“He won’t think that, Carol. He’s a pack leader. His place is with his pack. He’ll want to be there in case this hits his people. His sister and his aunt are there. Family takes priority. You wait. If one case of this sickness hits Green Valley, he’ll want to drag you back there pronto.”

She finished with her patient and was about to reply that Ryan wouldn’t be that way when Nurse Charlotte came in for her work shift. Jake accompanied her, but Ryan wasn’t with them.

Carol had a bad feeling about that.

Charlotte sighed heavily. “Looks like we have an epidemic of our kind getting sick and then not being able to shift back to their human forms. Now the humans think the wolves are invading Silver Town and the surrounding area. So they’re taking up guns to get rid of the menace.”

Jake shook his head. “Five men have already been arrested and thrown in the slammer. One said something about Darien being a wolf lover, and Darien just smiled in a sinister way. None have lawyers, so the court will appoint them.” Jake gave an evil smile.

“All werewolf lawyers. They’ll get the maximum fine—$20,000—five years suspended hunting license, and sixty days in jail for harassing wildlife on private property, carrying loaded weapons in a vehicle without a permit, firing across a road, and anything else witnesses will attest to.”

“Lupus garou witnesses,” Carol said, half commenting, half questioning.

“Exactly. Silver Town is werewolf run, and we plan to keep it that way.”

Carol chewed on her bottom lip and rubbed her arms. “Someone needs to take care of Doc Weber and watch him around the clock.”

“I’ll do it,” Charlotte said. “You run along now. My shift. You’ve already worked yours and more hours than you ought to have.”

“Thanks, Charlotte. Hopefully you’ll have a quiet night.” Carol left the hospital with Jake, flanked by Mervin and Christian. She expected Ryan to be waiting outside the operating room, but he wasn’t.

“Where’s Ryan?”

“He and the sheriff had to question Marilee and Becky at the bed and breakfast,” Jake said as he walked her to his truck. “When I called Bertha to learn if the women’s pack members were sick, she said a man had infected the two women to get back at Darien. Only now the man won’t give them the cure. This isn’t just a normal virus.”

“It’s not just a mutation of some sort that affects our people?” Carol’s head spun with the ramifications. “Some sick bastard bioengineered this?”

“Yeah, and then Miller gave it to them to infect our pack. Connor paid the lupus garou scientist to come up with the plague. Becky and Marilee wanted to start their own businesses, and Connor was going to give them a hefty sum for carrying the plague to our gathering. The only satisfaction any of us have is that Connor and some of his pack have come down with it. The women will have the same trouble dealing with it.”

Ryan drove into the parking lot, parked next to Jake’s vehicle, and hurried out of his truck. His jaw was hard, his eyes dark. The news wasn’t good.

“Did the scientist make a vaccine?” Carol asked both Jake and Ryan.

“That’s what we’re trying to learn.” Ryan hauled her close and held her tight as if he’d been away for eons. He brushed her cheek with his lips and then said to Jake, “We’re headed back to the house.”

Jake had an odd look on his face and didn’t move toward his own truck to follow them.

“Jake?” Carol said.

He frowned at her. “You saw me shift and not be able to change back.”

He finally seemed to believe her. “Maybe I’m wrong,” Carol said. “Maybe I just see you shift, but like everyone keeps reminding me, I don’t see the end result. That you shift back.”

But Jake’s expression remained dark.

She patted his arm. “We’ll find a vaccine. And a cure.”

“And this damned Miller,” Ryan said, hauling Carol into the truck. “See you at Darien’s place.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Jake said.

As soon as they were on the road, Carol said to Ryan, “I wish I hadn’t told Jake what I’d seen.”

Ryan shook his head and tugged her close. “We’ll get this under control.”

But behind his words she was certain she heard the worry that they might not.

“Darien’s going to be pissed about us mating when we didn’t say anything to him about it beforehand.”

Ryan let out his breath, wanting Carol away from this nightmare immediately. “Even more so when I tell him that you’re coming home with me tonight.”

She looked up at Ryan as if he’d lost his mind, and he knew as soon as she did that she wasn’t going to agree with his plan. But he had his own pack and his own place. Staying as a guest at Darien’s wasn’t in the plans. He had to investigate Connor and Miller’s hideout, but he thought that if Carol was with his pack, Connor and North and the rest of them would never learn of her whereabouts and she’d be safer.

