Skinned

¤ Butchered Nature ¤

“A waste, that’s what you fucking are, Valerie, you hear me?” Azeil snarled. I stopped dead on my tracks with shoulders tensed, breath catching as his words felt like it was a hard fist to my throat.

Reed clamped his hand on my arm, his eyes worried as he tried to gauge my reaction.

“You, Valerie?,” Azeil paused, “You’re just a product of a father’s rage, and a dead mother’s failure.”

I felt sick to my stomach, my hands shaking, and Reed tried to gather the my remaining wits by urging me to look at him.

“Don’t listen to him, let’s just go inside—“

I tugged my arm away from Reed’s solid grip and turned on my heel, and before I knew it, I had Azeil beneath me with a hand pinning him to the ground by his neck and the other landing him senseless punches that could add up to his medications.

“You should’ve stayed paralyzed on your fucking bed,” I spat, my voice taking on a deeper tone as I let out a snarl.

“Valerie!” Reed shouted, and he grabbed my first midair, halting me from landing another punch as Azeil turned his head to spit out the blood in his mouth, “Stop this and let’s just go. Heath’s inside, this isn’t the time.”

“Go on, Valerie,” Azeil choked out, “Fucking kill me like you killed Celeste. We both know it’s the only thing you’ve ever been good at.”

I shoved Azeil deeper into the ground with my hand on his neck, and I fought back the tears threatening to spill as I watched his hollow eyes, “Fuck you.”

“Come on,” Reed pleaded, and he pulled me up on my feet and off of Azeil before forcing me inside the infirmary.

We stopped at the lobby, from there Reed gave me a moment to gather myself, and I could already hear Heath’s muffled sounds of agony from the end of the hallway.

“What’s happening to him?” I questioned Reed, my eyes glued to the door to Heath’s room.

“Maxon had been looking for the bullet lodged somewhere in Heath’s leg, but we… we found out that the bullet shot into Heath dissolved into his tissue,” Reed paused for a moment as the sorrow in his expression appeared for a split second before going back to the same troubled look, “Whatever it is, it’s rapidly killing Heath—it’s killing the human in him, all except for his wolf. Max said, by the end of it, he’ll—There wouldn’t be any human left in him to keep the wolf tamed.”

“I need to see him,” I said and attempted to walk around him, but Reed immediately latched his hand onto my arm, halting me from seeing his brother.

“You don’t want to see him,” Reed told me, “That’s not Heath right now.”

“Let me go,” I snarled, my threat completely catching him off guard, and I took it as a chance to tug my arm out of his grip before making my way into the hallway with Reed calling me out from behind.

I strode inside Heath’s room, and immediately halted by the doorway when I saw him writhing against the hospital bed, my hand coming up to silence my cry as I witnessed his body ceaselessly morph between human and wolf.

Maxon was off to the side of the room, filling up a syringe with something that I was quick to recognize as morphine.

Blood and sweat stained the white sheets of Heath’s bed. There was dark blood running down his nose, canines ascending and descending as did his bones snapping back and forth between human and wild. The blood vessels around the whites of his eyes had disrupted, and it left an ugly crimson red to crowd around the clearness of his cerulean irises.

The constant back and forth shift was too much that it was already wearing his body down, and it had gone to the point where large darkened bruises were close to covering the entirety of his ribs and shoulders.

The morbidity alone drew me into horror, and my back hit the wall as I watched Heath under the unending torment of the poison in his system.

He was in so much pain that he didn’t even sense me entering the room.

I caught sight of his shoulder swiftly snapping into a different place, its sound a painful ring to my ears, and I flinched as soon as he released another cry of pain from the shift that was beyond his control, the struggled growl of his wolf forcing its way up to his throat in a short call for release.

“Fuck! M-make it stop! Make it stop!” Heath cried, his back arching of the bed as his wolf pushed him to release a hostile snarl.

“You gotta stay still, Heath,” Maxon gritted out, his hand flying to Heath’s arm as he tried to pin it into place in order to give him the morphine.

All I could do was watch, frozen on the same spot, before Reed stepped in to drag me out of the room.

“He’s in so much pain, Reed, I—” I sobbed out, my knees threatening to give out as Reed kept me on my feet by keeping his hold on my shoulders.

“I know, Valerie,” Reed let out a pained breath, his features cringing at the sound of his brother’s cries, “I can’t—we can’t do much for him at this point, the best we can do right now is to give what we can.”

I looked back at Heath from outside the room, seeing him toss and turning on the bed in complete agony while Maxon tried to give him the shot of morphine, and the colors on my face completely drained out as I it dawned on me that vampires had finally come up with a weapon that put them at a greater advantage—something that turned our very nature against ourselves.

They could sever the skin from wild, creating a single-minded killer of teeth and claw,

And Heath was slowly turning into one.