Page 26 of Wolf Bane (Marked #3)

I eyed the IV bag with racking uneasiness.

My memories of med school rummaged themselves into cooperation and enabled me to do some rough calculations based on the size of the bag, the catheter in my arm, and the drip rate.

I’d been hooked up at least twenty minutes, maybe a bit less.

My arm was freshly wrapped and, judging by the throbbing raw feeling, had been cleaned.

Fern gave me a tight smile when I looked up.

“Now don’t get flighty with me, alright?

You’re in our trailer, me an’ Del—Benoit, you know.

You’re healing faster than a human, but I think I got the worst of it before your tissue could mend with debris inside,” she said briskly.

“But if I were you, I’d write myself a scrip for some tetracyte. ”

I nodded, eyeing that bandage again. “Daniel have his shots?”

Fern laughed softly, reaching out to check my pulse. “All of the ones we’ve been able to hold him down for. Your heart rate is high for a human.”

“If I were entirely human, I’d be worried.”

She made an agreeing sort of sound and pulled back, putting some sanitizer on her hands as she turned to Waltrip and Benoit.

“Y’all don’t be dicks. More flies with honey, remember.

” She headed for the door, pausing as she reached Benoit’s side.

“And swear to God, you bring home another stray, you’re sleepin’ on the sofa in the office, you hear? ”

I had a feeling she and Reba might get along. Benoit gave her a sheepish nod, looking anywhere but at us as Fern left us alone in the room. “Where’ve you been, Waltrip?” I asked as soon as the door closed.

“Working.”

“You lied to me. How do you know Benoit??” It came pouring out, the things I’d wanted to ask him while he was low key avoiding me, and I realized my mistake as soon as the words fell. He was going to pick and choose, ignoring the rest.

It was his M.O.

His expression didn’t change except for a very slight widening of his eyes. I was right, it seemed. “I didn’t lie. Not about the working part,” he said after a beat. “Mal knew what I was doing.”

“Mal. Not Tyler?” I scooted carefully into a sitting position.

“This fucking thing,” I hissed, reaching for the Tegaderm holding the canula in place in my arm.

Waltrip and Benoit both looked away as I pulled it out, blood welling to the surface in a fat red bead before I could grab tissues from the bedside table to press over it.

“Why did Mal know? Is he working with you now?”

“I was doing something for him,” Waltrip said sharply. “Not that it’s your business.” He paused, then deflated a tiny bit. “Well. It wasn’t your business until last night.”

He glanced at Benoit, who made an uncomfortable sound low in his throat and started pacing back and forth in the small trailer bedroom.

“There’s not an easy way to tell you this, Landry. And I don’t think now’s the right time, but I also realize there’s never gonna be a perfect time.”

“What?” I asked, hating the slight tremor in my voice.

“Is someone… Did something happen to Ethan? To Mal or—” I froze.

“Reba? Is she okay?” She’d been left alone by the weres and shifters in the community so far, but had someone decided to make their dislike of me clear by harming her ? “Waltrip?—”

“Garrow’s no longer in custody.”

I was pretty sure I stopped breathing for a second. Finally, I forced two words out on a wheeze. “Since when?”

Waltrip shifted his weight uneasily, glancing at Benoit again.

Benoit was pacing so fast back and forth it was kind of a wonder that he didn’t just burst through the wall and keep on moving.

“He was transferred almost immediately from human custody to a facility run by weres and shifters. It’s… discreet.”

“Let me guess. Council runs it?” I bit out. “That’s where they took Mal’s ex, isn’t it?”

“No. She’s in custody of the council, at a safe house. Under direct one-to-one supervision with mental health workers and guards. Garrow was… not.”

“Stop pussyfooting around,” Benoit snapped.

“The prison’s a rat-maze of an old asylum, up ‘round the Canadian border in Minnesota. It’s in the middle of one of the oldest were territories in North America.

Older than the Europeans comin’ over. The tribes who own the land allowed the prison to remain there after a lot of talkin’ and a lot of pleadin’. ”

“Lund,” Waltrip supplied into the tense beat of quiet that fell between us. “Named the asylum after one of the first clans to come over. It’s on an island in one of the lakes.”

“Charming.” I breathed, the creeping awareness that Garrow was out, that Garrow was out, and I had been responsible for him getting caught, that a huge part of me, more than I wanted to admit, was a terrified little boy who had no idea what was wrong with him, and the man who twisted and turned me into what I am was out…

It settled into my blood and marrow and froze me in a knot of rising paranoid panic.

“How? How… I thought he was under watch, too? I thought the council?—”

“Someone turned heel,” Waltrip said tightly. “Decided Garrow’s more useful out than in.”

“The virus.” I glanced up at Waltrip. “Tyler found a link already, but we thought it was just someone who worked with Garrow in the past. Wait, no, I thought that. Tyler…” I frowned. “Did Tyler know? About Garrow?”

“So far just you, Benoit, and Mal.” Waltrip fidgeted, uncharacteristic for him.

“Mal… he thought he was being watched a week or so back. Had a weird feeling, he said. So, I told him I’d check some things out and, well, one thing led to another, and I started finding some issues with the chain of custody. ”

“Why did he think it was Garrow?”

Waltrip met my gaze with a bemused expression. “Because Garrow’s his boogeyman, too.”

A commotion outside the room had Benoit motioning for us to stay there while he went to find out who was fussing about what. I seized the moment to turn on Waltrip with a glare. “You’ve got until he gets back to talk, or I swear to whatever God you believe in that I will lose my shit, Waltrip.”

Waltrip, for just a moment, looked amused.

Like someone looking at a kitten absolutely raining hell on a shoe.

That didn’t help things a single bit, anger rippled through me in a hot, greasy wash that prickled along my skin and pulsed through my limbs.

