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.