(FREE TO READ) Bad Moon

chapter 49; claws

They didn't take him back to the showers.

Jaylin was thrown back in his cell so hard, he felt a pop as he hit the ground, his shoulder wrenched from its socket. They didn't feed him and Dr. Peterson didn't come back. It was as if he was thrown in isolation, away from any outside communication. This was his punishment, to be shut off from the world.

It was hours until he heard another person's voice. He was startled awake in the middle of the night by the sound of his cell door sliding open. But the time he'd wiped the sleep from his eyes, Gunner was at the side of his cot, Tupperware in hand.

Jaylin wasn't even a fan of pork chops, but he shed them from the bone so quickly, the rough meat scraped his throat going down and Gunner had to offer a drink from his flask just to stop his coughing.

"So things didn't go as planned," he assessed, watching Jaylin work the last of the meat from its bone.

"I still have tomorrow."

"Today, kid. It's three AM." He tossed back his flask and sucked down a deep draft, hissing gruffly on exhale. "And no, you don't. They're taking you to the lab first thing in the morning. After that, there's nothing you can do."

Again, Jaylin felt the hope in him crushed. He stared down into his lap, into the fraying cotton of his patternless sheets. That was it. That was his last shot. He'd never see them again. None of them.

"Jesus," Gunner sighed, "don't cry."

"Don't they usually cry?" Jaylin didn't want to. He'd told himself he wouldn't. He grit his jaw to try and stop it, but the tears were much stronger than he was. "All of the people she's taken away, didn't they cry too?"

"Tried to never get too personal with them," Gunner admitted.

"I'm losing my family. You might not be losing yours, but I'm losing mine. Everyone I love. My mom, my best friends...I never got to tell Quentin about Anna. About how much she's helped me."

"Anastasia Sigvard is dead." Gunner looked to him startlingly. "I did the autopsy myself."

"She's dead, but she's... here. She helped me find the grates in the shower and she shut off the lights yesterday in the hall—"

"That wasn't Anna, kid. That was a power surge and some minor hallucinations."

"It was Anna," Jaylin shuttered. "It was her. She was right in front of me. I know she's dead, I know Quentin killed her, but she was here."

"Whoa, wait." Gunner gave a laugh, hoarse like he'd smoked too many cigarettes. "Quentin Bronx didn't kill Anastasia Sigvard."

Jaylin felt his world slow to a stop. He searched for Gunner's eyes in the darkness, but he could only see the glare of his glasses and the deep-set circles beneath them. "What?"

"Quentin shot Anna in the chest, using a bullet laced with a chemical that reverses the turning process in werewolves. But when you turn into one of those godforsaken things, well—look." He took Jaylin's arm, black and callused and gave it a shake. Jaylin winced at his dislocated shoulder. "You feel that?" Gunner asked. "How hard it is? Like reinforced leather. Your skin—it's a shell. That's what makes it so damn hard to kill a lichund."

"So what does that have to do with Anna?"

"Your skin can't stop a bullet," Gunner said. "But it can slow it down. Slow it down enough that it won't hit any organs or major arteries. The bullet in Anna's chest stopped in the cartilage of her ribcage. It wasn't the bullet that killed her, it was the pregnancy."