Big Bad Bite (38 page)

Crash.

There went those inner cage bars that held
his beast.

*****

There were voices arguing again. God, she
could not wait until she was back in her own bed where people were
not allowed to argue. Or interrupt her sleep. How the hell was
anybody supposed to get any rest if everyone around them was
arguing for Christ’s sake? And weren’t hospitals supposed to be
peaceful? All Zen like so you could get your healing mojo out of
it?

An angry male voice snarled, “We have to try
and wake her up! Don’t you get it? HE’S FUCKING GONE! As in
G.O.N.E. Missing for three days! If we don’t try to wake her up now
that she’s more stable, even if we do find him, it won’t matter.
He’ll still think she’s dead. Seeing her alive is the only thing
that’s going to get through to him right now.”

Shit. That sounded like there were serious
problems around. She wondered who had died, and who had gone
apeshit? Cracking open an eyelid, she spied Adam’s beta Clay
standing nose to nose with Logan. What the hell was going on around
here? They were so wrapped up in trying to give each other death
glares that they hadn’t even noticed she’d come to. She opened her
mouth and tried to say something, but her throat was so dry that
all that came out was a strangled croak. At least the frog like
sound had gotten their attention. Two pairs of angry eyes swung her
way, but only her brother’s softened when he saw that she was
awake.

Taking quick steps, he came to the side of
her bed and put a soft hand on her shoulder. “Hey you. No, don’t
try to get up. You need to stay down and get more rest.”

Jenna patted his hand affectionately before
pushing it away so that she could sit up in the bed. Logan huffed
in frustration, seeing that she had absolutely no inclination to do
as he asked, and then pushed the button on the hospital beds remote
to shift the head of it to a sitting position so that she could
rest against it. Just as she was turning her head in Clay’s
direction to ask him to explain what was going on, she found him on
the other side of her bed, hands balled into fists, jaw clenched so
tight it looked as if it could snap in half. There was a struggle
of some sort going on there; only she didn’t understand what it
was. Was he angry at her? He certainly looked mad enough to wring
her neck. Then Clay did something that truly shocked the shit out
of her.

He dropped to his knees, averted his eyes to
the side, and bared his throat in submission to her.

Jenna forced words through a dry throat and
mouth that didn’t want to work, “What are you doing?” She sounded
worse than a frog being strangled, but at least she’d asked what
needed to be said.

Without changing his posture, Clay answered,
“Trusting you to be the kind of Alpha’s mate that the McPhee Pack
needs.”

Her confusion compounded. If she were in the
kind of groggy state of mind one experienced after waking up, she’d
blame it on that. However, that wasn’t the case here. In fact,
besides her extremely sore throat, she was starting to feel better
every second. Doing a quick internal check of herself, she noticed
that it felt like her abilities, the power she drew from to use,
were doubling by the minute, and she was on the fast track to at
least that aspect of her body being back to normal. Her physical
body felt like a different story. Besides her throat, her muscles
felt cramped, stiff and sore, which made no sense to her at all. It
wasn’t as if she’d been out running the Boston Marathon yesterday.
So why did her body feel like it had been put through the perpetual
ringer?

Pulling herself out of her musing, she turned
her head to ask Logan how long she’d been out but stopped when she
saw the look in his eyes. He was trying to stab Clay in the face
using nothing but the powers of his mind, and since he didn’t have
any actual powers of the mind, this level of concentration and open
hostility was kind of vexing to her. She looked back to Clay to see
him in the same prostrate position, utterly unmoved by even a
muscle. Which just seemed wrong to her on so many levels it wasn’t
funny. A wolf as dominant as Clay, a man who would only bow down to
his Alpha, who was Adam, or the Pack Master Davies, just did not
belong on his knees in front of her. It was similar to forcing the
lion to bow in submission to the lamb. Unseemly. And why did it
seem as though the wolf was waiting on pins and needles for
something? Hell, he was barely breathing as he waited in
anticipation for something. Why should he be waiting for anything
if it was to come from her? He should be out dogging Adam if he
needed something.

