The distant sound of a heart monitor flatlining stunned me out of an exhausted stupor, pushing my weary body upright in a hospital bed. The long beep was indeed coming from the monitor next to me, and for a second I thought I was dead. Then I saw that the finger clamp slid off my hand and innocently dangled from the machine. I sighed in relief.

It was short-lived, however. Just as I was about to lean back into the comfortable sheets and embrace oblivion once more, the door slammed open, and Hunter barged in wearing his blood-stained football uniform. He froze at the entrance, looking at me with those unsettling blank eyes. 

The next second he was next to me, hands clutching my shoulders.

“You’re not dead!”

“Last time I checked,” I answered on autopilot.

“I felt your heart stop!”

SHIT. Was it the weird proximity heart attack thing from Avaria? It couldn’t be.

“It’s the faulty heart monitor. See?” I gestured to the nagging old hunk of metal and attached the finger clamp. My steady heartbeat resumed at the exaggerated pace, not reflecting my perfectly calm state. If I fucking heard that saxophone again, I would toss the machine out the window and jump after it myself

“NO. I felt it stop! I ran here to you the moment I did!” Finishing the nonsensical sentence, Hunter gripped me to him in a bruising hug and all but straddled me on the bed. I tried to struggle, but mini-hulk was an immovable boulder on my chest, a glitchy paralysis demon of sorts.

Conveniently, the television turned on by the power of exposition, and I watched a frantic news coverage of the football match from a few minutes ago, with Hunter very clearly stopping mid-run and bolting out of the stadium. It was so sudden that a little part of me actually believed his bullshit about some sort of sixth sense. Was there a supernatural undertone to this story?

As he made guttural sounds of grief and relief into my hair, I filtered through the events of the last day or two, trying to piece together evidence.

The weird strength everyone seemed to possess, the strange emotional rollercoasters Hunter flopped between and now this? The physics was still broken, but maybe…

“Hunter?” I asked tentatively

“Yes?”

“This might sound weird but…” I hesitated, trying to narrow down the precise supernatural beastie I associated with this stepbrother of mine. I didn’t dare ponder for too long, as the prolonged, intense stare from his end might have fooled the system into romancing this moment.

“Are you a werewolf?”

We sat frozen for a hot minute. Hunter looked shocked at first, and then his face morphed eerily into what AI probably considered a sensual grin, but instead looked menacing as hell.

“Well, well, well, brother. What made you think that, I wonder?” He leaned close, making me squirm under the covers to put some layers between me and that face. I was the Red Riding Hood hiding from a fake grandmother, with as much luck.

“Was it my stature? Strength? Or…”

As if punctuating each question with a nudge from his nose to my throat wasn’t intimidating enough, he wrapped it all up with a full-body shove into the hospital bed.

“...My stamina?”

“The fuck are you talking about?” I finally gathered all the strength in my upper body and shoved. Same effect if I tried it on a brick wall.

“Don’t lie to me, Liam.” He purred, “I know you like me too. I can hear your heart beating so fast for me.”

I held completely still, my heart rate being a sensible 90 beats per minute regardless of the considerable distress I was in. The heart monitor next to me refused the facts of nature, as apparently most of this fucking reel, and was stuttering rapidly around a hot 200.

I held my breath, hoping to asphyxiate. Bastard wasn’t a damn werewolf, just a horndog. That will teach me to try to make sense of the plot again.

I made up my mind, there and then.

Screw. These. Assholes.

I’m going home.