5

3

MADDY

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a massive whitish blur. Blinking, my vision slowly cleared and I realized it was the ceiling. My whole body felt heavy, like a thick wet blanket was holding me down. My head felt groggier than usual. I was typically a morning person, but it was like my brain was trying to swim out of a deep pool of water.

Still, it was nice to be awake. The dream I’d had was not something I wanted to experience anymore. All those weird shifters beating the shit out of me. Why had I dreamed something so fucked up?

My thoughts stopped on a dime. The ceiling didn’t look right. It was smooth, cream-colored drywall. My house had awful, bright-white popcorn ceilings. I’d been thinking of scraping it all off for more than a year, but hadn’t gotten around to it. My heart rate spiked the second I realized I wasn’t home. Where the fuck was I?

Trying to lift my arms, I found they weren’t held down by a blanket like I thought, but were still super heavy. My mind cleared a bit, and I remembered my dream hadn’t been a dream. That it had all really happened. Those guys had come back into the bar. They had attacked me. Was I…had they taken me back to their place? Was that where I was? Alarm set it—a thick, unflinching panic.

A tiny moan escaped my lips, but I wasn’t able to form words. My head was starting to throb, too.

Before I could do anything else, a man in a white doctor’s coat leaned over the bed. He glanced down at me and lifted one of my eyelids with a thumb, opening the eye much further than I wanted. He flashed a penlight into the eye twice. It felt like someone had shoved an icepick into my brain. He was a shifter. I could feel the strange electric buzz on my skin where he touched me. It was one of the reactions I always had when I was near one. I’d never known anyone else who reacted that way, but it was the way I knew for sure. There was also that strange sense of otherness they had that I couldn’t put a finger on.

The realization made me even more scared. He was a shifter, which meant the fuckers who had tried to kill me really had kidnapped me. I must be in one of their complexes. A lot of shifter packs had their own doctors. Those who didn’t had shifter doctors who worked in regions and made house calls. At least, that’s what I’d heard.

My hammering heart was like a bass drum beating away in my chest. I moved my jaw and thought I could finally manage to speak.

“Whhh.” The first sound I made was like a whisper of air, nothing else. He was checking my other eye with the flashlight. I swallowed and tried again. “What’s…happening? Who are you?”

He clicked off the penlight and straightened. “My name is Doctor Carter. I’m the doctor for the Lorenzo wolf pack. You’re in my clinic.”

I coughed and my vision went blurry for a second. I was worried I would pass out, but I got myself under control. “So, you guys are the ones who attacked me?”

He frowned in surprise. “What? No, no, no. You misunderstand. You were attacked by a group of unknown shifters, yes, but that wasn’t the Lorenzo pack. The Lorenzo alpha and his friends interrupted the attack and chased off the perpetrators. They probably saved your life.”

With each moment that went by, my head cleared a little more and I was able to think. One thing he said made no sense. “If I was that bad off, why didn’t you take me to a real hospital?”

Doctor Carter shrugged. “I had all the equipment here to fix you up. Some stitches and a pint of blood? Another IV for fluid and a heavy dose of pain meds? All here. Now, as for why they chose to call me first and not 911? That’s something you’ll have to ask Nico.”

“Who’s Nico?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mention his name before. Nicolas Lorenzo, the alpha of the Lorenzo pack. He’s the one who helped rescue you.”

I struggled to slide my arms underneath me, trying to lift myself off the bed. I needed to get out of here. Abi was probably worried sick about me. Had they locked up the bar? Jesus, all the money in the register could be sitting there for anyone. I sat up, and the whole room seemed to tilt sideways. Overcome with nausea, I lay back down, gingerly resting my head back on the pillows.

“Easy there,” Carter said. “You aren’t going anywhere. The stab wounds on your sides were fairly deep. Nothing major, but it took a few stitches to fix. You’ve got a pretty good concussion, too. You’ll be out of commission for a couple of days at least. I need to keep an eye on you until I’m sure everything is okay up there,” he said, nodding toward my head.

“But my business⁠—”

“Nico has quite a bit of pull around here. I’m sure if he took the time to bring you to me, he’d have someone make sure the bar they found you in is fine. Don’t worry about that.”

I sighed, exhaustion rolling across my body. I was in no condition to go anywhere, but it was hard to admit. I looked at the doctor and slowly shook my head. “Why did those guys attack me? I never did anything to them.”

The penlight disappeared into his chest pocket. “That, I’m afraid, is the million-dollar question we’ve all been asking.” He paused. “How do you feel? Pain-wise?”

I was honest. “Pretty bad. My sides hurt.”

“Okay. I’ll have my nurse get you another Vicodin, but a smaller dose than last time. I don’t want you getting dependent.”

I nodded, and he left the room. I didn’t feel like I was in danger. There was no way to know for sure if he was telling the truth, but it felt like he was being honest.

A nurse came in a few minutes later with a small plastic cup. I took the small pill from the cup. As soon as I swallowed, I realized that it might not have been the smartest idea, but it was too late. Plus, the pain in my sides was getting worse by the second. The nurse left without a word, and I lay there. Ten minutes later, the drug kicked in. It was like someone was pouring warm honey all over my body. My eyes fluttered shut, and I drifted into sleep.

“Your bloodline should have been completely wiped out,” the shifter said. His eyes were a glowing, bloody red, his teeth like steak knives ripping out of his gums in crimson spikes.

“I don’t know what you mean!” I screamed.

“You’ll be dead soon enough.” His face had completely changed, a full wolf’s head, but a wolf from the bowels of hell.

The others had shifted, too. The howls were loud enough to crack the walls. Crevices formed in the ceiling and floor, blood erupted from each fissure. It spurted up until it was inches deep on the floor.

The wolves were on me. Their paws tearing my clothes, shredding my skin. Me, screaming as their jaws clamped onto my body. The flesh ripping from my breasts, my cheeks, my stomach. The leader tearing at my insides while I screamed. Raising his maw to the sky, blood flying from his teeth, and howling⁠—

I screamed and sat up, waking from the nightmare. The quick movement sent a fresh barb of pain into my brain. I clasped my hands to my head and lay back on the bed. I shivered and realized I was covered in a cold sweat.

The nurse came in a moment later, her eyes worried. “Are you all right, miss?”

I nodded. “I—sorry, it was a nightmare.”

She shook her head. “No apologies needed. Here, I brought you dinner.”

Dinner? I glanced outside and saw the window had a faint purple glow. The sun was almost down. There’d been bright Florida sunlight blasting through the glass before I fell asleep. It hadn’t felt like that long of a dream, but I’d been out for hours. My stomach grumbled, though. I was starving. I sat back up, slowly and carefully this time.

She set the tray on a rolling table that she positioned over my bed. It didn’t look like standard hospital food—a still-hot burger and fries with a pudding cup and container of diced fruit. There was a bottle of water beside it.

“I’m going to change some of your gauze while you eat, if that’s okay?” the nurse asked, twisting off the water bottle cap for me.

“That’s fine,” I said, my words muffled by the burger I’d already started to stuff into my mouth.

She started pulling the old bandages off, and I didn’t get the same buzzing sensation I got from the doctor. The nurse was human, which surprised me a little. I’d assumed the whole operation was run by and for shifters. I hissed while she pulled off the last strip of gauze. It was painful, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

I finished the fries and was chewing the last of the burger by the time she was done. Other than the one painful moment, she’d done a great job changing the bandages without causing me discomfort. She was pulling her gloves off when I decided to ask the question that had been percolating in my head since I’d talked to the doctor that morning.