When Micah burst through the doors leading into AKM’s medical unit, it was clear the shit was hitting the fan. The place was a hornet’s nest, everyone scurrying to and fro, doctors barking orders to nurses who tried their best to keep up. Medical equipment beeped and whistled. A shrill alarm sounded.
Surely this wasn’t all for Ronan. It was a werewolf bite. Yes, getting bitten by a werewolf was a shit bag of fun even on a good day, and, sure, from what he’d been told, the beast that had bitten Ronan was allegedly some kind of Frankenwolf, but Ronan should at least be stabilizing by now. Hell, how bad could a lowly werewolf bite be?
“What the fuck’s going on?” he said to no one in particular.
No one replied.
Micah grabbed the arm of a passing doctor. “Is he okay? Is Ronan okay?”
The grim look the doc gave him said it all. The situation wasn’t good. “We’re doing everything we can, but we’re having difficulty stabilizing him.” The doc freed his arm. “I’m sorry, I have to get back.” He hurried off like he was being chased by a school of bloodthirsty piranha.
It was a fucking werewolf bite! Why couldn’t they stabilize him?
Maybe a better question was what kind of abnormal werewolf created this much chaos?
He spied Brak in the corner, hunched over in a chair, his pallor a sickening grey. A waste can sat beside him.
Dodging aids and nurses, he hurried to Brak’s side and knelt in front of him.
“Brak, what’s going on? What’s happening to Ronan?”
With Brak’s nifty healing powers, he’d joined the medical staff to assist in situations that required more than standard care. Situations that were more like life and death and needed a special brand of deep healing. For Brak to have been brought over from the new facility meant shit was critical, especially if the staff were still running around with this much urgency after Brak had performed his healing magic.
Brak lifted his head and peered through the long brown strands of his sweat-soaked hair. If not for all that hair, he would have looked exactly like his brother, Trace.
When he spoke, his voice sounded as weak as he looked. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He closed his eyes and went utterly still as if holding back his gag reflex. After several seconds, he peeled his lids open and let out a long exhale. “Whatever bit him wasn’t natural, Micah.”
“What do you mean, not natural?”
He shook his head, keeping the movement small. “That venom was man-made.”
“Micah!”
He glanced over his shoulder as the doctor he’d spoken to a moment ago approached, his expression grave.
“What is it?”
“We need blood,” the doc said. “Can you—”
“Absolutely. Sure. Just give me a sec.” He turned back to Brak and squeezed his shoulder. “Thank you for trying.”
Brak nodded tightly and looked like he was about to lose his cookies as Micah stood.
He joined the doctor, who directed him into a chair on the far side of the room. A nurse rushed forward with a tray of blood-drawing paraphernalia as he rolled up his sleeve.
Things moved too fast for him to ask questions. The doctor rattled off some instructions to the nurse as she nodded and wrapped an elastic band around his biceps and tapped the crook of his arm for a vein. Then the doctor was gone and his blood was being sucked through a slender tube into a plastic bag.
“Take as much as you need,” he said, watching the red fluid drain out of him.
A few hours ago, he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to kill Ronan or welcome him into the family. Now, he was ready to give half his own blood to save the fucker. If that didn’t speak volumes about how his feelings had changed where his brother was concerned, he didn’t know what did. Still, he didn’t have to like the little shit to want to save his life.
“This will suffice for now,” the nurse said, checking the bag.
A flash of black hair and a black shirt caught his eye from the other side of the room. His father paced outside what Micah assumed was the room where Ronan was being treated. A giant pane of glass was all that separated father from son. Micah couldn’t see much going on inside, but the look on his dad’s face said it all. The sitch was going from bad to worse, and it was ripping his father to pieces.
Whoa. Who were the two imposing males with coal-black hair milling around on the periphery? The ones as tall as skyscrapers who looked like they owned the place?
The one with the goatee looked familiar. Micah was sure he’d met him before, but where?
He sniffed, filtering through the smells of blood, vomit, astringent, and surgical soap until he isolated their scents.
Lycans.
