Chapter 32:
The Monster did not come back that night. I hadn’t expected him to, especially not after the way he was acting. Especially not after what he had said to me when he left. After he had been gone for a few minutes I dashed back into the bed room to pull a shirt over my head before I went to my sister, making sure that she was comfortable in the guest bed and was still breathing. I'm sure it would have given my prudish sister a heart attack if I ran into the room in just my underwear and she was awake. She wasn't.
Her breathing was smooth and even and her pulse rate was normal. The only thing that seemed to be wrong with her was a slight bruise and lump on the side of her head. I just sat there and stared at my little sister while she remained unconscious until the sky began to become lighter in the small view from the window. She just looked so peaceful in this state that I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. When Chey was awake her face was always pinched somehow, like she was looking at everything around her with slight disappointment. It was an inherited expression that was always on her mother’s face every time that I ever saw that woman. But in her comatose state Chey’s face had finally relaxed, allowing me to look at my sister without being bothered by the resemblance she bore to my former stepmother. Cheyenne was actually very pretty. She had her mother’s slightly curly hair texture mixed in with the dark brown color that came from our father. Her cheekbones were high and regal looking while her chin was jaw was soft. In some ways I thought that her beauty had been what made her the way she was. Always thinking that she deserved something better than what she had in this world.
I sighed and gently pushed a random lock of hair back from her forehead and behind her ear. I hated that she was here. That she had to be part of this.
I hated what she had just had to see.
I knew she was eighteen but still.
In my mind she was still a child; in many ways she was. She was too young to have to live with this kind of sick bull shit. To have to sit by and watch your own older sister be hauled into some back room to be used as a semen receptacle while you are helpless to stop it. Didn’t know how to try to stop what was going to happen. Afraid to even try.
I took her hand and squeezed it in mine quietly. I didn’t blame her for not trying to stop what was going to happen to me in that instant. I didn’t blame her for passing out in a time of need. The truth was she couldn’t do anything and if she had tried she could have been seriously hurt.
In short, I had never been so glad that my sister was a chicken.
I really don’t know what I would have done if she had tried to be brave.
Being brave had always been my job in our sisterhood.
I was the one to hit Maverick Daniels in the face in the first grade for shoving Chey into the dirt. I was the one that made sure there were no monsters under her bed. I was the one that killed all the spiders that had the misfortune of falling in the tub when she went to take a shower. I was the one that made all the arrangements for my father’s burial when my stepmother was too distraught to do so. I was the one that had to tell Chey that her own mother had tried to kill herself at work.
I had always had to be the brave one.
If Chey had to be the brave one now….what did that make me?
I leaned forward in my seat beside Chey’s bed suddenly feeling very nauseous. I didn’t know what to do anymore. I didn’t know how to keep my sister safe. And I sure as hell didn’t know how the hell I was supposed to try to act like I knew.
Thinking about it literally made my pulse audible in my head. I groaned and leaned my head against the side of the mattress. What was I going to do? What was I supposed to do?
How was I supposed to keep doing this?
How did I figure out the rules for this game that I felt like had changed just the in last couple of hours?
“My head hurts.” Chey suddenly groaned her hand that was not in mine raising to rub the lump under her hair line. I jerked my head up at the sound of her voice. She looked a little confused, a little disoriented, but nothing more. I would have sighed in relief but for some reason it felt like there wasn’t enough air in my lungs to do so.
“Juniper what happened?” she asked me, looking over at me with a dazed and confused expression. The nausea that I had been feeling before seemed to only increase at her questioning and the pulse in my head got louder.
“Juniper?” she asked again. Her voice seemed so soft compared to the pounding in my own head. My heart was hammering. I couldn’t breathe.
Something was wrong.
I tried to stand up and immediately fell back down to the ground, the world spinning and shaking around me.
“JUNIPER!” I sister started screaming, her voice so loud that I thought it might make my head explode. What was happening? What was happening to me?
“C-cc-call Ky-Kyrie.” I managed to gasp out, barely able to keep breathing in the process.
“Who’s Kyrie?” she asked hysterically. She didn’t even know who Kyrie and I was unable to tell her.
“ Phone. Ile. Kitchen.” I gasped before I literally felt my airways begin to constrict so tight that I started to see spots in my vision. I was dying.
Why the hell was I dying!
Hands were suddenly touching me but I couldn’t tell who they belong to.
I couldn’t see anything and I couldn’t breathe.
“Shit.” I heard a masculine voice curse right before something began pulling down my pants. It was surprising how little I cared about my ass being exposed to the world at the moment. Apparently not being able to breathe took precedence over decency.
Something jabbed into my butt and I barely registered the pain over the burning dizziness in my head and lungs.
“What are you doing to her?” I heard Cheyenne shriek.
“A potent steroid. She’s having an allergic reaction”
Kyrie? Kyrie was here? I tried to touch him but ended up having something pin me down.
“Just stay put honey, stay still” Kyrie’s voice told me. “You have to stay still.”
“I’ll hold her down you do your save the world doctor thing.” I heard another voice say before I felt the force pinning me still shift.
Red? Red was here too?
“What happened to her?” Red’s voice barked as I felt Kyrie’s hands on my face pulling my eyelids up. “Yo are you brain dead? What happened to Juniper?” she snapped again.
“She-she I don’t know. We were in the kitchen and Sean he-he…and…I….oh my god.” Cheyenne was crying, sobbing actually.
