Page 5 of Primal
Rob shook his head. “No. I wanted to see what you’d say. I need to know my pack is made of worthy, protective males.”
Tyler’s chest puffed out.
“But we need to wipe her memory of the wolf as soon as possible,” he continued. “Hell, she may have already told someone. That makes her a liability to the entire pack.”
Tyler sighed, relieved Rob hadn’t been serious about killing her.
“She needs to be taken to Marion.”
Marion. Shit. Marion wasn’t one of our kind, but the Shifter Council used her talents on occasion to straighten out problems with humans. She had the creepy ability to wipe select memories from her victims or even implant new ones. It was an amped-up form of hypnotic suggestion. And she charged a pretty penny for the trick.
What’s more, she lived in Missoula and didn’t do house calls. We’d have to bring Riley to her.
Fuck.
This wasgetting complicated.
Mind wiping could also be dangerous. But Riley Abbott was young, and it was only one brief incident that had to be replaced. Hopefully, she wouldn’t suffer anything more than a headache. We needed her to believe her date with Tyler had been uneventful, other than a bad kiss.
Rob was right; every second that ticked increased the chance of her telling someone what she saw. Of course, if Marion could reprogram her memory into something more plausible for a human to understand, it would get Riley to explain that she had been confused about what happened with Tyler. Maybe even wipe the mountain lion part away, which could be traumatic in itself.
“I’ll take her,” Tyler said.
Rob shook his head. “She’s probably not going to get anywhere near you.” His alpha gaze shifted to me. “You’ll take her.”
I didn’t disobey an order from my alpha, so I nodded. I’d have to get one of my employees to open at the bar tonight, but that could be arranged. There was no other choice. It had to get done.
Rob went around the desk, opened a drawer and pulled out… shit. He pulled out a syringe and filled it, then capped it and handed it to me. “This is a low-dose horse tranquilizer. It won’t knock her out for more than an hour, but that will allow you to get her to Marion without giving her more memories that need to be erased.”
“Yes, Alpha.”
“Get it done.”
2
RILEY
Tyler had calledmy phone five times since I ran from him–no, ran from agiant wolf–all the way out of the canyon. I didn’t even know I could run a mile uphill without dying.
I rejected his call again and dialed the number of my best friend, Lila, with shaky fingers.
She’d dated Tyler for three years. Didsheknow that he was a monster?
“Shit,” I muttered when her phone went straight to voicemail.
God, what if… what ifhe’dbitten her and turned her into a werewolf, too? What if my best friend was also a monster? Oh my God! My brain spun out.
Iwas spinning out.
None of this made sense.
My heart thundered as I considered what to do. I replayed the scene in the canyon over and over, but I still couldn’t make sense of it. Okay, to review, I kissed Tyler, and it was not good. Then, he sniffed the air–like a wolf–and right after, the mountain lion appeared. One second, he was about to lose the fight with it; the next second… he was a giant wolf with bone-crunching jaws.He’d killed a mountain lion with his teeth.
Right. So Tyler was a wolf. A werewolf. Either that or he put mushrooms in the sandwiches we had for lunch, and I was tripping.
I should call my dad–working for the sheriff’s office meant he was good with emergencies. But no. No. Something stopped me.
Dad was overprotective as hell. After taking me to the ER for a drug test–because he’d totally think Tyler had drugged me to have his way with me or something ridiculous–he’d probably throw Tyler in jail without asking questions first. And Tyler hadn’t hurt me. The opposite. He’d been protecting me. He’d pushed me behind him to fight off a mountain lion.