"I tested the bullet you removed from his thigh, Miss Lara. It is as hot as coal to the touch." Viola said as she squeezed more cool water into the bullet wound and Sebastian’s body jolted and shook beneath her hands. "When I dropped the bullet into the water it sizzled and then turned cool after making the water hot around it. Maybe if we keep putting water into the wound it will cool down the bullet’s effect enough for you to remove them safely."

Miss Lara hadn’t thought to experiment with the removed bullet, nor had she thought of trying that approach, but then the man was dying already. What was the worst that could happen at this point?

Miss Lara knelt down beside her, took another rag and also began to squeeze water carefully into the bullet holes.

The wounds sizzled and Sebastian’s body shook violently and he let out a deep and guttural groan of agony.

Viola immediately set her rag down and moved to hold him, resting her cheek gently against his head and whispering, "Shhh. I am sorry. I am trying to cool you down from the pain." She rubbed his hair and caressed his damp forehead with her fingers until the violent shaking gradually reduced and his body quieted. She pressed her lips to his hair and closed her eyes for a moment as if gathering herself back together before she sat up straight and picked up the rag again.

Miss Lara watched her quietly, and found she couldn’t reconcile this caring and determined young woman with the little devil child called Serena who wouldn’t have given a single thought if someone had died right in front of her all those years ago.

She had been suspecting since yesterday that perhaps this was Serena, going by how she had behaved and from Julia’s words, but seeing how she was caring for this man, Miss Lara thought, she couldn’t be Serena in any way.

Serena had shown every sign of becoming something cold and entirely without feeling from childhood, and this woman kneeling on the floor pressing her lips to a dying man’s hair was something else entirely.

Miss Lara tried to put her mind at peace with the belief that this wasn’t Serena but Ivy.

"I think the water is helping. He is not making those sounds as much anymore." Viola remarked, looking at his face carefully. "We should keep doing it. Perhaps if we cool the bullet down enough you can attempt to remove it again without it dissolving everything around it."

Viola dabbed at his forehead with the damp rag and moved it carefully across his dry and cracked lips. She wiped the blood stains from his skin without letting a single emotion cross her face, methodical and focused and refusing to fall apart while there was still something left to try.

A few minutes later the water sitting in the bullet wounds had turned hot again and Sebastian was back to making those low sounds of discomfort that pulled at her every time she heard them. Miss Lara got up to fetch something to drain the water so they could replace it with cool water again, leaving Viola alone with him.

The moment she was alone she couldn’t hold back her tears. It was beginning to look like there was no way she could help him, no matter what she tried, and that realization was pressing down on her chest like something physical.

Though Viola had tried more than once to deceive herself about what she felt for Sebastian, she knew, sitting here on the floor beside him, exactly why everything he did and said and was had always affected her the way it did. She had fallen for him.

Somewhere between all the walls she had tried to keep standing and all the distance she had tried to maintain, she had fallen for him completely, and she hadn’t been brave enough to admit it even to herself until now when she was watching him slowly slip away from her.

Something inside her heart was dying along with him. She could feel it slipping away.

If she lost Sebastian at this point in her life, Viola doubted she could ever recover from it. She had not only lost her twin and her hope of ever being a normal werewolf, but she would also lose her best friend, her husband, whom she hadn’t given any chance at all inside her heart, because she had been afraid of a deep relationship with him.

Now he was dying before her, and there was absolutely nothing she could do for him. Nothing at all.

And it was killing her to sit there and watch him.

She wouldn’t even mind the arrogant Sebastian right now. In fact the pretentious bastard would be infinitely better than the silent and fading one lying in front of her.

Viola stared at the bullet wound that had begun smoking again and reached her hand out to check if the water was heating and causing the smoke, but just as her fingers got close enough something happened that stopped her completely.

The bullet, along with the water surrounding it, rose from within his skin. The dark bullet sat encased inside a small ball of water and hovered for a suspended second before she instinctively withdrew her hand, and then it dropped and clinked against the floor beside her.

Viola stared at it, too stunned to move for a long moment. Then she reached down and picked it up and found it completely cool to the touch. Not warm. Not hot. Cool. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

What had just happened?

As if compelled to test it, she moved her hand to the next bullet wound and reached close, and just like the first one the water inside the hole enclosed the bullet and drew it smoothly out of his skin.

Viola’s eyes went wide and she stayed very still for a breath, looking at her own hand like she was seeing it for the first time. She had no clear understanding of how she was doing it or how she was directing the water at all, but she moved to the next bullet anyway and then the next, working steadily and carefully.

It was then that Miss Lara came back into the room.

"What are you doing?" The woman asked as she set the water pail down and moved to kneel beside her, only to find herself watching a bullet rise from the wound encased in a small bubble of water and drop cleanly to the floor.

Miss Lara’s eyes went wide. She leaned in quickly to examine the wound the bullet had just left and found that unlike the one she had removed earlier, the surrounding tissue and muscle showed no damage at all.

She watched in silence as the girl continued, so focused that she didn’t pay her any attention. She kept removing the remaining bullets, one after another.

It dawned on Miss Lara then, slowly and with a dread that crept up from the bottom of her stomach, what she was witnessing, what it meant. And the panic that followed was immediate as she realized that the water creature she had made a pact with could sense the use of any water power on land, and right now, this girl would pull that dreadful being’s attention back here.

"Oh dear, stop that right now," Miss Lara said in a low, urgent voice, looking around the room and reaching out to push the buckets of water away from them both, so the creature wouldn’t use them as a passage to come through.