My gaze flicked up to the blue-eyed stare of the man from the bar. My stalker with a girl problem.
“Brayden?” I asked, confused. Maybe this was part of my hallucination.
“You know him?” My mom sounded impressed. “Doctor, please help us. She’s got a fever and has slept over twenty-four hours. She’s acting strange and—”
“I’ve got this, Gracie,” he told the woman at the desk. “Right this way,” he said to me, and then he caught me by the elbow and steered us away from the sign-in desk and towards the side hallway.
He really was a doctor? The possessive hot guy from the bar was a local doctor? My mind couldn’t process this.
The walls started to blur as dizziness washed over me, and I pitched forward.
“Averly!” my mom yelled.
Two strong arms wrapped around my shoulders and then behind my knees, and the next thing I knew I was being cradled in Brayden’s strong arms. It felt good to be carried—it was embarrassing, but I was so tired it felt nice to not have to walk right now.
“This way,” a female voice called out to my right, and suddenly a nurse joined us. A door opened and I lost consciousness for a second. Everything just went black, and when I came to I was inside of a small room on top of an examination table. Brayden had laid me down and was now looking at a woman who I assumed was the nurse, though she wasn’t dressed like one. She wore knee-high boots over fishnet stockings and a black leather corset.
What kind of hospital is this?
“Please explain to the mother what’s going on,” Brayden said, and his eyes flashed yellow.
Whoa.
The girl nodded, her long cotton candy pink hair shaking around her shoulders. “Come with me, ma’am.” She placed a hand on my mom’s shoulder and a blue light emanated from her palm.
What the hell?
“What was that!?” I yelped. “Mom! Mom, don’t go with her.”
The girl steered my mom out of the room, whispering something into her ear with her glowing blue palm on my mother’s shoulder and my mom never turned around to look back at me.
A pit sank in my stomach and I reached out to grasp the lapels of Brayden’s white lab coat with what little strength I had left. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you hurt my mother, I will skin youalive,” I growled for good measure.
He nodded. “I will protect her as if she were my own.”
His sincere response shocked me; my hands went limp and fell to the bed as a sob ripped from my throat. The fever had officially given way to pain. “What’s happening to me? I feel so weak, so tired, so confused.”
Blackness started to creep at the edges of my vision, and Brayden placed a hand to my forehead. “Your old self is dying. When you awaken, you will be born anew.”
What the cryptic hell did that mean?
The door opened and my blurry gaze flicked to the entryway hoping to see my mom. Instead it was a blonde chick, the same one he’d been arguing with under the streetlight the other night at the Rusty Spoon.
“They’ll come for her,” Blondie said.
“She’smine,” Brayden growled, and small patches of fur rippled down his neck.
I gasped, too weak to try and run. “What are you?”
“Is she really worth it?” the blonde girl asked. “Do you really think it’s her? After all this time?”
Brayden gave her a look that I couldn’t see, but it must have been scary because she immediately dipped her head in submission and focused on the ground.
Blondie softened her voice. “If she is who you think, she’ll be even more valuable and Silas will try to claim her.”
Brayden’s voice was more animal than human. “I made her. She’smine.”
I made her?My delusional mind tried to follow the conversation.
