“I’ll be right there,” I said, jerking on my jeans with one hand. “Where?”

“In the X-ray storeroom.” He barely stumbled over that phrase.

I knew where the storeroom was, on the far end of the emergency room at Kennewick General, where he worked. “I’ll come for you.”

He hung up without saying anything more.

Something had gone very wrong. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be catastrophic if he was going to meet me in the storeroom, away from everyone. If they knew he was a werewolf, there would be no need for storerooms.

Unlike Adam, Samuel was not out to the public. No one would let a werewolf practice medicine—which was probably smart, actually. The smells of blood and fear and death were too much for most of them. But Samuel had been a doctor for a very long time, and he was a good one.

Ben was sitting on my front porch as I ran out the door, and I tripped over him, rolling down the four steep, unyielding stairs to land on the ground in the gravel.

He’d known I was coming out; I hadn’t tried to be quiet. He could have moved out of my way, but he hadn’t. Maybe he’d even moved into my way on purpose. He didn’t twitch as I looked up at him.

I recognized the look though I hadn’t seen it from him before. I was a coyote mated to their Alpha, and they were darned sure I wasn’t good enough.

“You heard about the fight tonight,” I told him.

He laid his ears back and put his nose on his front paws.

“Then someone should have told you that they were using the pack bonds to mess with my head.” I hadn’t meant to say anything about it until I had a chance to talk to Samuel, but falling down the stairs had robbed me of self-control.

He stilled, and the look on his body was not disbelief, it was horror.

So it was possible. Damn. Damn. Damn. I’d hoped it wasn’t, hoped I was being paranoid. I didn’t need this.

Sometimes it felt like both the mate and the pack bonds were doing their best to steal my soul. The analogy might be figurative, but I found it nearly as frightening as the literal version would have been. Finding out that someone could use the whole mess to make me do things was just the flipping icing on the cake.

Fortunately, I had a task to take my mind off the mess I was in. I stood up and dusted myself off.

I had planned on waiting and talking to Adam directly, but there were some advantages to this scenario, too. It would be a good idea for Adam to know that some of the pack were… active about their dislike of me. And if Ben told him, he couldn’t read my mind to figure out that I wasn’t weirded out only by the mind control, but also by the whole bond thing, pack and mate.