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Chapter One

THERE WAS NO GOOD WAY to find out you had the disease, but Glenna thought this had to be the worst.

She’d been attacked, almost died from something so horrible her brain shied away from remembering. Now, she lay alone in her curtained alcove of the ER, blinking at the bright lights and struggling not to bleed out. She focused on sorting out the smells—antiseptic, bleach, blood—anything to avoid the memory of her own skin being torn by someone’s teeth, the hits to her stomach, the taste of her attacker’s blood in her own frenzied defense of bites and punches and torn fingernails.

From around the curtain, two orderlies came at her, looking like prize fighters under their strained-tight white coats and masks. Their latex-covered hands locked her wrists into soft padded restraints, clamping them onto the steel bed frame with cold, hard clicks.

Then, and only then, did her ER doc approach. Dr. Wong’s formerly friendly features now hid behind a white cotton mask over which she’d laid a large plastic one, leaving only enough room to reveal eyes tight with fear. She hesitated several feet away, just close enough for Glenna to hear her loud whisper.

“I’m sorry to tell you that you have lycanthroism.” The doctor’s glance darted away from Glenna’s. “The CDC is on their way.”

Shock rolled through Glenna’s pain-racked body, setting her damaged nerves on fire. Her mouth fished open and shut. Open and shut.

Lycanthroism. It couldn’t be.

She peered at Dr. Wong through swollen eyelids and tried to make out the rest of the words whispered from behind the sterile mask.

Isolation.

Highly contagious.

Fatal.

Impossible. She couldn’t have lycanthroism—she was getting married. Things like this didn’t happen to people like her. Was the disease even real?

She’d always thought it was a hoax. All the recent media hoopla about the brand-new disease went through her head. Accounts were mixed—so mixed she’d thought they’d made it all up to fill a slow news week.

They said—first you went crazy, hallucinating things that weren’t real. And then, as the disease ravaged your body, you totally lost who and what you were, and started attacking people close to you—anyone close to you. Biting and clawing...as if you’d turned into a beast.

They said—victims tore out family members’ throats then ran naked through their neighborhoods, blood streaming down their faces and necks, howling—before dropping dead.

They said—it was as if the victims thought they were werewolves, hence the name.

But there were no real pictures, and she couldn’t remember one confirmed case. Not one. Was she the first? This couldn’t be happening.

Her bed rolled away from the ER, pushed by the beefy men dragging her IV behind them. There was a flash, and then another, as the nurses took pictures of her with their phones. Glenna struggled to make a sound, to get something, anything, out through her bruised windpipe.

“Wait,” she croaked.

But no one paid any attention to her desperation.

Overhead lights flashed in and out of her vision as her orderly jailers whisked her down a dark corridor and into a small back elevator, where gravity’s pull made her stomach lurch. The movement tore through her injuries, stole her breath, and kept her quiet for the rest of the ride. It was when they wheeled her towards a set of locked steel doors—and she heard the buzzer—that she was finally able to scream.

***

GLENNA SWAM UP THROUGH the burning in her gut and fought her way to consciousness. Two nurses stood next to her bed in a darkened bare-bones hospital room.

“Poor thing. I would have gone crazy too.”

She tried to see the nurse standing next to her, but the only things she could make out were the plastic mask of the woman’s protective head-gear leering in and out of her blurred vision.

She couldn’t even make out that much of the man who responded, he and his scrubs were just a smudge of light blue standing in the shadows. “You can feel sorry for her now, but soon she’ll be as crazy as one of the monsters who did this to her. They need to be stopped.”

“But it’s not her fault. They attacked her. She never asked to get sick. Wow, I never even believed it was real. She still looks so normal.” There was some quiet movement and the woman added, “Maybe she’ll volunteer to be studied and they can figure out how to fight this.”

“Maybe she’ll get lucky and die before the insanity sets in and she starts hallucinating she’s a wolf.” He howled quietly.

The other nurse giggled, but then got serious. Her voice dropped lower. “You’d better shut up or you’ll get suspended.” They moved away from the bed. “What’s taking the CDC so long? I’ll feel better when she’s out of our ward, whatever the truth is.”

There were some beeps of a combination lock and the door clicked open. They were leaving.

Glenna tried to lift her hand and reach out—to clutch some sense of humanity from the nurses—but her will drained away under the effects of the drug sweeping her system.

“Too bad,” blue scrubs said. “She’s probably pretty when her face isn’t so swollen. I like redheads.” The door closed and the bolt shot home with a clang, cutting off the rest of their conversation. She fought the demanding wave of black trying to suck her back under. Until, finally surrendering, she lapsed into unconsciousness.

