Page 62 of Blood and Magic
“Everything’s good, brother,” he said, looking back at Morwyn one last time. “We’ll talk later.”
She nodded and gestured for me to follow her into an exam room. After Fenris left, I raised an eyebrow at my sister.
“What are you and Fenris talking about later?”
She tilted her head like I was asking a stupid question, but her cheeks flushed when she replied. “That’s doctor-patient privilege only.”
“Oh, is he your pincushion now, too?” I chuckled sardonically until she wrapped the tourniquet around my arm a little too tight. “Ouch.”
“Don’t be a baby.” She stuck me with the needle before collecting her two vials of blood, and when she was done, she put a bandage over the puncture mark and let me off her table. “How are you feeling?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” I groaned and rubbed my hands over my tired eyes. “I’m exhausted. Just like every other dominant when they come out of a transition.”
She hummed and used a different needle to put some of my blood on a slide before placing it under a microscope on her desk and leaning down to glance in the eyepiece. “That’s understandable. It’s just that we’re all so worri—” She cut herself off with a gasp and straightened, looking over her shoulder at me, her eyes wide, her mouth hanging open.
“What?” I stood and walked closer to her, but peering down the microscope would tell me nothing. I would have no idea what I was looking at.
“You’re… What did you do?”
I furrowed my brows at her and shook my head. “Nothing. What’s wrong?”
“Your red blood cells mutated. They look like…” My sister shook her head and blinked a few times before glancing into the scope again. “Well, I don’t know. I need to run some more tests, maybe reach out to a colleague in Europe.” She turned back to me and crossed her arms, tilting her head from side to side. “You went through a transition with Guin before. Was there anything different about this one? Are you noticing any new urges or anything you can’t explain?”
I took a deep breath and debated being honest with her. She was my sister, after all. But I worried this might make her more anxious about all of it, and with the full moon in a few hours, what difference would it make? Still, she couldn’t do her job if I kept things to myself. I opened my mouth to reply, but a knock at the door cut me off.
“Mill?” said Moose, ducking his head in the entryway. “We need you in the tech room.”
I nodded and gave my sister a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “We’ll talk after the moon, huh?”
Morwyn narrowed her eyes and nodded. “Yeah, okay. Just…be safe, alright?”
“See you at the shift.”
I turned and followed Moose through the hallways leading to the tech room, where a few of our brothers and sisters sat around their computers, typing on their keyboards. Screens lit up one of the walls, sectioned into black-and-white video footage of the various security cameras set up around our property and Vanderbilt Ranch. Logistically, covering that much area would take more resources than we had, so we focused on the places we were more likely to occupy.
“We haven’t been able to locate Marx since you got that whiff of him a few weeks ago,” Moose explained. “But he couldn’t have gone far.”
“We’ve been searching all of the outer perimeter cams,” one of the other pack members said. Channing was Lycan’s youngest sister, and she’d been one of my mentees for the last few years. I was trying to teach her everything I knew about hacking, but being from a younger generation, she had a better mind for this than I did. She taught me as much as I did her. “But I can’t get a read on him.”
“They’re good at hiding,” I said. “Anything new at their old nest?” They’d once occupied the old sanitarium on the outskirts of town until we ambushed it and burned it to the ground.
She shook her head.
“What about the bar out near Preston?” The vampires used to hang out at a local dive. But they’d abducted one of our submissives, who later mated a fairy, and between the two of them, they’d torn that place apart.
“Nothing,” she said. “I hope the rotation shifts we have going tonight will be enough, but I have no way of knowing.”
“We have enough pre-transition and human pack to keep an eye out,” Moose said. “But I didn’t know if you had any better ideas?”
“Let me drive,” I said, taking the keyboard to pull up a few other screens. Marx had texted Maeve weeks ago, and I’d been able to track him after that. If he were smart, he would have ditched that burner by now, so I was banking on him being an idiot vampire with nothing in his head. When I loaded the tracking software, nothing came up. But that could mean he didn’t have the phone on. “Keep an eye on this. Let me know if anything changes.”
“Ten-four,” Channing said.
Head buzzing and nerves on fire, I switched through the feed from Vanderbilt Ranch, checking on the human day workers and the animals within the boundaries. All seemed okay, but something rolled around in my gut, warning me to pay more attention. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know where it was coming from.
“C’mon,” Moose said. “We’re heading out to the shifting grounds.”
Swallowing down my apprehension, I left the youths to their work and went with the sarge.
