Chapter 148 The second wave
“She has to be turned.”
The words did not settle.
They pressed into the room and stayed there, demanding something from everyone standing in it.
Aria felt her chest tighten before she had fully processed what Marcus said.
His hands were still on Maya, both palms pressing down, trying to hold together something that was already failing beneath his fingers.
Blood on the floor.
Breath getting shorter.
Time running in a direction none of them could reverse.
Kane looked at Marcus and spoke without raising his voice.
“How long?”
“Minutes,” Marcus said.
That single answer removed every option except one.
Aria stepped forward and shook her head.
“Marcus, wait.”
“She is dying,” Marcus said, and his voice carried no emotion because there was no room for it.
“I know she is dying,” Aria said, keeping herself steady.
“But turning her like this will not work. Her body has no wolf bloodline. The survival rate for a human in her condition is almost nothing.”
“I know what the survival rate is,” Marcus said.
Aria held his gaze.
“Then you understand you could kill her faster.”
The silence that followed had weight to it.
Nobody in the room could argue with what she had just said because it was true and they all knew it.
Marcus exhaled slowly and then answered with the kind of quiet certainty that did not leave room for debate.
“She is already dying, Aria.”
Kane stepped forward and the room reorganized itself around him the way it always did when he had made a decision.
He looked at Marcus directly and asked the only question that still mattered.
“Can you do it?”
Marcus met his eyes and answered honestly because anything else would have wasted time they did not have.
“I don’t know.”
Kane held his gaze for one moment before he spoke.
“Do it.”
Aria closed her eyes briefly and then stepped back, not because she agreed but because there was nothing left for her to offer that would change anything.
Marcus turned Maya carefully, one hand supporting the back of her head and tilting her neck to the side.
Her head moved without resistance because she had no strength left to give.
Her breathing was so shallow now that Aria had to watch her chest to confirm it was still happening at all.
Marcus leaned close and spoke quietly even though he knew she could not hear him.
“I am sorry this is not how this was supposed to happen.”
Then he bit her.
Maya’s back arched violently off the floor and a broken sound tore from her throat that did not belong entirely to either a human or a wolf.
Her hands clenched hard against nothing and her body convulsed in a way that Marcus had to brace against to keep her from hurting herself further.
He held her steady with both hands, not restraining her completely but giving her something solid to move against while everything inside her went to war with itself.
Aria felt the shift the moment it began.
Energy surged under Maya’s skin, sharp and wild and pushing outward before forcing itself deeper, resisting everything that tried to contain it.
Her healing instinct fired immediately and her hands came up without thinking.
“I can stabilize her,” Aria said.
“Not yet,” Marcus said sharply, and his focus did not leave Maya for a second.
“Let it take hold first or it won’t work.”
Maya screamed then, and the sound filled every corner of the room with something raw and jagged that sat exactly in the space between human and wolf.
Kane did not move and did not interfere.
He watched everything with the specific stillness of someone reading a situation and preparing for whatever it produced next.
The seconds stretched and each one felt longer than the one before it.
Maya convulsed once more, hard enough that Marcus had to brace his full weight against her, and then everything stopped at once.
The arching stopped.
The sound stopped.
The movement stopped.
The silence that replaced it was a different kind of heavy, not tension but something that sat further down than tension, something closer to finality.
Aria leaned forward with her hands hovering an inch above Maya’s chest, afraid to make contact.
“Marcus?”
He was already checking.
Two fingers pressed to her throat, his other hand flat against her sternum, reading for anything.
He found nothing and pressed harder and still found nothing, and Aria felt the absence before he said anything because it had a specific texture she recognized from too many rooms that had looked like this one.
Kane stepped closer.
“What is happening?”
Marcus did not answer right away.
He checked again, slower this time, moving through each point of contact with the methodical focus of someone who needed to be completely certain before they allowed themselves to know.
The room held still around him.
Nobody breathed.
Nobody moved.
Then Marcus looked up, and every piece of control he had held onto through the last ten minutes was gone from his face.
“She is gone.”
Aria stared at Maya’s body on the floor, completely still, no breath, no movement, no sound, the kind of stillness that carries a weight that ordinary quiet does not.
Even Kane did not react immediately because the moment had not finished landing yet and they were all still standing inside it.
Marcus did not pull his hands away from her.
He kept both palms against her chest as though letting go would be the thing that made it real and permanent.
Aria’s voice came out barely above a whisper.
“No.”
Then Maya’s body jerked, sharp and violent and sudden, and Marcus froze for one full second before his focus snapped entirely back to her.
Maya’s chest rose with a harsh dragging inhale that sounded like it was pulled from somewhere deep and unwilling, and then another breath followed, uneven and broken but undeniably present.
Marcus moved his hand back to her throat and this time he felt something.
Fast, irregular, wrong by every human standard, but there, beating against his fingers like something that had decided it was not finished yet.
He started to say something and did not finish it because Maya’s eyes opened.
They were fully yellow.
Locked forward.
Focused on Marcus with an intensity that had nothing familiar in it, nothing that recognized him or the room or any of the people in it.
The growl that came from her chest was low and continuous and it filled the space completely, the sound of something that had just woken up inside a body it did not yet understand and was already deciding what in the room was a threat.
Marcus did not move.
He did not pull back or look away or change the position of his hands.
He stayed exactly where he was at eye level with something that was wearing Maya’s face and looking at him like it had never seen him before, and he kept his voice even and said her name the way he always said it, like it was the only word in the room that mattered.
“Maya.”