Alex opened the door for her, took her hand and helped her from the back of Izzy's sun-hot Sedan.

Sadie could still feel the blood on her face—flaked and so dry in places, it hurt. But there were two things keeping her together: a numb, dissociate feeling, like none of this had set in just yet—and then Alex.

That moment, when Qamar stepped foot in the ballroom and saw what those men had done to her wolves, Alex leaned in close and whispered in Sadie's ear,"Close your eyes, don't open them until I tell you."

She did. She squeezed her eyes shut, flinching to every rippling gunshot, but never opening them. She could feel the blood mist her each time a wolf turned. It was in her shoes, in her hair. She felt like retching when she tasted it, but Sadie didn't open her eyes. Not until the hunters—what was left of them, at least—had been chased out of the Opulent Rose. And even then, she didn't look to see what kind of death lay around her. She stared instead at the rose quartz bracelet on Alex's wrist as they evacuated the ballroom, hand in hand.

For an hour, they sat in Izzy's car while the wolves gathered their personal belongings from the rooms upstairs. Sadie didn't care what was left behind. She could forget her tarot cards and her favorite blue goldstone charm, but she could never forget what she experienced in that building.

That was why she breathed a bit easier when they brought in gas cans and set the place up in flames.

"We can't have anyone find out," Izzy told her after they'd packed into the car. She was freshly showered, but still stinking of blood. The whole place smelled like copper pennies. "No one can know what happened here."

The police would come after that. Fire trucks, investigators. That was why the wolves were thorough to remove the bodies from inside. Most of the staff had been wolves—those who weren't already knew of them, so there was no need to concern themselves with the humans of the hotel; everyone here had already sworn their secrecy to Qamar.

Sitting with her head against the backseat window, Sadie watched trees and houses wiz by. It felt more like she was standing in one place while a rotating lamp whirled shadows and lights around her. Like nothing was real—she was somewhere deep in her own head and everything was slewing about in some severed space of reality. She gripped the quartz sword a little closer to her heart.

Elizaveta had found it sitting on the dresser in Matthew's room, offered it to Sadie to be delivered to him. She couldn't part with it though. It felt like that beautiful stone sword was the tack holding all the shredded parts of her together. It was warm beneath her hands. Stone should be cold, shouldn't it?

Izzy had driven them to the nearest watch house where they were all to meet with the each of the Southern Californian sentinels. It was a massive home they'd parked outside of; an old townhouse, fenced in high cement walls and a gate that had been drawn inward to welcome visitors. They parked on the lawn beside four other cars, just as Matt's Wrangler came barreling through the dry dirt and grass. It stopped hard beside them and Bailey shoved himself out of the passenger seat, a manila envelope tucked beneath his arm. Two more men she'd never seen before gathered their things from the car and leapt out into the evening air. One of them still painted in bloody red patches, like he'd dried off on a towel and not bothered with soap or water. The other was a boy no older than herself, curly red hair stuck to the sweat of his forehead. They both followed after Izzy, who marched toward the door with a hefty bag over her shoulder.

Alex's hand had become a permanent attachment, gently leading Sadie here and there when all she wanted to do was stay in place. His encouraging push was the only thing guiding her up those wooden steps.

The door swung in to welcome them and every face inside peered out with looks of hope, looks of fear—and some looks too sullen to decipher. It was like they were drawn to her presence—maybe because she was a witch, or maybe because she was caked in blood. It didn't matter to Sadie, there were far more things in this place to concern herself with. 

Inside, the room was alive with the bustle of busy wolves. Bodies passed from one place to another, supplying the wounded with drinks and medicine. A girl about her age laid stretched out on a cot, wearing nothing but a bra, scrunching her nose while a man in glasses plucked tiny silver beads from the holes in her body. A medik rushed from one side of the room to the other, bundles of supplies in her hands. A woman in a high pony wove stitches through a knife wound in a young man's cheek. Sadie recognized him from the crowning ceremony—the boy with the pretty smile. He was one of Nicon's new additions.

He looked just as ruined as the others.

The sweaty red-headed man squeezed through on her right and sprinted across the room to a woman in a baby-blue cardigan. He pulled her in by the waist and she kissed him, then buried her tears into his broad shoulder.

That was when Sadie fell from the stars and plummeted back to reality. The shadows and lights were palpable matter again. The world was back in color—but most of it red. Red on sleeves of that baby-blue cardigan, red on the white-gloved fingers of a doctor passing by, red on faces and towels and her own two tattered tennis shoes.

Sadie covered her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt to keep anyone from seeing the quiver in her chin.

It was perigee night. A time of celebration, of love and laughter and dancing beneath a bloated moon. How many had died on a night that was meant for celebrating life?

"Sadie." Tisper was rushing through the door behind her, and for the first time in a long while, she felt Alex's hand leave her. Not a second later, she was swallowed up in Tisper's arms. "God we were so worried. Are you okay?"

Sadie gave a numb nod, turning just in time to see Jaylin walk through the front doors. His eyes found her, then lifted to Imani, who stood on the other side of the room, chatting with a man in a medical coat. He was biting the nail on his thumb. She was lost somewhere in the distance. They looked like they'd been working on the same math problem for eight hours straight—at their wits end, but with no sign of forfeit.

"They've been working so hard," Yui said, approaching them with that ginger way about her. Timid, like she knew it wasn't her place to pry, but her will to help outweighed her respect for privacy. Still, Sadie caught her reluctance in the nervous drag of her foot.

