Relentless Read Free Page A

them, like I’d seen other Fenryrian werewolves do in the past.
    Eileen interrupted my thoughts when she gave my shoulder a push. I realized Tom, Louise, and Karl were disappearing into the underbrush off to my left, with Tom in the lead, his nose tilted upward, testing the air. It almost made me giggle, until the scent came to me, thick, metallic, and frighteningly tantalizing.
    In front of me, the others pushed faster, shoving brush and tree limbs out of the way. A small clearing opened in front of us, and we paused. We’d found them. Bloodied arms and legs were skewed in strange directions. Tom and Eileen raced forward to kneel beside the bodies while I swayed in place, uncertain what to do. There were three of them. Tom held his hand to the throat of one where a pulse should have bounced against his finger. He shook his head, moving on to another one, leaving the third body for Karl to check. Tom frowned as he felt for the pulse on the second body, but Karl nodded excitedly as he checked the female victim and pressed a wad of gauze from his case to a gaping wound on the injured girl’s neck. Eileen knelt, placing her case on the ground near Karl. She began taking out small bottles filled with a golden liquid and syringes. She punched the needle of a syringe through the rubber stoppers on top of one of the vials. With a quick glance at me, she nodded toward the case.
    “You can draw up the other one. It’s three milliliters.” Motionless, I stared at her.
    “Come on, get moving.”
    Louise glanced up from where she had begun to arrange the torn and shattered body into something that resembled a person sleeping in the forest. The effort it took to reach in the box and get the syringe and vial was more than I’d expected. My hands trembled. Forcing myself to concentrate, I wrapped my fingers around the bottle and the plastic syringe. The cap on the vial flipped off easily. I set it on a cloth Eileen had placed on the ground then uncapped the needle and placed the cap beside the vial. Liquid sloshed when I turned the vial upside down and stuck the needle through the rubber stopper as I’d seen Eileen do.
    “You want to give it?”
    The vial fell from my hand before I could put it back on the cloth.
    “You want me to stick this needle in her?”
    “If you want to, you can. It will be good practice. It has to go in the vein, though.”
    “She’s never done it before,” Louise called out across the clearing.
    “But you’ve practiced in a lab class, right?”
    I shook my head. “No, I’m new. It’s my first time at the school.”
    “Oh, okay. Then give it to me.”
    She held out her hand, and I carefully passed her the uncapped needle. She bent over the girl’s arm and slid the needle into the skin without hesitation. Her fingers tugged at the plunger, pulling backward until a splash of red blood swirled into the syringe. Using a slow, even movement, Eileen pushed the plunger until all the liquid disappeared.
    “That was the memory block. She’ll sleep now. We’ll get her dressed and take her somewhere so that she’ll be found, since we don’t know who she is or where she lives. She’ll just think someone she was out with slipped her some drugs. Because she’s turning into a werewolf, her injuries are already healing.”
    “What about the others?”
    “We’ll take the bodies with us and put them out in the ocean.” She recapped the needle and put it in the bag.
    “But their families won’t know what happened.”
    Eileen caught the end of the tourniquet and jerked. It came away easily. She threw it in her bag along with the cloth and everything on it.
    “It can’t be helped. We can’t leave the bodies to be examined. Since they died before the virus could take effect, their wounds won’t heal. It would raise a lot of questions if they were found. Fenryrians may not care that the world starts to realize they’re here. We prefer not to raise any suspicions.” She grabbed the bag, snapped it