Page 7 of Cold Moon

The Reid pack was broken.

Since the fight, most of the remaining Reids had fled. Some hadn’t even returned to Reid land to get their things, just disappearing into the woods like they were looking for a girl in a red hood whose goodie basket they could steal and grandma they could eat.

The few who had stayed couldn’t remotely be called a pack.

But Dante had grown up in the Reid pack. And four days earlier, the Reids had tried to kill him. If anyone knew about a pack that wasn’t supportive, it was him.

Sure, I’d heard the quiet conversations about our Reid guest, in The Cider House the night before, and at Ambrosia Grocery over the weekend. Conversations about whether Dante had actually been attacked by the Reids, or whether he’d been fighting against us, and injured by a Grove. Whether he’d fled the battle and was now presuming upon the victors to care for him, even though he was a dangerous, feral beast.

The answer to those concerns was obvious enough to me. The people who asked that couldn’t possibly have seen Dante Reid. Soft, nervous Dante, with his sad expression and inability to look Linden in the eye. And that gash across his midsection, a wound so horrible and vicious that I couldn’t imagine any member of the Grove Pack inflicting it, except maybe Aspen—and Aspen had been quite clear on the fact that he hadn’t done it. He’d looked Brook in the eye and promised he hadn’t.

Not gonna lie, I might have swooned a little. It was like something out of one of those werewolf romance novels, except that there, Brook would have been a busty human woman, and probably had a job that let him wear stiletto heels instead of greasy overalls.

Me, I thought Brook was kind of badass, breaking all those “soft sweet omegas need to have soft sweet jobs” stereotypes. Me? Yeah, I’m a walking stereotype. Just hand me the stiletto heels, thanks.

And I’d rock them too.

Not that anyone in Grovetown would let me get high heels, because what if I collapsed again?

I sighed and turned my attention back to Linden and Dante, who were going through their usual afternoon conversation that mostly consisted of “Does it hurt here? Yes. How about here? Also yes.” At least Dante no longer made faces like he wished he could just die when he so much as breathed.

Werewolves healed fast compared to pack humans, but as far gone as Dante had been, it was going to take a long time for him to get back up to full health. Not to mention the fact that I, as someone who knew a thing or two about nutrition, was pretty sure that even before the fight that had landed him in the clinic, Dante had been malnourished.

Now, his healing body was racing through any meager fat stores he’d had, and there were tiny hollows under his lovely cheekbones. It didn’t help that his diet consisted of mostly liquid things until his insides got used to being on the inside again.

Fine, that wasn’t exactly how Linden had explained it, but I’m not a freaking doctor, okay?

“I read somewhere that some apartment buildings let the residents use their roofs for gardens,” Dante said, looking over at me. “Maybe not an easy answer, but it could work. But don’t any of those big organic food companies package vegetables?”

I sighed and let my head droop. “Yeah, but they’re owned by Sterling.”

He blinked at me, uncomprehending. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so ridiculous.

I did understand why Linden was worried about making public accusations about the corporate giant’s food poisoning werewolves, but dammit, lives were at stake. Linden kept reminding me that we didn’t know for sure, didn’t have proof that Sterling was the problem. But as long as we didn’t know, and all I was allowed to say was “try to eat organic,” people would smile, and nod, and go buy Sterling brands of frozen food.

We needed to stop tiptoeing around it, get the proof, and warn my fellow omegas that Sterling was trying to kill us, intentionally or not. Alexis had started a boycott, but in the end, that could only go so far, because so many omegas were like my reader in New Jersey. He wanted to eat better, but he couldaffordSterling company foods. He couldn’t go out and buy handpicked, homegrown, antibiotic-free whatever.

From the look Linden was giving me, I shouldn’t even be talking to Dante about it. Or maybe that was just his “you shouldn’t be talking to Dante at all” look.

I sighed and slid my computer over in front of me. “Rooftop gardens, huh? Let me see if I can find anything about it for New Jersey.”

It wasn’t going to be enough for my reader—he needed an option that didn’t take that much time. But it wasn’t a bad idea to have the information, regardless.

And I supposed I could go through the corporate structure charts I’d been building and try to find frozen vegetables that didn’t somehow trace back to Sterling company farms.

Good luck, sucker, my inner pessimist jeered. He was a jerk, but in this case, he was also right.

5

Dante

Healing sucked. I wasn’t used to being stuck in bed this long, and I’d been conscious and stuck in bed for days now, in a place that got increasingly dangerous for every agonizing second of my recovery. Sure, the alpha tolerated me now, while I was wounded, but what happened when I could walk—when I could shift?

I had never been sick or wounded this severely. It was no wonder I’d thought I was dying out there in the woods. I should have died, even felt like I deserved it, a little.

Somehow, I’d skirted the universe’s plan for me and kept on breathing, right there in the second bed of the Grove pack’s clinic, a thick remote hooked by a cord to my bed. It even controlled the small TV on the far side of the room. I’d finally gotten antsy enough to turn it on, just for the distraction.

We’d had a television when I was a kid, before Mom died. I loved watchingThe Magic School Busafter I got home every afternoon, before Dad got back for the night and took over. It’d been a shitty little TV, smaller and deeper than the one in the clinic, with a rounded screen that seemed to reflect every lamp in the room at once. Dad threw a liquor bottle through the front of it when I was eleven. We hadn’t gotten another.

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