Hunting Season: Werewolf Bodyguard Romance (Guarded by the Shifter Book 1) by Kate Rudolph (e novels to read online .TXT) 📕

"How are you holding up? Em asked. She reached for something on the counter, the small container into which Stasia had dumped the bullet that had hit Vega, and started switching it from hand to hand, fidgeting. It was an old habit of hers, one she only fell back on when she was nervous.

The container wasn't a toy and it certainly wasn't sanitary, but Stasia couldn't think about that right now.

"I really don't know." She had seen weird things before. That came with the kind of upbringing she had and the job she'd gone into. Plenty of weird shit ended up in the ER. But she had never imagined werewolves.

How was she supposed to react? Was she supposed to get mad at Owen for lying to her? Could she? When would that conversation have even come up? Before they fucked? It wasn't like he thought lycanthropy was a sexually transmitted disease. And there was no way she would have believed him anyway.

"It's kind of cool, right?" Em didn't sound so sure as she spoke, but there was a bit of childish wonder underlying her tone.

"Cool?" That was one word. Though Stasia's childhood obsessions had run more towards vampires than werewolves. But it was one thing to fantasize about the otherworldly and something completely different to find out it was real.

"I mean, yeah. Your boyfriend is like a superhero or something." She set the container down and picked up one of the tools lying on the counter and poked at the bullet.

Was he her boyfriend? Stasia didn't deny it, even if they probably needed to have a talk. More than one. "What are you doing?" She pushed out of the chair and came to stand close to Em to see what she was looking at. And she was relieved when her sister didn't back away. It hadn't even occurred to Stasia to fear that, but now she realized her sister might be afraid. "You're not freaked out I might turn into a monster, are you?"

Em laughed. "I’ve seen you PMSing. I know exactly how much of a monster you can be." She picked up the bullet with a clean set of forceps and inspected it. "Do you have something to wash this off?"

"Why?" Stasia asked as she found what her sister needed. Em had always had an inquisitive mind and she probably would have been an investigator of some kind if she hadn't become a popstar.

"They were freaked out about it. I'm going to assume that they don't normally deal with this kind of thing. And if the legends are anything to go by, shouldn't they have a super healing factor or something? This was a tiny little bullet. Even a human could have shaken that off." She put the container down on the table and took a package of saline that Stasia found sitting on the counter. She washed off the blood to reveal the spent bullet.

It looked like a bullet. But Stasia wasn't sure it was just a bullet. She hadn't dealt with many gunshot wounds. And those that she had, she hadn't finished the bullet out. It often caused more damage to even try.

"There's something extra on here," Em said as she picked up the washed off bullet with the forceps and brought it close to her face.

"What do you mean?" How could there be something extra on a bullet?

"Look." Em shook the forceps a little as if that would give Stasia a clue. "It almost looks like it fused with something."

"You're looking at the bullet?" They both jumped as Rowe interrupted them. He was standing in the open doorway and watching them curiously.

It wasn't like they had anything to hide, even if Stasia felt like maybe they should. "We're working on the assumption that you guys heal faster than normal people," she said. "Would I be right about that?" Given the way Vega healed the second the bullet was out of him, it had to be true.

Rowe nodded and came fully into the room. "We've had some reckless play, trying to figure out our limits. It takes a lot of damage to keep us down."

"So not just one bullet?" asked Em.

"That would be correct."

"What about a silver bullet?" she asked, waving the forceps with more trust than Stasia had in them. "Or a bullet with silver stuff on it."

"What?" That got Rowe all the way across the room to look closer at the bullet. "You think someone shot a silver bullet at us?"

Em shrugged. "Or maybe it hit something silver before it hit Vega?" she suggested. "Maybe a fork or a candlestick?"

Rowe thought for a moment as he looked at the tiny piece of metal that had almost killed his friend. "There were silver candlesticks around us, so it's possible the bullet went through one and fused with the silver." He took the forceps from Em and got a better look at the bullet.

He dropped it onto his hand and flinched as it touched his skin, then he curled his fingers around it and held tight for about five seconds before tossing it back into the container. When he opened his hand back up, there was a red welt that kind of looked like a mosquito bite.

"I was expecting something a little bit more dramatic," Stasia admitted. Going by the movies his skin should have been ghastly, not just minorly irritated. Of course, she wasn't living in a movie.

Row gave a little laugh. "Me too, honestly. That's why I flinched. We’ve played with silver. How could we not? We're freaking werewolves. But it's really hard to find silver weaponry and it's kind of soft metal. But maybe someone figured something out. I have to tell this to Gibson." Rowe picked up the container with the bullet in it.

"Of course." Stasia probably would have told the boss herself if she'd had a few more minutes to think about it. "This is the first major medical issue you've had, isn't