That’s where he’s seen goatee boy before. It had been a long time ago, soon after arriving in North America, when he was part of an escort guarding King Bain the First while meeting with the lycans regarding territorial boundaries.
What was the guy’s name again? Ramey? Rammstein? Rainman? No, Rameses. Like the pharaoh. And he wasn’t just any lycan. He was the brother to their imeut. That was what the lycans called their leader. If he remembered correctly, the title of imeut had something to do with the Ancient Egyptian god, Anubis. Lycans were allegedly descendants of Anubis, so the title made sense.
Rameses was second-in-command only to his brother, Memnon, and oh, what a joy Memnon was. He never smiled, never showed compassion, never allowed emotion of any kind into his expression.
Micah felt sorry for any female unfortunate enough to get stuck in the same bed with the guy. He probably fucked like a bulldozer. Or a ram. And not the animal kind. Micah was talking about the kind of ram that medieval armies had used to bust down the barred gates of castles and fortresses.
He could almost see it. Memnon probably climbed on top of the woman, shoved her legs apart, and impaled her before slamming into her a few times—just enough to get off, because efficiency seemed to be Memnon’s thing—and even before his cock stopped twitching, he dismounted and left the poor female wondering what in the hell just happened as he showered then returned to his golden throne. Or wherever he went when he was acting as commander in chief over the lycan race.
Memnon’s sexual habits aside, Chicago wasn’t lycan territory. So, what the fuck was Rameses and his black-haired sidekick, Pretty Boy, doing here?
The nurse finished drawing his blood and slapped a bandage on his arm before hurrying off with her bounty.
Rolling his sleeve down, Micah stood and meandered closer to where his father and the two lycans stared intently through the window at what was going on inside the room where he assumed Ronan was being treated. As he stepped around the nurses’ station and carts of equipment, more of the room’s interior broke into his field of vision. He saw the silver footrail of the bed first, then the white sheets covering what he assumed were Ronan’s feet and legs.
And then . . .
What the fuck?
Another lycan, a behemoth with a mane of sandy-blond hair longer and prettier than Severin’s, stood with his eyes closed and his hands extended over Ronan’s body like he was some kind of shaman.
Micah had seen it all tonight. Dead vampires who came back to life. A brother he never knew he had. A set of twins growing inside his mate’s belly even though he hadn’t had a calling. And now . . . some lycan with a hair-band complex was going medicine man on his brother.
Micah just hoped Twisted Sister didn’t end up giving his bro a lobotomy.
Priest heard the commotion going on around him, the doctors and nurses bringing in blood, blood, more blood, transfusing Ronan while he continued planting ancient healing energy directly from the goddess Sekhmet herself into the vampire’s body.
Frantic voices shouted instructions, nurses called for more blood, and bodies bumped into Priest as the activity reached a fever pitch. But Priest remained focused on the task at hand, his body and mind in a more or less meditative state, homed in on Ronan like the vampire was the only other living being within a square mile.
Priest’s left hand hovered horizontally over Ronan’s torso. In his right hand, he held his gold cartouche. Its gold chain coiled around and between his fingers.
Gold held tremendous value to the lycans because of its transformative powers and ability to conduct spiritual energy. They used it to heal, to bring their brethren out of hibernation, to open the portals between worlds and cities. To the lycans, gold was the difference between life and death, peace and war, justice and corruption. Without gold, they would be lost, which was why they hoarded any they could get their hands on.
He had known what he would find inside Ronan before he started the healing process. But he hadn’t expected the damage to be so prolific. The motley werewolf’s venom was more corrosive to vampires than he and the others had assumed it would be.
This wasn’t by accident. This wasn’t some random beast whose venom coincidentally did more harm to vampires than old werewolf venom did.
This was a weapon. One designed specifically to target vampires.
In their never-ending quest to hunt down the werewolves and eradicate them from this realm, Priest and his lycan brothers had recently begun to notice a change in their behavior and physiology. Not in all werewolves, mind you, but there was a new breed of werewolf infiltrating the hierarchy of paranormal beings that called earth their home.
