maybe I just felt years more cynical.
