“They’re gone now.”
NOTES: Part Two of Heroes Live Forever. Let’s see if I can keep up this pace! This part is a little weird, and it kind of ran away from me in places, but hopefully that doesn’t matter. Aaaaand I actually don’t have much to say about this one :D Thanks to everyone who read and left comments on Part One! ♥ Title is from Citizen Soldier by 3 Doors Down.
WHEN THAT MOMENT FINALLY COMES
Heroes Live Forever • Part II
Painkillers didn’t work very well on werewolves, if at all, but Cole took some anyway once he got back to the room he shared with Dia. Their physician had given him a small bottle, the brown plastic doing little to disguise the number of white pills inside. There was even a printed label, right out of a pharmacy, and Cole followed the dose laid out in small letters. He had hired their doctor for a reason; he trusted his judgement, and didn’t see any reason to question it, even if he felt a slight desire to double the dose in the hopes that it might have more of an effect. Ultimately he could end up doing more harm than good, and Cole wasn’t interested in exacerbating his condition. Clearly his body was just protesting, having its own version of a temper tantrum, the thought making the Alpha smile briefly as he looked around the room and then rested back against the desk, letting out another low breath. The pill bottle was set down on the flat level behind him, and he closed his eyes, lowering his head. Naturally he couldn’t feel the drugs kicking in, it wouldn’t be that quick or that easy, but maybe if he told himself - and his body, more to the point - that they were working, then he would start feeling better sooner rather than later.
Cole had been born a werewolf, and he was old. Much older than most of the other wolves in the city of Los Angeles. Even his mate, the second oldest in the pack, was almost a full century his junior. It was odd for him to feel in any way compromised, and it was only made worse by his status as an Alpha, a position he had held for over three hundred years, one that he had taken from his predecessor violently, as was tradition, and managed to keep ever since, earning the respect of those who followed him and bringing the pack up to the numbers it had boasted in the past. Under the last Alpha’s rocky reign, the pack had split down the middle, and worse, it had thinned out, numbers reducing drastically because of bad calls and fatal accidents and faulty calculations on the leader’s behalf. Cole had tolerated it for over a century before he couldn’t take it anymore. He had gone from fighter to Beta to Alpha in a little over a hundred years, a hell of a climb up the proverbial ladder of the wolf pack hierarchy. But not once had he looked back.
Maybe it had made him careless. Confidence was a big part of presenting a strong front; Alphas didn’t show weakness, not if they could help it. Not even when wounded. It left them vulnerable, and unsettled the pack, and if a dominant wolf was unlucky enough to have ambitious followers, it was all the invitation they would need to make an attempt to take over. Cole had never had to worry about that, and he knew he was lucky. After he had taken the title of Alpha, those who had been blindly faithful to the former leader had left, thinning the ranks even more, but after their departure the pack had grown strong again, stabilising and filling out with loners with nowhere else to go, the occasional child born into the group and allies who saw fit to stick around.
Cole had a good pack. A strong, large pack, one of the largest ever to be recorded. Even when his parents had been Betas, it had been rare for the numbers to rise so high as they were now. But times had changed. Cities had risen and expanded, the world had shifted, and supernaturals could hide in plain sight. The trials and suspicions were a thing of the past, and they could be overlooked. Even Cole’s pack, with its staggering numbers, could survive in Los Angeles, thrive even, and the humans would never know. They simply looked like a gathering of different peoples all under one roof, the renovated hotel that the Alpha had bought outright once they had found it, adapting her to house a pack. They had made changes, reinforced and rebuilt where necessary, and the basement had been overhauled completely, the elevator leading down a new addition to go along with it; the stairs had been walled over, leaving only one way up and down. The training room had once been a ballroom for guests, and the honeymoon suite had gone through one hell of a transformation. Cole looked around, smiling quietly. It had been the largest bedroom, so it had only made sense for the Alphas to take it, and Dia had done a great deal of redecorating. No one would ever think it had once been one of those cliché romantic suites. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence left behind. Everything had been changed, and not only because of the dust and wear of everything that had been in place when they’d arrived.