Which lead her to her next thought; where was
the man he
should
be kneeling in front of? Jenna was anxious
to see Adam. There were vague flashes of memory she knew were from
this hospital room where she’d heard his heart monitor beating, so
she knew he was alive, but he wasn’t here with her. Why? He needed
to be here. She had things that she wanted to say. Apologies to
give him for putting him through hell, by asking him to wait to
claim her as his mate. Promises to make by telling him that she
knew, without a doubt, that she wanted his Mark more than she
wanted her next breath. So where was her mate?

She lifted her nose slightly up to scent the
air, but what little remained of Adam’s unique scent was so old
that she knew he hadn’t been in this room for quite a while. Hadn’t
he stayed with her after he’d woken up? Why would he leave her and
not come back to visit?

She turned back to Clay and growled, “Where
is Adam?”

He sighed in relief. It was the only movement
his body made as he still held himself in rigid formality on his
knees. Apparently that was what he’d been waiting for. “He
disappeared three days ago.”

“WHAT?”

Before Clay could continue, Logan laid a hand
on her shoulder to get her attention, “Stay calm. We’ll find him,
Jenna.”

She was frantic. “Why has he disappeared,
Logan?” Her mind was reeling. She felt like a boxer who’d taken one
too many hits in the ring. Looking back and forth between her
brother and Clay she asked, “How long has he been gone and why did
he go? He didn’t want to stay here with me?”

Clay cut off Logan’s attempt to answer,
“Three days ago your body gave out and you flat lined. Adam woke up
while the doctors and nurses where trying to revive you. When he
realized it was you in the bed, he snapped. The staff tried to
restrain him, but we’re sure he’s slipped into a feral rage. He
half shifted right there on the bed, threw the doctor and two
nurses who were trying to hold him down against the walls,” Clay
pointed to the body sized dents in two different walls, “and then
tore out of here howling like a banshee. We tracked him to
different sections of the forest along the edge of the Pack’s land,
but we’ve been unable to corner him, or pinpoint his location at
any given time. The only reason we know he’s still alive is because
we can hear his agonized howls every so often.”

Jenna was moving before Clay had finished his
speech. Logan tried to keep her on the bed, loudly vocalizing his
protests that she wasn’t strong enough to leave but Jenna shoved
his hands away, snarling at him, and started lifting random items
around the room where he could see them to make a point. Her
brother flung his hands up in a pose of surrender and stepped back
from the bed. Clay held out a hand to help her down off the bed,
but she refused to take it, trying to make a point to them both
that she was indeed strong enough to go looking for her missing
mate. When her feet touched the floor she wobbled a bit because of
her unsteady legs, but once she didn’t feel as if she was going to
topple over face first, she demanded clothes.

Walking out against doctor’s orders and
family protests was one thing. Walking out with her ass hanging out
the back of a hospital gown was another. Wilmington had already
seen her in on the front of a newspaper in a sports bra; she’d like
to at least keep what her tush looked like to herself. And well,
Adam could see it once she found him, but that’s where she drew the
line, damn it. Generic gray sweatpants, a black men’s t-shirt, and
a pair of cheap flip-flops were handed to her. Pointing a finger to
the door, she cocked an eyebrow at both of the men and the room,
sending the silent directive.

Get the fuck out.

She was getting dressed without supervision.
Once the door had clicked shut, she pulled the clothes on as
quickly as she could manage, and then slipped her feet into the
flip-flops. There was no time to lose. A pissed off wolf was half
shifted and running around in the woods like a mad man with no
telling if his human half had checked out altogether or not. If she
was going to find him, and bring him back to the land where the
sane people dwelled, she had to haul ass. Because if she didn’t,
then there was a good chance that a hunting party would be gathered
soon to track down and kill the only man she’d ever loved.

This shit was ridiculous. She couldn’t
believe that she was standing here arguing when she had
to
go
. On the edge of the woods behind Adam’s house in the McPhee
Pack territory stood a wall of people trying to stop her from
heading out into the woods. Her Uncle, her Mama, her brother, and
her Uncle Rick were all looking at her as if she had marbles
rolling around loose in her head for brains, and refusing to let
her leave. Behind her stood Amy, Clay, and six other unknown faces
from Adam’s Pack. All to back her up so that she could go search
for their missing Alpha before some truly tragic shit happened.
Like someone going out there and taking his head off because they
thought there was no hope in hell of saving him.

