“Trey, how’s the wound doing now that you’ve cleaned it?” Saunders asked when she finished.
Trey studied the wound, pressing on the skin around it with his fingers to get some of the blood out. It was darker than it should have been and oozed more than flowed. A putrid smell suddenly filled the SUV, making Lana almost gag. It smelled like something rotting.
Zane howled louder than before. Jerking his right hand away from Lana, he grabbed Trey by the front of his uniform T-shirt. “Cut the fucking thing off,” he begged. “I can’t deal with this. Cut it off!”
When Trey didn’t respond fast enough, Zane released him to claw at the wound, like he thought he could rip his own arm off.
With Brooks’s help, Lana got a grip on the man’s right wrist, yanking his hand to his side. It didn’t help much. Zane was thrashing so hard it was nearly impossible to hold him down. Cursing, Brooks drew his fist back and punched Zane in the jaw so hard she heard at least one bone break. On the upside, it knocked Zane out, which meant he wasn’t fighting them anymore.
“Shit,” Trey muttered. “Doc, this is bad. The poison is rotting the muscles. Everything within a two-inch radius around the wound is black, and it’s starting to spread. What the hell will this stuff do if it reaches his heart?”
“We’re not going to find out,” Saunders said firmly. “You’re going to cut out the necrotic tissue to keep it from spreading.”
Trey looked stricken at the thought. “How much?”
“As much as you have to. Do it quickly before you have to take even more.”
It was the most horrible thing Lana had ever seen, especially since she had to help hold back the skin as Trey removed some of the muscle. When he was done, he leaned over and put his nose near the wound, sniffing it. After a moment, he sat back on his heels. He looked drained.
“I think I got the worst of it,” he told Saunders. “I could try for more, but if I do that, I might as well take the whole arm. I’ve already damaged it beyond the point of repair—even for a werewolf.”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment. “You did what you had to do,” Saunders finally said. “We’ll worry about saving his mobility after we save his life. Get him here as fast as you can. I’ll have a team waiting.”
“We’ll be there in less than five minutes,” Max called out from the front seat.
Trey leaned over again and put his ear to Zane’s chest. “His heart rate is still dropping. That poison must have made it into his bloodstream. I don’t know if he’ll make it five more minutes.”
Lana reached over and took Trey’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “He’s going to make it. We’ll find a way to save his life. I promise.”
“I hope so,” Trey said. “But this was just a flesh wound. What happens the next time we tangle with the hunters and they put a poison bullet through a werewolf’s chest? He or she won’t live more than a couple minutes—if that.”
Lana didn’t say anything. She only prayed it never came to that.
* * *
Lana found Max in the small observation deck overlooking the main operating room in Saunders’s research clinic. He was standing with his arms folded across his chest and his gaze locked on Zane, who was barely visible on the bed below. She wasn’t surprised to find Max here. It’s where he’d been going on and off for the past day and a half since his friend had gotten shot.
Right now, Zane was in an induced hypothermic coma. He was heavily drugged and wrapped in cooling blankets in an effort to slow his heart rate and limit the effects of the poison on his body. He was stable for now, but the longer those toxins were in his bloodstream, the worse it would be for him. Max and the rest of his SWAT team were worried Zane might never be able to use his left arm again, but Lana was more concerned about whether he was even going to survive.
She knew it was hard for Max to see Zane in a hospital bed, unmoving and covered in wires, tubes, and insulated wraps, but it was the only way Dr. Saunders had been able to keep him alive long enough for them to find an antidote to the poison. At least they hoped it would keep Zane alive that long. It was still a race against time, and they’d barely gotten off the starting line so far.
Max turned at the sound of her entrance. “I thought you’d be getting some sleep.”
Lana smiled and walked over to wrap her arms around him, pressing her face against his strong chest and breathing in his scent. It was amazing how much different the world was now that she could smell just about everything. But even with all the scents out there, there was only one that was both calming and energizing at the same time—Max’s. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, and she couldn’t help but think that she might actually be able to live on nothing more than his scent. It had that much of an effect on her.
“There’s no way I could sleep any more than you could,” she said softly against his chest. “I’m not going to sleep until we figure out an antidote for this poison and bring Zane out of his coma.”
She expected Max to complain, but he only squeezed her tighter. He’d stuck close to her ever since they’d brought Zane in yesterday morning, clearly worried. When he wasn’t doing that or checking in on Zane, he was outside, walking the perimeter of the clinic’s property. Lana tried to convince him there was little chance the hunters would find her there, but Max would only nod, then go back out to make another circuit of the area around the clinic, as if he thought the hunters were going to show up any minute.
“Have you made any headway with the antidote?” he asked, stepping back to look down at her hopefully. “Or at least gotten something back from any of your college professors that might help?”
Lana and Dr. Saunders had started working on an antidote for the poison within minutes of getting Zane into his hypothermic coma. A short time later, Lacey and Triana had joined them. As a veterinarian, the tall, willowy Lacey had a good understanding of human anatomy and physiology from her undergrad work. While the dark-haired Triana didn’t have a background in medicine, as a forensic scientist, there was little in the way of lab equipment that she didn’t know how to use. It wasn’t the setting Lana would have chosen when it came to meeting the two women for the first time, but at the moment, it wasn’t about getting to know the other members of her new pack. It was about figuring out where the hunters’ poison had come from and how to get it out of Zane.
Unfortunately, identifying the chemical makeup of the drug had been much more difficult than they’d hoped. Lana and the others had worked straight through the night, trying every test they could think of to figure out the basic structure for the poison, but it was a complicated process, and finding something when you didn’t know where to start looking was hard as hell.
Realizing they needed all the help they could get, Lana had sent every scrap of data they had on the samples to some of her former professors, telling them that a prospective employer had stumbled over this complex chemical formulation and needed help identifying it. She knew her former professors, and few of them could resist a puzzle. Figuring out what this poison was made out of was definitely a conundrum.
In the end, the answer hadn’t come from any of her professors or even Dr. Saunders.
