Page 37 of Cold Moon

“I know. And I can’t explain why your mother is how she is, but she’s struggling with the fact that you are an independent adult, Skye. And dating a boy? Well, that’s a huge step, isn’t it? If you go falling in love, moving in with someone”—I scoffed and opened my mouth, and Linden held a finger up to stop me—“If that happens, Skye, then she’ll have to really accept that you’re never going home. She doesn’t want that, and she’s willing to hurt you to stop it from happening.”

“Dante doesn’t want—”

“You like Dante, right?” His tone was light, like it was a real question. I just glared up at him, because it wasn’t a question worth answering. He nodded after a moment. “You respect Dante?”

“Of course.” How could he even think that I didn’t?

He smiled down at me, running a hand through my hair, and all my righteous indignation faded away at the expression. “Then I think that maybe, you should let Dante decide what he wants in an omega. Because offhand, I’d say he likes kindness. And intelligence. And ruthless efficiency while running an office. And you know, I just might know an omega who fits that description.”

“You think I should have said yes?”

“I think you should have said what was right for you. Not for your mother.” He leaned forward and kissed my forehead, unusually paternal for Linden. It was nice. Safe.

Unlike real life.

I sighed, letting my head fall back against his soft sweater. “He won’t ask again. He was nervous, and I said no.”

“There’s a pretty easy way around that, you know.” I glanced up and met his eye, and he waggled his eyebrows. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t even have to buy him flowers.”

21

Dante

Alexis’s parents were due to arrive in Grovetown on Friday afternoon with a bag full of Sterling cabbages.

Without a car of my own, going out to the Hill farm in the morning usually meant I spent the whole day there, until Ridge could get away and drive back into town, so I’d had to commandeer some space in the farmhouse to try and figure out the Condition.

“Do you think there might actually be something to the whole apple theory?” I asked, chewing the inside of my cheek as I looked over the produce spread on the card table Mr. Hill had set up in the kitchen corner. It was hardly lab space, and when he’d pulled it out of the cellar, I’d expected it would bother me more to be shoved to the edge of an active kitchen.

Instead, Barbara Hill was there to bounce ideas off of, and she proved to be good company for it.

At the stove, she laughed, hands on her round hips as she turned toward me. “Where’d you get the idea apples have anything to do with it?”

I shrugged, glancing past the fruits and vegetables I’d collected. The day before, I’d gone by Ambrosia Grocery and asked Isaac to help me pick out his most popular local produce.

I still couldn’t verify with complete certainty that diet was the critical factor in whether or not an omega developed the Condition. It came on during periods of high stress or physical change, when hormones or endorphins were working in overdrive—basically any time omegas’ brains squeezed out all those chemicals en masse that kept them alive and functioning properly.

“Just something Colt Doherty mentioned...” I scowled down at the apple at the center of the table. It was true that the Groves had enormous success controlling the Condition, and they ate more than the average number of apples, per capita, but correlation was not causation.

I’d run into Alpha Grove and his mate the night before, after picking up take-out from the Grille. Colt had been nice, quick to squeeze my arm and say it was good to see me again. His smile was perfectly manicured, like he’d practiced it in the mirror. It set me on edge, but his words and behavior were all genuine. That was something I was still getting used to, the wolves in the Grove pack meaning what they said and giving without thought of what they’d receive in turn.

Colt had jokingly asked me if I thought apples were the cure for the Condition. But if they were, it was hard to imagine Skye ever suffering symptoms.

Barbara picked up her wooden spoon and went back to stirring her plum jam. “Okay, so tell me—what qualities do apples have that might affect something like the Condition?”

For the past couple days, while I’d been waiting on fresh samples from the Menas, I’d been trying to figure out what made the Groves, particularly, so resilient. They weren’t the only pack that’d had better luck than most, but no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find anyone who’d done better.

That didn’t mean they weren’t out there. When werewolf packs had a resource they wanted to protect—healthy omegas—or a weakness they didn’t want exploited, they shut down. Didn’t talk about it. Kept to themselves and closed the world out until they’d recovered or were too desperate to stay silent.

But I had to work with the information that was available to me then, and it was that Sterling Corporation seemed to be using some product that affected omegas, and since the Grove wolves had only recently started purposefully cutting out their products, they had some other advantage.

It’d be a hell of a lot easier if that were diet than some special quality of evolution in this pack we’d have to try and replicate and share.

I sighed, stepping back from the table and pacing toward the counter where she worked. “Well, apples are high in fiber. If the Condition is gastrointestinal, that could make any solution in Sterling products easier to digest. Werewolves naturally tend to prefer foods high in protein and crude fats. Compared to humans, most packs tend to eat fewer fruits and vegetables. Obviously, modern diets have changed a lot, but the Grove pack does seem to have a more balanced diet, on average, than other wolves.”

“Okay, so, fiber?”

I huffed, spinning around and pacing back toward the table. “But the symptoms don’t fit. I’ve never heard of a case of the Condition that works that way. I mean, Skye can eat a greasy pizza and it wouldn’t necessarily make him puke. It’s just... eating well seems to keep him from having as many episodes.” Thinking about Skye was hard, but no matter how I looked at this, it came back to him.

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