Resilience

by Bailey Bradford

  Adam’s mouth burned, pain spearing along his gums. Weird, but nothing compared to what was happening inside him. The urge to claim Todd, to make him his thrummed through Adam. It was odd, because he knew Todd was his, but a red fog of need filled his mind, tinted his vision. Adam licked Todd’s skin, then bit, but something was different, something changed, and Todd screamed, and Adam screamed, blood pooling in his mouth

  as something snapped inside him.

  Agony shot through his bones and he flailed backwards, everything spinning and

  tipping, tossing him around from the inside out. He fought the pain, striking out, the thing inside him crazed with the rending of muscle and bone.

  His mind shut down, unable to comprehend what was happening, and instinct took

  over. The pain was killing him, destroying him in a barrage of fire and ice, and Adam howled, striking out, fighting for each breath, panic making him every bit the wild beast.

  If there were people around, he couldn’t see them, his vision warped, red, misted with blood or a mirage. Adam didn’t know, he didn’t know anything. Something touched him

  and he snarled, the pain firing a rage inside him. Everything hurt, every particle of him, rolling over him, anguish coming in waves.

  Adam fought it, terrified to accept it, to give in, some part of him knowing it’d be his end, and he had to stay. Todd. He needed to reach Todd. But Adam couldn’t, his body wasn’t his own, and the scent of blood taunted him with the promise of a horror he couldn’t comprehend.

  There was too much screaming, too much fear, too many voices. Adam couldn’t grasp

  what was happening, couldn’t comprehend anything but the fact that his body was turning inside out and he needed Todd, had to reach Todd, to touch him, to know he was okay.

  His mouth still had the coppery tang to it, and whatever was inside him knew that

  taste, blood, sweet and necessary and wrong and frightening. People didn’t do whatever he’d done, didn’t explode from the inside out in agonisingly slow motion.

  Adam tried to shout as a convulsion rocked him, contorting him into a rigid form

  before snapping him down and doing it again. He was dying, over and over, and it was never going to end.

  Something hit him, pinching at his hip, then his neck. More pinching pains, nothing

  compared to what was happening to him inside, outside, whatever. Still, he knew there was another thing under his skin, being put into him with each poke, each sharp stab. Then it was catching at him, bringing darkness but not peace as Adam was dragged away to unconsciousness.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Waves of pain crashing down on him were what brought Todd to screaming

  consciousness. His side burned like someone had poured battery acid on it, and his right arm felt the same way. What the hell had happened to him?

  Then he remembered and Todd screamed again, this time Adam’s name. He tried to get

  up but hands pushed at him, holding him down, keeping him from his love.

  The next time he woke up, Gabe was leaning over him. “Don’t freak out again or you’ll get another shot to knock you back out. Don’t make me watch them do that to you again, Todd. But I will, if you’re gonna kick and hit and tear your stitches open again.”

  Todd was scared, more scared than he’d ever been. Something was horribly wrong, and

  his mind shied away from it when he tried to think, to figure out what had happened.

  But where was Adam? Todd’s gut clenched, fear and pain hitting him hard. “Adam?”

  he scraped out after three tries.

  Gabe looked aside and swallowed, his nervousness fuelling Todd’s fear. “He’s being

  taken care of.”

  What the hell did that mean? Panic was rising, setting Todd’s heart to hammering in his chest. Something was horribly wrong.

  “He wasn’t hurt.”

  “That’s not true,” Todd tried to say, but terror reigned in his mind, snarls and claws and he couldn’t think about it, couldn’t speak. He wanted Adam, but why did that make him so scared at the same time?

  “You, on the other hand…” Gabe rubbed at his eyes and Todd was more confused.

  “You’ve got to stop almost dying on me, dude.”

  And, that fast, Todd shut down, eyes closing even as he struggled to stay awake.

  “How is he?”

  Gabe shook his head, not looking away from Todd. “He’s so pale, and scared. God, it

  was pouring off him, the fear and confusion. He asked for Adam.” Gabe finally looked at Mika. “I don’t know what to say. I think I fucked up last time he woke up.”