There were lycans, vampires, drecks, and werewolves, among other lesser beings like fairy creatures and benign shifters who tended to do more good than bad, but this new class of werewolf didn’t fit in with anything they were familiar with. They could shift without a full moon. They were more cunning than their lupine cousins. Their venom was as corrosive as battery acid, and it worked quickly, spreading and infecting its victim with the speed of a lightning strike.
These werewolves were not of a natural order. They were creations.
Someone had made these beasts.
The lycans needed Hunter more than ever now. Hunter would be a tremendous asset in tracking and destroying these abominations. These motleys. None of his brethren could hold a candle to Hunter’s tracking abilities and slaying skills.
And now he was back. Returned to earth by the curious and troubled mind of the vampire prostrated beneath his healing hands.
No doubt Ronan hadn’t a clue what he’d done by opening the gate. From what little he, Rameses, and Dain had overheard through the portal before activating the gateway, Ronan didn’t even know he’d opened it. He thought the ankh—the key—had failed. Only because he had no idea how the gates worked.
He and the others had a good chuckle at the conversation between Ronan and Rysk, waiting for them to depart before coming through, but then the werewolves had shown up, and it had become clear they couldn’t keep their arrival in Chicago a secret. They had to pass through the gateway, not necessarily to save the vampires, but to kill the beasts.
After millennia of hunting and killing the escaped werewolves, lycans were hardwired not to let even one get away. It was their bound duty to kill them. They had sworn an oath to both Osiris and Anubis that they would remain and hunt the werebeasts to the very last one. To rid this realm of their poison. Their sickness.
The problem with werewolves was that they bred quickly, and in a myriad of ways. They could infect a human with the sickness through a bite. Or a male werewolf in human form could mate with a human female and produce a werewolf child. Or a female werewolf could lay with a human male. Of course, the child would be latent until it reached adulthood and went through its first change.
This was an even bigger problem because lycans couldn’t detect werewolves until their first shift. That’s why such an effort was made to identify the offspring of known werewolves. Tracking and eliminating offspring during their first shift accounted for at least a fourth of the lycans’ kills.
And now they had these engineered motleys to contend with.
Which was why Memnon needed to cease Hunter’s exile. Immediately. Before they fell even further behind.
Yes, what Hunter had done was bad. Mating a vampire when it could result in an abomination was verboten, but this was no time to sit your star quarterback on the sidelines. They needed Hunter in the field, doing what Hunter did best, even if Memnon cast him from the clan. Having Hunter in this realm as an outcast was better than relegating him to some prison planet where he couldn’t do any good at all.
Priest sensed Dain and Rameses felt the same way, but even Ram, as Memnon’s blooded brother, held little persuasion over their imeut. And trying to withhold the knowledge that Hunter was back in the earth realm wasn’t an option. Memnon would know. He would see it in their thoughts. Which meant they had no choice but to tell Memnon the truth and hope they could persuade him to allow Hunter to stay, given these new developments.
New developments that caused Priest to think forming an alliance with the vampires was the best course of action. Something else he sensed Rameses agreed with him on.
He directed more healing energy into Ronan’s blood, gradually siphoning out the poison.
Vampires were crucial to maintaining the balance among the paranormal beings on earth. Without them, drecks would run rampant, and then the lycans would have two direct enemies, with no buffer to offer protection. And since Priest held little doubt these new motley werewolves were creations of that psychotic dreck, Bishop, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine Bishop also possessed long-term ambitions to do to the lycans what he was perpetuating against the vampires. Bishop had already dealt the sin eaters a heavy blow with cobalt, and now he piled on the hurt even further with his deadly motleys.
What would Bishop have in store for the lycans when the vampires were no longer a threat?
Priest didn’t want his brethren to be caught on their heels. It was time to be proactive and make a change. A lot of changes. Their survival depended on it.
He only hoped Memnon agreed once he was awakened and briefed.
Because if he didn’t, Priest might have to make hard decisions he would rather not make.
Remain loyal to his brothers? Or join Hunter and create a new path?