Chapter 10
Later that afternoon, I was in my unused bedroom, packing my clothes and toiletries. Why I bothered to unpack in this room when I spent every night in Abraham’s was a mystery to me. I decided to leave Charlie’s toy and treats here. He had enough at home that these could be just for Asheville.
I looked around the room, double checking to make sure I had everything I needed for the week ahead of me. When it seemed I was as packed as I was going to get, I pulled out Charlie’s treats and lowered myself to my stomach, so I could peer under the bed.
I found my tabby curled into a ball on the far side near the wall.
“Hey, Charlie,” I cooed, throwing a treat toward him.
When he didn’t respond, I tried again. “Come on, Bubba. We need to get back home.”
Nothing.
A hollowness settled in the pit of my stomach. It started out as small as the head of a pin but grew by the second as I watched my still cat under the bed.
“No. No no no no no,” I chanted as I pushed up off the floor and wrenched the bed away from the wall.
It went sliding across the room, way farther than I’d meant to, but I kept forgetting how much stronger I was now.
With the bed away from the wall, I could clearly see Charlie, wrapped into a tight ball, his little body shaking. What scared me more were the multiple piles of strange colored vomit that I found surrounding him.
“Oh, no,” I whispered as I sank to my knees beside him.
I reached out a hand and felt the tremors racking his tiny furry body. My hand ran from his head down his back, noticing how warm he felt.
How wrong.
“Oh, no. Charlie? Hey buddy, what’s goin’ on?” I asked softly as I reached underneath his quaking body to pick him up.
As soon as I had him in my arms, the tremors increased until his little body was jerking uncontrollably.
“Abraham!” I yelled.
The door crashed open and first Wyatt came running through, but Abraham was close on his heels.
“What’s the matter? What’s going on?” he asked as his shrewd blue eyes assessed the room for danger.
Both men were back to back in the middle of the floor, legs bent, bodies tight with tension and ready to eliminate any threat.
“It’s Charlie!”
Abraham’s eyes scanned the room once more before they landed on me and my cat. He was by my side in the next instant, large hands covering mine as I struggled to hold on to Charlie.
“What happened to him?” Abraham asked.
“I don’t know. I found him this way. I think he’s having a seizure.”
“Do you know how long this has been going on for?” Abraham asked slowly.
I was frantic, words spilling out of my mouth one on top of the other. “No! I have no idea. I just went to go find him and put him in his carrier and he was like this. Only he wasn’t spasming so hard when I first found him.”
Abraham rose to his feet, pulling me until I was standing beside him, Charlie cradled in my arms. “There’s a twenty-four-hour emergency vet in town. Let’s go.”
Wyatt got out of the way as Abraham and I ran out of the room and down the stairs. When we got out to his truck, he wasted no time yanking the door open and picking me up, depositing me on the passenger seat. I barely registered Wyatt hopping in the back and Abraham bringing his truck to life with a turn of his keys.
“How far away are we?” I asked, as I stroked Charlie’s soft fur.
“Thirty minutes, but I’ll get us there in twenty,” Abraham said, his deep voice, usually so calming, was doing nothing to keep the hysteria at bay.
Charlie stopped jerking so violently and was now lying unnaturally still in my arms. The small rise and fall of his chest was the only thing keeping me from completely losing it.
“Come on, Charlie. Just hold on, Bubba.”
The ride felt like an hour long but couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes. Before the truck was even in park, I was out the door and halfway to the building.
Once inside, I described Charlie’s symptoms and had him whisked from my arms, into an examination room. We followed behind the vet and stood watching with Abraham’s thick arm around me.
“Has he been eating regularly?” the vet asked, his stethoscope pressed to Charlie’s chest.
“Everything was fine yesterday when I was with him.”
The vet shot me a look out of the corner of his eye. “He was alone all day?”
I shook my head and tried to explain myself better. “We’re out here visiting my…” I looked at Abraham. How do I describe him with one word? “Boyfriend,” I finished with a cringe. “Charlie stays in a room by himself because they have… dogs.” God, I sounded like an idiot. “And he can’t just wander the house,” I added, not that it was making much of a difference. The vet was still looking at me like I was a moron. Maybe he wasn’t too far off the mark.
“We leave him in a room of his own for his safety and happiness while he’s visiting,” Abraham spoke up, thankfully summing up what I was trying to say far better than I was. “Elizabeth spent a chunk of time with him yesterday afternoon, and he was left on his own for the rest of the day.”
The vet seemed appeased with Abraham’s explanation. “Could he have gotten into anything in that room? Do you leave anything lying around that would hurt him?”
I frowned and thought hard before answering. “It’s a bedroom. There’s nothing in there but furniture and clothes. I don’t even leave the bathroom door open. Why? Do you think he got into something?”
The vet nodded as he continued his inspection of my poor cat. “It looks like he might be suffering from rat poison. We’ll have to do some more tests. Did you bring his food by any chance? We should check that too.”
“We just brought him.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Abraham said and left the room.
One question was on the tip of my tongue and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t swallow it down. “Is he gonna be okay?” I asked, my voice small and barely audible.
The vet shot me another look before pulling the stethoscope away from Charlie and draping it around the back of his neck. “He’s very sick,” he began, and my stomach fell. “We need to start flushing his system if we’re going to save him. It’s good that you got him here so fast.”
He hadn’t answered my question.
He’d given me a lot of important information but hadn’t actually told me if Charlie was going to be all right or not. The vet said I could wait in the lobby while they took Charlie in the back to work on him.
Out near the front of the building, I found Abraham pacing with his phone pressed to his ear. I could have easily listened to both ends of his conversation, but I chose not to.
Instead, I sat down in one of the uncomfortable plastic waiting room chairs and tried to put the thoughts in my head in some kind of order.
