by DJ Jennings
This one gave off a strange vibe, starting with the security guard at the door.
The armed security guard.
Jack came to an abrupt halt.
“Guns?” The guard was holding an automatic assault rifle.
But that wasn’t the only reason he stopped. Mara. He smelled her. Her fear, her anger, her terror, her disappointment.
He was going mad, wasn’t he?
Travis sighed, his bluish-green eyes troubled. He gave off a surfer dude vibe, but Jack picked up on so much more. His body cast a shadow over the slightly smaller man, and Jack just waited him out. A few more beats passed, the silence filled by the rush of wind against the trees.
Finally, Travis said, “This is where we bring shifters the first time they blow up.”
“Blow up?”
“Shift. We don’t know what they’ll become, and we have to get them safe and secure for the vaccination.”
Jack’s fingers involuntarily went to his thigh. He remembered the sting.
“I understand about the vaccine. It’s brilliant. But what do you mean, ‘blow up’?”
“We can’t know what someone will become. Most of us are wolves, bears, mountain lions, or smaller creatures like weasels, ferrets, raccoons. Once in a while we get a boar, and we have an elephant this week. You ever see a ragingly pissed elephant in a crowd of a few hundred shifters? Not pretty.”
Jack eyed the cabin. It could hold an elephant.
Barely.
“The gun’s to protect everyone else?”
“Right.”
“And someone who just experienced her first shift, ever, is in there?”
He nodded. “Newly vaccinated.”
“Why do you need me?”
“Danielle texted. Asked me to get you.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I assume the woman needs medical attention.”
The front door creaked open. Danielle’s eyes met Travis’s, cool and steady. Then she looked at Jack.
“Hey! Before you go in there, I—”
The scent was overpowering, drawing him into the cabin like a magnet, and he tore past her, desperate, moving with a swiftness that someone his size should not possess.
“JACK!” Danielle shouted.
“Jack?”
Mara’s voice pierced his skull, ripping his eardrums, her scent sinking through his nose, into his lungs, and tearing him up from the inside out.
He followed the sound, hands gripping a doorway to a bedroom where she rested, under the covers, her brow down, her eyes filled with horror. Anger.
Shame.
Why would she feel shame?
“What are you doing here?” they asked each other.
And then Mara fainted, slipping to one side. Jack had no choice.
He had to touch her.
Chapter 21