Suddenly alert, her nails dug into my shoulder blade. “What time is it?”
“Who cares?”
Claire opened her dark eyes, but they slid closed again as I pressed a palm to her cheek and she turned her head to kiss my fingers.
Then she started to sit up. “The full moon.”
I rested my hand on her chest. “You changed last night. Don’t worry. It won’t happen again so soon.”
“But the Seeonee think I’m going to be there,” she said. “And the Rothschild Pack knows I won’t.”
I froze. “You told them you weren’t going?”
Her expression turned worrisome and I reminded myself she wasn’t to blame for this.
She said, “I told them. What if they send someone else?”
“What are their plans, exactly?”
“I don’t know. They kept me in the dark.”
I started to disentangle myself from her limbs and the blankets. “I should get to them,” I said, glancing at my clock on the nightstand. We’d been lying here all day. Evening approached.
Claire sat upright, wincing. She was probably still sore from her change last night. “I’m going with you.”
“Better if you didn’t,” I said, pulling on my underwear. “I haven’t talked to my pack yet. They think you’re coming to play our scapegoat.”
“I’m not going to let you face this alone,” she said.
I opened my mouth to speak but a loud crash interrupted. I flinched. Someone kicked in my front door and just as quickly, footsteps sounded in the living room. I pushed Claire to the floor behind me, but as soon as the shadows appeared in the bedroom doorway something stung my thigh and I looked down at a tranquilizer dart.
The dart, the room, and the advancing figures spun out of focus as the ground rushed up to meet me.
They’d found me. I didn’t expect them to come after me, but they had. Ginny landed beside where I lay, unconscious, and I threw myself over her to shield her from the red wolves that stalked into the room on their hind legs. Peter stood in the doorway with a tranquilizer gun. Peter, alpha of the Rothschilds.
Worse, Jules was there, too. I recognized her instantly: curly dirty-blond hair, firm short figure. She was only a few inches higher than five feet and, even so, she was strong. She’d had to quit rugby after she’d broken the clavicle of a woman twice her size.
The wolves came towards me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the instinct for this sort of thing. They grabbed my arms with their padded hands, hauling me to my feet. Naked, I shivered.
Lamplight glinted off Peter’s glasses as he scanned the room. His short gray beard gave him a wolfish appearance even in his human state. He motioned to the wolves.
They pulled me along after him. One of them stooped and lifted Ginny, throwing her over its shoulder. Peter rummaged through Ginny’s satchel until he found her cell phone.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
“Breaking up your little love nest,” Jules said, arms crossed. “You left me for this?”
My nostrils flared. “I left you because you used me,” I said.
Jules jabbed a finger at my unconscious lover. “Like she isn’t? You’re just an infected to her.” She stepped forward and pain registered on her face, if only briefly. “I’m sorry. I never should have let Peter talk you into this. But once this is over, we’ll talk.”
“Once what is over?” A chill crept up my spine as I watched the wolf carry Ginny out the door. I started to struggle but the other wolves manhandled me to a less mobile position. “What are you doing to her?”
“As much as I’d like to, I’m not doing anything. We take the Seeonee territory tonight.” She sniffed at me. “You’ve already changed.”
“If you hurt her, I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Jules spread her arms, inviting me to explain. “You’ll what, Claire?” She stepped towards me and touched my chin with her fingertips. I didn’t have the freedom to recoil. “Don’t you see how they were planning to use you?”
I did. Ginny had come clean with me about that. But that was Seeonee scheming. There was no way Jules could know. “You’re lying,” I said.
“Why would I lie to you?” Her hand moved from my chin and stroked my cheek.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I stiffened as I tried to turn my head away, and she dropped her hand.
“Then you’re a bigger fool than Peter took you for.” She took a step back. “The Seeonee were going to use you for murder and let the humans kill you for it.”
I blanched. How did she know?
I didn’t have time to think about it. Jules pulled a hypodermic out of her pocket and removed its plastic sleeve. The red wolves tightened their grip on my arms and one grabbed a fistful of my hair. Another held out my wrist.
The wolf inside my head snarled. “What is that?”
“A new batch of cocktail,” she said.
She came at me with the needle but I struggled. The claws in my hair tightened and pain lanced up my spine. Jules grabbed my face and brandished the needle in my field of vision.
“You can hold still and let me administer this,” she said with an undercurrent of a lupine growl, “or you can keep up the shenanigans and I’ll jam it straight into your tear duct. Which will it be?”
Terrified, I held still. She grabbed my wrist, tapped the veins there with the back of her fingernail, and stuck me. The fluid spread up my arm like ice water.
Tingling followed the numbness and the wolf howled inside my head, trying to claw its way out. Every muscle cramped. I started to faint, but shook my head violently to clear my vision. The change was coming again, the pain still familiar from last night. “Why are you doing this!”
Jules waggled the empty syringe at me. “Test subject.”
My skin crawled from beneath, as though she had injected me with a hive of angry bees. My legs faltered and the red wolves dragged me along as they followed Jules out of the apartment. I wanted to vomit. My head spun. Tingling spread to the rest of my limbs, my mouth watered and my vision tunneled. I forgot where I was.
Next I knew, I was dropped on my knees in the gravel of the driveway. I did retch, and felt a little better afterwards, except the drug was making my heart race and spots clouded my vision. I heard Jules’s voice, painfully loud in my ears. “Did you make the call?”
The plastic click of a shutting cell phone was as harsh as a gunshot.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “They barked my ear off. Pretty convincing, to their credit.”
Footsteps on the gravel crunched like a coffee grinder. I wanted to cover my head but my arms wouldn’t move. My shoulders, still aching from last night’s disjointing, popped again and I blacked out as they readjusted.
“They’ll come right to us,” Peter said. I strained through the blurry vision and saw him crouch down beside Ginny. He stuck a needle in her arm. There were more wolves in the parking lot, at least a dozen that I could see.
Jules walked over to me, straddled me, and draped a loop of chain around my neck. I growled a deep, horrible sound at her and it shocked me that I’d made such a noise. I looked down at my hands, but black paws had replaced them. The pain and rage faded.
I was conscious. The change had come, and I was still conscious. This wasn’t the same drug as before.
Jules tightened the chain and pulled my head up, but I felt her finger pressed against my nape, under the chain, to prevent it from choking me. She bent to my ear.
“I know you can hear me,” she whispered. I couldn’t see her and I tried to struggle, but she put a knee between my shoulderblades and yanked my head higher. “I know you can, Claire, so listen to me.”