No, Samuel wouldn't have fallen once the police officer found him.
No matter how much he wanted to.
My dizziness was fading.
"You be happy," he'd told me when I'd left on my ill-fated date. A wish for my life and not for the date.
The jerk. I felt the growl rise in my throat and had to work to swallow it.
"He's all right," the nurse assured me. I pulled my head out from between my knees and noticed on the way up that her name tag read JODY. "We got the glass out, and though he's moving stiffly, he hasn't broken anything major or he wouldn't have lasted this long. He should have gone home, but he didn't want to - and you know how he is. He never says no, but sends you on your way without ever saying yes either."
I knew.
"I'm sorry," I told her, standing up slowly so as to give the appearance of steadiness. "It just caught me off guard. We've known each other a long time - and he didn't tell me it was anywhere near that bad."
"He probably didn't want to scare you."
"Yeah, he's considerate like that." My aching butt he was considerate. I'd kill him myself - and then he wouldn't have to worry about suicide.
"He said he was going to find a quiet place and rest for a minute," Nurse Jody said, looking around as if he ought to appear from thin air.
"He said I could find him in the X-ray storage room."
She laughed. "Well, I guess it is quiet in there. You know where it is?"
I smiled, which is tough when you're ready to skin someone.
"Sure." Still smiling, I walked briskly past curtained-off rooms that smelled of blood and pain, nodding to a med tech who looked vaguely familiar. At least the baby's cries had muted to whimpers.
Samuel had tried to commit suicide.
I knocked on the storage-room door, then opened it. White cardboard file boxes were piled up on racks with a feeling of imposed order - as if somewhere there was someone who would know how to find things here.
Samuel sat on the floor, his back against a stack of boxes. He had a white lab coat on over a set of green scrubs. His arms rested across his knees, hands limp and hanging. His head was bowed, and he didn't look up when I came in. He waited until I shut the door behind me to speak, and he didn't look at me then either.
I thought it was because he was ashamed or because he knew I was angry.
"He tried to kill us," Samuel said, and my heart stopped, then began to pound painfully in my chest because I'd been wrong about the bowed head. Very wrong. The "he" he was talking about was Samuel - and that meant that "he" was no longer in charge. I was talking to Samuel's wolf.
I dropped to the ground like a stone and made damned sure my head was lower than the werewolf's. Samuel the man regularly overlooked breaches of etiquette that his wolf could not. If I made the wolf look up at me, he'd have to acknowledge my superiority or challenge me.
I change into a thirty-odd-pound predator built to kill chickens and rabbits. And poor silly quail. Werewolves can take out Kodiak bears. A challenge for a werewolf I am not.
"Mercy," he whispered, and lifted his head.
The first thing I noticed was hundreds of small cuts all over his face, and I remembered Jody the nurse saying that they'd had to get the glass out of his skin. That the wounds weren't healed yet told me that there had been other, more severe damage his body had to address first. Nifty - just a little pain and suffering to sweeten his temper.
His eyes were an icy blue just this side of white, hot and wild.
As soon as I saw them, I looked at the floor and took a deep breath. "Sam," I whispered. "What can I do to help? Should I call Bran?"
"No!" The word left him in a roar that jerked him forward until he was crouched on both hands, one leg knee up, one leg still down on one knee.
That one knee on the ground meant that he wasn't, quite, ready to spring on me.
"Our father will kill us," Sam said, his voice slow and thick with Welsh intonation. "I . . . We don't want to make him do that." He took a deep breath. "And I don't want to die."
"Good. That's good," I croaked, suddenly understanding just exactly what his first words to me had meant. Samuel had wanted to die, and his wolf had stopped him. Which was good, but left us with a nasty problem.
There is a very good reason that the Marrok kills any werewolves who allow the wolf to lead and the man to follow. Very good reasons - like preventing-mass-slaughter sorts of reasons.
But if Samuel's wolf didn't want them to die, I decided it was better he was in charge. For a while. Since he didn't seem to want to kill me yet. Samuel was old. I don't know exactly how old, but sometime before the Mayflower at least. Maybe that would allow his wolf to control himself without Samuel's help. Maybe. "Okay, Sam. No calls to Bran."
I watched out of the corner of my eye as he tilted his head, surveying me. "I can pretend to be human until we get to your car. I thought that would be best, so I held this shape."
I swallowed. "What have you done with Samuel? Is he all right?"
Pale ice blue eyes examined me thoughtfully. "Samuel? I'm pretty certain he'd forgotten I could do this: it has been so long since we battled for control. He let me out to play when he chose, and I left it to him." He was quiet a moment or two, then he said, almost shyly. "You know when I'm here. You call me Sam."
He was right. I hadn't realized it until he said it.