Chapter 4 4

Luis looked down at the bloodied woman and shrugged. “Whatever you say, Nico.”

He was on the phone, relaying what we’d found to the doc when Sebastian and Felipe came running back in from the kitchen. Sebastian stopped mid-stride and looked down, then back at me, his eyebrow raised in a question. Unsure what he was trying to convey, I glanced down. Unconsciously, I’d taken the woman’s hand in mine and was holding it. When the fuck had I done that? Why was I doing that?

“We couldn’t catch them,” Felipe said, breathing heavily. “They had a car out back. They all jumped in and took off. We tried to chase them down on foot, but…” he shrugged. Shifters were fast, but not as fast as a speeding car.

“I only got a good look at one of them. I think he looked familiar. I’m pretty sure those guys were from Javi’s pack,” Sebastian said.

That made even less sense. “What fucking reason would Javi’s guys have for wanting to hurt a human? A woman, no less?” I asked.

The others shook their heads, confused as I was. Luis hung up his phone and turned back to us. “Doc’s coming. He only lives ten minutes away. This late? He’ll probably haul ass and be here in five.”

Luis was accurate in that prediction. We heard the squeal of tires in the parking lot a few minutes later. Doc came jogging into the bar and gasped when he saw the woman. “Holy shit. Is she alive?” he asked.

“For now,” I muttered as I moved out of the way so he could work.

Doc checked her over. Blood pressure, broken bones, pupil dilation. I stood back with the others and watched him go through the process. Though, I stood a lot closer than they did. I couldn’t seem to help it.

Doc pulled his rubber gloves off and sighed. “Well, the good news is she’s not going to die tonight.”

A breath of relief burst out of my mouth. Doc stood to go outside. “We’ll need to get her to the clinic. She’s gonna need quite a few stitches, and she’s had a good bit of blood loss. I’ve got some O-negative blood at the clinic. Should be plenty to help her out.” He nodded at Luis. “Come help me. I don’t have a gurney, but there’s a backboard in my van. We can use that to carry her.”

He and Luis came back in with a seven-foot long board with handholds all along the sides. I’d seen similar things on TV. Doc also had an inflatable neck brace. I sat and helped him put the brace on her neck before we got her onto the board. He said he didn’t think she had any spinal injuries but didn’t want to rule it out before he had a chance to check her thoroughly at the clinic.

I rode in the back of the van with her, letting the guys follow in the SUV. I looked at her face, so covered in blood it was almost impossible to tell what she looked like. I caught myself praying that she’d be okay. Praying wasn’t something I typically did. Why would I be so concerned about her? It was weird, to say the least. When Doc pulled into the clinic, I let out a pent-up breath.

I stayed by her side the entire time. We got her inside and into the exam room. Doc put a bag of blood onto an IV and slid the needle into her arm. While the blood worked its way into her, he started the stitching process. The guys were still there, but I’d almost completely ignored them.

Felipe nudged my arm. “What’s going on with you, man?”

“Huh?”

Sebastian nodded at the girl. “You’ve been hovering like the damned angel of death, dude.”

Thinking back, I knew I’d been acting weird from the moment I smelled the blood. It was like a switch had been flipped in my head. “I can’t explain it. I feel strange, so does my wolf. I just need to make sure she’s all right.”

“Dude,” Sebastian said, frowning deeply. “You’re talking like you found your fated mate or something.”

I looked down and saw that I’d taken her hand again. Even Doc was glancing over at me suspiciously. What Sebastian said couldn’t be true. The woman was human. It wasn’t possible for a shifter to be fated to a human.

I smelled the air again, and there was something else in her blood. Something that wasn’t entirely human. A hint of something else.

Fear and curiosity filled me. I didn’t say anything else. Instead I watched Doc work, and wondered who and what this strange woman was.