The floor was wood panelled, tasteful and dark, with a rug at the foot of the low king-sized bed. The desk on which he leaned was the same dark wood as the rest of the furniture, from the twin nightstands to the wall-length wardrobe-storage unit combo. The headboard above the bed was cushioned, and above it were three pieces of art that fit together, a slight touch of femininity - thanks to the flowers on the panels - that made the room feel more homely and comfortable. The bathroom door was ajar; if anything had been left more or less the same, it was that, there hadn’t been much to change, really, and they had seen no need to rip everything out and take the time to put it all back and fuss with the plumbing, though a great deal of the piping and wiring had needed replacing after they had bought the property. For the Alphas, the room was a sanctuary, it was their private pocket of the hotel, and looking at it now, Cole couldn’t help but smile. The only real official parts of the room were on Cole’s nightstand and in a wall bracket by the door. Two phones. One was a cell, Cole’s individual phone, and the other a wireless handset that connected to all the other telephones in the building. Every room had a phone, and an individual extension, similar to an office or another business. There was one main phone in the lobby that anyone could answer, though very few people outside of the pack knew the number.
The Hyperion was home to the pack, and it had been for a century, give or take. Cole had known as soon as he’d laid eyes on the building that they belonged there. It was tall - as tall as buildings could be in Los Angeles - and wide, but deep, a square of a building with a hole cut down the middle that could only be seen from above, leading all the way down to the tasteful, attractive courtyard that gave the pack a little taste of nature and the outside world without all the hustle and bustle and chaos of modern life and humanity.
His shoulders relaxed and he lifted a hand to push his hair back. It needed cutting, he realised languidly, the lazy spikes were longer than usual and heavy as a result, shadowing his brow. The thought didn’t stay in his head long. Dia was right, he realised. He was warm. He was starting to feel it, and yet the effort required to take a cool shower was lacking. His eyes lingered on the bathroom door, and a voice in his brain said ‘no’, not unlike a petulant child. The old wolf almost smiled and considered the bed instead. That thought didn’t last long either. The ache through his left side made the fresh deep breath uncomfortable.
Cole stayed where he was.
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There was a slight ache now, but nothing that wouldn’t be gone within an hour or two, and all things considered it had been worth it. Hearing that amount of laughter and feeling that level of calm afterwards had been refreshing after the recent trouble. The rogues had been disorganised, but they had been numerous enough to cause havoc, the kind that the pack couldn’t allow; unchecked, the rogues would have called unwelcome attention to werewolves, and therefore the pack, and they couldn’t allow that. In combat, that disorganised chaos had helped the rogues. It had confused the fighters, and a number of them had been lucky to escape without worse injuries. Keegan counted himself among the lucky ones. His guard had only slipped for a second, and it had been enough for his opponent to get a grip around his neck that could have, with the right application of pressure, done permanent damage. The bruises would linger for a few days more yet as his body worked on repairing the different levels of damage, but at least he could talk comfortably now. After the fight, trying to form words had been awkward and painful. Their physician agreed with his assessment of luck; with the right pressure, the rogue could have crushed his throat, and the human wasn’t sure a wolf could ever fully recover from that, even a hardy, experienced fighter like Keegan.
They walked side by side, his arm draped around her shoulders, hand hanging down on her other side. One of her hands was lifted, holding it in place, that same quiet possessiveness that Nerys always displayed when they were close together. The harmless excitement of the late afternoon had left the youngsters with growling appetites, and the older members had left them to raid the kitchen. Alannah and Brennan had moved the table away from the wall to indulge in a game of Poker with Irina and Connor. Dia had opted to sit it out and watch instead. Keegan and Nerys had excused themselves to head back to their room.
Her green eyes were down, watching the carpet ahead of them as they walked. Keegan watched her for a few moments before he gave her the tiniest tug with his arm, asking at the same time, “You okay?”
Pulling in a light breath, she lifted her head and gave him a soft smile, nodding gently.
Keegan wasn’t sure he was convinced, but if something was bothering her, then she would tell him in her own time. He couldn’t - wouldn’t - force it out of her.
