Page 18 of Cold Moon

“Sure thing. I’ll have that out in just a minute. To go, I guess?”

“If that’s not too much trouble, thank you.”

While she went to put the order in at the kitchen, I dug my cash out of my pocket. I figured one of those bills would cover the whole thing, and I tucked the rest away. The whole time I waited, I felt her son’s glare on the back of my head.

10

Skye

Why don’t you fucking dogs just die out like you should?

It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten a nasty message on my blog. It surely wouldn’t be the last. There’d been a creepy sexual comment about omegas, someone who’d called me names implying I was unintelligent for “not knowing that diet and the Condition weren’t related,” and even just the odd “don’t u no how many carbs r in corn!?” That one, responding to a post where I had, in fact, detailed the number of carbohydrates in corn. Apparently they had missed that it wasn’t a keto blog, but one designed to help omegas with the Condition.

The suggestion that all werewolves should die was a new insult, and I couldn’t help but connect it to Colt’s article. He’d drawn a tenuous link between Sterling food and the Condition. Maybe not everyone had seen it, and maybe not everyone believed, but this...

I grinned. This person knew. And them being angry that I was working to keep omegas healthy, well darn it all, that meant something good, didn’t it? I mean, not for them. They were a horrible person and I blocked their IP address on the website, but if speciesist monsters were angry at me, that meant I was doing something to help.

Also, maybe it was a little terrifying, because speciesist monsters were the kind of people who bought automatic weapons and used them to murder innocent weres.

But it wasn’t like I posted my address on the website, and I didn’t even work on it at home, only at the clinic. Anyone trying to hurt me would have to drive all the way through Grovetown with their car stinking of guns, and that would get all kinds of attention.

I gave a full body shake, like I could shake off the greasy feeling of someone who hated me for the crime of being born a werewolf. That was when the sound outside coalesced into footsteps headed for the door, just a few seconds before the clinic door opened.

Turning my brightest smile in that direction, I readied my usual “welcome to the clinic,” spiel, but it cut off when the doorway filled with Dante Reid.

I almost sighed like a Belieber over the bastardized version of “Despacito,” but shook it off, flipped my laptop shut, and looked him over, scenting the air. It wasn’t the blood of reopened wounds or ripped stitches that came to my nose, but the so-familiar smell of the Chadwick Grille’s turkey apple wrap.

My mouth watered at just the scent, I was so well-trained, but I ignored it. “Hey, stranger, it’s been forever. Like”—I glanced at the clock—“three hours. Everything okay?” I didn’t manage to keep the concern out of my voice, but that was okay. I was a medical professional, after all. I was expected to be concerned for our patients, particularly ones who’d already been through so much.

“I’m fine,” he answered, reassuringly, almost before I finished asking. “I just... Alpha Grove didn’t give me anything to do, said I can start working on Monday. So I went to get lunch and thought, you know, I probably owe you a bunch of meals.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, insist he didn’t owe me anything, but that was part of what Alpha Grove was working on, wasn’t it? We had cared for Dante, when we’d been put in a position where some packs would not have been so kind. When, likely, his own pack would not have been so kind—even to him, let alone one of us.

As toxic as it was, people were raised to think that if someone did something for them, they were required to repay the favor. And insisting that nothing was owed didn’t remove the feeling of debt. It just added another layer of guilt, and sometimes made things even worse.

Besides, there was absolutely no way I was going to turn down an offer to eat lunch with Dante Reid. He wasn’t just kind and soft-spoken and one of the most handsome alphas I’d ever met. He actually seemed to like me. Me. Tiny, useless Skye, who was too fragile to touch to the point that his own mother rarely hugged him for fear he’d break. Linden had long been the only exception to that rule.

But now there was Dante. He didn’t treat me like I was unbreakable or anything. Just like I was any other omega in the world, and not sad, lonely, porcelain Skye.

I patted the side of the desk that had a nice chair next to it. “Well in that case, come have a seat. What exactly are you going to be doing for Linden?” I asked, to keep myself from spewing the rest of the overemotional drivel running through my head. “You said working with Ridge? Are they going to have you working the farm?”

He blanched, and we both glanced down at his midsection, but he shook his head. Sitting down in the chair nearest me, he pulled out two sandwiches, setting one of them in front of me. “I don’t think so. He said probably lab work. I’m okay at that, so maybe I’ll be able to help. Don’t know that I’d be a lot of help on a farm, even without the stitches.”

I shrugged as I unwrapped my sandwich, pausing to take in the scent of it. Then stopping to take another long sniff of the air. For the first time since he’d come to the clinic, there was a real hint of Dante’s scent. It had always been smothered by blood and antiseptic and medication, but now, he was starting to smell like man. Like alpha. Like amber and like the tall pine trees that covered Reid territory, as though they had seeped into his blood, and even now, weeks removed from being on Reid land, it was still inside him.

He seemed to take my long silence as though I was waiting for more, and ducked his head, staring down at his own food. “I’ve never been much with my hands. I, um, I like science.”

Pausing mid-bite, I grinned at him. “Me too! I wanted to go to school for psychology, but—” Darn it. Why did my whole life have to revolve around my illness? Why couldn’t I have just this one person who didn’t think of me as Skye-who-had-the-Condition, but just... Skye? I sighed and bit back my irritation. It wasn’t his fault. “I can’t really leave pack lands without a keeper. The Condition.”

His eyes went round and scraped down me, as though he was seeing me again for the first time. It left me raw and smarting, my eyes stinging. He wouldn’t be back for lunch again, of course. Not unless it was out of pity.

Instead of asking about my illness or changing the subject and not looking me in the eye ever again, he nodded. “That’s why the healthy diet.”

I nodded, taking a giant bite of my wrap. He mirrored it with one of his own, still nodding, his eyes staring off somewhere past my shoulder. When he finished the bite, he looked back at me. “I think what Alpha Grove wants me to work on is hunting down what’s causing the Condition. It’s what he implied.”

“Sterling,” I agreed. “We think it’s something Sterling is using on their plants. Just getting near one of their farms made Claudia collapse last month, and she’d never been sick before her second term.”

“The pack’s second?” he asked. “Pregnant?”

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