Let him stay asleep, he prayed desperately. Don’t let him see me like this…
“I’ve got it, Griff!” Hayley flung herself back down next to him, his heavy leather jacket in her arms. “What am I looking for?”
“Inside pocket,” he gasped. “Box. Hurry!”
“Where—oh! Is this it?” Hayley’s eyes widened as she freed the small, slim case from his jacket. Stark yellow biohazard and poison warning stickers covered the black steel. “It’s locked. Griff, what’s in this?”
“Medicine,” he lied. “Key.” He scrabbled at the thin chain around his neck, his own claws cutting his skin. Breaking the chain, he dropped the small key into Hayley’s waiting hand. “Open. Carefully.”
“Okay.” Gingerly, Hayley extracted a syringe, holding it in the tips of her fingers. “You want me to inject you?”
“Yes.” He screwed his eyes shut, trying to concentrate, struggling to keep his human mind intact in the maelstrom of animal instincts. There was something else she had to do first, something critically important…“No! Wait!”
Too late.
He didn’t even feel the tiny pinprick of the needle through the storm of torment—but then the wyvern venom hit his veins.
The pain of uncontrolled shifting was as nothing compared to that.
Black ice raced through his blood, shattering every cell in his body in its wake. His lion and eagle screamed together, once, as the terrible void swallowed them all.
“Call Ash!” he said, or tried to say, with his last breath. “Call-”
Everything stopped.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hayley
“Ash?” Hayley shook Griff’s shoulder. “Griff! Who’s Ash?”
His whole body rocked under her touch, rigid as a statue and just as unresponsive. His limbs were still twisted into impossible configurations, but at least he didn’t seem to be transforming any further. Between one breath and the next, the vicious spasms ravaging his muscles had completely stopped.
That has to be a good thing…right?
Hayley had a horrible certainty that it wasn’t. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
“Who’s Ash?” she repeated futilely. It had to be important, from the way he’d suddenly yelled the name…
Struck by sudden inspiration, she pawed through Griff’s jacket again. Her hand closed on the thin hard rectangle of a cellphone.
It was locked, protected by a fingerprint scanner—she glanced at Griff’s twisted, half-animal hands and immediately dismissed that possibility—but a small button at the bottom of the screen read Emergency Contact. Praying, Hayley touched it.
Dialing Ash, read the screen, and Hayley’s breath whooshed out of her in an explosive gust. “Please pick up, please pick up,” she pleaded as the phone rang in her ear. “Oh, please-”
“Griffin?” said a calm, cool male voice.
Hayley could hear laughter and clinking glasses in the background, as if the speaker was in a restaurant or pub. “Are you Ash?”
“I am Fire Commander Ash, yes.” The man seemed perfectly unperturbed to be called by a complete stranger using his friend’s phone. “Who is this?”
“Griff said to call you,” Hayley blurted out, too panicked to even tell him her name. “Oh please, you have to come, he’s collapsed and I gave him the medicine but I don’t think it’s working!”
“Medicine?” Ash sounded nonplussed—and then his tone abruptly sharpened. “You gave him the syringe? The one with the warning stickers on it?”
“Yes, he-” Hayley found herself talking to a dead line.
He hung up? But I didn’t even tell him where to find us!