“I need to finish this,” the woman interrupted me. “Hold still. You’ll feel some pressure.”
She certainly sounds like a doctor, I thought. Professional, uncaring and using the word “pressure” to describe what would probably hurt like hell.
My premonition proved correct. A burning pain started in my ankle as she probed, muttering to herself while she shifted it a few times.
“Where am I?” I asked, biting back a yelp. “Is this a Ranger station or something?”
The man stared at me, his hazel eyes seeming to probe as much as the doctor’s pitiless fingers.
“What’s your name?”
“Marlee. Marlee Peters.”
“The sedative shouldn’t have worn off this quickly,” the woman remarked when I couldn’t help but yank back as she manipulated my ankle in a direction it didn’t want to go. “You know that, Daniel.”
“So give me another one,” I said, clenching my teeth as the pain began to throb. “Pressure”, my ass!
Daniel, as the doctor called him, let out a sigh. “Damn Gabriel,” he muttered.
Gabriel.
The name conjured up an image of a huge grey wolf glaring at me, one eye bleeding. “They hunt us,” it had said. Then it started writhing on the ground, its fur disappearing . . .
I tried to bolt out of bed, but Daniel had me pinned back before I’d even cleared the covers.
“It’s all right, Marlee,” he said.
“Like hell it is!” Whatever remained of the sedative they’d given me wore off in the flash of that memory. Run, my mind urged.
From over his shoulder, I could see the blonde woman sit back in disgust. “I can’t work like this,” she said.
“Get Joshua,” Daniel told her, still holding me to the bed.
I screamed for help, which drowned out any reply the woman made. I kicked, too, even though that hurt my ankle like I’d set it on fire.
Daniel went from holding me down to flattening me on the bed with his body. It was like a ton of bricks just landed on me. He even had his legs tangled in mine so I couldn’t kick.
I couldn’t move, but I could keep screaming, which I did, long and loud.
He winced. “Stop that. You’re hurting my ears.”
His arms were pinning mine down, but his hands were loose near my face. He could have covered my mouth to shut me up, but he didn’t. That meant he wasn’t concerned about anyone overhearing, which meant there was no one near enough to help.
I stopped screaming and tried another tactic. “Let me go. I’ll leave and you’ll never see me again.”
“Why were you in the woods alone, Marlee?” he asked. “That’s not very safe.”
Considering my current situation, the absurdity of that statement made me laugh. “You don’t say?”
He ignored that. “You remember what you saw. That’s why you smell like fear now.”
“It wasn’t real,” I muttered. “I was tired, I’d been lost for days, and I panicked because of the attack.”
“You know it’s real,” he cut me off. “Sorry, but you know, so we can’t just let you go. Even if nothing comes of your bites.”
That froze me more than the 200 pounds of muscle holding me down. I’d been bitten - several times, in fact. I’d seen the movies, knew enough of the folklore to know what happened to a person who’d been bitten by a ...
“This can’t be real,” I whispered.