Chapter 16 · Moonclaim - Chapter 16: Last Hunter Blood

The serum in Leon's veins was turning black.

Ivy could see it through his skin, spreading up from the injection site on his forearm like ink in water. He was on his knees in the basement lab, one hand braced against the steel table, breathing too fast.

"How long?" she said.

He didn't answer. His pupils were doing that thing again, flickering gold then dark then gold. The wolf was pushing.

"Leon. How long before you shift?"

"Twenty minutes." His voice came out rough. "Maybe less."

She looked at the monitors. His heart rate was spiking, temperature climbing. The latest batch of suppression serum was supposed to buy him three days. It'd been forty minutes.

"What changed?"

"I don't know." He dragged himself upright, stumbled to the fridge where he kept the vials. His hands were shaking. "The formula's the same. I ran it twice."

Ivy moved to the computer, pulled up the logs. Same compounds, same ratios. But the readout from his implant was screaming. Cortisol through the roof. Adrenaline. Something else she didn't have a name for, some marker that only showed up in wolves.

"Your body's rejecting it," she said.

Leon slammed the fridge shut.