Page 48 of Fake It ’Til You Mate It

I pull back, looking down at us.

Our clothes are covered in a very familiar black powder. Add in the fact that it suddenly feels like someone has stuffed both my nose and my ear with cotton, my inner opossum chittering softly as she curls up deep inside of me, too weak to do anything but nap… and, yeah. I know what this is.

“Wolfsbane.”

Max’s hands drop to my shoulders. “Did you get any in your mouth?”

His voice has an unfamiliar panicked edge to his growl that has me gaping up at him. “What?”

“Did you get any in your mouth, Honey? Did you ingest any?”

Oh. I shake my head. “No. You protected me from that. Max…” I don’t know what to say except, “Thank you.”

“When I find out who did that…” His fangs punch out, his wolf riding him dangerously hard. “I’m pretty sure it’s just wolfsbane. No silver or else our skin would be burning right now. That doesn’t mean we should play around with this stuff. It’s already affecting me.”

Me, too, but I can’t bring myself to tell Max that. I wouldn’t want to give him a coronary.

“Blow-back spell,” I tell him instead. “It’s a warning. Whoever charmed this didn’t want anyone else touching it, but if they did, they didn’t want to kill them outright. So they used wolfsbane to dull our senses and cut us off from our beasts.”

“Magic?”

I nod.

“So it’s not a shifter who is killing us.”

I didn’t say that.

“It could be a shifter and a witch. They could be working together,” I say, shaking my shirt, trying to knock off as much of the wolfsbane as I can before admitting softly, “or they could be someone like me.”

“It wasn’t you, Honey,” Max grates out.

I snort. “You sure? I was the one who brought us here and found it. Maybe I planted it.”

“And then made the blow-back spell go off? Please. This isn’t time for teasing me, Killer. Someone could’ve really hurt you. If it had silver in it…”

I’d be dead. We’d both be dead. “I’m okay, Max.” Giving in to my instincts, I go up on my tiptoes, laying my palm against his sharp jaw. “Feel a little lightheaded, but I’m okay.”

I don’t even tell him that I’m feeling pretty human at the moment. I’m sure he’s going through the same thing—worse, since he’s an Alpha—but my admitting the lightheadedness is enough to have that ol’ familiar muscle in his cheek jerking.

“That’s the wolfsbane. We need to get it off of us.”

Good idea. “We can go inside⁠—”

“We need to get it off now.”

Oh. Okay. “We could shift. That would get rid of it.”

“I don’t have any spare clothes.”

That means, if Max shifts to get out of his wolfsbane-covered clothes, he’ll either have to stay in his fur or be in his skin… naked. I already got a glimpse of what he looks like undressed tonight. It took everything I had not to open my mouth and tell him that I recognize him as my mate.

If it happens again, I don’t think I can.

“You have a washer⁠—”

“What?”

“A washer, Killer? You have one in your apartment?”