by A. D. Ryan
I was having trouble making sense of what I’d just seen on the monitor, but Cordelia’s name stood out like a light in a dark tunnel, tuning my focus. My fingers twitched as I knelt down and reached for it, curious as to what I was going to find inside. I continued to try and deny what I’d just watched, even as my fingers brushed the manila folder. Maybe I was going crazy. Maybe Cordelia really had been taken again, just like we’d believed all along. Just because the evidence wasn’t conclusive with that scenario didn’t mean it wasn’t a possibility…
As I picked up the file, something my dad said in the library the other day came back to me. He had mentioned the lack of desperation in the streaks of blood on the wall, and it never really occurred to me why that might have been. I wasn’t given the opportunity to properly question his budding theory, having been distracted, but I found myself questioning it now.
I recalled the subtle swooping strokes, imagining myself in the library and running my hands along them as I walked toward the door. My hand would have moved up and down, up and down… It was definitely not a pattern that one would attribute to desperation. It was almost…jovial. The revelation sent me back a couple steps; it didn’t make any sense. She had been so scared of being taken again. I continued to rearrange the puzzle I thought I’d almost solved, biting my lower lip as I tried to convince myself that I was reaching far beyond reason.
I didn’t want to allow myself to believe what I was considering based on the evidence I’d found, because I’d brought her back; if she were involved in the murder of her parents, then I was responsible. My head was starting to hurt. I closed my eyes, trying to imagine other scenarios. All I saw were words I’d read a while ago. Entries from a journal…
My eyes flew open, and a curse blew past my lips. Instantly, I understood. Truthfully, I think the suspicions might have always been there, constantly snapping at the heels of my awareness and begging to be acknowledged: Cordelia was a descendant of Gianna.
Cordelia could very well be the first hybrid.
With shaking hands, I pulled the cover of the folder back to find photos of Cordelia strapped to the slab, her eyes closed, body appearing limp. There were notes on the papers behind the photos, but I couldn’t make out most of the chicken scratch writing used, aside from a few words. One in particular stood out more than the others:
SUCCESS.
“Well, I guess this means you’ve learned my dirty little secret.”
Still kneeling, I whipped around upon hearing the voice that was both familiar and completely foreign at the same time. Slowly, I rose to my feet, never taking my eyes off of Cordelia as she stood in the doorway, smirking.
“Took you long enough.”
Chapter34 | conflict
Her eyes, while familiar, held a level of malevolence I’d only ever seen in the vampires I’d come up against. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it in Cordelia’s eyes, though; I saw it in them the night she caught me watching her from the doorway of her room. I just hadn’t realized what it was staring back at me, assuming it was due to PTSD.
Knowing what she was now, my wolf lunged forward, but I held her back. I couldn’t let her lash out. Not yet, anyway. My head was spinning at this unexpected turn of events. We came here for information and to find out if Bobby had been successful at turning himself into a hybrid. We hadn’t expected to find this.
There comes a time when you have to stop denying the truth, though. And that time was now. Memories of my abduction and my time in captivity came rushing back, not to mention the way Cordelia had been acting as of late.
As these memories filtered through my consciousness, something niggled at the base of my awareness. I couldn’t quite pinpoint it until I worked through the series of events backwards.
I recalled the night I overheard Cordelia talking to herself in Colby’s room, the look in her eyes when she caught me at her door. I focused on that memory specifically for a moment, trying to remember anything I might have seen, heard, or smelled.
At first, nothing registered, but soon enough, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end when I remembered smelling the slightest hint of a vampire…and not just any vampire. Bobby.
The soft whisper of Cordelia’s voice filled my head. “Any day,” she had mumbled, looking out the window, her head tilted downward ever-so-slightly. “It won’t be long. They’ll see I’m one of them. They’ll trust me and tell me things. Any day… Any day…”
It suddenly occurred to me that she wasn’t talking to herself like I’d originally thought. I was so stressed out, myself, that I hadn’t even entertained the idea that she’d been conspiring with the vampires. I deduced that Bobby must have been wise enough to stay far enough away from the house that we wouldn’t detect him, but still close enough that Cordelia could communicate her findings.
Nausea rolled in my belly, but I choked it back as I cycled through the other memories.
The soft trill of Cordelia’s voice thrust me back to my time in the cage. It was like I was there, the cold stone floor against my cheek as I fought through my drug-induced sleep. I’d heard voices breaking through the fog, and at the time, I’d only recognized Bobby’s.
“Why wait? Strike now,” the unfamiliar voice stated before Bobby’s deep voice said something about perfect test subjects—the stark realization that he was talking about me and the child I didn’t know I was carrying hit me like a ton of bricks.
