“No. But they’re waiting outside for us.” I plastered on a smile. “Look, you probably have a lot of questions. That’s why I’m here… I’m going to help you make sense of all of this. But the important thing to know is that those monsters can’t hurt you anymore.”
“Hurt me?” The girl finally slid around the edge of the counter, pushing herself to her feet. Her face was fuller than inthe photo on the missing person flyer. Her hair was noticeably thicker and…
I paused.
There through her brunette curls—a bite mark at the base of her neck.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
Her hand shot up to cover the bite, and a smile slithered onto her face. “Oh no? You said you’re here to help me. But you’ve ruined everything.” She pointed behind me. “You killed my pack.”
“Your family is worried about—”
“My pack was my family.”
My shoulders sagged, her words heavy and wrong. “I can’t save you if you talk like that,” I said lowly.
She laughed as if possessed by a demon of the Moon Goddess, but tears filled her eyes. “You can’t save me. You—”
A bullet went straight through her forehead, the force of it propelling her back until her body crashed onto the floor in a lifeless heap.
Footsteps sounded from behind me, marking the end of our five minutes.
“Joey.” Agent Hill pushed past me, dropping to his knees and immediately checking the girl for a pulse. His gaze darted to my face, then to the gun I still held in my hand. “What happened?”
“Look at the other side of her neck.”
Agent Hill reached over the dead girl, brushing her curls to the side, and he groaned once he found the bite.
“There was nothing we could’ve done.”
He shook his head, holstering his gun slowly, as if a million thoughts ran through his head. “You don’t know that,” he grated out.
“You see the bite mark, don’t you?”
Hill’s head snapped to where I stood. “She wasn’t a werewolfyet, Joey. We could’ve tried saving her.”
My eyes drifted to the body on the floor.
The poor agent was pathetically hopeful. He rose with his shoulders back and arms loose at his sides. “Li’s reopened blood studies—”
“Transfusions?” I scoffed. Transfusions as a cure for lycanthropy and vampirism were as delusional as Dorothy’s trust in the wizard. The victims were never strong enough. The science was never magical enough. “That’show you planned to fix that?” I gestured toward the body with my gun. “It’s a curse. Not a fucking disease.”
Hill didn’t shrink in the face of my objections. He’d probably heard them countless times before—from people not brainwashed by the Bureau’s bullshit.
“The full moon is in two days, Agent. She was going to change. And I could not let—”
All the strength in my hand disappeared, and my gun clanged on the floor. Hill’s head snapped toward the sound.
He looked up from the gun. “Are you okay?”
A searing pain shot up my arm, making stars dance before my eyes.
I thought I’d be able to hold back my scream, but it was too late. I was already crying.
Hill rushed to me right as I dropped to the floor. “What’s wrong, Joey? Hey, answer me. What’s wrong?”
“My… right… arm,” I stammered.
