Wallace threw a quick glance at his wife. Whatever he saw on her face must have hurt because his rage-filled demeanor slipped for a moment. But it came right back, and he looked angrier than ever.
“You think I give a shit what they think of me?” he shouted, pressing his weapon harder against his son’s head.
Tears of pain sprang into the boy’s eyes, but Terence didn’t utter so much as a whimper. Instead, he kept his gaze on Max, as if he believed Max would save him.
“Somewhere inside you, I think you do care,” Max told Wallace. “Else why bother to go to all the effort of getting them back?”
As Max spoke, the cops outside the house moved closer until they were at the broken windows, their weapons pointed at Wallace from a dozen different directions. The laser sights on Mike’s and Diego’s M4’s were little red dots on the side of Wallace’s head, and it was hard to believe the man didn’t see them out of the corner of his eye.
Maybe he did. Maybe that was the reason his face suddenly hardened. Or it might have been the simple fact that Max’s words had finally gotten through to him and he’d realized he’d lost the only thing that should have mattered to him—his family.
Regardless, the man’s heart rate spiked and his finger tightened on the trigger, slowly pulling it.
Max lunged forward, slamming into Terence and ripping him out of Wallace’s arms. He twisted in midair, so his body was between the boy and the barrel of the gun. He expected to hear the report of the gun going off followed by a bullet in his back, but as he hit the ground with his arms wrapped protectively around Terence, all he heard was the mad shuffle of feet as Mike, Diego, and the rest of the police moved in, shouting for Wallace to drop his weapon.
Max drew his own weapon, his body still shielding the boy, praying it was over and that they’d disarmed Wallace already. Instead, he caught sight of the man backing away with the barrel of the auto planted firmly under his chin, his eyes locked on his wife as he ignored the police ordering him to put down his weapon.
Max expected Wallace to say something, to blame everything on his wife and kids. Instead, he simply pulled the trigger. The weapon wasn’t very big, but it was big enough to make a mess, and Max quickly moved to shield Terence—not from injury, but from seeing his father die like that.
He was only partially successful. Terence had still seen enough, and his sisters had seen even more. No one moved. Then Terence, Nina, Natasha, and their mother were all in his arms, crying hysterically.
All Max could do was hold them and let them cry. Thankfully, one of the uniformed cops got a sheet from one of the beds and covered Wallace’s body, but there was only so much it could cover. No matter what was hidden now, the memories never could be. Max knew that all too well.
Sensing someone, Max looked up and saw Coletti standing there. Wordlessly, the detective sat down on the floor beside him and helped comfort the Wallace family even as he gave Max a nod of approval.
Max nodded in return. This hadn’t turned out the way he’d hoped. A father was dead, and that was going to take a long time for this family to get over. But Max had saved a woman and her kids, and at the moment, that felt like enough.
Chapter 14
“Any progress yet?” Megan Dorsey asked as she and Lana stepped out the main doors of the clinic into the cool night air.
Lana had been hoping for a few moments alone, but the moment the petite, dark-haired werewolf spotted her heading for the exit, she fell into step beside her. Then again, Lana had promised Max she wouldn’t go outside by herself. Besides Megan, she had the added protection of Jayna and the other werewolves, who were patrolling the perimeter of the property. While Lana couldn’t see any of them, she could smell them moving around among the trees.
“Quite a bit, actually,” Lana said. “We’ve been working all day on several different approaches to developing an antidote, and Dr. Saunders finally thinks we may have something that could work.”
Megan stopped to look at her, excitement evident on her face. “Is the doctor giving it to Zane now?”
Lana ran her hand through her hair. She wished it were that simple. “We can’t try it yet. Not until we do some additional testing to make sure there aren’t any unintended side effects of the antidote that’s worse than the poison itself.”
Megan’s brow furrowed. “Does Zane have time for that?”
“Probably not. But what choice do we have?” Lana wrapped her arms around her middle with a sigh. “If we give him an untested drug, we’re as likely to kill him as save him. Especially in his weakened state.”
Megan didn’t say anything to that, and they both stood there quietly, staring off into the darkness beyond the clinic. Lana used the quiet moment to take a few deep breaths, trying to get herself to relax. She didn’t know why, but she’d been feeling twitchy for the past hour, and it had nothing to do with the pressure to find an antidote for Zane. She wished she could call Max and talk to him, but she didn’t want to bother him. She had called her mother a few times to check on her dad, though. The doctors were still keeping her father in a coma, but he was stable. That was something at least.
“So, what will you do next?” Megan asked after a few minutes. “With Zane, I mean.”
“We’ll work on the chemical analyses throughout the night,” Lana said, though she didn’t know how they were going to compress all the normal drug-testing protocols she’d learned in school into the shortest possible time. “Then we’ll start running computer simulations of cellular interactions in the morning. Even with every computer in the building working on it, that could take a while. On top of that, we’ll need to find a few werewolves willing to serve as volunteers for low-dosage trials to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
“I’ll do it,” Megan said without hesitation.
Lana blinked, a little taken aback at Megan’s willingness to face a risk she probably didn’t even understand.
“Megan, this could be dangerous,” she said. “Even if it doesn’t cause an immediate reaction, there could be long-term effects we don’t know anything about. Even Dr. Saunders—who’s studied werewolves for a long time—can’t tell us what these kinds of drugs will do a few years down the road.”
Megan nodded. “I know that, but I’ll still do it. And there are a lot of other werewolves who will volunteer along with me. Everyone in Dallas knows what’s at stake here when it comes to finding an antidote to this poison and helping Zane. We need a way to protect ourselves from this new weapon, and we need to keep the SWAT Pack strong. They’re the only thing standing between us and the hunters.”
