Page 49 of Cold Moon

Well, except when they poisoned water, or other things no one was expecting. Maybe when another company decided to go in on their plan to murder an entire species.

I sighed and tried to shake off my lingering sense of nihilism. “Any lasting damage this time?”

He sat down in the chair he’d left next to mine, sighing. “That’s something I’ve been thinking about. Dante called yesterday to ask about physiological differences with omegas, especially ones susceptible to the Condition. There has to be something, doesn’t there?”

It only made sense, what with the fact that other omegas ate whatever they wanted and didn’t get sick like me. Me, I drank half a bottle of water, spent four days in bed, and still didn’t want to look at food half the time.

“So I’ve been talking to a friend I went to medical school with, and he invited me to bring a few omegas down and use the imaging equipment at the hospital where he works.” His lips twisted in wry apology. “As much as I hate to say it, I could take almost any omega in town as a baseline, but—”

“But I’m the only one you know who’s chronically ill.” I flopped back against the bed, staring at the ceiling. “It’s weird, you know. Most people are in the opposite situation. Omegas everywhere are sick. I talk to them online all the time. It’s only around here that I’m Skye the freak.”

“You’re not that here either, Skye.” He reached out and took my hand. “If anything, you’re Skye, the omega we’ve failed.”

Of course Linden would see it like that. He thought that as a doctor, he should be able to heal anyone, fix any ailment. That was his job, so he should be impossibly perfect at it.

I turned on my side and met his eye steadily. “If you’d failed me, I’d be dead now. If you want to take me and Colt in as before and after tests for how omegas should and shouldn’t be, that’s fine. I know you don’t blame me for being sick.”

“No one should blame you for being sick,” he corrected. “You would never have chosen this, and anyone who makes it worse by blaming you for it is an asshole.”

I could have told him that there were plenty of people who did just that. People who equated being healthy with being good, and thought that a sickly werewolf was seen as a failure, but that wasn’t his problem. And ultimately, it wasn’t mine, either.

My problem was taking care of myself, and helping Linden make it better.

“So you talked to Dante?” I bit my lip. “He hasn’t come in today. Or yesterday.”

“Dante does not think you being sick makes you bad,” he shot back, almost as defensive as if I’d been talking about him. I couldn’t lie, seeing someone so defensive of Dante warmed my heart a little. Then he leaned in and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I think he’s been working twelve-hour days since you got sick. He wants to figure this out, and it sounds like he and Ridge are making headway.”

“They... are?”

He smiled at me, squeezing my hand. “They are. And maybe it’s not a cure, but once we know more, we’ll know better how to deal with it.”

And that? Well, I couldn’t say for sure how Dante felt about me, or whether he’d ever want to go on another date after how the last one had ended, but it was undoubtedly the most romantic thing I’d ever heard of in my life. Dante wanted to stop the whole freaking Condition for me.

When I rubbed my suspiciously wet eyes, Linden didn’t say a single word.

29

Dante

I’d hit a roadblock. The information available on the internet about werewolves was suspect at best. Loads of it was written by wishful humans who longed for the idea of a pack because they were missing that sense of connection in their own lives.

And hell, when I turned off the safety filters on Ridge’s laptop, thinking I might find something fringe but useful, all I’d found was that there was plenty of werewolf porn out there. More than plenty.

There just wasn’t much concrete information. Werewolves weren’t known for having open social-media presences. There were obvious exceptions—Ridge’s mate and his podcast, a couple Instagram influencers, the entire Doherty family. Honestly, Alexis’s podcast was about as close as anyone came to telling the world what it was like to be an omega werewolf living in the age of the Condition.

Well, that, and Skye’s blog.

But what I needed was firm, specific information about werewolf anatomy, and the closest I’d gotten was an article that speculated that the reason werewolves had evolved in the first place was some latent, misunderstood part of the brain, present and dormant in some humans. There was lots of speculation about the ways we were alike, how some humans had been bitten and could shift afterward.

But hell, average humans didn’t know much about neuroscience, so I was pretty screwed on that front.

I needed a break—maybe an academic medical library—and a chance to clear my head, so that morning, instead of going straight to the farm, I went to Chadwick’s Grille to grab a couple breakfast sandwiches to bring over to the clinic.

If Skye still wasn’t up to eating, that was no big deal. But it seemed better to offer something he didn’t want than to come empty handed, and the wolf inside me was thrilled to be able to offer Skye anything at all.

It was early enough that Wanda and I were almost the only people in the Grille, and I had the chance to sit there quietly at the counter, nobody around to bother me.

When I got to the clinic, Skye looked better than the last time I’d seen him. He was sitting up in the third bed, his legs crossed comfortably under a blanket and a laptop balanced in his lap.

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