Page 6 of Strawberry Moon

4

Archer

The Grovetown clinic was like a holdover from the fifties, with its outdated furnishings and linoleum floor, but it had clearly been updated at some point, since the actual medical equipment was modern and high quality. The lab Alpha Grove had made for Dante was even better—the best, newest equipment money could buy.

I imagined some people would think it a waste, since the only person using it was Dante, a twenty-year-old with less than half a degree, but they would have been missing the point. Dante? Was a genius.

I was good in a lab. I’d been exceptionally well trained, and I knew all the equipment inside and out. But where I was a workhorse, Dante was an artist. He was one of the people who should have been sent to college instead of me, doubtless. He had already been the one to prove definitively—to me, at least—that Sterling was at fault for the poison causing the Condition. With more training and all the equipment Linden had bought him, I thought maybe he could work miracles.

He and his husband were planning to finish college, and I planned to do anything in my power to make sure they could. Not that they needed me—they had the Groves, just as good as any billionaire and twice as loving.

Dante was reading my research on his tablet, bought by Alpha Grove, no doubt, while Linden and Skye looked at the samples. Skye kept biting his lip, his blue eyes bright and excited behind his glasses. Linden, unfortunately, kept making faces.

Not, like, rude faces or anything, but like “oh wow that smells terrible” faces. And frankly, even if I could make synthetic pheromones work, I didn’t think they’d do much if the alphas who needed them couldn’t stand the smell of them.

I sighed and made a mark in my notes. “Which one was that?”

“Fourteen,” Linden answered, rubbing his nose. “It smells a little like melted plastic and flowers. Sorry, Archer.”

I waved him off. “Nothing to be sorry for. We’ve got to find a way to make it palatable to alpha noses, or it’ll never work. Even if we can make it, you know, work.” I glanced over at Dante, still scouring my pages and pages of notes, intent on the tablet. “Which we don’t know yet.”

Linden nodded and set the sample back in its spot. “Between the two of you? I’m sure you can do it. You’re the smartest wolves I know.”

That squirming mass of instincts in my chest surged up, thrilled and excited andalpha loves us, and I ruthlessly shoved it back down. I didn’t dislike werewolves like my damned grandfather. I was one, and that was fine.

But I needed to be completely in control of myself. I was still Archer, winner of the Virginia state spelling bee at age twelve, not some wild wolf who went around peeing on trees to claim them as his own. I didn’t have time for wolf instincts.

Linden was reaching for the next sample when there was a screech in the parking lot, brakes hit just a little too hard. Everyone in the room perked up and turned to stare at the door.

My exceptional omega ears picked up a few words, but Skye must have heard better than I did, because he sucked in a worried breath between his teeth. “Ford flipped the tractor.”

And with that, the whole atmosphere of the clinic changed. Dante and I didn’t move, but Linden and Skye went into emergency mode, and despite knowing Skye was excellent in an emergency—I’d be dead otherwise, after all—it was impressive to watch as they turned from excited onlookers helping Dante and I with our research to doctor and his assistant, ready for the emergency they faced.

The emergency, as it happened, almost made me sick.

Three men came stumbling into the clinic, two of them bracketing a third, who I normally would have taken a long, slow pan up and down. He was blond and handsome, with skin browned by the sun and hair bleached by it. His strong jaw was clenched in pain and... his leg was, well, shredded would have been a kind way to put it. It was broken badly, white bone visible through the bloody tear in his jeans, little bits of grass clinging everywhere, even right to the wound.

My gorge rose at the sight, and somehow, Dante knew how much it was bothering me, and stepped between us, even as Linden proclaimed it “not that bad,” and told them to get Ford up onto bed number two.

I was considering peeking around Dante to get another look at the exceptionally handsome, if exhausted-looking, man with the injured leg, when something occurred to me.

Pheromones.

That was how Dante knew I’d been horrified. I was an omega in distress, and he smelled it. Dammit, this was a chance for research, and I was letting my libido get in the way. I whipped out my notes, grabbing for a pen from Linden’s desk and leaning forward to whisper, “What does it smell like?” to Dante.

He turned a curious eye on me. “Blood?”

“No,” I waved that away. “Me, my distress. You smelled it and were bothered.”

Understanding dawned on his face, and he nodded, then stopped to consider for a moment before whispering an answer. “Bitter. Like... like something that should be sweet turned sour and wrong. It makes a difference that you know in your heart what it’s supposed to smell like.”

Interesting. Also, it was a good thing that omega distress pheromones weren’t what we were trying to synthesize, because I had no idea how to make something smell familiar-but-wrong. Familiar was hard enough all by itself, and I’d been too damn focused on the actual chemical make-up of the pheromones.

Instinctively, as I often did when thinking about pheromones, I took a long deep breath, and was smacked in the face with...

What the hell was that?

I mean, yeah, there was blood and grass and more blood, and the bitter-acrid scents I was beginning to recognize as pain and worry.

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