Page 65 of Cold Moon

He stared at me when he was finished, his cheeks hollow. “I’ll show this to my grandfather. If there’s anything here, if you’re right, I’ll make him see.”

Sure, this guy was still a spoiled brat, but I couldn’t hold back a smile. “When the alpha sends me the test results from today, I’ll tie it together. Let you know what I find.”

Archer nodded stiffly. “Good.”

He turned to leave, and... damn. I had a science buddy.

38

Skye

Somehow, having Colt and Linden and Linden’s doctor friend, Lawrence, there for the MRI made it less awful than it had been the last time I’d been to a human hospital for testing. I wasn’t alone—the single, pathetic, sickly subject of testing—with the team of them trying to fix what was wrong with me.

We were all getting tested, having the same imaging done. Yes, it was still because I had the Condition, but this time it was for comparison. And for once, when I thought about having my medical information compared to someone else’s, the most important thing that came to mind wasn’t the idea that I was going to come up the loser.

No one was going to look at the tests and think I’d failed somehow.

Because I hadn’t.

Nothing I’d done had earned me lifelong complications from illness, because that wasn’t a thing. No one deserved to be sick. Except maybe people like Mr. Sterling, since I was pretty sure he was deliberately making other people sick. He probably deserved it.

“Would you look at that?” Linden’s friend said in the middle of my scan, just loud enough for me to hear, and okay, that was scary. Except he didn’t sound bothered. He sounded excited.

“Am I dying?” I asked, trying to keep the tremors out of my voice. Nothing to be scared of. It was just a scan. Not gonna kill me.

Colt’s voice came over the speaker then, dry as dust. “I don’t know what I’m looking at, but offhand I’d say Skye’s is bigger than mine.” I could imagine him shooting a wink my way at the innuendo.

“It is,” Linden’s friend agreed, missing the joke. “Much bigger. It’s not a static thing, but omegas do tend to have considerably more mass in the remus gland than betas or alphas. But his is... well, it looks inflamed, but that alone probably wouldn’t account for the difference.”

“So... dying?” I asked again.

Finally, Linden spoke up. “Probably an indication of your recent relapse. Or your recent heat. We’d have to take more images at other times to be certain, but I’d hazard a hypothesis that the size of it might have something to do with susceptibility to the Condition.”

“It’s possible,” Lawrence agreed. “I mean, the gland is most prominent in omegas, and omegas are the ones affected by the Condition. And since it’s also the gland that produces all those lovely soothing pheromones omegas have, well... there’s a strong correlation.”

“And it’s not like we can test the poison Sterling is trying to feed us on actual live omegas,” Colt said, but his voice was unusually tense. Not like he was casually throwing out that it wasn’t possible, but like he was cutting off a line of thought. Like maybe they had considered it, and he was telling them not only no, but fuck no.

“No,” Linden agreed, his voice soft and thoughtful. “We’ll have to find other ways to test it, obviously.”

Not that I’d have expected my own alpha to want to experiment on me. A human who was excited by a breakthrough, well... I didn’t know much about medical ethics, other than that I was pretty sure experimenting on me probably didn’t go along with them.

The machine stopped whirring, and finally, a moment later, I was free and could breathe again, sitting up. I took half a dozen deep gulps of air, trying to force back my nerves, and make my hands stop trembling.

“I think we have what we need, Skye,” the doctor’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “You can go ahead and change back into your clothes. We’re going to go in there”—he pointed to a door—“and look at some comparisons. Just come on through when you’re ready.”

Thank goodness.

To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure why they’d had me change into a gown in order to scan my head. But I wasn’t a doctor, so what did I know? I wasn’t going to argue. I grabbed my stuff and went into the bathroom while Linden’s friend suggested getting some scans of humans for the cause. Some humans had a remus gland too, he pointed out. It was theoretically why some of them were able to turn when bitten.

And if I spent a few minutes sitting on the toilet, breathing out some of my stress, well, no one but me had to know.

It was just scans. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I wasn’t any sicker than usual, and everything was fine.

Finally back in my own slacks and button-down, I draped the gown over one shoulder and headed back out to rejoin the others.

Only Linden and Colt and the doctor weren’t the ones waiting for me right outside the bathroom. No, that was a silver-haired man with deep crow’s feet and no laugh lines. A man with a gun in one hand, pointed in my direction, and a finger to his lips.

“You’re going to be good and keep quiet, right?” As though to remind me why that was a good idea, he lifted the gun a few inches, till the freezing metal brushed my chin.

---