Chapter Two

Sam hung his head low, letting his long, bleached-blonde hair swing forward to hide his face, avoiding the all-seeing eye of the hospital security camera. He pushed the oversized maintenance cart into the stairway where it took up most of the landing and hefted the mop and bucket up the one flight of stairs to the hospital’s secure wing on the fifth floor, where Ian was already positioned on the landing. Marcus came down from the stairs above. In the artificial light, his pale blue scrubs glowed blue, making his dark skin look even darker than normal. They met in front of the locked fifth-floor door.

“How long until the CDC comes?” Sam placed the mop and bucket in a corner, ready to grab for cover in case anyone came. He rubbed his sweaty palms on his thighs. “The target is vulnerable here. We need to move soon. Once the CDC grabs her, we’re done.”

“We just got the call.” Marcus’s face was grim. “They were delayed by the collision. But they’re sending a back-up transport.”

“Damn it! They were supposed to be delayed for an hour or more.” Sam ran a frustrated hand through his hair.

“We’re out of time.” Marcus’s lips twisted. “Look, my break is over in ten minutes. I’ll go back into the security wing, disable the system and distract Darla. You’ll have three minutes, tops, before I turn the system back on.”

“Can’t you give us more time?” Ian asked.

“No. The system has a fail-safe. After three minutes you need to have a second key card input or it turns on an alarm. We’re lucky. It has the three minutes delay only because the alarm going off drives Dr. Smythe crazy.”

“Is the target ready to go?” Sam wanted to move, needed to move. Once they were in action he’d settle down, but right now, doing nothing was killing him. Just being inside the hospital for the last hour, with its pungent scents and artificial light was almost enough to drive his wolf into a frenzy. Good thing Marcus was a dormant, with no wolf inside, or he’d never have been able to handle the nurse’s job.

“Yeah. Darla gave her a sedative just before I took my break. Just disconnect the IV and take her out. She should be completely unconscious when you take her. One thing, she’s really hurt. She’s stabilized, but just barely.”

Sam shook his head. “Is it even worth it? Is she going to live?”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know.” Marcus shook his head. He gave a nervous glance up the stairs. “Look, I need to go. Give me ten minutes, and then call my cell. If it’s clear I’ll tell you we’re on. If not, then get out. We won’t be taking her.”

“Marcus—” Ian shifted his weight from foot to foot “—we’ve got to take her. If the CDC gets her we’ll be up shit creek.”

“Can’t see you two in jail.” Marcus grinned, flashing his trademark white teeth. He always said the ladies loved a man with white teeth, and Marcus loved the ladies. “I’d be okay, but you two? No way. Your wolves would eat their way out of your bellies before the first day.” He gave a short laugh, turned, and headed up the stairs to the sixth floor where he would blend in, as if he’d been hanging out on his break before heading back to the fifth floor and the locked wing.

Sam and Ian waited in the empty stairwell.

“Shit, you know it really screwed things up for us that they tested her for lyco,” Ian said. “How in the hell did she get it?”

“I don’t know, but she did.” Sam checked the time on his phone. Five minutes left. “And with the CDC having complete control of anyone who tests positive, she’ll be in their experimental labs before we know it. Then we’re really fucked.”

Ian and he gave each other that look that said they were fucked anyway. They’d known each other since high school, worked together as enforcers for Sam’s old pack for almost as long and when he’d moved packs and joined up with the Ram’s Haven enforcers, Ian had been right behind him. Sam knew going into this op there was no one he’d rather have at his back. Whether Ian felt the same after Sam’s recent walk on the crazy side? He had no clue. But there was no time to ask.

“Better call.” Ian pulled on his ball cap and reached for his latex gloves as Sam punched the number into the throw-away phone.

Marcus picked up on the third ring. “Hey, babe, you aren’t supposed to call me at work.”

“Hey babe yourself.” Sam rolled his eyes at Ian. “Are we on?”

“Yeah, we’re on. I’ll see you tonight. I gotta go. I shouldn’t even have the phone on. Bye, sweetie.”

“Bye, sugar-cakes. See you tonight.” Sam hung up and tucked the phone in his pocket. “Okay, swipe the card.” He pulled on his own gloves and got ready, the latex sticking on his sweaty palms. Three minutes to get to the room, punch the code, disconnect the IV, and get her out to the stairwell. It was going to be tight.

