Jaylin painted plaster along the last red cut on Quentin's back, trying not to touch to deep, but to cover the mark completely like he had the others. Then he stripped the last piece of bandage from its backing and laid it over the deep vertical gash.

"I'm sorry," he said again—for probably the dozenth time now.

"Stop apologizing." Quentin was minding the smaller punctures on his thighs, dabbing on the plaster and laying down bandages over the marks. "They don't hurt, really."

Maybe they didn't, but Jaylin felt too rotten to lay it to rest just yet. He moved closer to the edge of the bed where Quentin sat, leaning against his back, resting his chin on the broad surface of Quentin's shoulder. He still smelled of the shower, all lavender and lemon.

"Do they always do that, or is it perigee?" Jaylin asked.

He watched over Quentin's shoulder as he pulled a fresh bandage from the first-aid kit and laid it over the deep divots on his thigh—five cruel crescent cuts, bruising the skin just beneath the hem of his boxer briefs. "All the time," Quentin said. "But you get better at controlling it."

And when Quentin was done minding his own gashes, he reached for Jaylin's hand and brought it forward from under his arm to take a look. "They're starting to go down, see?"

Jaylin could see it—the elongated tips of his fingernails, not as sharp as they'd been, but still talons compared to usual. He had no idea it was these things he'd been scraping down Quentin's skin.

He pulled his hand away to wrap his arms around Quentin's middle, feeling the risen lines on his stomach—just small scrapes compared to the one on his back. Jesus, where hadn't Jaylin clawed him to ribbons?

"Did it hurt?" he asked.

Quentin was screwing the cap back onto the jar of healing clay. "Nah."

"It hurt, I can tell."

"These things are natural for us, Jaylin. It's alright."

Jaylin sighed, thumbing along the lines on his stomach. "You didn't do it to me."

"I've had a lot of time to learn how to control it."

"You mean you've had a lot of sex," Jaylin said, chin jabbing his shoulder.

Quentin gave a passive laugh through his nose. He brought Jaylin's hand up again and he tried not to flare as Quentin placed a kiss on the wild blue veins of his wrist. "Nothing that prepared me for you."

He burned, ears and cheeks and fingers and toes. The heat flushed his neck. And if only to steer them back on track, Jaylin asked, "Will the clay fix them?"

"Give it an hour," Quentin said.

"An hour? What's in that stuff?"

"Herbs and roots and desert clay. Just things we know to have healing agents for us. Devi makes it and I buy jars every spring." Finally, Quentin had placed the last of the equipment back in the box and gave it a shove onto the nightstand. "No more sighing. It's alright, Jaylin."

He had to ask it. Quentin wasn't Tyler, but he needed to know.  "Still love me?"

Quentin turned his head to look at him with a grin, and Jaylin shut his eyes as he felt their heads rest together at the brow. "More now, I think."

Jaylin laughed, pressing back against his forehead. "So you don't regret it?"

"Why would I regret it?"

"Anna."

He partly expected Quentin to go cold like he'd done before. To pull away, find that distance that came with betrayal. But instead, Quentin turned to him a bit more, and Jaylin was swept by the feel of his lips—one soft, lingering kiss and then another. Moving until he'd pressed Jaylin onto his back, lips walking down his chin, kissing the apple of his throat. Then he rose to look Jaylin in the eye. "I've had sex with two people since Anna died. I regretted it. Even though it was perigee—even though I had no control over what I wanted then. I regretted it and I hated this night for manipulating me. But it wasn't perigee that made me want you, Jaylin. And I am never going to regret you."

Jaylin grinned, fingers lost in Quentin's hair. He felt so bare with only a sheet covering him, Quentin dressed in nothing but the briefs he'd put on fresh out of the shower. Jaylin would miss the skin-to-skin contact when they inevitably dressed again. "So there will be a next time?"

"I'd like there to be."

Jaylin's grin widened. "And next time I can top?"

"Maybe."

"You promised."

"It was a verbal contract," Quentin said, grinning against his lips, "those never hold up in court."

Jaylin laughed, feeling that stubble on his jaw, letting his fingers burn beneath the friction of it.

"I'll write up a contract, then."

"No, you won't."

"I will. Once Lisa shows me how." He shifted beneath Quentin, fingers following the lower cleft of his lip. "Maybe not. There's no point in suing you when neither of us have any money." He flinched from that pain in his hips and Quentin caught it, rose just a bit to look Jaylin over.

"It's fine. My thighs hurt," Jaylin confessed. "Never done it like that. I don't think I had the muscles for it."

"I'll run you a salt bath," Quentin said, and when he rose, Jaylin wanted to rise with him. He let his hands slip from Quentin's hair, let him take all that wonderful warmth away. Because Jesus, his thighs really did hurt.

