Bite the Bullet

by L. A. Banks

  Silver Hawk looked away, but his voice remained steady and his chin tipped up a little higher with ancient dignity. “I did not know if this predator had become you, because I could feel you struggling with an inner beast. I could only pray to the Great Spirit that your Shadow Wolf would prevail.” He looked at Hunter with intensely sad eyes that leaked compassion. “Tonight your Shadow won. But there are many more moons to come. Then there is also the UCE Conference. That is my deepest concern.”

  “After all these years, what set it off, Pop?” Frustration scored Hunter’s mind, causing him to punch the wall as he began to pace. “All right, I admit it—I was starting to come unglued before more toxin got into my bloodstream, but I don’t want to believe that . . .” He looked away from Sasha and spoke to the window. “Something significant had to set it off.”

  “I agree,” Silver Hawk said after a long pause, both men now speaking in a diplomatic dance around the subject of Sasha’s heat.

  “Okay—can we just stop talking in riddles, gentlemen?” Sasha walked forward and folded her arms over her chest. “First of all, yeah, all right, night one was pretty intense. However, I’m not buying that Hunter’s entire physiology just blew a gasket over me. Would be highly flattering, but highly unlikely. And trust me, after all this, I am so not in the frame of mind for that, you have no idea. I know Hunter has to feel the same way, with pack brothers missing, attacks at random, and the physical trauma he just experienced . . . so what’s spiking the old virus in his system?”

  Humiliation wound another layer of tension around his spine when his grandfather looked away, trying to swallow a half-smile. Sasha had no concept how much focus and control it required to be in the same room with her, even now.

  “Sasha’s got a point, Pop,” Hunter finally conceded. “It felt like something just hit me out of nowhere.”

  “When I tracked you to here,” Silver Hawk said, his expression growing serious, “I thought there was only one beast. You. Then I found evidence of more than one . . . which gave me the hope that I had not arrived too late. I had wanted my own answers, therefore I did not go to the calling of the packs. But I did follow the trail they were supposed to take after I collected more medicine from my friend. It seems as though the beasts are also following the packs that are left in the region. That is what I do not understand. Infected Werewolves have traditionally tried to hunt as far away from our packs as possible. Only once in my lifetime did they double back in retribution.”

  Silver Hawk looked out the window. “That was how your mother was lost, but since then, our retaliation had been so thorough that they’d been practically made extinct in North America. Now they have cast a shadow on the northern-most Shadow Wolves.”

  Sasha stared at Hunter for a moment and then turned her gaze on Silver Hawk. “You saw how Hunter acted once infected Werewolf toxin entered his system. He already had the strain in him, so maybe a dirty blood hit so close to healing from a previous battle just made what was latent in him go full blown. Maybe his system just couldn’t tolerate another infection so close to the last one he’d thrown off?”

  She began to pace, scratching her head, and watching her was beginning to produce vertigo. Instant recall of her glistening, café au lait skin coming out of the bath she’d taken outside the pack house shoved its way to the forefront of Hunter’s brain. Even though he tried his best to ignore the visual stimulation as he watched her lithe form move beneath layers of fabric, that was next to impossible. She was in heat. She was his mate. Regardless of her claims that they weren’t that serious yet, or the trauma she’d spoken of, some things were basic and embedded in millennia of evolution. The scent she trailed superseded anything else in the room and awakened his libido with a ferocious yawn.

  “That had to be it. I was with him after we fought in the Uncompahgre . . . he was fine for a month,” she said, her gaze distant. She sent her line of vision beyond them as though seeking the moon for relief. “I wanna get him to Doc for some off-the-record lab analysis.”

  His grandfather nodded as the room fell silent. Hunter folded his arms over his chest, needing to think long and hard about submitting to lab tests. Sasha’s eyes held a silent plea that was hard to ignore and it was his turn to allow his gaze to seek the dark horizon.

