Page 148 of Caged

“They’ve never let the information slip before. They know the second it gets out, they’re as fucked as we are. So why now?” Dax scrapes a frustrated hand through his hair. I don’t have an answer for him, and honestly, it isn’t something I plan on spending a ton of time focusing on. It happened, and now we have to deal with it.

The worst part of this whole nightmare isn’t even the waiting. It’s that I still can’t feel anything from Caelan in our Bond. His side isn’t gone, but it’s ominously silent. Muted. Like he blocked it off to protect us from his anguish.

He would do something like that. Self-sacrificing son of a bitch.

Like he can read my thoughts, Dax throws himself down on one of the leather couches placed around the room and asks, “Have you felt him? Since we got here, I mean?”

I shake my head. “No. I haven’t. But that’s better than the alternative. I’ll take a muted Bond all day over the alternative.”

The alternative is no Bond at all, because our packmate is dead.

I slide down the wall and rest my forearms on my knees, dangling my clasped hands between my legs.

We sit in silence for another twenty minutes before Dax mutters, “What do you think he was talking about when he asked us to stop the light?”

Too tired to lift my head, I let it drag along the wall until I’m facing him. “Dunno. He was really out of it. Muttering a lot of incoherent shit.”

“Yeah, but…” Dax picks absently at a callous on his palm, clearly lost in thought. “You didn’t see him when he looked at me. He was passed out the whole time except for that one moment. He just seemed so fucking frantic. I’m sure he was trying to tell me something important.”

“He was probably talking about the pain, Dax. I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it.”

He clears his throat and tips his head back, squeezing his eyes shut. “Yeah… You’re probably right.”

“Where do you think⁠—”

The double doors to Caelan’s room swing open, and I snap my mouth shut. My body tenses, fear making my adrenaline spike as Dr. Calder and Lenora walk out. They look like shit. Blood spots their scrubs, and exhaustion is clear in every line of their faces.

Calder tiredly pulls off his scrub cap as Dax and I scramble to our feet.

“I’ve called Gavran in. He and Silas will be down in a minute, and I’ll go over everything with you,” Calder says.

He looks like he needs caffeine and three days of sleep. Lenora doesn’t speak. Calder’s always reminded me of a mix between Hawkeye Pierce and Dr. House, but Lenora’s more reminiscent of the Grim Reaper with a scalpel. She’s damn good at her job, but she scares the actual shit out of me.

Thank the gods we don’t have to wait. Silas rushes in seconds later with Gav on his heels. Before he’s made it down the hall, Gav barks, “What’s the damage?”

Calder takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. My muscles coil tight, some primal instinct preparing me to fight.

It’s a stupid instinct. Silver poisoning isn’t something I can fight. It’s not something anyone can fight.

“He was about three minutes from cardiac arrest when we got him in the room,” Calder explains solemnly. “It took us forty-five minutes just to stabilize him. The asshole had him on a custom IV of silver diluted with glucose-saline.”

He cracks his neck from side to side. “I’ll be real with you. It was horrifying. Clever, but horrifying. I almost want to find the fucker to ask him how the hell he came up with it.”

Calder sinks onto the couch across from us, scrubs wrinkled, mask hanging from its strings around his neck. “From what we could tell, the silver was set up to trickle slowly enough to bypass his body’s immediate rejection system. That let it circulate longer. If he was dealing with anything high-stress and his heart was pumping harder, well, it would eventually turn his insides into a burrito of internal damage.”

Lenora’s face is a blank mask as she adds, “We flushed his system with multiple rounds of Bonded platelets, and then followed that with a saline-magnesium blend with trace copper.” She finally glances up from her charts and notices we’re all staring at her. She turns to Calder, brow wrinkled in confusion.

“They don’t know what that is, Lenora.” He murmurs.

“Oh!” She seems shocked for a second. Clearly, she can’t comprehend how it’s possible we’re all dumb as shit.

“It helps offset internal destabilization due to silver poison, right?” Dax asks, but his tone makes it clear he’s only being polite.

Of course, he’d know that.

For a second, Lenora’s face looks like she wants to smile, but she doesn’t. “Right.”

That’s it. No further explanation offered. She refocuses on her chart, flipping through pages like she’s already forgotten we’re in the room.