Inside the bathroom that smelled so much of Sebastian and made her body hum to life and her pulse throb, Viola saw her reflection and almost gasped at the hickeys covering her body, especially on her neck and breasts, it went all the way down, her thighs carrying bite marks that turned her face red like an overriped tomatoes.

"Sebastian!" she muttered in shocked disbelief at the sheer extent of the hickeys scattered across her skin. "How did he expect me to hide all of this?" she grumbled to herself.

Unlike werewolves, she did not possess fast healing, and Zoe would be arriving today.

Viola pursed her lips at the thought, though despite herself, she still found her fingers drifting to the marks on her neck, lightly tracing them with a smile she could not quite suppress.

"Sometimes you act like a dog, Seb," she sighed.

Then she turned on the shower and stepped beneath the water without waiting for it to warm, needing the cold shock of it to pull her fully back into herself and stop the lingering sparks and delicious warmth his touch had left behind in her body.

The water came down in heavy, steady streams and she stood under it with her eyes closed, her forehead tipped forward, letting it run through her hair and down her back and carry whatever was left of last night off her skin. Not because she wanted to be rid of it. More because she needed to begin the day and standing here remembering wasn’t going to make his absence any shorter.

She reached for the soap.

And then the water moved.

Not the way water moved when pressure changed or something shifted. It moved with its own intention, the stream nearest to her shoulder pulling away from its downward path and curling slowly, like something waking up and stretching to life.

Viola went completely still, her face going pale.

Her heart slammed hard against her ribs as the water began gathering in front of her, pulling itself from the streams running around her. It twisted and thinned, shifting shape until a small, fluid, and entirely impossible creature stood before her.

Its form flickered uncertainly between a serpent and something unrecognizable, its body made entirely of moving water. The bathroom light caught against its rippling form and scattered pale silver reflections across the tiles.

She stumbled backward and hit the shower wall behind her, believing the water that had attacked and pulled her under in Nightshade was back to do it again.

"No." She breathed, her chest seizing immediately with the memory of Nightshade. Her hands pressed flat against the tiles behind her and she was already looking for an exit, her pulse roaring in her ears.

But the shape didn’t move toward her.

It stayed exactly where it was, hovering in the falling water, and if something made entirely of water could be said to have stillness in it, this thing had it. It wasn’t coiling or moving with the shower water anymore. It tilted what she could only describe as its head and regarded her the way a patient creature regarded something it had startled by accident and was now waiting for to calm down.

Viola stared at it.

It stared back.

Or whatever passed for staring when you had no eyes, only water shifting in the shape of them. What the hell was this?!

She pressed herself against the wall for a long moment, breathing hard, waiting for it to lunge or to change shapes or for the voice she had once heard in Nightshade to follow. But nothing happened.

The shape simply existed in front of her without any alarming movement to attack.

"You’re not the same one, are you?" She questioned, and her voice came out quieter.

The shape moved in a way that looked almost like a dip of its head in acknowledgment, and then it did something else that made Viola’s breath catch completely.

It began moving toward her shoulder.

She flinched, every muscle in her body screaming at her to push it away, but it didn’t touch her like a grip or a pull. It touched her the way water touched skin, pressing lightly against the curve of her shoulder where a bruise had bloomed dark and tender from Sebastian’s mouth, and where it touched she felt warmth instead of cold, a deep traveling warmth that moved through the hickey.

She looked down.

The bruise was fading. Right there beneath the touch of this impossible water creature, the mark was lightening, the tenderness easing, the skin smoothing back to its unbroken pale as if Sebastian’s mouth had never been there at all.

"Oh." Viola said softly.

She watched it move to the next one. Then the next. Traveling across her skin with that same careful gentleness, touching each mark Sebastian had left on her and dissolving it back into nothing.

She didn’t understand what this was and had never heard of it. Though she was aware that many werewolves had abilities and powers, it didn’t include giving water shapes...

How did she have water abilities? Viola raised her hand to try it and watched as she could move the water with her hands, pulling it into a large bubble, and when she brought her hand down it splashed against the water creature, and it squeaked and glared at her, at least she thought it glared from the way it looked at her.

"Sorry..." She muttered. "You don’t perhaps talk?"

It shook its head.

Viola sighed. "I am getting confused about myself. What am I? I am a werewolf, I can feel it, but what are you?" She asked it.

Whatever she was, whatever ran in her blood beneath the surface of this wolfless, supposedly powerless body she had been told her whole life was a deficiency, she was beginning to suspect it was something else entirely. Could it have something to do with why she had never received her wolf?

Did she even have a wolf? But then if she didn’t, what was that voice that had once spoken to her and told her to find her twin? She felt her head spinning from all these questions.

She watched the water shape finish its work and draw back, returning to the streams of falling water until it was simply a part of them again, its form dissolving back into ordinary shower water that ran down the tiles and disappeared into the drain.

Viola stood in the middle of the shower for a long moment, wondering what on earth had just happened.

Then she looked down at her unmarked skin, every trace of last night erased, and felt a strange feeling move through her, a grief she hadn’t expected for the loss of those marks, which was ridiculous and she knew it was ridiculous, and yet she felt mad that it had wiped Sebastian’s marks from her.

"You could have talked to me about what you are rather than do what you were not asked to do, water." Viola rambled, and as if hearing her, the water pouring over her head smacked her hard on the face so that she yelped and stumbled back.

Viola gasped at it. "I hope next time you don’t try to heal things without asking me first, not everything is meant to heal." She sighed, pressing her fingers lightly to her collarbone where the most visible mark had been.

"I need to figure out what I am. I can’t be anything other than a werewolf, I can’t be." She said quietly to the water, to whatever had just happened.

Outcasts were not welcome in the werewolf world, this world belonged only to were-people, and anything else would be killed or cast out. Vampires and any kinds of creatures had been cast away a very long time ago. It had been that way since the beginning of time and she wanted nothing to do with water creatures, the oldest enemies of werewolves.

"You had better never show yourself to me again." She said to the water, not wanting to be implicated in anything that had to do with it.

The water ran on in silence, offering no answers. But she had a feeling in her chest that it wasn’t gone. That it would come back. That it had always been there, waiting for her to be ready, ready for what exactly, she didn’t yet know.

She turned off the shower.