What the?—
“Chase!”
His head jerks up, finding me. “No.” He stops short, backtracking so quickly that his boot gets snagged on a tree root and he goes down.
That gives me enough time to reach him. Crouching down at his side, I peer into his sweat-slicked face and nearly moan.
Something’s wrong. Something happened out there… and it’s not good.
I zero in on his hand. “Chase? What’s the matter? Let me see.”
He tries desperately to jerk out of my reach. “No, baby, don’t—” Grimacing and swallowing back a groan, Chase flops backward before I can touch his hand. He turns away, hiding his face, hiding the pain and the fear and the panic I’ve already seen, but that’s nothing compared to the shiny, dark liquid seeping from between his fingers that I can’t miss now.
My stomach drops to the dirt.Blood.No. Fuck, no. It can’t be.
Can it?
“Is that blood?” I throw myself at him, intent on pulling his hand away. It’s so much more than the amount he spilled when he cut himself with my knife. “Damn it, Chase. Let me see!”
“Baby, no?—”
I barely even notice that he’s called me “baby” twice now. Let him call me whatever the hell he wants. Right now, I need to see. I have to know.
I flop on top of him, the way I’m straddling him like this the last thing Chase would’ve expected of me. It works, too. He goes still, and I pry his fingers off of his bicep.
And that’s when I see the chunk of skin missing from the back of his arm.
Everything that happens next is nine months of trauma, of grief, of loss, of a sweet, feisty twenty-five-year-old chick forced to become a killer after watching nearly everyone she loves die.
I fall back, putting some distance between Chase and me. Lurkers start to Turn almost immediately. Once the venom from a bite is introduced into a host, it’s a matter of hours before the complete transformation is done. After twenty-four hours, he’ll be invulnerable.
Less than that, if I can get an antidote into him, he’ll be fine. He’ll recover.
He’ll be my Chase.
But I know him. He’d sacrifice himself. That, or the lurker bite would overtake him and he’d turn on me and Mav—and we’d have to put him down.
Fuck, no.
I’ll take care of this. I’ll save him the way I wasn’t able to save my brother, my mother, or my twin.
I fall back, but before I do, I snag the taser out of his holster. I’m glad Maverick showed Chase and me how to work it because it’s easier than I would’ve thought to shoot the barbs into Chase’s chest.
He was already on the ground. When the taser hits him, he jerks, body spazzing, before his eyes roll into the back of his head. He’s out, and as long as he is, he can’t eat us.
Here’s hoping a lurker’s increased metabolism and regenerative properties won’t have already kicked in to help him shake off being tased…
There’s no time to waste. I shove the taser back into the holster, then grab Chase by his boots. Unlike how Chase did for me when the cramps were terrible, I can’t pick him up and carry him in my arms. I can, however, drag his dead weight through the dirt until I’m back at the campsite.
“Help!” I shout, not caring one bit if anyone other than Maverick can hear me. “Now! Antidote. I need my antidote. Get me my pack!”
Maverick is suddenly at my side, crouching over Chase. No pack, I notice, and I want to scream at him that there’s no time to waste.
“The kid got bit,” he says uselessly.
No shit, Sherlock. “And I have an antidote in my pack. I can fix him.Watch him.”
“What the fuck happened to him? Shit, Xandra… he could Turn and attack us. You know that, and you brought him back here? Or did you kill him?”