Alex was the only one who didn't turn to her. His eyes were on Imani, listening, hearing, assessing. "They don't know what's wrong with him," he said. Sadie was sure he'd plucked the assumption right out of the alpha's head, but every part of her prayed he was wrong.

"Is he in that room?" Jaylin asked, pushing his way past a man with blankets in his arms. He must have followed Alex's eyes to the bedroom door beside Imani, recognized that subtle beeping behind it. Matt reached out to stop him as he squeezed his way by, but Jaylin shrugged the touch away and moved past the wounded and the mediks to reach the door.

"Don't. He needs rest," Imani said, but Jaylin ignored her.

He turned the handle and shoved the door open.

And then he stopped moving. He went still there in the doorway, frozen for the longest time. And when he snapped back to reality, it was not without a stagger backwards, a violent whip out of the room. His face went sallow and he hastening through the clutter of wolves, past Matt and out of the front door. It was Alex who stopped Matt from chasing after him, but he didn't say a word. He caught Matt by a fistful of his shirt, all while still gazing at that room with the faintest resemblance of a zombie.

Some time between the moment Jaylin had opened the door and the second he'd rushed out of the house, Alex must have caught a thought, because he was the first to start moving toward the subtle beeps in the distance. This time, Imani stepped aside as they all followed him to the doorway where Jaylin had turned to stone.

It was a bedroom inside, but it looked nothing like one. Instead it had taken on the appearance of a hospital room—a machine, pulsing with a visual heartbeat, attached to the finger of the body that laid along the bed, pale as death. He was washed of color, save for the black-blue stains beneath his eyes. Wires stuck to his skin, blood passed through a plastic tubing to the veins in his arm. A mask pushed air into his lungs and out again with a hiss.

The wounds in his body had not been bandaged and a blackness burned at the skin around each hole. One in the stomach, one in the shoulder, one in the chest.

"Quentin," Alex managed. He'd nearly lunged into the room, but Imani barred him back with a strong arm.

"I was trying to avoid this," she said. "We haven't dressed his wounds yet."

Sadie felt sick. She swallowed the stone in her throat and asked, "Why not?"

"We're still trying to remove the bullet fragments. There's no exit wound."

Tears sat on the rims of Alex's eyes. He blinked fast, but they went nowhere. "Why does he look so bad? What's wrong with him?"

"You'd expect him to look better?" Tisper said. In her voice was a kind of quiver that Sadie hadn't heard since the night Jaylin went missing. "They shot him. Three times, they shot him."

"Alexander is right," Imani confessed. "I've seen wolves heal from shotgun blasts faster than this. Something's wrong. Almost every other wolf was wounded with pepper, but these bullets are different."

The medik didn't take a gander into the room like the others. He hung back, patiently waiting for a chance to explain. "It's rare—almost unheard of for a wolf to die from blood loss," he told them. "To kill a werewolf, you've got to hit vital organs. Their bodies heal too quickly to bleed out. But Quentin... if he had not received a blood transfusion sooner, he'd be dead right now."

"What's happening to him?" Alex asked, sounding nothing like himself. "What the hell did they do to him?"

Imani went quiet. She let her eyes rest once more on the alpha, his chest rising, falling, rising, falling. But not without substantial effort. It was like his lungs had holes and every breath he took was empty and gainless. He was a fish out of water.

Sadie braced herself and asked, "Is he dying?"

"We don't know," Imani confessed.

"Usually, this wouldn't be the case," the medik said. "But his wounds aren't healing. His flesh seems to be rotting from its contact with the bullets... like an acid erosion, I guess you could say. Granted, it's rotting slowly, but the cells are dying. Bit by bit, minute by minute. If this was some kind of infection, his body would have fought it off by now. We believe it to be a deliberate poisoning."

"Can't we find out what they used?" Tisper asked. "Like snake venom, you know? Name the snake, find an antidote."

"We've tested the bullet fragments that have been extracted." The medik reached up and wiped his hands up through his mauve-brown hair. He had to be in his late thirties. Stunning, like the doctors from television. "The bullets are silver—a given. But we aren't finding any sort of poisonous substance on them. We won't know for sure until they're sent into a lab for testing."

"So until then, we wait," Alex said. His words were cracked all around the edges. "We wait and he rots."

"He'll look better once he's regained the blood he lost," Imani said. "In the meantime, our mediks will deliver the samples and I will be searching for a way to slow the effects of the bullets."

"You don't need to slow it down," Alex said, words gnashed between his teeth. "You need to make it stop!"

Imani moved closer—that empowering gaze of her pressing him down. "Thirty two other wolves were wounded today. Six of them died. One as young as eighteen. There are worse places he could be than here."

Alex swallowed—his face gone red. Those tears still balanced on the ledge of his lashes. He turned away from Imani and left the room in a blaze of fear and anger—gone through the front door, just as Jaylin had.

an; these next few chapters are a bit slow and editing them is a huge drag so it's taking me a bit longer than usual.

Also life is shit.

So please hang on for a bit ♥ writing this has become a lot harder for me lately because I am exhausted and stressed and as much as I love this book, my focus is deteriorating and whereas I used to stay up until like 2 AM working on it, all I want to do now is sleep.

So yeah, stuff is still crap and it's deeply affecting my writing. Hopefully that'll change soon but I've been saying that for months lmao I hate the idea of a hiatus but I might need one really soon.