Ian opened the door and pasted the latch with duct tape. The wing was quiet. Too quiet. All the tiny hairs on Sam’s neck lifted up in warning.

He had to remind himself that the quiet was a good thing for them. The powers that be had had the entire wing cleared. They were petrified of lyco.

Sam jerked his chin into a quick nod and they moved. Into the wide corridor and down past the empty nurses station. Ian punched in the code and they were in.

The room was nearly bare, only the essentials to keep the patient alive had been left. A locked room in the psych ward was the only place the CDC had felt was safe enough for a lyco patient. If they only knew how easy they’d made this by moving her here and isolating her. It almost made Sam laugh.

Ian disconnected the IV like a professional while Sam used the bolt cutters on the restraints. He tried not to look at the patient’s face, the purple-black swollen features doing a good imitation of a Halloween mask buried in a fall of luxurious dark red hair.

One and a half minutes.

Sam scooped up her long body, blankets and all. She weighed surprisingly less than he’d thought with her height. Her head lolled off his arm, but he couldn’t stop to do anything about it. Good thing she didn’t have a brain or spinal injury or they never would have been able to attempt this. He carried her across the room and out past Ian, holding the door.

They moved back past the empty nurse’s station. Marcus’s muffled voice and a woman’s responding laugh sounded down the hall. He smiled. Marcus was flirting. What else was new?

They headed for the stairwell.

Thirty seconds left.

Ian brushed the side of the nurse’s station. A pen clattered to the floor.

“Did you hear something?” The female voice echoed down the empty hall. Sam sucked in his breath.

“Oh, honey, that was just the sound of my heart, beating loud at your gorgeous presence.”

The woman giggled. Both Sam and Ian exhaled, Ian shaking his head at Marcus’s corny line. Sam balanced the lanky redhead and ducked the camera. It should be disabled, but he knew better than to bank on it. Under his breath he counted the seconds. Ian pushed in front of him and grabbed the landing door.

And they were out. Smooth as French Silk pie.

Down on the fourth-floor landing, Sam folded her into the maintenance cart, hiding her in the prepared space. He laid her head as gently as he could in the corner, tucking the blankets around her and stuffing handfuls of her slippery fall of hair in after her. Then he shut her in.

They pushed the maintenance cart through the fourth-floor hall, past the main bank of elevators. Ian carried the mop and bucket. Each step had to be slow. Excruciating, janitors paid-by-the-hour, slow.

Finally, they were in sight of the small back elevator. Ten more steps.

A tiny Native American woman, shoulders stooped with age, waited in front of the metal doors. She had a small beaded bag suspended on an old string around her neck, and she held a large bag in one gnarled hand, long, sharp, metal needles protruding, dangling bright red and yellow yarns. The ding sounded, the doors opened. She stepped into the elevator and pressed a button, a gap-toothed grin spreading across her wrinkled brown face.

Sam maneuvered the cart into the elevator, and Ian got in behind him. The doors shut. From inside the cart came a low moan. The woman jerked, the wide smile on her face sliding away. Sam fake coughed into his elbow.

“That sounds bad.” The old woman moved to the other side of the elevator, reaching for her necklace and holding it like a talisman against Sam’s cough. “Hot honey and lemon in whiskey, works every time.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sam nodded, keeping his overlong hair swung low, mindful of the elevator camera. Come on, come on. Their cargo couldn’t be waking up. If she did, and found herself stuffed in the close quarters of the cart, there was no telling what she’d do. He faked another long hacking cough, just in case. Finally the elevator dinged on their level of the parking garage.

“Ma’am.” Ian touched his cap.

The old woman gave him a tight nod, her body pressed into the side of the elevator, as far away from Sam as she could get. “Honey and lemon,” she called after them as they exited and wheeled the cart out the elevator doors and out into the lobby of the underground parking lot.

They didn’t speak until the cart had been wheeled up the panel van’s wheelchair ramp and they were inside with the doors shut.

“I almost wet myself when I saw that old lady,” Ian said.

“Yeah. Thank God she wasn’t security.” Sam climbed into the driver’s seat, his body still tight with the tension from the op. The adrenaline coursing through his veins would take time to ease off. He rolled his neck and drove the van out into the heat of a sunny fall day in Colorado. He could hear Ian rattling around in the back, checking on their companion. “She still out?”

“Yeah.”

They passed the police cars blocking the front entrance for the CDC, and headed for the freeway—and the freedom of the Rocky Mountains.

They’d done their part. They’d saved the woman from the CDC and their experiments. Now they just had to hope she survived.

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