  Mika sat in a chair beside the bed. “What happened?”

  “I told him he had to quit almost dying on me. He just…closed his eyes and went back to la-la land. He’s hiding, isn’t he?”

  Mika hitched a shoulder. “I don’t know, I’m not the best at psychological stuff. But, considering one second Adam was fucking him, and the next he bit him, then everything went to hell for sure, I think Todd has the right to be traumatised.”

  “Yeah,” Gabe agreed. He reached up and brushed at Todd’s hair. “It’s just shit, man.

  He’s had such a hard life up until he and Adam got together. He never asked anyone for anything, just wanted to live a good life with his man, and now…”

  “And now what, Gabe?”

  Gabe glanced back at Mika and couldn’t turn away from the fierce expression his mate wore. “I-I don’t know.”

  “I do.” Mika sounded so sure, and Gabe needed that, needed him right now. “Todd is

  going to heal, mentally and physically, and he’s going to be told what happened. And he’ll understand. Blaming Adam won’t be something Todd does, but Adam… He’ll blame

  himself, just like I would if I’d torn you up.”

  “I still don’t understand how the fuck—” Gabe stopped, aware he was close to yelling.

  Todd was probably better off unconscious right now. “I don’t understand how the fuck Adam turned into one of us!”

  Mika scrubbed at his cheeks, looking so tired Gabe ached for him. “I don’t either, but there’s a big shouting match going on in Maarten’s office. Heard some punches thrown, some furniture break. Some bodies hit the floor.” He shrugged.

  Gabe gaped at him. “Shouldn’t you make sure our friends are okay?”

  Mika snorted. “Do you really think that was any of our friends getting their asses beat?”

  Gabe thought about it, compared Aidan to Maarten and the other shifters… “Well, no.”

  “Yeah, so I wasn’t going in there, Aidan’s got it covered, and, besides, I wanted to come sit with you and Todd.” Mika took Gabe’s hand in his and one of Todd’s in the other. “I’d never have thought I’d have friends like him and Adam.”

  “Speaking of Adam…”

  “Zane’s with him,” Mika muttered. “I checked on them before I came in here. Zane’s

  having to keep Adam tranquilised. He can’t control his shifting, and he’s obviously very distraught over what’s happened to Todd.”

  “And probably to himself,” Gabe pointed out.

  Mika wrinkled up his nose as he considered that. “I don’t think he’s even thinking

  about himself. Zane said he’s only yelled for Todd, he hasn’t even acknowledged what happened to him.”

  “Kinda hard to do if he’s knocked out, duh.” Gabe rolled his eyes. “Geez, what a mess.”

  Maybe he should have been more puzzled over Adam going from regular ol’ human being to shifter from out of fucking nowhere, but Gabe was too worried about Todd, and Adam.

  “When are we going home?”

  “As soon as Todd gets the okay from the doctor, Marcus is shipping out here. He’s

  sending the best one he has. She ought to be here any time now.” Mika cocked his head when a particularly loud scream rent the silence. “Guess she could be here already, actually. Hard to say with a
ll that racket going on.”

  “If she’s here, she better get her ass in here and check on Todd.” Gabe had barely

  spoken the words when there was a knock on the door. Instead of calling out, Gabe got up and opened the door. “Oh—oh!” He hugged Shania. “I should have known it’d be you!”

  “Get off me, you over-exuberant goofball.” But Shania hugged Gabe and patted his

  shoulder gently. Her eyes conveyed her sorrow for his suffering even if she didn’t say it out loud. “Mika,” Shania said as she nodded at him. “Let me look this young man over before the fighting in the other room ends and I have to tend to more injuries.”

  “Do you know what they’re fighting about?”

  Shania tutted and shook her head at Gabe. “No, because all they’re doing is cussing and fighting and I only just got here. Now, tell me what happened. I know what I was told on the phone, but I want to hear it directly.”

