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“Drink it.”
“No!”
He put an arm around her shoulders and raised her toward him. The sheet slipped, and her bare breast flattened against his bicep. “Drink it, or I will force it into you.”
She darted her gaze to his eyes, expecting anger, but found no vehemence. He jiggled the cup, waiting, and she nodded. The crap tasted like liquid dirt. She choked, but Eiji kept the cup to her lips until she’d swallowed it all. To her surprise, when the last bit went down, the fire in her belly eased, and the shaking subsided enough for sleep. She shut her eyes and forgot everything until the next time she woke up.
This time she sat in bed with a nightgown on, a blanket pulled up to her shoulders. Eiji brought in breakfast of a boiled egg and dry toast. She tried not to wrinkle her nose at it.
“Tell me about your kind,” she demanded. “Are there a lot where you come from? In Japan?”
“No.”
“You told me you have a brother and parents and grandparents.”
His movements were precise as he arranged food on her plate and stirred her tea. After tapping the spoon on the side of the teacup once, he set it aside and turned the cup with both hands, but she didn’t know why because it wasn’t like there was a handle she needed to grab. She reached out to try her ability to pick it up, but it wobbled, and he helped her take a sip.
“And great-grandparents,” he corrected her as if no time had passed. “Okaasan is wolf.”
“Oka…” she repeated. “Your mom?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“All of the women.”
That shocked Shae into silence. She sat there watching him, knowing she smelled it strong on him, but since she had no training to tell her why she smelled the wolf on Eiji, and if all the others smelled that way even if they weren’t, she didn’t know what to make of it. On the edge of her mind, she still felt panic. She wanted to give in to more tears and scream and rage at him for not protecting her, as if that was his fault. There was something else too, something at this point she was too scared to broach with Eiji. At least in her semi-reasonable right mind, she didn’t believe he intended to hurt her.
Rather than approach the biggest fear niggling at her mind, she asked him, “Do you know who I am too?”
“Too?”
“Also.”
He appeared to think about it. “Shae Jones.”
So Eiji might have been hiding what he was, but he didn’t know she was a Keith. Maybe—and it was a slim chance—he hadn’t heard of her family at all. She didn’t want to tell him. He might have lost a few of those women in his line who were shifters and held a grudge. She’d told him she wanted to die, but she hadn’t meant it—at least not now. But as each hour passed, she felt the virus spread. At some point—she wondered if it were only at the full moon—she would change, and from that point on, she would be a wolf shifter, no longer human. Maybe she wasn’t considered human now.
A teardrop rolled down her cheek, and Eiji leaned over to brush it away with his thumb. He moved closer and kissed her lips. Shaking and lost, she clung to him, allowing him to share his warmth and his energy.
“I won’t always be on my back,” she whispered when he moved away.
“I know.”
He ended up feeding her as if she were a baby and letting her sleep the afternoon away. In the evening, she went through another rough patch where Eiji force-fed her more of the mud drink. All the time, Shae strained her ears to pick up sounds outside the house, wondering when Darryl would come back. She wanted to warn Eiji and tell him to go away for his own safety, but to be left alone seemed more than she could bear. She knew it was selfish, but when he held her in his arms at her weakest points, she let him.
One night Eiji took her outside on the porch and sat in a chair with her on his lap. The night air cooled her fevered skin, and she didn’t complain that she was strong enough to sit up by herself.
The entire time she’d kept her eyes shut from exhaustion, but now she opened them and peered into the night. “I still can’t see any more than I could before.”
“You will later.”
Shadows shifted, but whether it was a figment of her imagination, she couldn’t tell. “We shouldn’t be out here.”
“They won’t come yet.”
She jumped at his words, and Eiji’s arms tightened around her. “T-Tell me about your family again. Why are only the women wolves, and does that mean you can’t change?”
