───── Piper ─────
I held the needle up to the light and turned it this way and that, admiring the way the silver tip threw back the light. I wondered with some amusement if any magpies in the canopy were envious of my prize.
The glittering appeal was lost on those imaginary birds the moment I buried it in my forearm. It felt like holding a lighter to my skin, but I pushed the silver-steel through the mangled flaps of my flesh with brutal efficiency, knowing it was the only way to reliably stitch up the wound. The silver ensured that my flesh wouldn't automatically heal around the strand of hair trailing behind the eye of the needle, my suture of choice, thus trapping it in place. The last thing I needed right now was an infection.
I gritted my teeth throughout the task, but not against the pain; this was nothing compared to what I'd suffered as a child. No, I gritted my teeth against an onslaught of memory. The task was too familiar and blurred the borders of memory and reality.
I could see her, in these moments: her handsome bone structure and coal-black eyes, burning in a wreath of unruly ringlets. I frowned at the vivid nature of the illusion, breathing in her scent of leather and sweat.
"An alpine breeze," I whispered, trying to anchor myself in the present. Five things to keep the memories at bay. The smell of rotting leaves in the underbrush. The smooth, round stone by my feet. It would be perfect for skipping. But I was getting ahead of myself; I needed to focus on the now. The shrill caw of a bird...
It was as if someone had turned a dial and dimmed the sun. The small clearing in which I sat became some place else entirely: a dank, stone dungeon, so dark it needed to be lit by flaming torches...
"No," I whispered, trying to claw myself back into the present.
It was too late. The past and present blended seamlessly, until I couldn't tell one reality from the other.
I stared through the silver-steel bars at the wall of the crypt, wondering if I'd killed any of the people buried there. The place stank of animal and human excrement, undercut by the smell of festering wounds, which never truly went away. But the bars... if I stared long and hard enough, sometimes they disappeared. Simply vanished, as if I could walk right through them...
A brittle, crunching noise drew my attention to the neighbouring cell. Wavering torchlight revealed an emaciated wolf, desperately gnawing on the bones of its last meal. Perhaps sensing my attention, it lifted its head and warned me away with a snarl that was almost as savage as its eyes.
I shuddered, but my fear was not of the creature, so much as sharing its fate. It was not uncommon for a werewolf to lose all semblance of humanity after fighting in the arena for too long, and I was pretty sure it was crunching down on the bones of its own kind. My kind.
A small but firm hand seized my elbow, and in that moment I knew true, unadulterated fear for my life.
Corinne's hold was firm — painfully so — but I did not cry out. Instead, I turned around in her grip, attempting to be quiet and observant, the way she liked me. Dancing flames in the hall lent life to the shadows of my mother's face as she reached into the lapel of her leather jacket, retrieving a small bundle of cloth.
Before I could guess at the contents, she pressed it into my hand. I warily unwrapped the gift, watching her closely in my peripheral vision.
"What's it for?" I asked, frowning at the silver-tipped needle my efforts had unearthed. I was intuitive, as she had raised me to be, but the response she sought from this test eluded me.
Corinne scowled at the question, as though it proved me stupid. "For your wounds," she snapped, and it was all that I could do not to flinch away from her anger. She hated it when I flinched, and punished me for the reflex frequently. "There will come a time when you are injured by silver. Or perhaps your opponent will prove more dominant; in that case, the hurts they inflict on you will not heal at the usual pace. Use this to stitch the wounds and allow no one else to tend to them. Can you tell me why this is essential?"
"If I was hurt and asked someone for help, I'd just be telling them what my new weakness is," I guessed, trying to make it sound like a statement.
"Yes. And what else?"
"And I should suffer the consequences of my own actions?" Stupid, I thought, cursing the uncertainty of that upward inflection. The flash of anger in her eyes prompted me to elaborate. "If I get hurt, it's my fault because I could have prevented it."
"Exactly."
I felt a pang of mixed emotions that pulled me back to the clearing in the woods, ever so briefly. I mourned the childhood that I had lost, but I also passionately loathed the woman who'd stolen it. My mother was a twisted woman, and even now I struggled to shake off her hateful influence. Her victim-blaming nonsense was drilled so deeply in my brain that I'd chosen to stitch up my own wounds instead of going to the infirmary, for crying out loud!
Corinne reached out, pulling me back into the past. I snapped into a fighting stance, but to my surprise, she shook her head. "I won't risk weakening you before your first battle," she promised, whispering as though not to spook me. "I merely wish to embrace you."
Before I could punch her or otherwise protest, the stocky woman wrapped her arms around my waist, tucking my head beneath her chin. For several seconds, I stood there, agape. In all my life, I'd never been held like this.
Eventually, I collected the scattered fragments of my thoughts and returned the hug, gingerly, as though we were both fashioned from spun sugar. She was warm, and smelt familiar, and the hard lines of her muscles were clear in our closeness. Was this what it felt like, to love someone? Did you hold them, simply because you could? Her hair tickled my cheek as I surrendered myself to a unique sense of mutual helplessness, something I had never experienced, not even dreamed of, until now.
"Make me proud," she whispered, smoothing down my hair.
Trying my best wasn't good enough, so I assured her I would.
Corinne took back the needle, promising that she would leave it in my cell, on the concrete slab I slept on. Then she turned me towards the door at the end of the tunnel, through which I could hear the muffled antics of a blood-thirsty crowd. Usually I was a part of it, standing on the edges of the man-made pit, watching closely as men, women, children and the occasional wild animal fought for the right to live.
But the time for living vicariously through others was over. It was time to put my training into practice.
A shrill bell splintered the masonry. I lurched into the present, feeling the whiplash of nine years. The silver-tipped needle swung from my forearm like a spider, glinting as it spiralled. Somehow, amid my flashback, I'd finished closing the wound.
I took the thread between my teeth, cutting it on the edge of a molar. The needle fell into my lap just as my phone started ringing. Whoever texted me was getting impatient.
Wound tighter than a spool of fishing wire, I reached into the pocket of my leather jacket and retrieved my phone. Assuming it was Ethan on the phone, I swiped to answer automatically, not bothering to check the caller ID.
It was about time Ivy woke up. I had a few choice words for the freshly minted Omega of the High Pack.
"Piper." The voice was familiar, but not the one I'd been expecting. "Whereabouts are you?"
I cleared my throat, trying to play off my emotional instability as congestion. "In the woods. Why?
"We have a situation," Colden said grimly. "I need your help. Home in on my thoughts for the exact coordinates."
Of course there was a situation. This was a supernatural high school, and I was a leader within it. I needn't dwell on old memories, I realised with a surge of relief, and in that moment, I loved the fact that some serious scandal had occurred and that the school's population was threatened. It meant that I was needed; that I could focus entirely on the here and now.
Order reclaimed the discordant scape of my brain, reinstating structure where my hallucination had wrought havoc. With each new breath, my confidence swelled; with each heartbeat, I settled, until my flashback faded into the distant memory it was supposed to be.
"I'm on my way."