The Aftermath of Awakening
Third POV limited
The seven minutes are truly the most precious of a man’s life, the kind where everything you’d rather die saving flashes before your eyes while your unconscious mind still can’t believe the word "it’s going."
Every word she spat out, he heard, but they came through blurred, distant, like his own memory refusing to hold still. He couldn’t move a thing, not even his fingers, which felt too heavy to lift. Being weak was the one thing Saint hated most about being human.
The moment a warm hand wrapped around his, Marchetti surged, clinging to the edge of his mind like it was fighting off its worst enemy, straining against everything that had left him unconscious and limp. She rambled on, spilling word after word, her small voice cutting through every fiber of the weakness that felt like death closing in.
Then warmth crept into the cold he’d felt against the part of his brain that still recognized itself as a mouth, soft in a way nothing in that darkness had been. It didn’t belong there. Nothing gentle belonged in what he was drowning in.
For a moment the pull eased, only slightly, but enough to drag him through.
He didn’t know it was her. He didn’t know anything, not how long he’d been sinking, not which direction counted as up in the shallow current dragging him along. But somewhere inside him, some old, animal part of him, the part that had learned to survive long before he’d learned to think or use his ability, recognized something in that warmth. Something familiar.
Marchetti stirred harder. Saint’s eyelids snapped open, confusion spreading across his face before he could even register the image of the person standing in front of him. He jumped off the bed, sniffing the scent that had haunted him all night, the shampoo his mind still couldn’t shake, the one thing that could send Marchetti spiraling and somehow pull him back sane again.
His eyes darkened. Marchetti trailed his lips along her neck, completely deaf to whatever sounds she was making beneath him. After a long moment of taking in her scent, he lifted his face, Saint’s lips only inches from hers now, claws wrapping possessively around her waist as he hooked her leg around him, positioning his body flush against hers.
His mouth brushed hers. "How do you smell this good, this tempting, all at once, my little spitfire?" Marchetti asked, his voice pure animal instinct, every sense in him ready to ravish and taste those lips.
"Please." She whispered, tears trailing down her cheeks, defeated. Just then his irises snapped back into focus, his head spinning through some different spiral of memory, thunder rumbling across the sky outside as it split open into darkness.
He wiped the tears from her cheek. Before Dr. Quinn could plunge another syringe into him, he charged toward the window and burst through it, out into the storm, eyes scanning across the compound.
"Shoot!" someone shouted from the gate. Guards sprinted toward one of their own as Saint lifted himself over the gate, ready to jump.
Nicole tore the gun from a guard’s hands, aiming for Saint’s upper arm, ready to fire. He pulled the trigger, the bullet lunging toward Saint’s arm, but he was already gone, leaping off into the storm, sprinting through the rain in jaguar form, a shrill cold running through him as he tore past the two old houses ahead and vanished into the woods.
Quinn was already at the window by the time the shattered glass finished raining down onto the terrace below, his hands still gripping the empty syringe like it might somehow undo what had just happened.
"He’s not stable. His body’s still fighting the toxin, and he just ripped out his own IV and jumped through a window." Quinn’s voice cracked with something close to panic. "If Marchetti takes full control out there, we might not get him back."
"Don’t shoot him." Dax’s voice cut through the chaos as guards scrambled toward the compound gates, some already raising their weapons on instinct. "I don’t care what he looks like out there. Nobody puts him down."
Milo was already at the security feed, fingers flying across the keyboard, tracking the blur of dark fur crossing the lawn before it vanished into the treeline. "He’s gone into the woods. Cameras lose him past the old caretaker’s house."
Aurora hadn’t moved from the spot where he’d left her, arms wrapped around herself, staring at the shattered window like it might explain what she’d just watched happen.
"Why did he listen to me?"
She asked herself, confusion and fear plastered across her face. For a moment she’d thought the man who kept her trapped in his mansion like a possession had come back, weak but present, but no. This version of him, the one she’d seen when he leapt through the window pane, still half in animal form, was something she couldn’t fully take in.
"Hybrids really exist in Chicago." Aurora muttered, eyes wide, her heartbeat, which had felt like it was about to burst from her chest, finally settling into something steadier.
She walked slowly toward the bed, gaze fixed on the shattered glass and the long claw marks scored into the wall, before sinking onto the mattress, weak with exhaustion and hunger. She’d forgotten she hadn’t even eaten breakfast until her stomach growled loudly enough to remind her. Just then a gunshot ripped through the sky, and her heartbeat flared again, harder this time. Dax leapt through the window while Aurora rushed to it, Dr. Quinn right beside her.
Nicole appeared moments later, breathless, the gun still loose in his hand, standing in front of Dax, his face colored with concern and worry.
"Where did he go? I should’ve reacted faster. I had the shot, but I hesitated too long and missed it." His face twisted with something that looked exactly like guilt. "I’ll take a team out. We’ll find him before he gets far."
Dax gripped Nicole by the collar, pure rage burning behind his brown eyes. "You’re proud of missing a shot at someone that weak? What the hell were you thinking when I said no one pulls the trigger on him?"
"I didn’t know," Nicole tried to explain, but Dax’s grip only tightened around his collar.
"Pray he’s fine when I get to him, or else..."
"His nervous system could still be compromised," Quinn said, cutting Dax off, rain soaking them both, hair plastered to their foreheads. "Waking up doesn’t mean he’s recovered. If Marchetti stays in control too long out there, in that state, he might not be able to shift back at all."
"So we chase him," Dax shouted, turning his focus back to Quinn.
"We have to find him before someone else does." Quinn’s voice left no room for argument.
Aurora stood frozen a moment longer before the words came back to her, quiet beneath everything else. *My little spitfire.* He’d known her. Somewhere underneath all that fur and fury, some part of him had recognized her, had chosen her voice over the storm raging through the rest of him. For those few seconds, Saint had actually been there. She didn’t know what that meant yet, but she believed, with a certainty she couldn’t quite explain, that she could reach him again.
Deep in the woods, Saint finally slowed, rain pouring over him in sheets, his body trembling with an exhaustion he could no longer outrun. His own heartbeat pounded loud enough to drown out everything else, except the low, insistent pull still dragging him forward.
"Run," Marchetti urged.
"Stop," Saint fought back, dragging himself to a halt against a tree, claws digging into the bark. Her voice cut through the fog first, before anything else could reach him.
"Please, Saint."
It was the only thing sharp enough to reach him. He staggered to a stop, breath ragged, rain running through fur that hadn’t yet receded. He looked down at his arm and found blood, dark and slow, seeping from a wound he didn’t remember taking.
But it wasn’t the pain that held his attention.
Beneath the rain, beneath the blood, her scent still clung to him, faint but unmistakable, and Marchetti wasn’t fighting to shake it off. It was calming him.
A branch snapped somewhere behind him.
Saint went still, every instinct sharpening at once, his vision blurring at the edges as he forced his eyes back open.