Page 21 of Crave

“Your shoulder—"

“It’s fine. Nearly healed.” He worried the scar at the edge of his lip. “Scared the hell out of me, sweetheart.”

I studied Dallas’s profile, willing him to meet my eyes, the memory of us frozen yards apart in the final seconds just before the vampire crashed into me from behind causing my gut to clench.

“Council’s on the way to bag the dead vamp.” Brody propped his hands on his service belt. “We’re lucky this didn’t turn out a whole lot worse.”

Which was pretty much Brody-speakfor, You scared the crap out of me anddon’t do it again. At least someone was treating me normally.

Dallas held my eyes. “You sure you’re okay?”

I looked away rather than answer.

“Start from the beginning,” Brody ordered. “I want to know everything that happened out there.”

Briefly, I recounted patrolling the five miles on the north side of the Caldwell ranch between my car and the highway, then took them through the details of the fight.

“I can barely feel my wolf. Can’t shift. Everything sounds and smells muted, like I’m trapped underwater. It’s almost as if I’m… this is going to sound crazy.”

“Human.” Dallas uttered it like a swear word.

Not that I hadn’t been thinking the same thing. But still.

Brody rubbed his jaw, staring out the window for a long moment. He was in uniform, had probably been out on patrol when Dallas called. “You didn’t smell anything, get any hint something was off?”

“They flashed in right on top of me. It was like they knew exactly where I’d be. I barely had time to shift and grab my knives. Dallas and I managed to take the female out, but her partner ghosted me out of there, then punched me in the head the moment we reformed. That’s the last thing I remember.”

“They hit you with anything—some kind of aerosol? Needles? Wolfsbane?”

“Not that I remember.”

Major whined and West crouched down to scratch his tummy. “The vamps look sick to you?”

“Same as always. Strung out on shifter blood and who knows what else their handlers amped them up on before sending them out into the field.”

“They’re losing entire cities to blood and drug addiction. It’s a wonder they haven’t made themselves extinct by now.”

Vampire social hierarchy operated on a complicated system of castes. Those who’d maintained power for centuries within the covens used the youngest members as their servants and foot soldiers, forcing them to drink from captured shifters and attack rival covens for territory. The covens were constantly plagued by revolts, infighting and sickness. Drink from a shifter once, twice, maybe even ten times, and you might be okay. But repeated exposure to a protein in our blood triggered an immune response that ate away at the myelin sheath protecting nervous tissue, causing acute lycanthropic degenerative disease in vampires. Over time, victims lost muscle coordination, experienced dissociative episodes, lost the ability to swallow and breathe, and eventually died.

“Something about today’s attack felt off.” Dallas rose from beside my bed to pace over to the window. “They want Topher. And they want us to think he knows why.”

“They’re screwing with us,” West said sharply. “Convince us he can’t be trusted, then separate him out from the pack. It’s classic reverse psychology.”

While they argued, I tucked the quilt around my middle, rose unsteadily and made my way to the mirror above the room’s antique wooden bureau. I cursed the moment I caught sight of my reflection. Dark purple bruises circled my neck, an ugly lump rising just over my right temple. There weren’t many ways to leave permanent marks on a shifter. The lycan virus caused us to regenerate too quickly for scar tissue to form except when toxins like silver or wolfsbane were introduced.

“I’m not healing.”

“We don’t know why,” Dallas said from behind me.

But it made sense. I couldn’t shift. Couldn’t feel the presence of the pack in the back of my mind. Now this, too.

“Naomi’s best guess is this is some sort of infectious agent, a biological weapon designed to take out shifters. But I was exposed, got knocked around, too, and I’m not showing any symptoms. Naomi stitched up your arm the best she could, but if it’s not better in twenty-four hours, you’re gonna need to go to one of the hospitals down in Houston for more tests. She left some antibiotics for you to start on in the meantime.”

I cursed.

Dr. Naomi Jennings was the local vet, a certified medic, and our first line of defense as far as health care went. She was scary smart, as in, had-gone-through-most-of-the-coursework-for-your-standard-medical-degree-for-fun smart, wore her hair in gorgeous Fulani braids, and loved to go rock climbing on the weekends when she wasn’t tied up at the animal clinic in town. Enhanced self-healing made showing up in the ER with a gushing knife wound problematic when all traces of scarring would be gone within hours. Both of the Austin packs had physicians, but the closest major medical facilities for shifters were four hours away.

“So a bloodborne pathogen?” I wiggled my fingers at Major. Tail wagging, he came over to lay his big square head in my lap. “Some sort of vampire sickness I contracted when the second one tried to drain me?”