Page 19 of Cold Moon

I nodded, then froze. Was I not supposed to mention that? Did anyone not know that Claudia was Linden’s second, and that she was pregnant? She was showing now, so anyone who saw her had to know...

Dante didn’t even seem to notice, just went back to looking over my shoulder, nodding some more. His eyes darted back and forth, like he was reading something, even though I knew there was nothing behind me to read.

Then he shook his head and turned back to look at me. “Sorry. I get distracted. But wouldn’t it be a heck of a thing, if you and me and this Ridge guy helped your alpha stop the Condition? I know you’d still have to deal with it some, but we could keep it from spreading to new omega kids.”

All I could do for a second was blink, and I had to swallow hard before I could answer. “Yeah. Yeah, it would.”

Maybe I was being too optimistic, but he sort of... well, he got it, didn’t he? He understood that stopping the Condition wasn’t a magical cure that would undo the damage it had done to me. He hadn’t made it about pitiful little me. No, he’d made it aboutusand helping. Not about my sickness and himself being the savior.

Even Linden had never been able to give me that.

11

Dante

Over that first weekend, I tried to fit myself into some kind of pattern. There wasn’t much for me to amuse myself with at home, but I had errands to run on foot, supplies to buy, and the library in Grovetown was chock-full of current magazines and newspapers, had public computers, and offered more books than I could read in my lifetime.

In the morning, I got up early and went to the Grille, where I sat at the counter sipping coffee and waiting for Skye to show up for his breakfast sandwich. We ate together, not talking about much of anything, but he was the first person in the Grove pack who seemed any degree of comfortable with me, so it was nice to start the day with his smiling face to remind me I was a person and not a foreign Reid monster.

Then, we went our separate ways, him to the clinic and me to the library, where the whole building was quiet and empty, and I could skirt beyond notice of the Grove wolves who resented my presence in their territory.

In any case, if Alpha Grove was going to have me looking into the Condition, I should learn all I could about it before I started tampering with chemicals.

The Condition occupied something of a hole in my knowledge base. It wasn’t that I was uninterested exactly, only that the Condition had ravaged my pack before anyone could stop it. It’d killed my mother.

As terrifying as the idea of there being no cure was, I was also afraid to lift up that rock and see that there was something that would’ve saved my pack and my mom.

Still, my way of repaying the Groves relied on my understanding of the Condition. It was something of a relief to realize that there was no source of useful, applicable knowledge I’d been missing all this time. Well, outside of Skye’s blogs.

When I told him on Sunday morning about the research I’d done the day before, he pulled it up on his phone and showed me. I spent that afternoon on one of the library’s computers, reading every post he’d made so far.

He’d written a lot about diet and exercise, but hadn’t come any closer to the root of the problem than anyone else.

Monday morning, I was looking forward to catching him at breakfast when a shiny silver SUV parked outside my apartment. Alpha Grove was sliding out of the car when I opened the front door. He had a Pyrex container in his hands and walked straight up to the duplex’s porch with a smile on his face.

“Brought you breakfast,” he said, sticking it out. “Quiche. Rowan made it. I figured I could check your stitches before we head over to the farm?”

“Okay, sure.” I tried to ignore the sting of disappointment that I wouldn’t see Skye that morning. That meant I might not see him the whole day, and a prickle of unease tingled in the back of my head.

He picked up a messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder, then I led him into my apartment. It was awkward, having him standing there in my kitchen, inspecting my bare stomach while I held my shirt up. He replaced the bandage.

“You can come by the clinic tomorrow and I’ll take them out,” he said as I dropped my shirt. “Thank the moon for werewolf healing, right?”

His smile was generous and open, but mine felt tight on my face. It was werewolf claws that’d done this to me in the first place, and it felt weird to be too thankful when things were so messed up.

“Yeah. So, should I put that in the microwave?” I nodded toward the Pyrex on the kitchen table.

Alpha Grove shrugged. “You could. About thirty seconds is plenty. It’s also pretty good cold.”

“Great.” I grabbed a fork and put it on top of the container. “Ready?”

It wasn’t a long drive to the farm, but the land opened up before we got there—big, rolling fields of green plants and rich, dark soil. Alpha Grove turned down a dirt road and drove up to a two-story farmhouse.

There on the front porch, a big guy stood in a flannel button up, a tan coat with a zipper, and jeans that looked more practical than fashionable. When we got closer, I saw there was another guy on the porch with a computer in his lap. The big guy swung down and kissed his cheek before hopping off the porch to come and greet us.

“Alpha,” he said to Linden with a nod.

“Ridge, good to see you.” Alpha Grove stepped back, slightly out of the way when I walked around the car, and Ridge turned his enormous farm-boy smile right on me and stuck out his hand.

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