That would happen over her dead body.

So here they stood wasting precious time. Her
fuse was about to burn down, and then BOOM! She was going to blow
up and go postal all over there asses. They were just damn lucky
she didn’t have one of her guns on her, because if she did, she’d
be making them do some old fashioned fancy cowboy footwork as she
let off multiple shots near their feet to get their
pain-in-the-butts moving out of her way. Unfortunately, no one
seemed to have any firearms with them. Very inconvenient.

Crossing her arms over her chest she huffed,
“Look. I get that you’re trying to look out for my welfare and that
you’re worried about me since I just got out of the hospital, but
you need to move out of my way. I need to find him. Not next week.
Not even tomorrow. Today. I need to find Adam now. The longer we
wait, the further he slips into a feral rage, the more likely it is
that we lose him for good. I can’t risk that. I won’t risk him.
Don’t ask me to.”

Mama was spitting mad. “Jenna June, you’ve
lost your fecking mind if you think we’re just going tae let you
flounce around in the woods after you almost died three days
ago.”

Jenna rolled her eyes to the sky and started
praying for divine deliverance, but unfortunately, there were no
grand displays of angry lightening to help her out. Go figure.
Maybe if she prayed for her Mama to magically acquire a ‘Mute’
button that might work out better. As her Uncle Rick joined in the,
let’s-lecture-Jenna-and-pretend-she’s-not-a-grown-ass-woman party,
she dropped her eyes back to the human wall in front of her and
started scanning her Mama from head to toe for that new magical
button that should have appeared. Her extremely intuitive mother
caught on to the fact that Jenna wasn’t even bothering to pay
attention to her lecture and narrowed her eyes, so she snapped out,
“Are you listening tae a thing we say, you daft girl?”

Damn! Mute button idea hadn’t worked
either!

She looked over her Mama’s shoulder to the
woods and imagined Adam out there. Sure he wasn’t some scared lost
little boy waiting for mommy or daddy to come save him, but he was
confused and hurting. She remembered the gaping hole of nothingness
that had spread over her consciousness when she’d seen him lying on
that pavement covered in blood, flesh sizzling from their impact
with the silver bullets. The visible proof his body was already
rapidly being poisoned by silver that could stop his heart, and
wither it to the size of a grape. And she’d instantly known that if
she’d lost him, there would be nothing but a bleak and empty future
to look towards. Hence why her sanity had temporarily snapped like
an over stretched rubber band and she’d crushed the bitch that had
hurt him with her own car.

Jenna wasn’t even suffering from a wolf’s
obsession, so what she’d felt and had gone through in that moment
was only a small iota of what Adam must have felt when he’d seen
her flat lined on that hospital bed. With his wolf so much more
prominent than other Shifters had to endure, who knew if his
humanity was intact? All she knew was that if there was even the
smallest chance that she could go out there, find him, and convince
him to come back to her, she had to try. What life would be worth
living if she couldn’t have the one who could fulfill all of her
dreams?

No life was worth living without dreams.

She’d realized that now. Adam had dragged
Jenna from a bleak existence of hiding and loneliness into his
arms. He’d offered her an extended family in himself and his Pack.
He’d offered her companionship so she wouldn’t have to feel alone
anymore. He’d offered her a future of hope. She was going to fight
for that future if it killed her. This apparently was the thing
that her immediate family was scared of. They were afraid that she
would go out in those woods, find an Adam who was unreachable and
dangerous, and he would kill her in his disoriented rage. Now she
just had to make them see that it was a possibility she was willing
to risk.

Inhaling a deep breath, she held it in her
chest for several prolonged seconds to help center herself, and
then slowly blew it back out. With a sense of renewed patience, she
walked over to her Uncle Rick the Police Chief first. Raising
herself on her tippy toes she grasped his shoulders to keep her
steady, leaned up to his considerable height, and kissed his cheek.
When she was done, she set back on her heels and looked him
straight in the eye. “During all of my on and off the job training
you taught me to never give up on a mission if it was for a good
cause.” Her Uncle gave her a short nod in agreement. “He’s the best
cause I’ll ever fight for.”