“She’s overdosed werewolf blood.” Kyrie’s cool voice interjected, his hands leaving me for a moment before something sharp bit into my arm.
Werewolf blood?
How the hell did I overdose on werewolf blood?
I never let that bastard put a drop of that shit in me, never.
I would never let him put that foul tasting monster blood in my veins.
Wait.
Foul tasting.
I had ingested it. When I bit him his blood had filled my mouth.
Shit.
I could feel my airways begin to open up and I started breathing in huge gulps of air, still shaking.
“Juniper can you hear me?” Kyrie asked me, lifting me up into a sitting position.
I nodded, still breathing hard and trying to get control of myself. I opened my eyes to find the world blurry and too bright.
“How did you get wereblood in you?” he asked urgently.
“B-bit him.” I managed to gasp, my breathing still labored.
“Shut the front door! Did she just say she bit the muttface?” Red asked in shock. I tried to look at her, my vision still burry and distorted. I was only able to see her bright red hair and the edges of her face. “Kinky.”
“Red shut the hell up. And go get the hydrogen peroxide from my bag.” Kyrie snapped at her.
“What’s the magic word?” she sniped at him, no doubt grinning like a mad person.
“Now damn it!”
“I love it when you talk to me all demanding.” Red flirted back at him but she must have done as he asked because he didn’t yell anything else at her.
“You’re going to have to drink this Juniper. It’s going to taste like shit but you have to ok?” he asked me putting something to my mouth.
I drank immediately.
And regretted it instantly.
It tasted horrible and I felt even more nauseous than before. It was only a matter of time before I….
“BWUAH”
I threw up.
Someone started to hold my hair back as I continued to barf into some sort of pot that my head had practically been shoved into.
“You’re doing good Juni, get it all out.” Kyrie comforted me as I continued to wretch my guts up. Even though I was kind of pissed at him for being so damn patronizing I could feel that his choice was right. I could already feel my nausea begin to fade and my vision begin to become less blurry. I was feeling better.
I wasn’t going to die.
That was a relief.
Suddenly the door about ripped of the hinges and a scream left Cheyenne’s lips as a huge black monster wolf ripped into the room, eyes wild and searching. It’s eyes landed on me and we locked gazes for half a second before it had bolted across the room, knocking Kyrie and Red out of the way to stand over me, knocking me back down to the floor. He snarled at the others in the room, jaws snapping at them rabidly.
He’s back.
The Monster was back.
And from the noise he was making and the way his hackles were raised he was out for blood.
Shit.
“Bad Doggie, Nine!” Red grunted at the Monster from her crash point in the corner. My vision was clear enough now that I could see the pissed off look on her pixy face. “Didn’t I tell you that you should keep that thing crated when company is over Juni?”
The Monster roared in her direction, obviously not pleased with her tone.
It was pandemonium.
The creature was still roaring and snapping at everyone in sight as it stood over me, Kyrie was holding his hands up trying to calm the beast, my sister was screaming her head off like she was in a low budget horror film and Red…well Red was laughing her ass off.
Typical.
“Sean…Gamma Sean please calm down.” Kyrie kept repeating over my sister’s cries and Red’s cackles.
The Monster’s face twisted slightly, becoming only somewhat more human looking.
“Who was strangling the Mate?” the Monster demanded. “WHO?!!!”
The voice was sinister, twisted to a point that it was more frightening that anything I had ever heard, including how he had been when in the manic stage.
“She was having an allergic reaction.” Kyrie calmly told the Monster his hands still raised. “No one was strangling her. Look at her neck. There are not busies. We would not hurt your mate. We were trying to help her.”
“Just like a man to show up after all the work is done.” Red grunted in agreement, seeming to finally sober from her amusement. The monster snarled at her but then took a long whiff of air. Whatever he had smelled must have sufficed because his hackles dropped and he finally looked down at me with a scrutinizing expression. I was sprawled underneath its feet on my back, my hair was caught under one of its paws and the pot that I had thrown up into was spilled all over my shirt. Normally I would have been a little grossed by that but with the Monster on top of me like he was I only noticed it as an afterthought.
“True?” he growled at me though his half human half beast voice. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything in response so I just nodded. His eyes lost the blood thirsty edge and he gazed at me once more, calming into a serious look that made me remember the change of persona he had undergone in the last 24 hours.
His expression told me everything I needed to know.
He was not the lovesick puppy anymore. The part of him that had sought to appease me or make me love him was gone.
Just as I thought that he stooped slightly and looked at the vomit covering my shirt with slight puzzlement. He sniffed it once before his big gross tongue licked some of it off of me. My nose instantly wrinkled.
“Eww…I don’t care what you say that’s just wrong.” Red gagged from across the room. The Monster’s gaze flickered back to her and hardened slightly.
“Blood. My blood.” The Monster grumbled, seeming to put two and two together as he stared seething in Red’s direction.
Red just folded her arms over here chest while Kyrie nodded to the Monster’s statement and my sister was still belting out screams like a freaking banshee.
How my sister was still screaming was at a loss to me. How the hell was she doing that? Circle breathing?
The Monster seemed to be thinking the same thing because he looked at her with flattened ears before he seemed to decide something and suddenly shifted back into human form, leaving him standing over me on two legs.
To everyone's ears' utter horror, my sister’s screaming volume increased to glass shattering levels.
And that is the story of how my prude of a sister saw a naked man...for the first time.