I stopped on the faintest, smudged scrawl of: ‘crimson eyes’.
I’d found it!
Ah hah—see, I could be helpful.
“Do you have a pencil?” I hissed, squinting at the words like if I stopped, they’d vanish.
“Uh… Karma does.” Phantom got up and rummaged about in Karma’s bed before handing me a rather chewed-on mechanical pencil.
I looked back down at the words, squinting hard—with Phantom joining me this time—to try and lightly retrace the missing piece.
32
VANDLE
The gym seemed duller than usual. Everything always did after I’d been around Crescent.
It was late afternoon, and the gym was busy. The air was heavy with stale sweat, and flaring auras, buzzing like halos of static giving strange, artistic smudges to overlay the greyscale scene before me.
Around us were constant clangs of heavy weights hitting worn old mats, benches busy with packs letting off steam. On one side of the room, rut cages lined the walls, which weren’t the central display cage fights that the Redgraves so often hosted.
I passed a few brawls going on in the sparring field—the open space in the middle of the gym—and toward the others.
I spotted a few members of the Emerald and Wakefield packs first, then caught sight of Sin doing chin ups, while Karma let loose on a punching bag that looked like it was holding on by a thread. As I approached, old foam burst out of one side, forcing him to turn it around.
His aura wasn’t out right now (likely to preserve the life of the punching bag), but I knew what it would look like if he did decide to let it out.
“Spar? I asked. Trying to settle Karma’s unstable aurawassomething we could do today.
“You’re worried I’m going to crack?”
I snorted. “Or me.”
Crescent had dragged me solidly back to sanity, but it didn’t mean I was fully stable.
We went a few rounds before taking a break. Karma headed off to take a piss in the nasty gym bathroom, and Sin, who had been focused on his own workout, paused to bring us some water from the fountain.
“How’s it looking?” he asked before Karma had returned.
“Not… great,” I said after taking a drink of the metallic-tasting water. It wasn’t long now until the appeal, so there was just as much chance he might have an episode before, during, or after.
“We still have Crescent, though. So if anything goes wrong, I don’t think he’ll seem… violent?”
I had to cross my fingers.
Karma arrived to take the cup from me, and I was distracted by the approach of a bulky alpha with a black eye and a few smears of blood on his face.
“Vandle, right?” He held out a hand.
I took it before I could register the tenseness from Sin which meant I might be missing some crucial politics.
Whatever.
“Mind taking a look at our packmate?” he asked, pointing two fingers at his eyes to indicate mine. “Want to know how their auras are looking. Appeal in a few weeks.”
“Sure.”
He turned and pointed out two alphas who were in the sparring field, brawling on the ground.