Before I could let my rage distract me, the sharp voice registered as distinctly female for the first time. “…don’t need more testing…time to act.”
“You’re not in charge here,” Bobby had said, raising his voice. “Remember your place.”
While I couldn’t confirm with certainty that the female voice was Cordelia, something told me I was onto something.
That was when denial seeped in and reminded me that Cordelia was in the woods that day, hurt and bleeding. It was the scent of her blood that had drawn me farther from the house. The blood was real—it was hers. There was a lot of it, and she was hurt. I desperately wanted to believe she was just a victim in all of this, but diversions seemed to be the coven’s go-to tactic in getting what they wanted.
Me.
The final memory, and possibly the most disturbing, was the way she begged Marcus to forego the mission to meet up with Jackson. It was the coven’s plan all along to take out the Alphas. It would cause a ripple effect throughout the Pack as we grieved and struggled to find our way without a confident leader.
“W-why?” I demanded, still flashing back to the carnage at the manor and feeling dizzy. “They were your parents. They loved you.”
Cordelia’s lips curved up into an evil grin, her teeth bright and her canines longer and sharper than I remember them being. “No. They loved the old me. When I came back, everybody walked on eggshells around me. They didn’t trust me.”
“They didn’t want to burden you after everything you’d already been through,” I challenged, part of me still hoping I could get through to her wolf side…or better yet, her humanity, if there was any left. “They wanted to protect you from the evils of the world. That’s what parents do.”
With a sinister giggle, Cordelia dropped her head and looked up at me through her lashes. “They couldn’t even protect themselves when it came down to it.”
The wolf snapped just beneath the surface again, itching to be set free. I kept a handle on it, still trying to wrap my mind around everything. I opened my mouth to say something else, but Cordelia stepped into the room and moved around me, assessing me like I was her prey.
“Mom was easy,” she said, her voice taking on a sweet cadence.
Angry at the ease with which she said “Mom,” my lips curled up and a snarl started to ripple through my body. “You don’t get to call her that,” I growled, hands balling into fists at my side. “Not after what you did to her.”
“Dad was so busy in the library,” she continued as though I hadn’t said anything at all. Her eyes staye
d on me as she walked, and her posture told me she was on the offence, ready to attack at any given moment, just waiting for me to drop my guard. “Mom was so comfortable with me around, helping in the kitchen. She was so caught up in getting things ready for dinner that night, her back to me while she washed and peeled potatoes, that she didn’t even see me coming. I snapped her neck without even breaking a sweat.”
I remembered Miranda’s body in the library, neck bloody but no blood spatter. It coincided with what Cordelia said, because if Miranda’s heart had stopped beating, there would be no arterial spray, only a downward pooling of blood on and around the body. Which was exactly what I had found.
“With her not following me around every damn minute, I was able to spend a few minutes with Daddy, asking him questions about what he was working on. He was buried so deep in his precious dossiers that he didn’t notice the silence through the rest of the house…not at first, anyway.” Cordelia stopped walking around me, standing between me and the open door again. “When he called for my mother and she didn’t reply…well, his concern was intoxicating. He barely made it five feet before I ripped his throat out with my bare hands.” With a sigh, Cordelia looked down at her hands, her fingers curling and claws breaking through the ends.
She went through the transition so easily that it made me question just how long she’d been like this, and it made me realize that she’d played me like a fiddle since I’d first met her. She made me think she couldn’t shift, that it was as painful for her as it was for the rest of us, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.
She knew these things about us and manipulated me into opening up to her from the moment I figured out who she was, and it made me sick to think my instincts had failed me.
When her eyes met mine again, they were no longer a golden hazel; they were amber with a thick ring of red around the outer edge of her iris, and blue-black veins appeared on her pale skin, surrounding her eyes and edging out over her cheekbones. I’d never seen anything like it, and I didn’t want to admit that it frightened me, but it did.
The wolf continued to pace along the edge of my control, salivating and waiting for me to unleash her. The way Cordelia’s eyes seemed to cut into me told me she wasn’t going to let me out of here alive, and I recognized that I would have to fight my way out.
“You wanted to know why.” Her voice was low, almost raspy. “Because without an Alpha, the Pack is disorganized…weak. Ripe for the picking so the coven can finally be rid of them.”
It was my turn to smile, and I loosened the leash on the wolf just enough to ease my fear. “So I suppose that means you haven’t heard.” Cordelia’s smile faltered, eyes flashing with curiosity. “I’m the Pack Alpha.”