  Gabe was going to get a headache from all the eye rolls he was doing. “We don’t know for sure! All we do know is, Adam had been roughed up pretty bad, he was all battered and bruised, and that was putting a delay on trying to find his friend Jameson and Jameson’s mate Luuk. Anyway, Maarten asked Dr Spiegel if there was anything he could do to help Adam heal up faster.” Gabe narrowed his eyes as anger rushed up from his core. “Adam met with the doctor, and suddenly he’s healing super-fast and he and Todd are doing the deed.

  Best we can figure, Adam started to shift in coitus. Todd has a nasty mating bite on his neck and shoulder. There was lots of screaming. We came running, along with seven or eight other people, and Adam was on the floor thrashing, parts of him man, parts of him wolf. He was…” Gabe swallowed back the bile rising in his throat. “Uh.”

  Mika took his hand and placed it in Todd’s. “Sit with him, I’ll finish this.”

  Gabe sat and Mika, whispering so that Gabe could hardly hear him, finished filling

  Shania in. But Gabe didn’t need to hear it, because he could see every second of it in his mind. Adam, convulsing, his body twisted in ways that shouldn’t have been possible in man or beast. His agonised screams would haunt Gabe forever.

  And Todd, he’d tried to grab Adam, confusion and terror and pain all fucking Todd’s

  head up too. Otherwise, why would he have got close to Adam when he’d looked like some kind of demonic thing? Gabe wasn’t trying to be mean, but he’d never ever seen anything like that, and Todd hadn’t cared, had only wanted to get to Adam…

  Much like shifter mates would, Todd had been thinking only of Adam’s pain and

  suffering. He hadn’t cared about the risk to himself, and so he’d damn near been

  disembowelled. When Adam had realised what he’d done in the split second he was fully man, that was the truly hellish scream that was branded into Gabe’s memory. His ears still rang with it. And who could blame Adam? If Gabe had nearly killed Mika, by accident

  even—because occasionally he was tempted to strangle the man—Gabe would just want to die.

  “We don’t know what happened to make Adam one of us,” Mika was saying. “As far as

  I know, there’s only two ways for a human to become a shifter. Since Todd isn’t a shifter, he couldn’t turn Adam, and there was no exchange of blood and fluids with the Alpha Anax, obviously.”

  “Which leaves Spiegel,” Gabe growled. “I’ll fucking kill him!” Because Adam would

  never ever have consented to fucking someone else, or being fucked by someone else, and the whole biting and exchange of blood and semen? Yeah, a sixty-nine was cheating, and having to bite and be bitten on the cock as you came? Gabe wanted to cover his dick just thinking about it. Adam wouldn’t have done it, which meant… “Spiegel had to have knocked him out and done it. Adam would never have consented, he’d never have cheated on Todd.”

  Gabe was definitely going to kill Spiegel, and that was no joke. God or whoever better help anyone who got in his way.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  So help him, if Zane gave him another shot, Adam was going to find a way to beat his ass! He needed to see Todd, to know…to know he hadn’t killed him. It was a burning in his gut, a buzzing in his head that set his heart to slamming in his chest, the need to see Todd. To touch him, and, oh God, to beg him for forgiveness. If Adam were any type of man, any type of good man, he’d leave Todd after what he’d done to him.

  But Adam couldn’t, even thinking it set off that fucking nightmare of a thing inside him. It scratched and clawed and howled and tore him up from the inside out all over again.

  He couldn’t think of leaving Todd, he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he couldn’t—

  “Adam, Adam, stop.”

  Stop what? Adam snarled as pain ripped through him.

  “Do you need another syringe?”

  Nonononononono! No more! He just needed to see Todd! And he needed the pain to stop so he could do that, find Todd, hold him. He couldn’t be dead, Adam would know if he was.

  He’d die too, the ache of the loss killing him slow or fast, alone or by his own hand.

  Somewhere inside Adam, a part of him whimpered at his need. He’d loved Todd more than life for years now, but this, this was a new industrial-strength version of that love. As if, it’d always been there, hidden under a filmy layer of glass, but now that glass was clean or broken or just…just whatever, and the emotion was clearer, sharper, more intense. Todd truly was his other half, and Adam had hurt him, badly.

  “Give me another one.”

  “No!” Adam roared, the single word tearing out of him, burning his throat.