Charlie was hurt.
Badly.
He’d gotten into something that had made him sick. But how?
How could he have gotten into rat poison? Charlie only had access to the bedroom, and I knew there was nothing like that in there.
But, then where had it come from?
“Wyatt’s on his way back here with Charlie’s food and dishes,” Abraham explained as he took a seat next to me. His big body dwarfed the chair and made me feel small, but when he wrapped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed, I also felt protected. Safe.
But I had no right feeling that way when my cat’s life was hanging in the balance.
There were so many thoughts swirling through my head, I didn’t know if I could choose just one to voice, so I kept them to myself.
In what felt like minutes and also hours, Wyatt came rushing into the building with a bag full of Charlie’s things. He handed them off to a secretary at the front desk and then took a seat opposite us.
I didn’t know Wyatt particularly well, having had trouble differentiating him from his brother, but it was easy to see something was on his mind. His blond eyebrows were drawn low over his light brown eyes. He usually had a pretty bland expression on his face, but now it was pinched and tense.
I instantly knew something was wrong.
Abraham spoke up first. “What did you find?”
Wyatt’s eyes twitched in my direction before focusing on Abraham. “There was poison in his dish.”
I leapt to my feet.
“What?!” I screeched, drawing the attention of the two secretaries sitting behind the front desk.
Abraham stood and wrapped an arm around my waist, dragging me toward the doors. “We’ll just be outside, please come get us if there’s any news,” he called to the two confused receptionists.
Wyatt followed us out and when we were clear of the doors, I rounded on him. “What the hell do you mean you found poison in his dish?”
Wyatt’s eyes were trained on Abraham who nodded once. “I could smell it,” he explained.
It was clear Wyatt was a man of very few words, which I normally would respect, but in light of what happened today, I’d gladly wring them out of him with my bare hands if I had to.
My body started trembling as I took a shaky step toward him. Only one word made it past my tense jaw. “Explain.”
Abraham placed a comforting hand on my back that I just barely refrained from shaking off.
“As soon as I picked it up, I could smell something wasn’t right. I sniffed his food and realized there was a foreign smell. Abraham mentioned it might be rat poisoning, so I had some guards search the house. They found a bucket of rat poison pellets in one of the cleaning supplies closets.”
The tremors wracking my body amplified as I spun away from Wyatt to pace the sidewalk. I was desperately trying to make the pieces fit together, but the worry, and anxiety, and adrenaline were mixing into a disorienting cocktail I couldn’t work past.
I needed to clear my mind. I needed to get myself under control if I had any hope of helping my cat.
I decided to start off simple. “How could that rat poison have made it into Charlie’s food?”
Wyatt’s eyes jerked toward his alpha, but he didn’t answer. I glanced at Abraham and found his fists clenched tight by his sides, his jaw ticking with his increased heart rate.
Finally, after what felt like hours of silence, Abraham confirmed what I’d been too afraid to say out loud. “Someone must have put it there.”
Someone must have put it there.
Someone put rat poison in my cat’s dish.
Someone poisoned my cat.
Someone was trying to kill Charlie.
The tremors in my muscles reached an all-time high as fur sprouted out of my skin. A large crack reverberated through the air and Wyatt and Abraham immediately jumped into action.
Wyatt used his large body to block me from view of the busy street while Abraham grabbed my arm and dragged me around the side of the building.
By now, my hands were paws with sharp tipped claws and I could barely stand.
“Elizabeth,” Abraham started, his voice deep and commanding. “Do not shift.”
Easier said than done.
I lost the battle with my legs and collapsed onto the asphalt of the dirty parking lot, my body shaking uncontrollably.
“El,” Abraham spoke up again, and I turned to face him, noticing my face had elongated into a snout already. “Think it through.”
Slowly, realization of where we were and what was happening sank past the rage and fear that was controlling me.
I needed to get myself under control. Fast.
I took a deep breath and concentrated on that action alone.
In. One.
Out. Two.
In. Three
Out. Four.
“That’s it, El. Come back to me.”
I turned to find Abraham’s blue eyes trained on me, the lines around them creased with worry.
Another loud crack filled the air and my legs straightened out into that of a woman’s instead of a wolf’s. Slowly, the fur on my arms receded into my skin and the bones of my face rearrange themselves.
I was still shaking, but at least I hadn’t fully transformed into a wolf.
“Good girl,” Abraham said, his voice deep and soft and making me feel like everything would be all right as long as he had some part in it. Like he wouldn’t let anything really bad happen. “Come here,” he said before crouching down and pulling me into his arms.
I took a deep breath of his clean smell and let it out slowly. Now was not the time for me to lose my head and make this situation worse than it was. Charlie needed me running on all cylinders. I had to figure out who hurt him and make sure nothing like this ever happened again.
But what I wanted to do was rush back into the vet and demand they let me see him. I needed to make sure he was still breathing. That he was going to be okay. As strong as that desire was, I knew it would only be helping me, and not my cat. So, I’d do the next best thing.
I pulled out of Abraham’s arms and rose on shaky limbs to my feet.
“We need to figure out who the fuck hurt my cat,” I swore, the cuss slipping from my lips like I talked like this all the time. Which I didn’t. But I’d been picking up some colorful language from Del and now seemed like a perfect time to roll it out.
Abraham’s eyes were wide as they met mine. Apparently hearing me curse surprised him too.
“We will, El. I have my men on it right now. They’ll investigate and call me when they have something. Until then, let’s see if we can find out how Charlie’s doing, okay?”
I nodded once, my body still wound tight with the anger that wanted to flow from my veins like lava. I’d go check on my pet and when I was sure he was going to be all right, I’d find out who did this to him and make them pay.