My thoughts, finally clear after the long and awful day, muddled into sensation, into something closer to instinct than logic.

The shift in my vision was new—it had only happened once before—but I knew what it meant.

The shift was close to the surface.

Anger—I could break it down into physical components like cortisol and epinephrine, fight or flight, catecholamines getting riled up as my body tensed—tugged that part of me to the surface, stirred it loose past the point of whatever subconscious control I had.

Waltrip’s eyes widened not with fear or aggression but interest, sweeping over my half-reclined form as I breathed through it, tried to swallow it back down. “I didn’t get a chance to see this happen before,” he muttered. “Not really. Too much was going on. You… Can you fully shift?”

My body ached—the wound on my arm, the rattling my skull took earlier, even if I’d really wanted to, I didn’t think I could successfully shift.

Instead, I hung in a halfway point. The change just below the surface, pulsing in my senses and making everything too much.

My bones had changed just a little, my fingers curling towards paws, but past that… It was just theoretical.

“Not yet,” I panted, closing my eyes. “Waltrip. I’m tired. Tired of being jerked around, lied to, treated like a fucking mushroom, used up… I need to know. Please.”

When I opened my eyes, he was staring back at me with a troubled, soft expression I’d never seen on him before.

It was kind of unsettling.

“About two weeks ago, maybe a few days more, Mal started feelin’ like he was being watched.

I tried to tell him it was probably some residual stress, some PTSD stuff, you know?

” He shrugged restlessly. “But I was, ah, visiting him a bit and one night—” He darted a glance my way.

I managed to keep my expression neutral but he and I both knew we’d be revisiting that tidbit later.

“I was visiting him one night and someone was fucking around outside. In that easement between y’all’s houses. ”

“That’s where tall, dumb, and bitey got me,” I muttered. “We need some freaking security lights.”

“Yeah, for someone who’s been hunted down, kidnapped, attacked, tortured, and nearly murdered several times in the past two years, you’d think you’d be more up to date on your security measures.”

“I installed those cameras near the door!” I threw up my good hand at Waltrip’s glare.

“Can we table that for later? You and Ethan can both jump my ass about it.” And where was Ethan, I wanted to ask.

Is he okay, does he know where I am, does he know about Garrow…

But I swallowed it down and glared back.

Waltrip was looking for any avenue to divert down, and I wasn’t about to make it easy for him.

He made an impatient sound, shoving my feet aside to sit on the bed.

“Whoever’d been out there, it set Mal off in a tizzy.

It was a night you were out with Ethan, and Mal was convinced he’d been hallucinating shit or was just mistaken.

I made Mal stay inside and shifted, went out to see who it was… ”

His pause was heavy, painful.

“Whoever it was, they had Garrow’s stink all over them. Ethan ever tell you about scent marking?”

“Uh, I know some animals do it to mark territory or sometimes their offspring… Is Garrow out there rubbing his face all over other weres or something?” The mental image was hilarious and disturbing.

Picturing that florid, scowling face headbutting some lackey like a mama cat…

“Oh my God, do you think he wears one of those ear headbands and a fake tail, or does he just use his own?”

“What? Jesus, Landry, neither! The principle is the same, but we don’t do that whole,” he waved one hand in annoyance, “thing unless it’s our kid or something.

The kind I’m talking about is… bloodier.

” Lips pressed into a thin line, he glared over his shoulder at the bedroom door. “Christ, where the hell is Benoit?”

“Waltrip. Spill.”

He made an unhappy, growling sound low in his chest, the complaint threaded with a thin whimper of discomfort.

“Scent marking like this, it’s when a were starts their own clan.

It’s an old way of doing things. Most clans don’t do this anymore.

” He scrubbed his fingers through his beard, grimacing, obviously upset and annoyed.

“Those loyal to their new leader drink some of their blood mixed with wine or beer or something like that. Then they smear it on their skin and shift. It’s symbolic, mostly, but traces of the leader’s scent mix with the loyalists. It’s… hard to explain.”

“At this point in my life, I’ve come to accept that anything to do with weres is uncharted territory for me,” I said quietly. “This were that came for Mal, they had Garrow’s scent?”

Waltrip nodded grimly. “They were gone by the time I got outside. So, I promised Mal I’d look into things with Garrow. I didn’t think he’d been sprung.”

“And Mal knows.”

Waltrip nodded. “He does now. I told him before I came here. Tyler’s at his place, watching out for him and Mariska.”

I nodded faintly. “And Ethan?”

“Probably not far behind me.” Waltrip chuckled darkly. “He’d have run here on all fours if he thought it’d be faster than driving.”

“And the six-million-dollar question: Why are you here, Waltrip? Benoit knows you pretty well, looks like. You and him friends?”

Waltrip pursed his lips, jaw clenching so tightly I heard his teeth squeak.

I flopped back—carefully—onto the bed and stared at the ceiling.

“Okay. I think I may have found the edge pieces,” I murmured.

Waltrip made a confused sound, and I shook my head.

“They want me to help them here. Think I’ve got some insider knowledge about this virus going around. I told them I didn’t, but I’m starting to think maybe I do.”

Things were sliding together. I just needed some expert opinion on whether or not my conspiracy theory could hold water.

Waltrip reached toward me like he wanted to touch my face. “How hard did you hit your head?”

“Benoit hit me, it wasn’t an accident.” I swatted his hand away.

“I need your phone. I have to call Ethan. And…” I trailed off.

“Shit. I need to talk to Justin too. This won’t work out if he’s not on board.

” Or if he’s spiraling again… Still . But I had a bit of hope he might be distractable, or at least functional, if I told him what I needed help with.

Waltrip’s suspicion game was always on point. It’s what made him a good PI, I’m assuming. “On board for what ?”

I shook my head. “Everything.”