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“Don’t take too long,” she warned. “Margo’s running out of time, and Eli could return before we’re ready.”
He had been hurt by the things he tried to do to us. He had weakened and would need time to recover. Margo didn’t have time. My stomach roiled as I ran away from Amelia and headed to the hospital on foot. I couldn’t wait around for a bus. I needed to push my body, to think about something other than Margo. There had to be another way out.
I made it to the hospital without any awareness of the journey. I was too preoccupied with my doubts to even greet Ryan as I passed him in the hallway. Nathan was cooing over Diane as she lay in her cot in the hospital room when I burst into the room.
Perdita was folding baby clothes into a bag. She turned to smile at me, but her face dropped when she noticed my appearance. “What happened?”
“Margo’s dying.” My face crumpled, every emotion finally setting itself free inside me. We had run out of options, out of time, and now Margo faced nothing but death, no matter what she decided.
Nathan was there almost immediately, holding on to me. He let me feel, let me expel everything without any questions. I gripped onto his shirt, struggling to breathe, the reality setting in. Perdita gently freed one of my hands and took it in hers.
“I’m okay,” I said at last, sniffling. Perdita handed me tissues, then guided me to a chair. They hovered over me, waiting until I was ready to speak.
“Vira showed up again,” I managed to say. “She’s with the pack now. She told Margo that she’s dying, that it’s too late to stop it, that whatever Eli’s doing is making Margo worse. Margo said… Margo said she already knew.” My voice quivered. “She didn’t know how to tell us, and I didn’t even notice. Victor knew immediately, but I…”
Perdita rubbed my back. Nathan perched on the bed facing me. Neither of them spoke, and that was a relief because my brain was shooting from one thing to another, not landing on anything.
“Eli attacked. Or tried to. He tried to get to me, and Margo protected me, except he redirected at Byron. We’re okay. I shifted, and it helped, but that made it worse because it gave Margo the idea. Eli would have killed one of us, but it was hurting him, too, and Vira showed up again and tried to stop him. Because Margo’s her blood, she knows when she’s about to die. She can’t help it. She’s a bit like Margo, except that she recovers in the end. Margo’s not recovering. Margo’s dying because she’s human. So she wants to not be human anymore.”
I looked up at them. They both seemed confused. I didn’t blame them. I felt confused, too. “Margo wants us to kill her,” I said weakly. “She wants to take the risk. She wants to shift.”
“Wait,” Nathan said. “You mean she wants to become a werewolf?”
“But we don’t know if it’s possible,” I rattled on. “So there’s as much chance she’ll die from that. She said she’d rather choose how she dies, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this, to do any of this. How do people do this?”
I blinked back tears then became aware of Perdita pushing a cup of water in my hand.
“First, you take a deep breath and calm down,” she said. “We don’t think straight when we lose control, right?”
She brought me back to our first years together in an instant. Me, secretly turning wolf at a young age, and her, coaxing me back to humanity in that understanding way of hers.
“It’s okay to feel,” she continued. “But let’s put a pin in it for a bit and think first. Margo’s definitely dying? Vira knows for sure?”
I inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly. “They both know, but the pack knows, too. The scent of death is all over her now. I didn’t notice at first because I wanted to deal with Vira, but it’s true.”
“And she’s asked the pack to turn her,” Nathan said. “That’s a first for me.”
“Do you think it’s possible?” Perdita asked.
“Maybe?” he said. “There’s no way I could give any guarantees. It’s risky. Are there no other options?” He turned to me. “Did Vira say anything else?”
“Only if Margo hid somewhere isolated, away from death, but she thinks Eli will follow, no matter what. We have his attention, and he’s obsessive. She said he’s breaking compound rules out here, that he’s obsessed with power. Maybe this is a takeover. I don’t know. He’s using Margo to either see what she can do or kill her painfully or start something with us or his people. I don’t understand him. Even Vira doesn’t understand him.”
“So the harbingers don’t allow this kind of attack,” Nathan mused, “but Eli is doing it anyway.”
“They hide in the mountains,” I recalled. “Lots of them don’t even have the gift anymore unless a relative is dying. They don’t sound like a threat to us at all, except for Eli. But he’s only attacking one person at a time, and it seems to drain him.”
“But he could have called in reinforcements,” Nathan continued. “Could have lied about what’s gone on here.”
I felt calmer for the discussion. Point by point, following logic, that was what I needed to reassure myself. “So we’re still at risk, and Margo thinks we need her to protect us. To protect all of us. If we fight, we’ll win, but we’ll lose people in order to win. She wants to save everyone.”
“That poor girl,” Perdita murmured. “There’s so much on her shoulders.”
“She thinks that being a shifter would help her survive the effects of being a harbinger,” I said. “We have no idea if we can even make it work. We haven’t done that on a human, never mind a harbinger.”
“Lia was turned into a werewolf,” Perdita said to Nathan. “If it was done for your grandmother when she was dying then we could find a way to make it work again.”
“The harbinger thing is an unknown that could interfere,” he said, frowning. “And none of us were there in my grandparents’ time.”
