Cry Wolf (Alpha & Omega #1)(9)

She thought he was through, but then clothing formed around his naked body, flowing over his skin as his skin had flowed over flesh as he changed. Nothing fancy, just jeans and a plain white T-shirt, but she'd never known a werewolf who could do that. This was real magic.

She didn't know how much real magic he could do. She didn't know a lot about him other than he made her heart beat faster and nudged her usual state of half panic away.

She shivered, then realized it was cool in the house. He must have turned down the heat when he'd come to Chicago. She looked around and found a small quilted throw folded over the back of a rocking chair and snatched it up. Careful not to brush too hard on his oversensitized skin, she laid the blanket lightly over him.

He lay with one cheek against the floor, shuddering and breathless.

"Charles?" Her impulse was to touch him, but after a change, the last thing she wanted was touch. His skin would feel new and raw.

The blanket slid off his shoulder and when she lifted it to cover him again, she saw a dark stain growing rapidly on the back of his shirt. If his wounds had been of the usual sort, the change would have mended them more than this. Silver-inflicted wounds healed a lot slower.

"Do you have a first-aid kit?" she asked. Her pack's first-aid kit was equipped to cope with wounds dealt in the half-serious fights that broke out whenever the whole pack got together. Impossible to believe that Charles wasn't as well prepared as her...as the Chicago pack.

"Bathroom." His voice was gravel-rough with pain.

The bathroom was behind the first door she opened, a big room with a claw-foot tub, a large shower stall, and a white porcelain pedestal sink. In one corner of the room was a linen closet. On the bottom shelf she found an industrial-sized first-aid kit and took it with her back to the living room.

Charles's usually warm brown skin was gray, his jaw was clenched against the pain, and his black eyes were fever-bright, glittering with hints of gold that matched the stud he wore in his ear. He'd sat upright, the quilt pooling on the floor around him.

"That was stupid. Changing doesn't help silver wounds," she scolded him, her sudden anger fueled by the pain he'd caused himself. "All you did was use up all the energy your body needs to heal. Let me get you bandaged up, and I'll find some food." She was hungry, too.

He smiled at her-just a little smile. Then he closed his eyes. "All right." His voice was hoarse.

She would have to take off most of the clothes he'd put on. "Where do your clothes come from?"

She'd have assumed they were what he'd been wearing when he'd changed from human to wolf, except she'd helped strip him so the Chicago doctor could examine him. He hadn't been wearing anything except bandages when he'd changed into his wolf.

He shook his head. "Wherever. I don't know."

The jeans were Levi's, worn at the knee, and the shirt had a Hanes label. She wondered if there was someone somewhere who was suddenly running around in his underwear. "Sweet," she said as she carefully peeled up his shirt so she could get a look at his chest wound. "But this would be easier if you hadn't dressed."

"Sorry," he grunted. "Habit."

A bullet had pierced his chest just to the right of his sternum. The hole in the back was worse, bigger than the one in his front. If he'd been human, he'd still be in the emergency room, but werewolves were tough.

"If you put a telfa pad on the front," he told her, "I can hold it for you. You'll have to hold one on the back. Then wrap the whole thing with vet wrap."

"Vet wrap?"

"The colored stuff that looks sort of like an Ace bandage. It'll stick to itself, so you don't need to fasten it. You'll probably have to use two pads to get enough coverage."

She cut his T-shirt off with the scissors she'd found in the kitchen. Then she ripped open the telfa pads and set one against the little gaping mouth on his chest and tried not to think about the hole that ran inside him from his front to his back. He pressed the pad harder than she'd have dared to.

She sorted through the kit, looking for the vet wrap, and found a full dozen rolls on the bottom. Most of them were brown or black, but there were a few others. Because she was angry with him for hurting himself more when he could have just stayed in wolf form for a few days, she grabbed a pair of fluorescent pink rolls.

He laughed when she pulled them out, but it must have hurt-his mouth thinned, and he had to take shallow breaths for a while. "My brother put those in there," he said when the worst of it was over.

"Did you do something to annoy him, too?" she asked.

He grinned. "He claimed that was all he had in the office when I restocked the kit."

She was ready to ask a few more questions about his brother, but all desire to tease him died when she looked at his back. In the few minutes she'd spent organizing her bandaging efforts, the blood had pooled in the area between his skin and the top of his jeans. She should have left his shirt alone until she had everything ready.

"Tarditas et procrastinatio odiosa est," she told herself and cut open a package of telfa pads.

"You speak Latin?" he asked.

"Nope, I just quote it a lot. That was supposed to be Cicero, but your father tells me my pronunciation is off. Do you want a translation?" The slice from the first bullet, the one he'd taken protecting her, burned a puffy red diagonal line above the more serious wound. It was going to hurt for a while, but it wasn't important.