Page 13 of Broken

It was what made him Wolf, that spirit of night and darkness that had merged with humans and made them into shifters.

Was this what he was? The opposite of her?

And what did it matter? After this was over, he’d never see her again. That thought stabbed him somewhere in the chest. Not his heart. He didn’t get his heart involved with missions.

This was a job, nothing more.

He packed up everything and put it back in the bag. Then he picked up his phone and sent a message to Thanatos through a secure channel. He meant to tell him the mission was done, but what came out was: Mission still in progress. More later.

Just as he was deciding whether to send it, he heard a restless movement from the bed, and Ireland gave a little moan, as if she were in pain.

Cole sent the message, dropped the phone and went over to the bed. Ireland’s face was flushed, and before he even touched her skin he could feel the heat radiating off her.

Somehow in the last forty-five minutes, her wound had gone from starting to heal, to infected as fuck. She was burning up.

He stripped away the bandages and checked it. The wound was blazing red along the center, the edges almost black, like the flesh was starting to rot away.

Damn it all to hell. There’d been some kind of toxin on that whip after all.

Over the next couple of hours Cole did everything he could think of, but her fever just kept going up, and the wound just got uglier.

He tried cleaning and draining the wound again, ice bags for the fever. Cool water and soothing talk, although he hadn’t expected that to do much. He sucked at being comforting.

Brutal realism was more his style. Right now his brutal realism was telling him that she was probably going to die of this wound, but for some reason he wasn’t listening.

Because he was also a stubborn bastard, and he didn’t like to lose. And because she was so damn helpless, but she was fighting so hard.

By hour three, he was desperately going through not only his own med kit, but everything the Wild Bloods had in the house as well. They’d dealt with some magic in their day—one of their best friends was a dragon sorcerer. Maybe they had something…

He found it at the back of a shelf in the linen closet—a glass jar with some kind of ointment in it. It was labeled “Anti-Magic Shit.”

Clutching it tightly, Cole went back to Ireland.

But as soon as she caught a whiff of it, she started fighting him. He was afraid to knock her out again, because depressing her nervous system might make things worse. But her thrashing around was wasting energy she needed for healing, and accelerating the toxin’s effects. She already looked thinner than before.

“Come on,” he murmured to her. “Let me do this. I don’t know what else to do.”

Once more he tried holding her down, trying to get at least a little of the ointment on.

Suddenly, she gave a wrench, and her face morphed into a wolf. Gray, with a delicate muzzle. Fur sprouted on her skin, rippling down her chest. The wound seemed to pale for a minute, to get a fraction smaller.

Holy hell. She was a shifter, and her wolf was fighting the wound. Maybe her wolf form was less vulnerable to the toxin?

He began whispering in her ear. “That’s it. Change. Be the wolf. Fight the magic. Heal.”

She was whining, growling, straining to come out. Didn’t this woman ever Change? Or was there some kind of spell on her that prevented it?

He didn’t care. Something told him it might be the only thing that would save her.

He let own face and throat change, his nose elongating into a muzzle, and made encouraging wolf noises.

She strained harder, fur rippling and disappearing, claws coming out and receding.

Come on, he willed her, pulling on his wolf’s dominance. Change. Change!

And then she was Changed, all fur and muscle and feisty will. He was so startled he lost his grip on her, and she rolled off the side of the bed onto her paws, the gold bracelet somehow still snug around her front leg. She lurched a little as the pain in her wound stabbed at her, and then faced him, lip curled, and snarled.

Cole almost laughed. It figured—she was as independent and uncooperative in wolf form as she was in human form.