Wulfe Untamed (Feral Warriors #8)(70)

Natalie stood in front of the window of her bedroom, Jane Austen’s Emma clutched against her chest. She’d tried to read, but her mind simply refused to quiet long enough for the words in front of her eyes to register. It didn’t matter that she’d already read the book three times in years past and practically knew it by heart. For a short while, she’d worked on her computer, but that had been even less productive.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she’d shattered an empty wine bottle against the edge of Kara’s dresser. Had she really intended to attack shape-shifters? Maybe she had. Or maybe she’d been out of her mind and would have turned on anyone within reach.

The thought scared her. Twice now, she’d lost time, though the first time her memory had been intentionally taken from her, presumably for her own good. This time she found far more disturbing because she hadn’t been in her right mind. She hadn’t been conscious of her actions at all. And there was a chance Satanan had been controlling her in some way.

Turning away from the window, Natalie set the book on the nightstand, then sank onto the edge of the bed and stared at nothing. She felt as if she’d awakened in an alternate universe where nothing she knew or believed was true anymore. Shape-shifters, Daemons, magic all existed in this world. Xavier lived. And she, herself, was somehow being used to empower a Daemon, perhaps the most evil creature ever to walk the Earth.

For the first time, she thought she understood what it felt like for some of her patients, when, after years of seeing one way, of their brains processing the words on the page in a way that sometimes made the words all but impossible to read, their eyes were opened. What was once invisible or distorted finally became clear. Just last week, she’d gotten a call from the mom of one of the kids she’d taken through a full course of vision therapy. The woman was in tears because her daughter was now reading at grade level, a thing they’d feared would never happen. Words that had appeared to her seven-year-old’s eyes, to leap and bounce across the page, now lined up straight and still as they were meant to.

Seeing clearly in the child’s case was a blessing. Natalie wasn’t so sure she could say the same. Not when her eyes had been opened to a truth she was beginning to fear she wouldn’t survive.

Pushing to her feet, she walked back to the window, turning her gaze northwest, toward Frederick, toward home and the life she needed to return to. She had work to do there, still. There were too many kids at risk and too few doctors available to help them. How many times had she heard otherwise excellent eye doctors disparage vision therapy as voodoo? Many viewed it with the same skepticism she suspected medical doctors viewed acupuncture, unwilling to explore a specialty they knew little about, thereby leaving at-risk patients without the options that could profoundly change their lives.

Yet, returning to that life meant leaving this one and never seeing Wulfe again. Or Xavier. And the thought felt like a fist to the solar plexis.

Cut yourself.

Natalie stilled, her pulse leaping erratically at the strange thought that blazed suddenly in her mind.

Draw your blood.

To her disbelieving horror, she lifted one hand and began to claw at her opposite wrist, raking the tender flesh with her fingernails.

“No.” The word was a bare whisper, uttered between clenched teeth. Pain tore along her wrist, ice filling her veins, because she couldn’t move of her own free will. She couldn’t call out. She could do nothing but what the voice in her head told her to do.

Satanan. This was his doing!

Suddenly, pain sliced across her cheek. Oh, God, no. Not now. Not this, too.

She opened her mouth to call for help, but she could force no sound between her lips. He was controlling her completely. Eyes filling with tears, heart pounding with terror, she tore at her wrist until her fingertips were slick with blood.

Finally, the words came, but they weren’t her own. They fell from her lips in a whispered, frantic torrent, in a language she’d never heard. If only she could make some kind of sound, even just bang against the wall. But her body refused to cooperate. It was no longer her own.

She’d been caught fast in the web of a Daemon.

Chapter Nineteen

“I need to get out of this f**king house!” Wulfe shouted, slamming his fist into the wall of the ritual room so hard that plaster rained down on him from above. He was trapped within a body that could no longer shift, within a four-story prison from which Satanan just waited for a chance to come after him again.

Worst of all, he feared Satanan might be f**king with his mind.

If only he could take a run in his wolf, but his other half was lost to him, now. He couldn’t even walk out to the goddess stone to listen to the rumbling falls of the Potomac River and feel the wind in his face.

He was so f**king angry! So frustrated. So . . . terrified . . . that this nightmare would never end.

Hawke clapped him on the back. “Come on, buddy. Get Natalie. It’s almost time for dinner. You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten.” Hawke grunted, the shadows from the loss of his own animal clouding his eyes. “No, you won’t. But your stomach will feel better, and that’s something, at least.”

Wulfe nodded. But as he turned for the door, he felt an odd tug at his mind as if his subconscious was trying to get his attention. Had he forgotten something?

He shook his head. No, this tug felt external. Satanan? The thought chilled.