“I want to take you home with me,” he said, a little more amenable this time. He hadn’t even considered she might object.

“I have to stay and figure out a way to cure this. Unless you have a doctor in Green Valley who might have some idea of what to do.”

He sure wished he did. If the doctor had been a lupus garou, he might have helped. But as a human, he couldn’t.

“No, Carol, he’s human.”

“Human?” She said it like the man was an alien just arrived from another planet when she’d been strictly human herself not that long ago.

“We can’t allow him to learn what we are.” Ryan was unsure why the fact the doctor was human distressed her. Unless she’d had high hopes he could help with this.

“You didn’t see Doc Mitchell change in a premonition, did you, Carol?”

Chapter 25

CAROL SIGHED DEEPLY AND RESTED HER HEAD AGAINST Ryan’s shoulder as the truck rumbled toward Darien’s house. She was tired, but this virus had to be stopped and the effects counteracted.

“No, I haven’t seen any visions of Doc Mitchell.” Carol wished she had—anything to know what had happened to him. She snuggled closer to Ryan, feeling more chilled by the situation they were in than by the weather.

“But the way the doc disappeared makes me surmise that either North and his men kidnapped him, thinking that he might be able to help with their medical problem, or he shifted, ran off, and was unable to change back. If North and his newly formed pack came down with this before we did, I need to interview them.”

Ryan stiffened beside her. “You can learn what you have to over the phone. You’re not meeting any of North’s people face-to-face. I’ll be leading a force to learn their whereabouts, the lab they’ve been using— and hopefully find a vaccine.”

She tapped her fingers on her lap. “It’s remotely possible our people could eventually change back on their own.”

“But that most likely would mean only a few like Lelandi, who is a royal, could avoid shifting during any phase of the moon.”

“What if…” Carol’s eyes brightened. “What if when the new moon appears, the condition vanishes? Those of us who aren’t royals can’t maintain our wolf forms. So what if the condition ceased to exist?”

“Maybe. But the first full moon made its appearance this morning. The three-quarter moon appears in the morning nine days later, and the new moon, eight days after that in the evening. That’s a long time to wait to see if we make it out of this on our own.”

Surprised he’d know the exact timing of the phases of the moon, she raised her brows.

He shrugged. “I’d considered the moon’s phases might knock out this anomaly, so I checked the timing of the phases for Colorado for this month.”

“Hmph, you could have told me you’d already thought of it.”

He rubbed her arm. “You haven’t been a werewolf long enough to think in those terms all the time. So what happens if half our pack or more can’t keep from shifting while we wait about seventeen days for the new moon to appear? What if the town is no longer run by the werewolf kind? And humans decide to take over? Worse, what if those who are stuck in their wolf shapes are still unable to shift back when the new moon appears?”

Ryan’s phone rang, and he saw it was his assistant mayor. “Yeah, Grandbury?”

“Your admin assistant is fine. Ingrid had already shifted and changed back. She knocked out whatever ailed her—she suspected food poisoning and that whatever she ate could be more easily tolerated by her wolf’s stomach—and she returned to work. She didn’t want me to tell you in case she shouldn’t have shifted, per your orders. But she didn’t get word until it was too late.”

“Thanks. I’ll check on her shortly.” Vastly relieved, Ryan put away his cell phone. “My admin assistant was sick, shifted, knocked out what appeared to be food poisoning, and shifted back to her human self,” he told Carol.

She relaxed against him.

“We may have an isolated case of this virus here in Silver Town. Which probably means that Connor and his bunch did engineer this sickness and brought it specifically to Darien’s people.”

“Thank goodness. If we can immunize enough people in the area—it’s called ‘herd immunity,’ in our case the term ‘pack immunity’ suits us better—we could stop the spread of the virus. But letting other packs know about a vaccine wouldn’t be easy, would it? Lelandi said that the packs are not very open about where they’re located.”

“Let’s worry later about other packs contracting it.”

“All right. So we need to know who was sick in our pack first.”

“When they were dancing, Mervin said Becky told him she was worried about shifting and not being able to change back. He thought it was a strange thing to say and just figured she’d had some weird nightmares. But the word has spread through the pack that Doc Weber can’t shift back due to this virus, and now she’s really scared.”