Page 68 of Cold Moon

I yanked myself up to my knees, going to him, looking at the bullet placement, checking his pulse, his breathing. It hadn’t hit his heart, but from the sound, one of his lungs had collapsed.

And Archer Sterling wasn’t a werewolf.

Archer Sterling was dying, unless—and maybe even if—he got to a doctor in the next minute. Not only was I not a doctor, I didn’t have any of the tools I’d need to fix this, even if I thought I could do it.

Looking into Archer Sterling’s terrified face, my mind flashed back to earlier that day. Some humans had the remus gland, Linden’s friend had said. Some of them could be turned into wolves, if they were bitten.

I looked down at his face. “Archer? Archer, I can’t fix you. You’re going to die.” He breathed out what might have been a laugh under better circumstances, an incredulous half smile on his lips, but I shook my head. “There’s a chance. Maybe.” I grabbed his left hand, the one that wasn’t pressed to his chest, and held it up. “I can bite you. I don’t know if it’ll work, but—”

His eyes traced my face, glancing back and forth from my mouth to his wrist repeatedly, before he closed his eyes. I was terrified it was a no, or that he’d lost consciousness and couldn’t say yes, but before I had a chance to panic, he whispered, wheezing and thready, “Do it.”

I didn’t know where a wolf was supposed to bite a person. It just wasn’t a thing we did. We all knew it was possible in theory, but why do it, when most humans didn’t want it? Hell, they wrote whole horror plots based around evil werewolves taking their agency and forcing the bite on them. All I could do was pick a place, go for it, and hope for the best. So I did. I let my wolf’s teeth break free, growing long and sharp, and I sank them into the meat of his forearm.

He sucked in half a sharp breath, his whole body wincing in pain, but he didn’t scream. Instead, he murmured something else. “Phone.”

Phone?

Oh! It only took me a moment to find his cell phone in his pocket, but by the time I looked back up at him, his body was lax. Unconscious. I opened it with his face, which felt skeevy as all hell, but otherwise the only choice was to call nine-one-one. And what would I tell them? Help. The rich man whose house I’m at has kidnapped me?

Murder Sterling would just meet them at the door and say they were being pranked, that he was alone in the house.

I needed someone who wouldn’t be deterred by the asshole.

Also, I only knew one phone number by heart. So with my own heart beating double time and an unconscious Archer Sterling beneath me, I dialed my one number. The clinic.

39

Dante

I’d never expected to get anyone from the Sterling Corporation on my side. Hell, I had thought this whole thing would be an uphill battle from the start, like every other damn attempt to make the world a little less shitty. But Archer Sterling might actually be a decent guy, and even if he was clearly a spoiled ass with screwed up ideas about werewolves, that didn’t make him evil.

People could grow. Change. Maybe.

At least, I was going to try and give him a chance, because things would be a hell of a lot easier if he had our backs.

I suspected we’d have a harder time convincing him that there was something insidious behind what we’d found. Maybe he could see the evidence of danger, but pushing him to think it was purposeful and someone at their company, maybe even his grandfather, was a mass murderer? That would be a much bigger hurdle.

I leaned back against the counter, my fingers tapping the edge. For the moment, there was nothing more I could do but wait. Maybe I should have gone to the hospital, but with all the testing done, that meant Skye and I could relax when he got back to Grovetown.

That was better, right?

While I was talking my way out of thinking everything I did was some degree of a mistake, the phone rang shrilly through the clinic. I sucked in my cheeks, wondering if I had the authority to answer. But, well, if it were an emergency, whoever it was would need to know Linden was away from the office.

I went over to Linden’s desk and picked up. “Grovetown Clinic, this is Dante.”

“Dante—” The rasp on the other end was immediately recognizable, that soft, low voice that’d gasped my name so recently was now filled with fear.

“Skye! What’s wrong? Where are you?”

My wolf’s fury bristled, even as I tried to convince myself everything was fine. He was having an episode or a panic attack, but Linden was there to help him.

Except if he were, Skye wouldn’t be calling me. There wouldn’t be fear and desperation in his voice. His voice wouldn’t break on a gasp that sounded too much like a sob.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s a house. The trees outside—dark leaves still.” This late in the year, that sort of thing was worth noting. “It’s dusty. I don’t know where I am, Dante. Archer’s here. He’s—He’s bleeding. Unconscious. Sterling shot him. I—” He cut off sharply, but all he was doing now was working himself up.

“Okay. I’m coming to get you, okay? I’ll call Linden, and we’ll find you.”

“Okay,” he whispered. “I don’t know when he’ll come back, Dante...”

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