  It wasn’t that he disagreed with her approach or had a problem with the pack’s long-time, secret family friend; it had more to do with his very real apprehension about what Doc Holland might ultimately find. Words were not sufficient, even though he knew she was waiting for some verbal response that he couldn’t freely give.

  Silence echoed in the kitchen while the faucet dripped and refrigerator motors quietly hummed. He wished he could draw her into his arms right now and express how much he loved the way her razor-sharp mind aggressively attacked the problem. More than that, show her just how much he loved her . . . and how her hesitation to take his life, even after what she’d thought he’d become, had forever affected him. She’d even gone back for their amulets.

  Saying nothing but feeling everything, he allowed his gaze to land where the large, etched piece of amber framed in silver hung between her unrestrained breasts. Perhaps it was the insistent, cool stream of air that flowed through the kitchen, or the heat of his gaze, not that it mattered, but after a moment he could see her nipples tightening under the quilted thermal undershirt fabric.

  With effort he dragged his gaze to meet hers, wishing for a fleeting moment that they were alone. The conflict she wrestled with burned deeply in her intense, wolf-gray eyes. Anguish, hope, questions, fury—he’d seen the entire spectrum of emotion wrench her . . . even down to the gentle caress she’d offered with a sip of water, a last act of compassion before she might have to destroy a beast that had done the unthinkable. Her eyes had said, Hunter, forgive me, I love you. In that brief ellipsis of time he knew she would have done what was necessary as a strong warrior, but it would have destroyed a piece of her soul. For her, now, more than himself, he prayed that he’d purged this latent beast within him.

  “Hunter,” she said softly, “just consider it once we get to New Orleans. I know there’s no time to stop in Denver like we’d talked about, but let Doc look into this . . . see if there’s anything he can do. You had been all right . . . it was a month of . . .” She turned away and wrapped her free arm around her waist. “You’d been okay for a long time.”

  Hunter nodded. “All right. I trust Doc with my life. But the tests can’t interfere with the UCE Conference. There can be no signs of weakness at those talks.”

  He leaned on a set of stainless-steel cabinets, absorbing Sasha’s voice on more levels than his grandfather could fathom. Why did she have to remind him of the nights they’d spent together for a month after the battle in the Uncompahgre? Just a brief reminder sent hot images flooding through his mind. The way her cheeks flushed as she avoided his eyes, he could tell the memory had awakened something within her, too.

  “I didn’t have the toxin in my system to the degree that you did after we came out of that firefight,” she said as though choosing each word with great care, and then finally looked at him. “The more I think about it, I bet a lot of other Shadows from the various packs didn’t, either . . . but what about those that had?”

  “What are you talking about?” Hunter pushed off the cabinets. “I was the only one in the clan shunned for having the latent disease. I’m the only one with the birth defect because my mother had been attacked while carrying me.”

  Silver Hawk nodded and then briefly closed his eyes as though jettisoning the painful memory. “What my grandson says is true. He was the only one across all packs and clans of this era to have two wolves within him. We have been feeding the honorable one for many years, hoping to starve the dark wolf to death.”

  “Do we know how many beta males actually tried the illegal substance, though?” Sasha’s frank question made Hunter and Silver Hawk simply stare at her.

  “Sure,” she said, pressing her point, “
maybe the real hard-core toxin junkies died that night trying to take a stand in the Uncompahgre with Fox Shadow, but what about the ones that tried shooting up with the stuff a couple of times and then swore off it? They would have been compromised, just like you—and easy to re-infect . . . and they would home to a pack. That is the way of the wolf.”

  “That is the way of the wolf,” Silver Hawk murmured as though his thoughts were a million miles away. “They are, indeed, moving like a pack, not lone rogues the way demon-infected Werewolves normally hunt—and their eating habits are even more deadly; they will eat their own kind.”