  “It’s for your own good, Adam.”

  He knew that voice. Adam blinked through the haze of red-tinged pain to see silver—

  grey eyes. Zane. Zane with his creepy pale eyes. If he weren’t miserable, if Zane weren’t the one knocking him out, Adam might be more charitable.

  “Todd…” Adam begged.

  Zane moved out of sight for a moment then was back, peering at Adam. “Todd’s going

  to be all right. He was…” Zane paused, glanced away. “Hurt pretty badly. He’ll be all right, though,” he reiterated. “You need to calm down. This constant shifting, the partial shifting—

  I don’t know what is happening to you. I’ve never seen someone turned, not like this. With Gabe it was a simple matter of sex and blood from his mate and blood from his Alpha Anax.

  I don’t understand how you’ve become a shifter.”

  Oh fuck. Fuck! Adam’s lungs froze up as fear flooded his mind. He didn’t want to be a shifter, he wanted to be a man, who loved his partner dearly and would grow old with him and, God damn it, Adam worked on animals, he didn’t want to be one!

  He was utterly terrified.

  The needle pierced his skin and he hardly noticed it until the unnatural sleep grabbed at him with icy fingers. And Adam screamed at the realisation that he was still being kept from Todd.

  Gabe didn’t give a flying fuck if Maarten and Aidan and the whole goddamned shifter

  hierarchy was in that office fighting and yelling, that office was also where Dr Spiegel was and Gabe was going to go in there and beat some answers out of the fucker. Normally he wasn’t violent, didn’t think it was the way to handle most situations.

  But this wasn’t a normal situation at all. His friends had been hurt, Todd almost dying because Adam had gone all shifter-batshit crazy. And Adam wasn’t even shifting right! But, beside that, he knew, he knew Adam wouldn’t have consented to being changed, especially not when it would have involved sexual intercourse with someone else. Adam loved Todd, that true, forever kind of love—like him and Mika. And the other mated pairs. That kind of love. So no way would Adam have screwed around, which meant Spiegel did something.

  Maybe he knocked Adam out or…

  But Adam hadn’t been in his office very long. Gabe stopped a few feet from the door, frowning and trying to block out all the yelling. Hadn’t Spiegel gone to Adam and Todd’s room? And wasn
’t Todd in there at the time?

  What. The. Hell?

  Gabe couldn’t put all the pieces together. All he knew was, Adam had been a human.

  Now he wasn’t, and Todd had nearly died because of it. Was there some sort of recessive shifter gene or something? Would they know if there was?

  Hell, this was so confusing! A loud screech made his brain throb and Gabe started for the door hiding all the chaos from him.

  “Wait.”

  Oh hell’s bells on a banana, Gabe knew that voice. He stopped and looked at the other end of the hall to where, sure enough, Marcus Criswell stood. “Hey, it’s the Grand Poobah,”

  he joked, but his heart wasn’t in it. “What are you doing here? I thought you weren’t supposed to be in this place since there’s been a coup and crazy shit and—” Gabe felt a spurt of happiness despite all the awful shit that was going on. “Nathan!”

  Nathan, gorgeous redhead that he was, looked fabulous with his hair pulled back in a severe braid and his tight, firm body displayed in some kind of Spandex-cotton-mix-looking pants and a long-sleeved shirt that fit him like a second skin. The deep green colour set off his pale complexion and eyes beautifully. If Gabe didn’t love the guy he’d be so envious he’d hate him. As it was, he was just really, really happy to see Nathan.

  Nathan hugged him hard enough that Gabe thought he was going to snap in two. “We

  had to come. Marcus and I consider you and Mika to be more than just pack members, y’all are family to us. And your friends, they’re important because of that. Add to it the total weird factor of, what the fuck happened? And Aidan wanting to kill a few people? There’re lots of reasons we came.”

  “Exactly.” Marcus, freaking giant that he was, hugged them both and Gabe nearly

  popped out a lung. “I’m thinking Aidan is in the office here?”

  “Like you really had to ask?” Gabe said right after Aidan yelled a string of curse words.