But as Quentin had turned to sit on the edge of the bed, Jaylin caught something—three crooked scars alone his bicep. Scars that definitely hadn't been there before.

And suddenly, he was in the park, beside the pond. In the arms of Matt, blistering with anger. Flickering with some terrible urge to hurt.

He caught Quentin by the arm and felt along those scars, something sad and upset sitting deep in him. "I did that. Didn't I?"

Quentin met his eyes, but withheld an answer until he'd given a long look to the scars himself. "Lichund marks... for some reason, they don't heal the same on us."

"I didn't mean to hurt you."

Quentin took him by the wrists then, pulled him upright. "I wish you'd stop apologizing."

"But look at you," Jaylin frowned. The teeth marks on his neck, the lines down his chest, his stomach. He touched the scratches that striped his middle and Quentin gave a soft laugh, fingers sliding into Jaylin's hair as he brought their foreheads together.

"You have no idea how good it felt."

Jaylin slid his arms around Quentin's neck, helpless to his grinning again. "You liked it? Ah, you're one of those. If I'd known, I would have brought a whip."

"No, no whips."

"I was a boyscout. I'm good at tying rope."

"Jaylin."

"How about candle wax? I think Matt has a taser. I don't know how far you want to take things—"

Quentin silenced him with a kiss, fingers on Jaylin's chin, sliding down to the heartbeat of his throat. He kissed him like that again and again, to keep him quiet maybe—or maybe just because he wanted to, but Jaylin couldn't deny the comfort of his lips. The way they made his heart reel. The way he wanted to kiss them forever.

I love you. He wanted to say it again, but it was a strange, distant things. He never thought he'd have I love you. It was too far to reach. It was outside and he was in. So he showed Quentin instead, kissing him slow. Kissing him with everything he was, until he was dizzy and breathless and he felt Quentin's kiss fade. Even still, he stayed near, eyes shut while Jaylin wandered through his hair with idle fingers.

But it was the sound of his cell phone that finally drew Quentin back. He let out a deep gust through his nose and Jaylin watched as he pulled himself up from the bed and moved to the dresser, taking the cell phone into the bathroom with him. It wasn't that he tried to eavesdrop, but Jaylin couldn't help the way his hearing had advanced. Every sound was just a small focus away.

"What do you want?" Quentin had asked—an edge to his voice that made Jaylin wonder if he still had a bit of booze in his blood. Then the water was running, and Jaylin couldn't hear anything beyond that. Not until Quentin was walking out, setting his phone aside and digging through his drawers for a pair of jeans. Jaylin watched him drag the denim up to his hip.

"Where are you going? It's three AM."

Quentin was too busy shoving a shirt on over his head to answer. Not until Jaylin demanded, "Quentin. What's wrong?"

"I'm going to kill Bailey," was all he said, his back still to Jaylin. "I'll be back as soon as I can." And he was gone the way he always went. Too quickly

Jaylin sighed and slid from the bed, noting the cell phone Quentin had left on the dresser. He thought once or twice about taking a peek, but forced himself to move toward the bathroom instead. He may be more physically fit than before, but the muscles in his thighs ached and Jaylin regretted spending so much time straddling Quentin—so much energy moving his hips.

He could see the flush on his face when he stepped into the steamy bathroom. That was a lie; he didn't regret it. If he weren't so sore—if it wasn't so late, he'd drag Quentin to bed the moment he got back for a second go. But it had to be well after three in the morning and Jaylin's chest ached from how hard his heart had been beating, so he waited for his bath to fill, added the salts Quentin had left out for him and soaked in the scent of orange and ginger.

For thirty minutes of unbothered luxury, Jaylin soaked in his heaps of bubbles and his therapeutic salts, and the feel-good music that whispered through the bathroom radio.

And then the bathroom door clattered open. The curtains reeled away, and Tisper was standing there in her polkadot pajamas, with her bow in her hands and her quiver on her back.

"Jesus, Tisper!"

"Hurry and get out. Where are your clothes?"

"Just put him in something," a second voice said. Felix popped his head in and gave Jaylin a scrutinizing snarl. "Jesus. One of the most dangerous creatures known to wolf and look at ye'. A bubble bath? Fuck me." He tossed a bundle of clothes to Tisper and dipped out again.

Jaylin didn't rise from the water until she held out a towel for him. Then he wrapped it around his waist, shoved himself into the T-shirt Felix had given him. Then the boxers, a bit too large. They were Quentin's, definitely. "What the hell is going on?"

Once he was dressed, Tisper tugged him from the bathroom, leashed him around the bed and out into the hall. Felix followed as they rushed into her room, and she inched up a blind on the window. "Look."

