Page 21 of Renegade Queen
Maddox merely raised an eyebrow, but did as he was told. At least he wasn’t one of those men who fought you every step of the way. Or at least not on this one thing.
Tank grabbed a sandwich and a bottle of water from the fridge and passed them to a bemused Maddox, who looked at them like he’d never seen anything like it before.
“I thought I’d feel different,” he finally said as Tank sat beside me again. “Did it work?”
“Oh yeah, it worked. The fact that you’re awake now is kinda unbelievable,” I told Maddox. “You won’t feel your animal stirring until we get closer to the next full moon. Your first shift might make you wish it hadn’t worked, though.”
If the three of them thought this was the bad part, they were about to get a rude awakening. And the fact that they would have to go through all of this under a Nymerian moon? I had a terrible feeling it would make it that much worse.
“So, where are we?”
“Just outside Fairbanks, Alaska,” I told him. “We were just talking about pulling over for the night.”
“Alaska? How long have we been out for?”
“We’ve been driving for about sixty hours.” Tank yawned. “And it took us a couple of hours to get the RV and figure out how we were getting here.”
“Yeah, we really should have thought that part of the plan through before we ended up with three sleeping beauties to haul around.”
The memories of loading up the RV floated to the front of my mind, and I snorted in amusement.
“I don’t think I want to know why you’re laughing.” I saw Maddox cringe in the rearview, and it only made me laugh all the harder.
“You should have seen Tank carrying you all bridal style onto the RV. I really should have taken pictures.”
“I swear when I laid Ryder down, he tried to hug me harder.” Tank barked out a laugh, and even Maddox cracked up at that, albeit not as hard because he still looked like crap.
“You should eat that sandwich. Your body’s been through a lot, and you need the energy.”
I saw the sign for an RV park and pulled off the road. As Tank jumped out to speak with the park manager, I turned around to look at Maddox. He’d at least eaten his sandwich and was now leaning back in his seat with his head tipped back against the wall.
“Tired?”
He rolled his head to the side to look at me, but he didn’t move apart from that. For a man who’d been asleep for three days, he looked exhausted. But he’d been through a lot, and he had the weight of his missing brother on his shoulders. The one I’d told him was already dead—that might not have been my finest moment.
“Just worried about Dean and Ryder,” he said, rolling his head to look at the rear of the RV. “Shouldn’t they have woken up by now?”
“No.”
“Why, what’s wrong with them?” The panic in his voice made me immediately feel bad.
“Oh no, nothing. I’m sorry. I should have worded that differently.” Why the hell was I apologising? “You just shouldn’t be awake yet, but we should have seen it coming with how long you managed to hold out against the venom.”
“Hold out? If my memory’s right, I dropped like a stone.” The self-deprecating laugh screamed that we should have really explained the process of what they’d go through a lot better than we had. Or, you know, at all. Because now that I thought about it, apart from the initial suggestion that we do it, we really hadn’t discussed it.
“You shouldn’t even remember the end of the bite. You should have blacked out when the venom surged through your bloodstream. But you managed to stay on your feet for, like, five whole seconds.”
I could tell from the look on his face that he didn’t realise how impressive that was.
“Five whole seconds. I’ll remember to update my CV,” he drolled.
He was still staring at the door to the rear of the RV, and the need to comfort him rose inside me. It was more confusing because of the whole thing with Tank as well as my typical snarky attitude.
“I’m surprised you haven’t asked me yet,” I evasively started to try and change the subject to something I knew he’d be happy about. After all, the other two had taken the bite from Arlow, but Maddox, he had the honour of Silas being the one to turn him.
“Asked you what?”
He groaned as he sat up, his hand coming up to his neck as he rubbed at the muscles there. But when he finally looked at me again, I could see the spark of interest in his eyes.