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next to the door, dishevelled, unkempt, barely recognisable.  His usually luscious chocolate - brown hair was tangled and dirty.  Days-old stubble covered his handsome face , and he wore a bloodstained T -shirt and torn jogging pants over his muscular frame.  But it was his eyes that caught and held her attention.  Liquid mercury eyes filled with horror, pain , fear and despair.  She resisted the urge to go to him , hug him, comfo rt him, tell him it would be okay. T hat was a really bad idea with a newly infected Werewolf , and there was still the woman somewhere in the house.
    “Derek, where is the woman?” she asked.  “I need to see if I can help her.”
    At her words , his face crumpled . H e closed his eyes and dropped his head back onto the wall . T ears coursed silently down his cheeks. He lifted one hand to point down the corridor.   “It’s Trish, my sister,” he choked out.  “I’m sorry.  I ’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to… ” His voice broke, and he couldn’t continue .
    Gabi felt her heart clench.  Though she’d never met his sister , she knew that Trish was the only family Derek had left.  She also knew that Trish had only just finished recovering, physically at least, from being beaten half to death by an abusive boyfriend.
    She flew down the corridor in the direction he pointed.  Using her nose to track the scent of blood , she entered the first bedroom.  The dark - haired woman was laid carefully on the double bed, her face turned away from the door.  She was motionless.  Gabi braced herself and hurried to the bed, concentrating all her senses on the woman.  She let out a relieved breath as she detected a faint heartbeat and the slight rise of the woman’s chest.
    There was a bandage on her right arm and shoulder , but blood was seeping through and soaking into the bedspread.  Gabi reached for the woman carefully, turning her head to assess the damage to her neck and shoulder and lightly probing her wrist for a pulse to confirm what her ears had told her.  The pulse was unsteady and faint, but it was there.  It was a good thing she was unconscious; the wounds were ugly and savage, consistent with the bite marks of a large wolf. Gabi laid the back of her hand on Trish’s forehead.  The telltale heat had already begun to take hold . I n a few hours she’d be burning up with fever.  If her body was strong enough to survive the fever , she’d pull through , and her wounds would heal in a matter of days.  But when the full moon exerted its irresistible, magnetic pull in a little under four weeks ’ t ime, she’d go through her first C hange.  Into a Werewolf .   But first , she had to make it through the fever.
    Gabi pulled out her phone just as Derek ghosted into the room and collapsed to his knees near the end of the bed, staring despairingly at Trish, heedless of the tears and blood streaking his face and clothes.
    “She just came to help me,” he said, an ocean of misery in his whisper.  “I told her I was sick, and I told her to stay away, but she came anyway.  She’s like that.  A real mother hen.   You’d think she was the older one.  When I wouldn’t open the door , she unlocked it using her own key and came in anyway.  Something inside just exploded out of me.  The next thing I remember is Trish screaming and crying, and the taste of blood in my mouth.”  He stopped talking to stare at his hands in disbelief.  “I didn’t have hands, I had paws.  Huge, furred paws with great, vicious claws.”
    “Derek,” Gabi interrupted him sharply, “I’ll explain everything in a minute.  Go and put on some coffee and clean yourself up . I’ll be there in a moment.”  She put an authoritative edge in her voice.  Whether it was her tone or the stuntman just functioning on autopilot she wasn’t sure, but Derek dragged himself upright and left the room.  S he heard a shower turn on.  As s he looked back at the woman lying on the bed , she wish ed