Page 76 of Hunter Moon

“What?” I demanded.

“Aconite.”

I blinked. That must be bad, even the sounds of the word all sharp and threatening. “Okay, for the laypeople.” Clearly, there was something on or in the bullet that’d hurt Aspen, but I wasn’t a warrior. I definitely wasn’t a chemist. And my wolf, gasping for air and frantic, needed to understand why our mate was so hurt.

“Wolfsbane,” Skye said, his pale face even paler.

“He’ll be fine,” Linden insisted gruffly. “A small amount, in a limb—won’t keep him down forever. But we need to flush the wound, close it, get him on a drip.”

And the best thing I could do then was rub Aspen’s ears and be glad he hadn’t shifted back. Everyone knew that was a shifter’s last resort. Your body couldn’t heal, it convulsed, forced the change because there was nothing else for it to try.

So long as Aspen was in control of the shift, I had to believe he was going to be okay.

49

Aspen

It was one of those idle fancies that a guy sometimes has, when his job regularly takes him into danger—how he’d like to die.

This, ironically, was exactly what I’d always pictured.

I mean, if I had to die, it was going to be because of violence, obviously. So I might as well die in Brook’s arms, while he talked to me.

How fucking selfish was that? What gave me the right to further traumatize Brook with my death?

Besides, assuming I was going to die of a single bullet wound to the leg, even a poisoned one, was an overreaction. It was painful, and I still couldn’t feel most of my leg, but the numbness wasn’t spreading, and I wasn’t getting worse. I wasn’t throwing up, and I’d had that reaction to aconite before, so I knew it wasn’t life-threatening.

There were some benefits to being an alpha, after all. We were the ones people wrote all those “terrifying wolf-man” stories about, where we healed practically instantly and literally ripped limbs off people. Not that I’d made a habit of ripping people’s limbs off.

They dragged me into the clinic, laying me on one of the beds inside, Brook still plastered to my side, telling me about the things that we were going to do. About home and family and pack and our future.

A tiny part of me felt bad for making him worry.

No, I knew that my being shot was more important than the temporary discomfort of having to worry about me, but still, I’d caused Brook enough pain to last a lifetime. Adding any more to the total was just adding to the debt of happiness I owed him.

Fortunately for all of us, I was not dying, and never leaving again, so I’d have plenty of time to chip away at that mountain of debt.

My eyes drifted closed of their own accord, and I slipped into a technicolor world of daisy tattoos and aspen trees and dozens of adorable pack babies, like the freaking werewolf Brady Bunch.

When I woke, it was to the smell of food. Beef and tomatoes and something else delicious. I lifted my head to find Brook still sitting beside me, giving me a purse-lipped look that fell somewhere between relief and exasperation.

“Seriously? You sleep all morning, but then we get food in here, and you’re straight up?” He scoffed and shook his head. “Such an alpha.”

“Here now, I resemble that remark,” Lin protested, coming into view from my other side, concerned face peering down at me. “Feeling better?”

I whuffed, stretching out my neck and scanning the area for where the food smell was coming from, but finally gave up, sighing. If I wanted to tell them I was okay, and more importantly, if I wanted food, I was going to have to shift.

If I wanted to warn the alpha that danger was coming.

I stretched, trying to get a feel for how bad it was going to be. The numbness from the aconite was mostly gone, leaving only the ache of a healing bullet wound. It wasn’t so bad.

I let the wolf recede, and unlike the last time I’d shifted back, it didn’t try to cling at all, simply let go, slipping inside and leaving me naked and panting on the clinic bed.

Linden pulled the thin clinic blanket over me, only pausing to inspect my wound for a moment. “That’s looking a lot better already. How do you feel?”

Only Lin would worry about me before the threat. The one thing I might have been better at, if I’d become pack alpha, and it was the thing that would have made me an asshole. “Campers in the woods again. Not real campers. Shot me. It’s not a fluke, Lin. They were doing recon. Testing boundaries.”

“Did you recognize them?” His whole body had gone tense, eyes boring holes into me like he might be able to see my memories if he stared hard enough.

---