When Carter heard the knock at Hadley’s office door, there’d been no reason to assume it was anyone other than the food delivery driver. After all, the app on his phone had just pinged the guy’s arrival outside the office complex. And when he’d glanced out the window beside the door, he’d seen a twenty-something guy standing there holding a takeout bag from the restaurant.
He’d barely opened the door when he picked up a slightly familiar muddled scent and by then it was too late to do anything more than jerk back as the guy grabbed his arm. His claws and fangs were sliding out even as he realized it was Strickland charging at him through the now-open doorway, not some delivery guy.
But the moment Carter lunged at him, the move turned into a clumsy stumble, his claws retracting on their own. He tried to understand what had happened to them, only to realize his head was too fuzzy to reason clearly.
That was when Kamden’s words echoed in his head about skinwalkers being able to sedate victims to keep them under control and docile. And yeah, he was definitely docile.
With Strickland there and Hadley a few feet away, Carter’s inner omega should have been absolutely clawing his way out. Yet his wolf half was strangely quiet like it wasn’t interested in any of this. Not even when Strickland grabbed hold of his arm and half carried, half dragged him down the hallway. Carter weighed two hundred and twenty pounds and Strickland wasn’t even breaking a sweat. If Carter hadn’t been so out of it, he would have been alarmed.
When they reached the end of the hallway, Strickland shoved Carter through an unmarked door into a small, dark room, dumping him unceremoniously on the floor.
“I was just going to stun you and feed you to my spawn, but then I realized you’re one of those filthy werewolves—the screwed-up kind—and decided against it,” Strickland whispered, leaning over so that the light from the hallway barely illuminated his face. “I can’t imagine what it would do to my spawn if they ate you.”
Questions raced through Carter’s addled mind, starting with how Strickland knew he was an omega werewolf, assuming that’s what he’d meant by the screwed-up kind. He also wanted to know what Strickland intended to do with him if he wasn’t going to feed him to his spawn. Finally—and most importantly—what was Strickland planning for Hadley?
“I suppose I could snap your neck, but what’s the fun in that?” Strickland continued, regarding Carter like he was an interesting bug. “So instead, I decided to dose you with enough venom to stop your heart and lungs. The idea of you flailing around for the next fifteen minutes slowly suffocating as the woman you love walks out of the building with me brings a smile to my face.”
Carter glared up at the skinwalker, refusing to believe that Hadley would ever go anywhere with this sicko.
Strickland chuckled. “I know what you’re thinking. That Dr. Delacroix will run the moment she sees me. Unfortunately for her, she won’t recognize me—at least not until later.”
At that, Strickland’s features began to change. Five seconds later, Carter lay on the floor looking up at himself. The sight made his gut clench.
“As you can see, Dr. Delacroix will happily walk out of this building with me,” Strickland said, his words coming out in Carter’s voice. “And you’ll get to live—for a short time, at least—with the knowledge that within the next three or four hours I’m going to kill her, eat every single piece of her, and wear her skin for as long as I want. And there isn’t a damn thing you could do to save her.”
If Carter could have spoken, he would have begged, not for his own life, but for Hadley’s. Speaking was impossible though, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway as Strickland walked out of the closet and slammed the door, the sound seeming to crush his soul.
Taking a deep breath—or at least as deep as Strickland’s venom would allow, Carter tried to wiggle his fingers. When that failed, he tried to move his toes, without any luck. In frustration, he tried to shout, but nothing came out except a raspy groan. He panicked, almost giving into the claustrophobic sensation of being trapped in his own body.
He was just telling himself to relax, knowing he had to somehow get his body to fight through the hold the venom had on him, when he heard Hadley’s voice calling to him.
“Hey, Carter. You ready to get out of here?” she said, her voice muted by at least two doors and a little bit of distance.
Another spike of fear ripped through his gut at the sound of her voice, knowing that Strickland was somewhere nearby waiting to grab her. The fact that he’d be able to do it easily since he was wearing Carter’s face made it that much worse.
Carter practically threw himself into a tantrum as he fought to move his body, to kick the door, knock over a bucket, let loose a shout—anything that would warn Hadley there was something wrong. But nothing worked at all.
He clenched his jaw and struggled to calm down, turning his thoughts inward. Skinwalker venom must be powerful indeed to affect a werewolf so drastically. Werewolves had extremely high metabolic rates. Alcohol burned off too fast to even make it worth the time and money to try and get drunk. And in those cases when someone in the Pack had been drugged with any of the usual run-of-the-mill stuff, it’d run through their system in minutes.
Which was why he was getting more worried by the second as the toxin in his veins continued to keep him paralyzed. What if this stuff was somehow specifically formulated to affect supernaturals more than it should? How long before he couldn’t breathe at all? Before his heart stopped beating?
A few seconds later he heard a door closing and realized that Hadley had left the office and was walking down the hallway toward the exit even now. He had to get to her. But unfortunately, he didn’t know how he was going to do that.
Not without some help.
Having no other option when it came to where that help would come from, Carter reached out for his inner omega. Everything he’d tried over the last few minutes had failed, so he prayed his wolf might come at it a different way.
Carter would have laughed out loud if he could. After a decade of seeking to keep a wall between him and his omega, now he was purposely trying to connect to that other part of him.
But how?
He attempted to picture the curtain that had always presaged his omega taking over, praying he could wish it into existence. But while he could certainly feel something there between him and his inner wolf, the symbolic curtain remained elusively invisible.
Dammit! he yelled in his head, wishing he could do it out loud. Work with me here. I can’t do this on my own!
Carter didn’t expect his plea to gain him much of anything, so he was surprised when his vision began to go a little gray. Dread set in when he realized it could be the venom doing this and that he was about to pass out.
But it wasn’t the venom. It was the gauzy curtain he’d been begging to see. Of course, now that it was there, Carter was suddenly terrified at the thought of purposely giving over control to his omega. But it turned out that he needn’t have worried, because it appeared that part of him wasn’t interested in being in charge at the moment. The curtain that had always signified an approaching loss of control now held him at bay.
