Pack Mentality: Wild at Heart

Chapter 7

For someone who was making the most of her second chance, Becky didn't like to dwell on time. It wasn't as if she were perpetually late, but she also didn't like to focus on how much time it took to do something; she felt it took away from the experience. Time felt like lace now, delicate and full of holes, impossible to see the pattern from up close. She remembered Black & Brave and then the house, though the house was mostly blood and pain. Everything after that was vague: angry voices, rolling beds, the hiss of air. She distantly remembered waking up on a plane, but she couldn't remember getting on board or where it was going.

She wasn't sure how much time she had lost. She wasn't sure where she was. The more Becky thought—which was difficult, because her brain felt like a water balloon about to burst—the less she was sure of at all. She thought she should have legs, but she couldn't feel them, so maybe she didn't. She was pretty sure she had hands because she had seen those, but her eyes weren't always working properly, so maybe she didn't have those either. Maybe she didn't have a body at all anymore, just a drifting consciousness that had nowhere to land.

"Hello, Becky." The words sounded like wind chimes in a summer breeze, nostalgic and magical. When Becky managed to open her eyes, she saw a tiny woman who seemed to embody the concept of pixie. Becky had wrestled smaller women like Alexa Bliss and Kairi Sane, but this woman seemed even tinier somehow. Her energy, however, was the polar opposite of her stature: wherever she stood, calm power seemed to reign. "My name is Zenna. I'm Vida's sister. Do you remember Vida?"

It took Becky a moment. Remembering female werewolves wasn't exactly high on her list of things to do at the moment, but the name was familiar. "Tall?" she said at last. "Amazon?"

Zenna chuckled, and she had the laugh of someone three times her size, hearty and full of life. "That's her. Our parents started naming their kids from the back of the alphabet, and I was lucky letter Z." She pulled a chair up to the bed—no, a stool—and hopped up on it. "I need to ask you some questions, but first, how are you feeling? How's your pain?"

Was it pain? Becky, yet again, wasn't sure. What she could sense of her body felt thick and sluggish, like being congested. Moving took a ridiculous amount of effort, so she avoided it if she could. "Heavy," Becky managed. "Slow."

Zenna nodded, jotting notes on a clipboard. Given all the flashing, beeping technology in the room, her clipboard almost looked comical. "You suffered quite an ordeal. I have you on some heavy painkillers right now so we can work on stabilizing you and properly assessing your injuries."

"Thank you." A thought sparked somewhere in the recesses of Becky's brain. "For work... only certain meds...?" Something about a wellness policy came to mind, but there was no way she would be feeling well any time soon.

"Seth told me about that," Zenna assured her, "and you don't have to worry. All our medications are made by witches, so any human-made test would read them as generic organic supplements." Her tone was cheery enough, but Becky could hear a vein of worry pulsing through it. "Do you think you can tell me what happened? Don't worry about it making sense. Just say whatever comes to mind: feelings, colours, sights and sounds...."

"Someone at the door." Becky didn't want to shut her eyes and have her brain replay the memory, but it took too much effort to keep them open. "With a box... and knife." She lowered a hand to her abdomen and was delighted to realize she did indeed still have hands and that they they were no longer restrained. "Stabbed." When she felt the area, it was so padded with gauze that she could barely feel the wound. "She... wolf. Teeth." She made a clamping motion with her other hand. "Biting everywhere."

"I'm told you managed to attack her," Zenna noted. "What do you remember about that?"

I did? Becky only remembered one knife, the one that came in with the box, and she didn't remember grabbing it. But screams came to mind now and a hard thump. She wouldn't have had time—or the strength, with a stomach wound—to run around the house looking for a suitable weapon, so she would have had to use something that was handy. If she was in the living room, it could have been anything from a lamp to a book. "Screaming, grabbing...." Becky shook her head in frustration.