Page 52 of Cold Moon

Perfectly healthy.

And there was me, the result of his so-healthy products, lying in bed because I’d had half a bottle of his poison water on an empty stomach. The irony didn’t escape me, that I’d have gone out there and given him hell, if, you know, I hadn’t been lying there in a clinic bed.

“No reason you should have to bother with this baseless slander, Grandfather,” the sharpest of the voices spat, and if words were weapons, people would have been pouring into the clinic a moment later. “I can go see this ‘proof’ of theirs. Do you even have a proper laboratory in this town?”

And that, well...

I slid one leg out from under the blanket, turning as I did, to face the side, and—I didn’t even try. When you’ve spent as many years as I have sick, fighting your body’s reactions every single day, sometimes you just know that today, your legs aren’t going to be willing to hold you up.

So instead, I sat there in my bed, as my alpha and Dante fought my battles for me. As small-minded bureaucrats and businessmen suggested that my life wasn’t as important as their company’s income.

I balled up a fist and hit my useless leg with it, like the violence would make me heal, or make me feel better. Really, it just turned into a reminder that I was a weakling. I couldn’t even hurt myself when I was trying to.

Dante was hesitant about the lab, and he didn’t want to say it outright, but I could hear it in his voice. Tiny drops of his concern falling into the air, like blood into water, and I could imagine the Sterling monsters salivating at the thought of the sweet, fresh kill. My sweet Dante, so vulnerable, trying so hard, dealing with people who wanted him to fail.

Why did everyone want to hurt him so much?

My attention came back to the conversation—all too easy to hear with my better-than-average omega hearing, which was one of the few things not affected by the Condition—and the first thing I picked back up on was a gravelly voice saying, “Well, I can certainly stay here, and—”

There were a few quick footsteps that had the cadence of Dante’s boots on pavement, when everyone else in the parking lot had sounded as though they were wearing loafers. He was coming closer to the clinic door.

Dante wouldn’t bring them in, would he?

What would I even do, faced with the bogeymen who’d spent my entire life tormenting me? The people who might be responsible for me being short and scrawny and sickly, and freaking... a werewolf who needed to wearglasses.

“Oh, I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Linden’s smooth voice interrupted. “You’re welcome to stay in your car, but since I’ll be going with you and Dante to look at his results, I’m going to have to lock the clinic up.”

“You would drag an old man—”

“An old man who was healthy enough to invade my pack territory in order to issue threats is healthy enough to come to the lab and see why his threats are in error.” Linden’s voice had gone hard, as it so rarely did. I could picture it, the way his gray eyes went cold and steely, and his whole body tensed, as though ready for violence. Unlike so recently, with Dante’s pack, I suspected that violence was going to be silly and unnecessary. The Sterling people were monsters, sure, but they were monsters who poisoned pregnant women and babies, not monsters who came with tooth and fang bared, ready to have their own blood drawn in return.

No, they only struck people who couldn’t defend themselves.

A moment later, there was a snatch of murmured conversation even I struggled to pick up on, though it sounded closer than the rest.

“—sure about that? I know the story is important, but the lab is crawling with Sterling products.” That had been Linden, his voice low and filled with that quiet tension that said he was fighting his alpha instincts.

The response wasn’t so hard to hear. Colt, strident and fiery, as though his voice could barely contain the anger in his words. “Yes. I’m not missing a minute of this, and it’s all going straight to the public. This is harassment and intimidation, and you know as well as I do that they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t as guilty as we know they are.”

He was right. There was no real doubt of that. If they had good intentions, they’d have come with scientists and questions, not shouting in the clinic parking lot about how we were trying to take money from them.

It was hard to imagine what I would do if someone told me I was endangering millions of lives, but that was mostly because I didn’t do anything that affected millions of lives. If someone told me I was hurting the pack, well, I’d be defensive and bothered, but I wanted to think I’d take a moment and consider it. Find out if it was true before making threats and screaming about the people who dared accuse me.

On the other hand, if that happened, the person accusing me would be someone I knew: a friend, a neighbor. There was no situation wherein a complete stranger would ever intimate that I was responsible for the Condition. Well, except those sort of people who always blamed people who were ill for their own situations. Like if only I ran a few more miles a day, I wouldn’t have the Condition at all.

On the table next to me, my phone buzzed. It was a text from Linden.

“Not going to let them know you’re in the clinic. I’ll send someone to sit with you.”

It was both vindication, because it meant that Linden thought these people were as dangerous and underhanded as I did... and really annoying. Yeah, I knew, I’d blow away in a strong wind. It was the so-hilarious joke my mother used to tell her friends whenever they said anything about my weight.

I knew I was short and scrawny and couldn’t even fight off some corporate monsters and their villainous lawyers or whatever, but it still hurt to be reminded.

Once again, reminded by the Sterling Corporation that I was a ninety-eight-pound weakling, who couldn’t possibly defend myself. Who needed someone else to come sit with me, to protect me from the bad guys.

Ten minutes later, Aspen and Brook showed up at the clinic, Aspen looking pissed and ready for a fight, and Brook holding onto his arm.

The way Brook glanced up at his mate wasn’t frightened and looking for reassurance, though. Not like some stereotypical werewolf fiction. No, that look said it all: Brook was worried about Aspen. But why?

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