Exceptions:If a patient knows for a fact that they have been bitten by someone carrying the lyssa virus and a matebond has been formed, they are unlikely to ever experience the active form of LYS-93, due to the antigen produced by the vector at the time of the bite. This antigen can only be produced once in a were’s lifetime. In the case of a matebond and subsequent injection of the antigen, a shifter will never contract the active form of the virus and therefore retain the ability to shift.
ChapterTwenty-Eight
It wasn’tthat Otto hadn’t believed his mate when she told him about lyssa. He believed thatshebelieved it. Clearly something was going on, and since Josephine was a being he’d never seen before, he was forced to accept her explanation — and the danger she warned of — as the truth.
Still, he was a bear.
His kind tended to be hard-headed. Once they got something in their minds, they were loath to change it. They also tended to seek out the simplest answers to their questions. In this case, the simplest answer wasnotthat his mate had a previously deadly disease that would kill his bear once he was infected, but that she was simply something new. They would figure out what that was together, after she was safe.
Otto had been working on their plans for escape for two days. He didn’t want to take Josephine any closer to the front than he had to, but he also knew that he now possessed the intelligence his battalion had been sent to retrieve, making his return to Alliance lands imperative.
Lee Seymour, commander of the Northern Alliance forces and a friend, needed to know what was happening in the Orclind. Someone, probably the Iron Chain, was making a new breed of soldiers to fight in the war and Josephine was the proof they needed.
Once they were reunited with his battalion and the information passed on, Otto would be expected to pull back from the military and be reassigned to the civilian guard. Mated men couldn’t be expected to fight on the front line, after all. Instinct would never allow them to leave their mates and cubs unguarded. Luckily, that same impulse made them perfect for defending towns and cities.
Otto would request a reassignment to somewhere close to the northern border, to the smallest town they could find. He wanted Josephine somewhere quiet and as safe as could be expected in the war. A part of him wished to abscond with her to the Northern Territories, but he worried his mate wouldn’t handle the rugged life well. Certainly, making the journey all the way back to Nuuk to stay with his parents wasn’t an option, either.
His priority was keeping his mate safe. Unfortunately, there were few good options available to him. Certainly Meadow Creek, as he’d recalled the morning of the fourth day in the cell, wasnotsafe.
His memory had come back to him in pieces. The morning of the first day ofstage two,as his mate called it, Otto woke with a jolt against the cold tile floor. As usual, he woke agitated and confused, his instincts in a riot over the fact that his mate was not within reach, but as the fog cleared, his patchwork dreams came back to him.
Standing by a fire in their camp, listening to Rafael and Miles discussing the letters they’d received from their packs.
Sipping the boiled oat water they tried to pass off as a replacement for coffee as he stared bleakly into the flames, wondering what the fuck his life had come to.
Being summoned to the command tent, where Collin, Lee’s second, was stooped over a map. “There’s activity here,” he’d said, pointing to a speck of nothing just on the other side of the Black Hills. “But we don’t know what it is. Looks like a homestead. The hawks have come back saying there’s routine shipments going in and out. We need to know what they’re doing there.”
The dream grew hazy then, filmy like the first frost on a lake, before he was suddenly beneath a hulking orc carrying a battle hammer, fighting to shift but pinned beneath the man’s massive foot in the mud.
He woke up gasping, reaching for Josephine, and upon finding her missing, tore at his chains until reason slowly trickled in alongside the watery light of dawn through the tiny window over his head.
“There’s activity here,”he kept hearing Collin say, over and over, as he regained his bearings.“But we don’t know what it is. Looks like a homestead.”
And then, just as he forced himself up onto his bare feet to stumble toward the toilet, the memory snapped into focus.
Meadow Creek.The name was scrawled in messy handwriting just above that tiny speck on the map.
They weren’t simply close to the front. They were his battalion’starget.
Otto had spent every moment after that revelation frantically debating the best course of action. He knew that he’d been in the cell for a handful of days. In all likelihood, his men were already within spitting distance of the homestead, creeping across the border in their shifted forms to avoid detection.
This was good and bad.
On one hand, it was a relief to know that at any moment they would arrive to rescue him. On the other, he worried that they couldn’t wait for that to happen. What if he was still locked up when they arrived? His men would never hurt a woman if she didn’t attack first — particularly a submissive — but Otto had no idea what her madman father would do if backed into a corner.
Would he execute his daughter to save his secrets? Would Josephine get caught in the crossfire?
It wasn’t a risk he could take.
So when she arrived, escorted by the lean-cheeked creature who looked at her like he wanted to get his spidery hands under her skirt, Otto decided they would go ahead with their plan to escape in the night. His keen ears had picked up his one-sided conversation with Josephine about what he expected from her, how he would have her in his bed soon enough. He heard itall.It took every last wisp of his restraint to keep from snapping his teeth at the witch.
The bear wanted to challenge him. The bear wanted to feel the crunch of his weak little bones between his jaws. The bear wanted to pull out the bloody ropes of his intestines through his fuckingmouth.
But he couldn’t. Not yet. Otto wanted nothing more than to wring Harrod’s head from his scrawny neck, but avenging his mate came second to making sure she was safe.
Otto inspected the breakfast Josephine had delivered, noting with a smile that she’d apparently snuck him a far greater portion than normal. He decided that, should his men not take care of things, would simply have to return to handle Harrod and her father.
Finding the keys tucked into the blankets made him grin with unvarnished pride.My brave mate,he thought, burying his nose in the blankets that carried her earthy, luscious scent.We’ll be free soon.