  “And are driven ravenous by a she-Shadow in heat . . . not necessarily a top consideration for the run-of-the-mill Werewolf. True, male Weres appreciate she-Shadows in that condition . . . just like a male Shadow can appreciate a female Werewolf in said condition, too—but it’s not our general preference. What was out there looking for Sasha was on a mission, like one of us. It was a corrupted male Shadow Wolf, had to be, raging for Sasha like that.” Hunter stared at Sasha, nodding slowly. “But how? How did the toxin in that man get to me? There’s been no incidents since we put Fox Shadow down hard.”

  “Now you’re talking about issues in my territory—the military’s concern with weapons of mass destruction. This one I went to school for, fellas.” Sasha gave them both a look and then began to pace. “Biohazards and biogenetic weapons that have a hundred different effective delivery systems are one of the things I’m deployed to track, isolate, and destroy.”

  Hunter found the edge of the sink to lean against; watching her mind hunt and wrestle the issue with a strategic defense against the danger to the pack was making it really hard to focus. It was so damned sexy to witness that he could barely breathe.

  “This particular virus is insidious, gentlemen.” Sasha’s gaze swept past his grandfather’s and pinned him against the sink. “It’s worse than the Vampire strain, which has control factors. As I’m sure you’re aware, Vampires can actually determine when they want a victim to turn into one of their kind; Werewolves can’t. Demon-infected Werewolves can’t. It’s an equal opportunity agent of cellular destruction that can get into the bloodstream if ingested, through a cut, a direct blood exchange, or a saliva swap. That’s why this one is considered the most formidable because it could easily morph into a pandemic outbreak, if not contained. Even I could be a carrier.”

  “Even though we were both battling the beasts, Sasha, you didn’t have the toxin that heavily in your system, so there’s no way you could have given it to me. Besides, I haven’t picked up any Werewolf tracer in the pack. If our supplies had been poisoned, I would have assuredly picked up the toxin scent,” Hunter countered.

  “Maybe,” his grandfather said carefully. “Under normal circumstances, yes. And those that had been infected could have easily hidden themselves from their pack alphas until they felt the scent had sufficiently diminished.”

  Sasha’s gaze found the drain in the center of the floor at the same time Hunter’s sought the window.

  “Yeah, well, like I said,” Sasha finally added, “somebody figured out how to get it into your system.”

  “Son, you were bitten and scratched during the last battles behind demon doors and in the Uncompahgre. You then healed quickly as our kind can do, but it was a new and fragile balance inside you. A concealed viral attack on your system, at a time when your defenses were down and you were least disposed to be aware of even the most extreme changes . . .”

  Hunter looked away and then walked to the far side of the room.

  “Think back,” Sasha said, imploring him with her voice as she neared him from behind. “What did we eat, what did we drink? You had been all right for damned near a month after going through freaking demon doors, now this?”

  “We gathered supplies, like always, from a safe pack outpost.” He turned and looked at her, seeing it step-by-step in his mind, unable to stop staring into her wide, gray eyes. “We ate at one of our diners—then we set out to head up into the mountains.”

  “And the later it got, the thirstier you got,” she said, placing a hand on his arm. “You drained an entire canteen . . .”

  Hunter closed his eyes. “My plate at the diner had to be spiked, and then the water . . . you never ate, just watched me . . . because . . .”

  “Of my condition,” she said quietly, nodding. “I was too wound up to stomach anything—I just wanted to keep moving and reach where we had to go.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I remember. And after I left the tent, I polished off the other canteen and packed them with fresh snow, then melted it over a small fire that I built into a larger one for the morning, so you’d have water when you woke up.”

  Hunter opened his eyes, his gaze seeking Sasha’s and holding it. His body ached for her in the worst way now; the throb that being close to her produced was almost unbearable. They both shared a silent understanding and danced a quiet shadow dance of souls, leaving out the most intimate details of their interaction, skipping over sections of what had transpired. There was no need to elaborate before the wise old man, who could most likely read between the lines, anyway. But as a matter of courtesy and a matter of privacy, Silver Hawk just nodded with a grunt.

  “It was in the water; it always is,” the elderly man announced. “The body is made up of this element, and to poison a people and drive them from their lands, take their water—or pollute it.”

