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Matt fought for breath as he gathered his thoughts. He needed blood—a lot of it and fast. He didn’t have a knife, but he did have fangs. Or at least the Nahual did. According to Mandenauer there was a cure for lycanthropy. He’d take the man up on it.

If they survived.

Before he could think any more about it, Matt offered his leg, and an instant later the creature’s teeth sank into his calf.

Matt cried out, his fingers clenching around the edge of the door. The Nahual tore free a bite-sized chunk of flesh and blood sprayed. Matt yanked his leg back where it belonged.

Then he saw the gap in his plan that loomed as large as the one in his calf. How was he going to paint a circle around the tableau if he was holding on to the door to keep the Nahual from latching onto his throat?

“I never said it was a foolproof plan,” Matt murmured.

Burning pain shot through his veins. His vision flickered. For an instant he was somewhere else, running across the range, chasing a herd of—

Bam. Matt was back in his body, still clinging to the door as the Nahual paced and snarled on the other side.

Had those been teenagers?

Matt shook his head. “I never chased any kids. I never ran on four paws.”

Yet.

“Mandenauer!” Matt shouted.

He hadn’t heard any shots or any screams. Just a thud. Maybe the old man had merely dropped his gun.

As if that would ever happen.

Another muffled thump in the distance had Matt’s spirits lifting. The old man wasn’t dead. He was—

A second snarl reverberated down the stone hall. Matt risked a peek just as the reddish-brown wolf with Gina’s eyes emerged from the gloom.

* * *

Gina smelled blood and she wanted it, needed it, craved it like she craved the moon. She was half-mad with the pulse of hunger. When she caught the scent of the man who smelled like oranges what was left of Gina’s control snapped.

How dare anyone take what was hers?

She charged, crashing into her maker, who stood between her and the kill. She relished the battle. The crunch of bodies, the snap of teeth, the rip of flesh, then the splatter of blood against the dirt like rain. Fighting kept her from remembering the siren call of insanity, which made her want to howl at the moon, scrape at the ground, and whine until the voices shrieking in her head went away. They were loud, those voices, and they hurt her ears, even as the agonizing hunger pierced her stomach with razor-sharp claws.

Beneath those screams something whispered that she couldn’t kill her maker—literally—that this was foolish, suicidal, wrong. But the hunger, the smell of oranges and blood, and that flicker of memory—a man’s laughter, his kiss, his touch, the way he made her feel. Every time she thought she knew who she was, another memory would surface and confuse her, increasing the lure of that madness.

However, violence, blood, pain—they grounded her in this body, solidifying her as the wolf she knew herself to be. Her maker would never die? Fine with her. That only meant she could hurt him again and again and again. He was

the perfect toy.

She didn’t even notice when her prey stopped hiding and began to move.

* * *

This was his chance.

Matt let go of the door, swiped his fingers through the bleeding mess that was his leg, and got back to work. It was the race of a lifetime.

Would he finish the job before one of the werewolves won the battle over who got to kill him?

Would he complete the circle of blood around the drawings before he passed out?

Or would he become a werewolf first and have no fingers for painting, let alone enough humanity left to care?

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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