Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
The sting was immediate, and Daniel gasped as if he’d been shocked by electricity—and his body certainly reacted as if there were volts going through it, his legs kicking out as his head jerked back and hit the wall behind him with a sickening thump.
“What the fuck are you doing!” Gus barked as C.P. also shouted—even though it was too late.
The scorpion was tiny and fast, and it marked its trail down the electrode pads that were still stuck on Daniel’s sunken chest. Three stings? Four?
Lydia tried to catch the thing, but then she stopped with that because what if she got stung? Ripping off her fleece, she used the folds of the pullover to brush the arachnid off his skin. But that didn’t work. In the end, the scorpion chose when to go, skittering off into the shadows.
And then she didn’t think about the damn thing.
Daniel’s body started contorting, his lips peeling back off his teeth as he writhed in agony. In a sickening bloom, sweat broke out all over him, and his eyes started to roll into their sockets, only the whites showing.
“What did you do…” She fell down beside him. “Oh, God, Gus—”
The doctor dropped to his knees and checked Daniel’s pulse at his wrist. Then he looked to the steel portal. “I need an EpiPen… and I don’t know what else, but none of it is in this fucking hallway. Jesus! He’s insane—”
“No,” Daniel gritted out as he jerked his head up, his hands like claws as he lifted his arms. “I want this…”
Lydia put her face into his. She wanted to yell at him, she wanted to kiss him, she wanted to pray—
His eyes focused on her. “I want… to go out fighting, not failing. Fighting… for us… not dying by a disease.”
Tears flooded her vision. It was the very essence of him, wasn’t it. He was a warrior, a man of strength. And he was right, dying while hooked up to tubes on a fadeaway by inches was not his way.
But, oh, not like this. Not here. Not—
Gus pressed two fingers to the side of Daniel’s straining throat. “He’s going into anaphylaxis, I have to get that EpiPen. Right now.”
Lydia didn’t think a thing of it. She closed her eyes.
And shifted into her wolf form.
* * *
As Gus’s patient went into a seizure at the same time a catastrophic allergic reaction started to get rolling, he thought things couldn’t get more out of control. He was wrong.
One minute, Lydia Susi, a woman he had known in the kind of deep and intimate way tragedies tended to forge, was exactly who he had always been cognizant of. The next… she was…
Going through some kind of transformation that he had never seen before.
And would never have believed if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes.
The change in her physical body was the source of myth and nightmare, a wolf emerging from the confines of her human form, arms and legs turning into limbs with paws, face altering into that of a canine-snouted profile, fur covering the nakedness as her clothes were split and fell away.
When it was all over, Gus thought once again of being out in the woods with Daniel.
“Jesus… Christ, I was right,” he breathed.
She was the wolf.
He looked at C.P. And when she was only staring with a remote expression of awe, he realized she had known all along—
A strangled wheezing sound refocused him on Daniel.
“I need my bag,” Gus said. “It’s in the patient room.”
“We’ll get it,” C.P. responded.
Standing by that door, a gun in her hand, and her eyes shining with a war-like light that suggested she was ready to shoot at anything that moved, he thought, for the millionth time, that C.P. Phalen was the most incredible woman he had ever met. And next to her, the wolf—Lydia???!—was likewise ready to roll, its jowls crinkled with aggression like the thing was already biting something.
“You have to stay here with him,” she said. “You’re the best medic we’ve got if he needs CPR.”
When, Gus corrected to himself.
“I agree,” he muttered. “But wait.”
Rising to his feet, hysterical laughter, the kind that meant a person was totally losing it, bubbled out of the terror-congestion inside his chest. And before he knew what the hell he was doing, he marched over, grabbed Phalen around the waist, and yanked her against him.
After a split second of shock, she yielded, her body easing into his own, her right arm—the one with the gun on the end of it—rising to rest along the top of his shoulders.
Gus bent her back, like he was dipping her while they danced.
“I’ve wanted to do this since the moment I first met you.”
With that declaration out of the way, he kissed the ever-living shit out of the great C.P. Phalen, crushing his mouth to hers, licking his way into her, holding her against him even though his ribs were still broken. But fuck it. Fuck everything.