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“Gabriel? Gabriel, look at me! Talk to me!” I patted his cheeks anxiously and stroked his thick black hair away from his face, which was pale and nearly lifeless.
“What is it? What’s going on?” Christopher peered at me anxiously in the rearview mirror.
“He’s not moving! He won’t talk to me!” I was trying not to cry, but I could feel the tears stinging my eyes. “What’s wrong with him?” I demanded.
“Could be the Shift back with the Wolf’s Bane in his system took too much of his life force.” Christopher sounded grim. “We need to stop somewhere and try to revive him.”
“There!” I pointed up the road where there was an old-fashioned looking motel—the kind I’d heard my granny call a “motor court” years ago.
It was one of those single-story places where there are just a lot of rooms in a row with the office in the middle and a parking lot out front. There was a dry swimming pool to one side and the building was painted in a faded green. A flickering neon sign proclaimed it was the “Dew Drop Inn.” It didn’t look like the neatest or the newest motel I’d ever seen, but it was someplace to stop for the night—which was coming on rapidly.
Christopher turned in at once.
“You stay here with Gabe,” he said to me. “I’ll see if I can get us a room.”
He was only in the office a few minutes, but it was long enough for me to worry about Gabriel, who was still partially unconscious. I kept patting his cheeks and calling his name until at last, he opened his eyes.
“Zoe?” His gaze was cloudy but at last he managed to focus on my face.
“Gabriel!” I exclaimed. “Are you okay?”
“Not…sure. Don’t…think so.” His voice was low and hoarse and a shiver went through his big body as he talked.
“Is he coming around?” Christopher was at the back door of the Escalade looking in anxiously.
“I think so, but he seems sick,” I said.
“Not surprising considering what he took.” My Beta stepbrother sounded grim. “I got us the room on the far end. We just need to get him inside and then we can figure out what to do.”
Christopher drove us to the far room—which was number 12, located right beside the dry swimming pool—and then the two of us somehow managed to get Gabriel inside. Christopher had to do most of the heavy lifting but I did my best to help, draping one of Gabriel’s long, muscular arms over my shoulders as we basically dragged him inside.
The room was neat but plain with a single king-sized bed that had a maroon bedspread and several flat pillows. We laid Gabriel in the middle of it and then Christopher went to park the Escalade out back, behind the motel so it couldn’t be seen from the road. He told me that the Packs would probably be in disarray since Gabriel had killed both their Pack Masters, but there was no sense in taking a chance.
“It will take them some time to choose new Pack Masters, but when they do, they’ll be after us,” he said to me. “We can stay here for the night but we have to move on in the morning.”
Where we would be moving to, he didn’t say. I think we were both thinking the same thing—what happened next depended on Gabriel.
I watched over my older stepbrother anxiously as Christopher moved the Escalade, but he didn’t say anything else. He had blood on his mouth, I noticed. I guessed it had carried over from his wolf form. I wanted to wash him off, so I went in the bathroom, searching for a washcloth.
There was a stack of towels and cloths on a wire rack over the toilet. I reached for one and found that the wedding dress I was still wearing felt extremely tight across the bust. In fact, it felt tight all over.
Frowning, I looked down at myself and was horrified to see that my large breasts had somehow gotten even larger. Was that even possible?
There was a rusty mirror mounted over the sink and I looked at myself in its tarnished surface, focusing on my breasts. They were bulging out of the top of the gown, almost threatening to split the seams.
I stared at myself in disbelief. What was my body doing now and why did it have to choose this moment to do it? Why had my breasts suddenly decided to swell?
Then I flashed back on the tea that Crenshella had given me to drink earlier, right before the ceremony. Hadn’t she said it would bring on my Heat Cycle? Which was exactly what I didn’t need—especially right now in the middle of a medical emergency with my stepbrother!
“No!” I moaned, looking at my reflection. “I don’t need this right now!”