It took Jaylin a moment to understand what he saw on the ground below. Large SUV's, soft-top hummers, flashlights attached to the ends of black rifles. The men that leapt from the vehicles weren't military though; they were dressed in jeans, t-shirts, vests with all the proper pockets to tuck away their small, important supplies.

"Come on," Felix hissed, "we're out of time!"

Jaylin didn't understand what was happening—just that Tisper's grip was concerning. She leashed him along behind Felix, who moved swiftly down the hall with a heaping air of anxiety. They didn't stop for the elevator. Felix led them down the stairs, and for every step Tisper pulled him along, that pain in his hips cracked through Jaylin.

Then they were on the first floor, rushing toward the lobby. Felix stopped though, at the bend of the hall where moonlight gushed through the lonely courtyard exit.

"What the hell's going on?" Jaylin hissed. "Who are those guy—" but Tisper pushed him back against the wall with a hand over his mouth, the beams of flashlights sweeping through the foggy glass window on the door. The second they disappeared and the night outside went dark again, she was back to dragging him—fingers steel around his wrist.

"What do we do?" she whispered. "They're out there, we can't go that way."

"There's another exit in the ballroom," Felix said, and again they were moving, racing toward those red velvet curtains.

The ballroom had been emptied of guests, but the drinks, the sofas, the decorations all sat in disarray. They had to edge around the clutter to make it to the ballroom exit, but by then, those beams of light were staining these windows too.

"They're everywhere," shuddered Tisper. "What do we do?"

"There's one more exit, we'll have to go through the kitchen," Felix said. But he took two steps in that direction and turned still as stone. "No," he said. "They're surrounding the exits. Bastards."

Tisper's hand went tighter. "Where do we go?"

Felix took to motion again and they followed him to the far left of the ballroom. The door he opened was not to the kitchen, but a laundry room, where baskets of dirty bedding were waiting to be bleached clean again. Shelves upon shelves of chemicals had been stocked on the walls, and the stench of them alone made Jaylin's nose itch. Smells like these had been a sensitive thing to him lately.

Felix was hasty, moving fast, this way and that; ripping open caps of cleaning detergent and dumping the bottles on the floor. "Get in the hamper," he told them both.

For the first time since they'd took to their feet, Tisper hesitated. "In there?" Her whisper was fierce. "I am not climbing into a hamper full of used hotel duvets."

"Listen, Princess," Felix said, shoving fresh sheets to the ground and soaking them in a full bottle of white vinegar. "You aren't the first woman I've managed into a set of dirty sheets, ye' won't be the last. They've got hounds, know what that means? They can smell the lich on him."

"Okay," she said, crossing her arms, "so Jaylin, you get in."

"Both of you," Felix said. "Ye' wreak of him, too."

"I'm not—" Tisper began to protest, but a shatter sounded from somewhere in hotel. Glass crashing to the ground—and a lot of it.

"Get in the fuckin' bin," Felix ordered. Then he stepped out and shut the door much too softly behind him.

"What's going on?" Tisper climbed into the laundry bin and tugged him closer by the wrist and Jaylin asked again, "What's going on?"

"Felix says they're hunters."

"Hunters?" He huddled close as they sunk deeper into the bin, cramped together in slept-in sheets. "Like, camo and bear-mace hunters?"

"No, Jay," she whispered, but Tisper couldn't get another word out before the sound of distant shouting made her sink lower, cling tighter.

They were like echos, the voices. Worn over distance and time but still they reached Jaylin.

"Spread out, search the rooms. I want every one of them down here, stuck and silvered until you find it." Then something metal cocked and beside him, Tisper's breath hitch.

"Watch your backs," the man said. "They know we're here."

Through the small square window, Jaylin could make out the figures—dark, tall booted men and women, shooting those flashlight beams around the ballroom. And then there was a cry. They were dragging a woman toward the center of the room, her long golden hair a wild mop over her face.

"Found them in the back," a new voice said. "Looks like they were sleeping in tents." Then four more bodies were shoved forward and forced to their knees. One of them Devi. "What should we do with them?" the man asked.

Jaylin couldn't see them but he could see the third shape step into view. A wolf. He knew from the bristle on the back of his neck.

The figure inhaled the scent of them for a long silent moment. "They aren't wolves," she said.

"Fine," the leader grunted. "Bind their wrists anyway." And then as he stepped back, the he seemed full of a sudden resolve. Like there was nostalgia in the smell of the place. His voice thundered, "We aren't leaving here empty handed. Leave no stone unturned until you find the lich."

an; I know this chapter wasn't super great. I didn't edit it much. I'm depressed and dealing with money problems right now so I can't put all of my focus into this like I usually do. Sorry ♥