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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 onewith 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.
When he pulled back, he stared right into her eyes. “If we make it out of this alive, I’m taking you out, woman. And I’m paying.”
Phalen laughed in a short burst and blinked away tears. “We’ll split the check. But I’ll let you get the door for me.”
He searched her face and prayed he would see it again. “Deal.”
And then fun time was over.
As he righted her balance, she looked down at Daniel. A bright-red flush was spreading up his neck from the stings, and his lips were swelling. Down on his chest, his ribs were pumping in an uneven way, and one of his legs was kicking sporadically.
“Is there anything else you need?” she asked.
He described the location of the go-bag in thepatient room. And he nearly pulled her back as she turned to the keypad and started to enter the numbers.
She was going to die out there.
Or maybe they would all be killed, picked off one by one.
