Free Shattered by Dean Murray

other side
of the elevator. Addison pushed the call button and hoped the smokers
would stay in the other hall until after she'd made it safely back up
to her apartment and behind the five different deadbolt locks
securing her door.
    Just as the
elevator arrived and the doors started opening, a group of four
poorly-dressed young men came out of the hallway and gathered a
couple of feet away from her. They were all obviously high. The one
on the right was definitely the pot smoker—he seemed to find
everything quite hilarious—but the others had eyes that were
too-bright and seemed to be moving with too much jerky speed to not
be high on something else.
    Addison pushed
her cart into the elevator and had to suppress a grimace as all four
teenagers crowded into the elevator behind her. She pushed the button
for the eleventh floor, but none of the boys pushed any of the other
buttons.
    It wasn't until
the doors had closed that she realized that the disturbing smell, the
one that had been mostly covered up by the smell of pot, was coming
from the boys. Only it wasn't anything that they were wearing, it was
coming out of their pores.
    Addison's
stomach knotted up tighter and tighter as the seconds crawled by. If
her new suspicion was correct, then she was in a lot more trouble
than she'd realized. It wasn't a matter of just overwhelming a few
teenagers or her cover getting blown anymore. She needed to get out
of town as soon as possible and make sure that James and Alec
understood the full extent of her suspicions.
    None of the
boys hassled her on the way up to her floor. One of them even held
the doors for her so she could get her cart up over the two-inch lip
created by the elevator's stubborn refusal to stop even with the
floor.
    The smell of
pot momentarily crested to the point that it wiped out every other
smell as the weed smoker moved closer to her, but she didn't think
anything of it until it was too late.
    One second she
was struggling with her cart and then in the next she had a
handkerchief over her mouth and she was breathing in something that
burned her lungs. Addison managed to get an elbow into the boy on her
right, the one who had been holding the doors open, but even that
took more out of her than it should have.
    The urge to
sleep was sudden and overwhelming. Addison tried to stomp down on the
instep of the pothead who had dosed her with the chloroform, but her
limbs didn't want to cooperate. She was too clumsy and exhausted; she
collapsed into the arms of the boys who'd been waiting to catch her.
    "This
better be the right hag. I think she might have busted one of my
ribs. Are you sure this is the right one?"
    "Yeah,
Slash and the boss were watching her the whole way back from the
grocery store."
    "Why does
he want her again? She doesn't seem special."
    "I don't
know. He said something about Perkins tipping him off when she moved
in and then she didn't act right when he shook her down last week. He
thinks she's got access to more money than she should have."
    Addison's
thoughts were slow and clunky. She wanted to open her eyes, but they
were just too heavy. If she'd been a human, a dose that size would
have put her under, but her shape shifter metabolism had been just
strong enough to keep her from completely losing consciousness.
    Unfortunately
it hadn't been up to the task of keeping her in fighting condition,
and even now her mind was spinning like a stripped cog. She'd tried
so hard to stay in character when they'd shaken her down, but
apparently she'd misjudged just exactly how much money someone in the
projects would have had.
    The elevator
had started back down towards the ground floor at some point while
she'd been trying to follow the gang members' conversations. That
somehow didn't seem as important as the fact that Addison didn't know
what had happened to her cart.
    Momentarily
forgetting that she was supposed to be pretending to be completely
unconscious, she tried to ask about the cart, but the words