Reality
Elara
Her expression was one that stayed in my memory even until I slept off. Somehow the conversation with her warmed me out so badly to the point where I began to feel the throbbing of the pain in myself again and a headache from where I must have hit my head. I reached for my dark hair and found no bump—luckily—then again, even if there was one it would have long since deflated by now. I lay down against the soft silk-lined pillow and probably fell asleep before my head hit it.
Once again I was in that strange black place with that strange woman, but this time she was inches away from my face. Her strange eyes glimmered with humour. “You handled that rather interestingly,” she said, the humour rising to a soft giggle.
“Who are you and what do you want from me?” I felt exasperated, tired, and frankly I wanted to enjoy a good night’s sleep—just being asleep and being aware that I was asleep; perfect. I would take the closing-your-eyes-and-opening-it-to-find-out-it-was-morning kind of sleep. At this point I was tired of her shenanigans.
She stopped laughing and suddenly looked at me with a very serious expression. “You should know,” she said. “You should know it by now: you’re not normal. You should come to that knowledge. You should see yourself differently.”
I frowned rather deeply till I must have looked like the Grinch. “What are you talking about?”
She grabbed my shoulders rather painfully and pulled me until I was a mirror inch from her face. With wide eyes I stared at her as my expression changed from light to dark. “Remember what you are,” she said. “You are no ordinary human. You took his blood and now you must fulfill your destiny.”
She let go and suddenly I fell, but luckily I fell to the bed. My eyes opened and I found Kendrick hovering over me. Slowly my eyes fluttered closed again just as he mumbled something like, “Her colour is better.” But I could hear no more; I slept this time and, gladly, it was an actual sleep.
When I woke it came with that undeniably childish urge to stretch out my sore bones. I did just that but forgot to wind when my side began to ache me. It wasn’t the sharp pain from before—the painkillers had dulled that. No, this one was slightly different; it was a dull ache that didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would.
“Hang on,” I heard the familiar voice of Kendrick saying. “Don’t move too much.” I stopped mid-stretch in a rather awkward position.
“Okay, very good,” I said slowly. “Am I moving?” He reached for my side and slowly began to unwind the bandages. He stopped suddenly, staring at the wound, then at my face as if I had grown a second head.
“What the fuck?” he said in the most human-like manner I had ever seen lately. “Wow,” he added to himself. He really did spend time around humans. “How is this possible?” he asked slowly.
“What?” I mumbled, looking towards the wound. The wound, as at the last time I saw it, had been a horrible gash that the stitches pulled together with reckless abandon. It looked as though a plus-size woman had tried to fit into jeans several sizes too small for her and it ripped. All my flesh wanted to come out; all my insides were intent on greeting the world. But now it looked closed, like pretty pink cloth—no longer angry pink but pretty pink.
Maybe I was just fed good food, I told myself, genuinely remembering the way I had been fed over the past few weeks: mostly porridge and broth, but damn, it tasted good. These werewolves—or whatever the heck they were—had rather amazing sense of taste, or maybe it was just the sensitive tones and how everything had to be perfect, even down to the smallest of details. Now it was nutritious, but not nearly as nutritious as allowing the wound to heal that quickly in record time.
“Well, it’s not that bad, is it? I mean, I’ve mostly just been sleeping, so maybe my body—” I trailed off, hoping he would see my desperation. Somehow the last thing I wanted was to be weird. My life was already weird enough as it was; besides, I was here, so surrounded by furries.
He looked back at me. “Oh no, you don’t understand. The wound was deep—really deep. If anything had happened, it would have been the inside that healed first before the outside, even with the stuff I gave you.” His smile moved over as though he didn’t want to say it. He still didn’t tell me what he’d given me.
“Was it the stuff you gave me?” I tried, hopeful. He shook his head. “No. It only numbs pain—at least for the most part. It has no record anywhere that it helped our kind or any kind. In fact, it’s a faster, more common known drug.”
I lifted my lips. “Can I get some of it? I remember how it tasted like it was bad but it made me feel much better.”
“Go easy—too much of it and you could get addicted to that kind of stuff.” He moved away, folded his arms, and still looked at my wound as though, well, it was strange. For him it was barely anything; in fact I still wanted to just leave, although it was bad now that I thought about it.
“I told Selena I was leaving until I was fully healed, and now I’m nearly fully healed, but I am doing the perfect myself,” I mumbled. “Riddle me something, doctor.”
He smiled. “Do you like the name? You like the title that bad?”
“You have no idea,” he said with a playful grin on his face. “I spent two years in human med school.”
“Why?” I frowned. “It’s hard there, I know. At least I know a couple of people that went.” I blinked rapidly, remembering two friends I had once upon a time—Samantha and Arie. Samantha being stuck in med school at the time, trying to take her first round of board exams. I shook my head, dismissing the memory; they were gone now, after better things. I thought—much better than being stuck with me.
He frowned, noticing something. “What?” He leaned closer; he was now only a few feet away from me. “You’re too guarded,” he said. “Of course I know it’s hard being people like you—people who’ve been through stuff, which is fine. Everybody has to go through something to make them something, but you’re just a little too guarded, almost as though you have too many secrets in your little mind to hardly take it.”
I opened my mouth and then shut it, settling on a deadpan expression. “Two years in medical school, doctor?”
“Unfortunately that doesn’t qualify you for the title, but I think I’ll just give it to you.” The little smile on his face faltered.
“Oh no, I earned it while I was there. Besides, I knew everything I needed to know about human anatomy since I wasn’t even treating humans anyway.”
“Are you people different from us?” My curiosity was rising off the ceiling.
“No, not really the same, but you can imagine our physiology changes easily enough when we shift into our beasts. It’s a rather gruesome thing, but it is what it is—we are what we are.” He looked down at my side again. “That is not normal, even by our standards. Humans don’t heal that fast. I know this; I’ve watched a human heal from a tiny little gash for several weeks. Literally, she was limping for two weeks, complaining about the pain, but you had a gash—three gashes.”
He raised his fingers and slowly— for some odd reason—his nails started to grow longer. Like really long: one inch, then two inches. Black and glistening. “This is what struck me,” he said. “Two inches, close to three depending on how feral the beast was.” “And it’s nearly closed. Something strange is happening with you,” he said slowly, searching my face.
“Yeah, well, I’m just as curious as you are.” Truth be told, I wanted to tell him about the strange woman, but a part of me genuinely wanted to keep quiet about that. “I have my secrets,” I said. They’re perhaps a little too much for my mind to bear.