3

MADDY

T

he first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a massive whitish blur. Blinking, my vision slowly cleared and I realized it was the ceiling. My whole body felt heavy, like a thick wet blanket was holding me down. My head felt groggier than usual. I was typically a morning person, but it was like my brain was trying to swim out of a deep pool of water.

Still, it was nice to be awake. The dream I’d had was not something I wanted to experience anymore. All those weird shifters beating the shit out of me. Why had I dreamed something so fucked up?

My thoughts stopped on a dime. The ceiling didn’t look right. It was smooth, cream-colored drywall. My house had awful, bright-white popcorn ceilings. I’d been thinking of scraping it all off for more than a year, but hadn’t gotten around to it. My heart rate spiked the second I realized I wasn’t home. Where the fuck was I?

Trying to lift my arms, I found they weren’t held down by a blanket like I thought, but were still super heavy. My mind cleared a bit, and I remembered my dream hadn’t been a dream. That it had all really happened. Those guys had come back into the bar. They had attacked me. Was I…had they taken me back to their place? Was that where I was? Alarm set it—a thick, unflinching panic.

A tiny moan escaped my lips, but I wasn’t able to form words. My head was starting to throb, too.

Before I could do anything else, a man in a white doctor’s coat leaned over the bed. He glanced down at me and lifted one of my eyelids with a thumb, opening the eye much further than I wanted. He flashed a penlight into the eye twice. It felt like someone had shoved an icepick into my brain. He was a shifter. I could feel the strange electric buzz on my skin where he touched me. It was one of the reactions I always had when I was near one. I’d never known anyone else who reacted that way, but it was the way I knew for sure. There was also that strange sense of otherness they had that I couldn’t put a finger on.

The realization made me even more scared. He was a shifter, which meant the fuckers who had tried to kill me really had kidnapped me. I must be in one of their complexes. A lot of shifter packs had their own doctors. Those who didn’t had shifter doctors who worked in regions and made house calls. At least, that’s what I’d heard.

My hammering heart was like a bass drum beating away in my chest. I moved my jaw and thought I could finally manage to speak.

“Whhh.” The first sound I made was like a whisper of air, nothing else. He was checking my other eye with the flashlight. I swallowed and tried again. “What’s…happening? Who are you?”

He clicked off the penlight and straightened. “My name is Doctor Carter. I’m the doctor for the Lorenzo wolf pack. You’re in my clinic.”

I coughed and my vision went blurry for a second. I was worried I would pass out, but I got myself under control. “So, you guys are the ones who attacked me?”

He frowned in surprise. “What? No, no, no. You misunderstand. You were attacked by a group of unknown shifters, yes, but that wasn’t the Lorenzo pack. The Lorenzo alpha and his friends interrupted the attack and chased off the perpetrators. They probably saved your life.”

With each moment that went by, my head cleared a little more and I was able to think. One thing he said made no sense. “If I was that bad off, why didn’t you take me to a real hospital?”

Doctor Carter shrugged. “I had all the equipment here to fix you up. Some stitches and a pint of blood? Another IV for fluid and a heavy dose of pain meds? All here. Now, as for why they chose to call me first and not 911? That’s something you’ll have to ask Nico.”

“Who’s Nico?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mention his name before. Nicolas Lorenzo, the alpha of the Lorenzo pack. He’s the one who helped rescue you.”

I struggled to slide my arms underneath me, trying to lift myself off the bed. I needed to get out of here. Abi was probably worried sick about me. Had they locked up the bar? Jesus, all the money in the register could be sitting there for anyone. I sat up, and the whole room seemed to tilt sideways. Overcome with nausea, I lay back down, gingerly resting my head back on the pillows.

“Easy there,” Carter said. “You aren’t going anywhere. The stab wounds on your sides were fairly deep. Nothing major, but it took a few stitches to fix. You’ve got a pretty good concussion, too. You’ll be out of commission for a couple of days at least. I need to keep an eye on you until I’m sure everything is okay up there,” he said, nodding toward my head.