Side by side, they walked down the hallway towards their room, until, without warning, Nerys stopped. Keegan, so tuned into the behaviour of his mate as he was, mimicked her a fraction of a second later, eyes fixed on her now. Her eyes were narrowed, a frown of concentration and confusion. Her head turned, the Beta female looking back over her shoulder. Nerys turned quickly, eyes widening, head tilting.
She had seen something.
Lacking her unique sight and the complex gift that granted it to her, Keegan couldn’t see what had caught her attention. He could only feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising in that telltale way. The fighter had often wondered to himself if it was all in his head, a trick of the mind when he knew Nerys was seeing something beyond the mortal plane. He knew Nerys could sense something, so his body reacted as if it could too, even if that wasn’t possible.
“Who is it?” Not ‘what’. ‘Who’. Nerys didn’t see things, she saw people, or at least the impressions of people left behind. Keegan was convinced that she had seen a ghost; he knew that look on her face.
“I’m not sure,” was her quiet response, eyes narrowing again. She took a few measured steps back in the direction they had come, and then in a collected, businesslike fashion, posture straightening and lean shoulders squaring, she strode down the full length back to the bend. Her gaze swept down the length and for over a minute she stood there, silent and assessing. “They’re gone now,” she said at last, looking back down the hallway to Keegan.
When she joined him again, Keegan didn’t drape his arm around her shoulder. Instead, he quietly unfastened the strap at his wrist and peeled the glove off, offering the bare, exposed hand to his mate afterwards.
Wordlessly, with a small, grateful smile, she slipped her cool, pale hand in his warm one, and walked with him to their bedroom door, no doubt telling herself all the way not to look back over her shoulder.
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The small of his back was still against the edge of the desk when the handle of the door turned and the portal opened to grant Dia entrance. The entrance to their room had its own miniature hallway, meaning he didn’t see her until she took several steps after closing the door to bring her into the main body of their bedroom. Her brown eyes were already turned in his direction. Clearly, she had been expecting to see him on the bed, and that was plainly visible from the doorway, even without stepping into the room.
“I thought you were going to lie down.” It wasn’t a question. There was a subtle hint of dissatisfaction riding along underneath the concern. She stepped towards him, tilting her head so she could see more than just his profile. “Cole?”
Breathing in, he looked at her. “I was,” he confirmed quietly. It felt like the pills had kicked in. Moving was unappealing. Maybe he should have laid down right after he’d taken them.
Dia didn’t ask why he hadn’t. She glanced down at the bottle by his left hand. “You only took two, right? Nate says these things are strong.”
Cole nodded. Bad idea. He winced.
“Cole?” Dia lifted a hand and touched it to the side of his face. A small, soft Spanish curse fell from her tongue, and she shifted her hand to his forehead instead. “Cole, you’re burning up.” It wasn’t just concern in her voice anymore, it was more than that, and her eyes were bright with the power of it as she stepped around to stand in front of him, taking his face in her hands and lifting it to see him in the light. “And you’re pale,” she added, shaking her head. “You need to lie down.”
There was an unmistakeable authority in her voice now. Out of all the wolves in the pack, it was only Dia, by rights, who could give Cole an order. She was his equal, his fellow Alpha, his wife and mate. There wasn’t anyone else in the pack who saw fit to tell him what to do, and very few who would dare, even if it crossed their minds. Dia and Dia alone could tell him what to do, and have him obey.
So it was that even with the building ache in his side and the new pain in his skull, he used his hands to push his weight forward and off the desk. Dia pushed his hair back for him, staring at his face, body tight with tension, on the brink of moving to the male’s side to help him to the bed. Cole was on the verge of telling her she didn’t need to help him.
Neither of them got very far.
It felt like nothing he had ever felt before, ripping through his body, connecting the two points of pain in his side and his head, and his legs failed him, knees buckling. Dia swore again, in Spanish and then English, and it was only her lycanthropy that gave her the strength and speed to catch her mate before he struck the floor. She went to her knees with him, one arm under his and around his back, the other at the base of his skull, against his neck. Her hand felt cold against the skin there, and Cole dropped his head to her shoulder, grimacing. That wasn’t right. Dia’s hands were always warm.
As his vision swam and his other senses seemed to stall and blur and fog together, he thought he heard her raise her voice to call for help.
TO BE CONTINUED.