Page 55 of Robb

And then: Tahnee. I have to call Tahnee. I have to warn her.

And then, as something hard and heavy crashed down on the back of his head: nothing at all.

Chapter 10

The buzzing roar of a not-so-distant chainsaw brought Robb back to consciousness. That, and a sudden, painful, full-body spasm that would’ve sent him sprawling to the floor if someone – or something – hadn’t been holding him upright.

He gasped as his lungs heaved in precious oxygen, his muscles stuttering as they tried to regain their regular rhythm.

To say that he felt like shit would be the understatement of the year… but it wasn’t the most important thing right now. It wasn’t even in the top ten.

Taking a moment to try and regain his equilibrium, he took stock of what his senses were telling him.

His eyes didn’t tell him much at all, given that they were still closed, his eyelids so heavy and painful that he knew it would be a task to get them open.

His dingo was making its own slow crawl back to full consciousness, its nerves on edge, its thoughts jumbled. Its senses were numbed, dulled – Robb quickly figured out he couldn’t rely on its heightened awareness to give him much more information than he already had about where the hell he was or what the hell was happening.

The pain that still burned through every nerve in his body told him that he’d been poisoned. If he had to guess, he would say that he’d been injected with wyvern venom. Not only did the truly shitty way he felt match the known symptoms, but Hargreaves had a known fondness for using it.

Between the dry air blowing against his skin, the faintest whiff of printer ink, and the too-loud hum of electronics, he was almost certainly in some sort of office environment.

Although that didn’t explain the chainsaw.

The chainsaw roared again, slightly less loudly this time, and Robb realized with a foggy startlement that it wasn’t a chainsaw at all, but the vibrating of his phone as it sat on a hard surface. Now that his head was clearing, the insistent buzz was coming down to a tolerable volume, no longer making it feel like someone was taking a drill to his skull.

That raised the question, though: who was calling him?

Dragging his eyelids open with great effort, Robb took stock of the room he was in – or as far as he could at the moment, anyway. Everything was bright and smeary, like he was seeing the world through a thin layer of Vaseline.

“Oh, at last,” said a voice somewhere off to the side, and Robb turned his head slowly.

The blur in front of him began to resolve into a figure – and Robb was unsurprised to see the old man from the alleyway, looking much more sprightly now.

Robb kicked himself internally for falling into what was, in hindsight, an obvious trap. The man hadn’t registered on Robb’s radar as a shifter, but that didn’t mean much. He could’ve been using a power suppressant that made him undetectable, or he could be a human who was in cahoots with Hargreaves.

The dingo snarled in a mixture of rage and shame.

How dare they pretend that an elder is in need of assistance in order to progress their foul work. They are the lowest of the low.

On the table, the phone continued its relentless hum.

“We thought we might’ve left the antidote too late,” the old man went on, his face now mostly visible to Robb’s rapidly improving eyesight. “You were in pretty rough shape for a while, there.”

If this was considered relatively good shape, then Robb was at least somewhat grateful that he’d apparently been knocked out for the worst of it. Both Hector and Rhys had been poisoned by wyvern venom in the past while on missions, and their reports had been harrowing stuff.

But this gave him valuable information: Hargreaves wanted him alive. If they’d wanted him dead, they could’ve just let the wyvern venom do its thing. It was uniformly fatal without an antidote, even for shifters.

Clearly, Robb had something they wanted. And if he could work out what that thing was, he would have a chance of stringing them along until he could either escape, or be rescued.

“But it seems like you’re made of sterner stuff than most,” the old man went on, apparently enjoying the sound of his own voice. “I guess that’s not really that much of a surprise, coming from the legendary Robb Lockwood.”

If the revelation about his name was supposed to be a surprise to him, Robb had to say it was a pretty weak attempt on their part. He was basically a public figure as far as shifter law and order went. As much as he tried to protect his own safety by keeping a low profile, he’d long assumed that Hargreaves knew exactly who he was, even before he’d known that there was a mole in the Agency.

On the table, his phone stopped ringing for a few seconds – before it started again.

That, more than anything else, was the thing worrying him.

Is it Tahnee? Have they come for her?