Moonlit Dangers

Chapter Twenty One

        I woke up to the feeling of something gently moving through my hair. I slid my hand up to my hair, grabbed for the foreign object and jerked as I realized it was a hand. As I turned my head to inspect it further, it was snatched away.

        "You're awake." Kory stated. I looked up to see him sitting in a chair by the side of my bed. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, and had placed a book on a table close to him.

        "I'm alive." I whispered amazed. "How?" I attempted to sit up, but Kory gently pushed me back on the bed with a hand on my shoulder. "Hold on for a little while. You have a concussion." That explained why my head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

        "How long have I been out?" I asked, pulling the sheets up.

         "Three days." He replied looking down. "Even with the concussion, they had to drug you. You were fighting in your sleep and busting up the doctor's hard work." I flushed, embarrassed.

         "It's okay. The med staff here is used to it." He said amused. "How do you feel?"

        I took a brief inventory of my body. Other than my head feeling a little woozy, I felt sore around my middle, my sword hand was stiff, and my right thigh felt heavy. "I'm okay, just a little sore." I watched as he got out of the chair, and walked across the room. He came back and held out a small plastic cup full of water. At the sight of it, I realized that I was parched. I took the cup from him, drinking the cool liquid deeply.

        "Thank you." I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand before putting the cup on my bedside table. 

         He sat down in the chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. "I thought you'd already be a dog by the time we got there." He rubbed his hands down his legs.

        "What? No. Never." I said, rolling onto my side, causing it to throb slightly.

         "We didn't think you would willingly be bitten. We knew you would fight it. We thought the Lycans would have done it immediately. I was...relieved that you weren't."  I watched him without replying. He seemed...twitchy. "When you were snatched, Lee and I were right there. Right there. We just couldn't reach you. There were so many of them, it was all we could do just to make sure we didn't go down. Evelyn was almost to you as well. But the dog that took you immediately ran. Who would've expected them to have a tranq gun?" He shrugged. "Anyway, we fought our way out of there and immediately called the compound. I'm so happy that Lee is the type to think on his feet. As soon as you went down, he started shooting the Lycans full of GPS trackers."

        "GPS  trackers?" I echoed lamely.

    "It's a new prototype that one of the guardians has created. A dart that immediately ejects a GPS chip once it enters something. It's how we found the actual den." I thought about it for a moment.

        "It's how you figured out where I was."

      He nodded. "I had to call my contacts in the government for permission, because I didn't know how quiet we would be able to be when extracting you. Once we had permission, we flooded the place with guardians. Fought our way through room by room. When we burst into that room...I thought you were dead. There was so much blood..." He cleared his throat and turned his head away from me.

        I reached out and touched his shoulder. "I wasn't though."

        "No." He looked back at me and smiled, his eyes lighting up. "No you weren't."  He reached out and touched my face gently. At the sound of the door opening, he sat back, pulling his hand away. I was slightly irritated until I saw who had entered the room.