He Staged My Funeral, Now His Wolf Howls at My Door novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Gray Zone

Hazel fakes a collar failure to reach the Seattle market, swaps her own herbs into the plan while Calvin watches and says nothing, and the herbalist asks if she really means to die.

We were an hour west of Spokane before I read Marla's note.

I unfolded it under the dashboard light, with my chin tucked so Calvin couldn't see.

It was four lines in her blocky handwriting.

Gray Zone market, back row, blue awning.

Woman with the brass scale. Tell her you're the doctor from the tower.

She owes me for her daughter's fever. She'll know what the swap is.

Don't drink it straight, Doc. Please.

I folded the paper small and put it inside my cheek.

It wasn't a clever hiding place.

My pockets were not private, and neither was anything else I owned.

The collar hummed against my neck, a thin, steady current.

My wolf lay somewhere under it, quiet and cold.

"We're due at the tower by three," Calvin said.

"I know."

"Are you all right? You've gone gray."

"I'm wearing a shock collar, Calvin."

He said nothing to that.

The Gray Zone sits on the edge of Seattle, in a lot behind a closed tire shop.

Wolves trade there what the registry doesn't license.

I had passed the lit entrance a hundred times from the back of the Alpha's car.

I pressed two fingers against the steel at my throat and made my voice small.

"Pull over."

"What?"

"The electrodes are misfiring. My wolf is rejecting the metal. If I don't get neutralizing herbs, I'll seize."

Calvin's eyes cut to me.

"Don't play games, Hazel. The Alpha expects us back in two hours."

"Where would I run?"

I held up my father's black card between two fingers.

"Or would you rather I seize on the highway and ruin your plan tonight?"

He looked at the card, then at the road.

His hands tightened on the wheel, and I watched him lose the argument with himself.

"Ten minutes," he said.

He parked beside the fence.

"I'm coming in."

"Fine."

The market was a dozen stalls under strings of yellow bulbs, with a smell of hot oil and dried leaves.

Nobody looked at the collar, though several people looked at it twice.

The blue awning was at the very back.

A heavyset woman sat behind it on an upturned crate, a brass scale on a card table in front of her.

She looked at my face. She looked at the collar. She looked at Calvin behind me.

"He waits outside my awning," she said. "I don't do business over a man's shoulder."

Calvin opened his mouth.

"Ten minutes," I said gently, and he stayed where he was.

I stepped under the blue canvas and lowered my voice.

"Marla Quinn sent me. I'm the doctor from the tower."

"I know who you are." She did not smile. "Turn around."

She took a tiny pair of shears from her apron and cut the lead behind my ear.

The current stopped.

My wolf stirred, a quick, painful turn, as blood came back into a numb limb.

I swallowed a sob and held onto the table until it passed.

"Now," the herbalist said. "Marla says they'll give you something to stop your heart for a few hours."

"The Alpha's own formula. Concentrated inhibitor."

"Mm."

She weighed something small and dark on her scale and folded it into a square of paper.

"Under your tongue, two minutes before you drink."

"What does it do?"

"Leaves one thread of your heart alive. Too faint for any machine they own to see."

"The cold does the rest," she added. "You wake slow and sick."

"How sick?"

"You'll be sorry for a week, and you'll be alive."

I took the paper and slid it up my sleeve.

She wrapped a second packet in brown paper, and her voice dropped.

"This one's for the wolf. After. It won't bring her back, but it keeps her from dying with the bond."

I gave her everything in my pockets, which was my father's black card and a hundred and ten dollars.

She took the card.

"That'll do," she said. "That'll more than do."

I turned to go, and she caught my wrist with a rough warm hand.

"Doctor."

"Yes?"

"You're not drinking that to die, are you?"

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