  They didn’t ask what he’d meant. Hunter knew from experience that there were just some old wounds, which current-day events sometimes touched and disturbed, that took his grandfather further back in time than he wanted to go. He was just grateful that Sasha seemed to understand that and had let it go with a simple nod.

  Chapter 11

  Clarissa dropped her steaming cup of coffee in the middle of the attic floor. It slid from her hand so effortlessly that it seemed like it fell in slow motion as her eyelids began to flutter. The multiple computer screens and surrounding technology had felt like it was closing in on her as her vision blurred. Bradley caught her before she also fell and shattered on the floor like her cup. Winters was right there with a chair on wheels for her to slump into.

  “What is it, Rissa?” Bradley said, rubbing her hand and then stroking her bangs back from her damp forehead. He stooped beside her, panicking, and turned his attention toward Winters. “Get a cold, wet paper towel and some water.”

  He continued to squeeze Clarissa’s hand and stroke her hair as she began to loll her head from side to side. Then for several seconds, she stopped breathing and opened her eyes in a glassy, unfocused stare.

  “Clarissa! Talk to us!”

  Winters rushed over with the cold compress and placed it on her forehead. Her once-normal, creamy complexion was waxen and flushed. Bradley began shaking her more roughly, his voice tight, sharp bursts of commands.

  “Breathe, Rissa. Talk to us—what do you see?”

  Seconds passed and then she suddenly took a huge inhale and her eyes focused.

  “They’re alive and headed this way.” She searched Bradley’s and Winters’s faces for an explanation.

  “Who’s alive?” Bradley pressed, wiping back her bangs and bringing the water Winters handed over to her lips.

  “Second Lieutenant James Fisher and First Lieutenant Darien Woods,” she gasped.

  Bradley was on his feet. “That’s a Vampire ploy if ever I heard one.”

  “I went through that body-double shit with Vampires before, and almost got a slug put in my head from the brass for allowing one into the labs by accident. I’m not proud to admit it, but that’s how they got their hands on the toxin in the first place. Never again. Don’t let ’em play you, Clarissa.” Winters’s gaze hardened, adding years to his normally youthful face. “Those men died in Afghanistan. Reinforce the perimeter with—”

  “No,” Clarissa said, gasping. “I need to tell you about the other images they’re sending me. They’ll rendezvous with us during the day tomorrow, w
earing silver, garlic, or whatever else we require as proof positive.”

  “You sure?” Bradley said, his tone strained.

  Clarissa nodded with a weak smile. “They pass muster.”

  “A coupla hours ago you guys wanted to know if Sasha was sending the Green Berets. Well, from what I understand, they’re it—with a cavalry coming a day or two behind them.”

  Winters wiped his palms down his face. “Leave it to Trudeau to resurrect two supposedly dead guys for the mission.”

  Bradley found the edge of a desk and sat down with a thud. “I swear this job is gonna give me a heart attack one day.”

  “We need to move. This place is no longer safe,” Silver Hawk said quietly, breaking Sasha’s trance.

  Sasha quickly dragged her attention away from Hunter and nodded. She’d been so wrapped up in the sound of his voice and the earnest intensity of his eyes that her responses fell a beat behind what made good common sense. Damned right they needed to move. What was wrong with her?

  “I know there are several grounds trucks in the garage area,” Hunter said and then sent his gaze toward the door.

  She briefly studied Hunter’s rigid posture, monitoring the tension that ran through his body and wafted from his aura, then glimpsed Silver Hawk who had discreetly averted his eyes. “Okay, let’s mount up, then.”

  It was time to click into her military mind. There was nothing like the immediate threat of danger to put things in perspective. Sasha began loading her arms with weapons and that definitely helped her focus. But seeing Hunter do that nearly unraveled whatever newfound focus she’d claimed. Call it twisted, but there was just something about watching him set his jaw hard . . . and watching the steel cable network of muscles he owned move beneath his tight thermal shirt and fatigues.