The expression on her face transformed to immediate amusement, and she clapped her hands together like an excited child who just got everything she ever wanted for her birthday. “Well isn’t that just perfect! Naming someone as inexperienced as you… Man, that must have really pissed the others off,” she stated, cursing as if it was no big deal for someone her age to do so. “I bet it caused a lot of resentment. Am I right?”
“Not exactly,” a deep voice said from outside the room, causing Cordelia to whip around and release an extremely uncharacteristic hiss. Nick appeared in the doorway, his eyes moving briefly to me and then back to Cordelia.
“Well, if it isn’t everybody’s knight in shining armor,” Cordelia quipped dryly. “You know, you have this pesky habit of showing up when you’re not welcome.”
“Guess I’ll have to work on that.” His tone did not belie his anger and apprehension as he sized up Cordelia. We still had no idea what exactly we were up against, but I could sense Cordelia’s increasing desire to fight.
Cordelia shrugged. “Eh. Doesn’t really matter. Not like you’ll be walking out of here.”
Before another word could be spoken, Cordelia let out a savage scream, curling her fingers and slashing at the air as she rushed toward Nick. I reacted, releasing the wolf and darting across the room. I was just reaching for her, preparing to rip her away from Nick and throw her across the room when I noticed her freeze in place.
Looking at her, it appeared that she was trying to walk through a thick, gelatinous wall. I watched as she struggled, noticing the frustration and anger on her face as she tried to figure out what exactly was happening.
I was trying to assess it for myself when Alistair appeared from the hall, entering the room and muttering something under his breath as he nodded in my direction. I could feel the energy waves rolling off of him and was able to deduce he was behind whatever was happening to Cordelia.
Cordelia grunted. “That’s one effective binding spell, Shaman,” she said through clenched teeth. “You should know, when I get free, I’ll rip your heart from your chest and feed it to you.”
Alistair only smiled before acknowledging me. “Your call. The binding spell will hold for a few hours. We should gather what we can and leave.”
“I want to detain her,” I announced, surprising both men. “We could learn something from her…” My eyes met hers, and the wolf decided to toy with her a little given she had been a part of everything that had happened to me recently—everything that had happened to this pack. “We could cage and maybe torture the truth out of her.”
Cordelia sneered and struggled a little harder against the invisible barrier. “I won’t talk. I’ll die before I tell you anything.”
Feeling confident, I walked past her, glaring. “Then I guess you’ll die in a dank dungeon back home.”
“No. That’s not possible. We would have known,” Corbin tried to argue as we sat around the dining room at the manor.
“I understand your hesitation to accept what I’m saying, Corbin, but it’s true. We’ve seen the files…we saw her shift on camera. Cordelia is a hybrid…the first of her kind. You saw her when we took her from the compound.”
“I can’t believe it,” Layla offered breathlessly as she leaned back in her chair. Her eyes glistened with tears as she stroked her stomach. Behind her, Vince laid a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. She looked up at him. “If only we’d found her sooner.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I told her. “With the barrier spell they’d used, there was no way we were going to locate that place if I hadn’t been taken. I wish this wasn’t a possibility, but all the evidence indicates it might very well be.”
I explained everything we found in the lab, and I recounted what I’d found the day of the murder before the cops showed up as well as earlier in the library.
“True, I picked up traces of the vampires, but it wasn’t nearly as strong as it would’ve been had there been even one in that room,” I continued. “Something wasn’t adding up.”
“I believe you,” a small voice said from the entry. I turned to find Colby there, hair limp, skin pale, arms crossed as she leaned against the doorframe. “I knew something was off with her.” Colby’s eyes met mine. “I should’ve said something sooner. I just…I thought what everyone else did—that she was suffering from some sort of post traumatic stress or something. I didn’t think she would—”
Zach rounded the table and pulled her into his arms as she broke down. Her sobs were muffled against his chest as he ran a hand over her head and back, trying to calm her. It wasn’t hard to see that she harbored some guilt about what happened. She probably thought that, because she shared a room with Cordelia, she should have seen the signs a little more clearly.
By that logic, though, I should have seen something was amiss before I broke her out and brought her back home…
The sounds of Cordelia’s screaming echoed through the house. No matter how hard we tried to block her out, it seemed like it was all we heard. I had gone down a couple of times to see if I could reason with her. I couldn’t. She was so reluctant to open up about anything, and the more she fought, the more I realized that the change into a hybrid might have actually wiped out every ounce of humanity she had
as a wolf, just as Alistair had said it might.
Colby and Corbin weren’t able to handle the sound of their sister screaming from the pit…not that I could blame them. Having spent so much time getting to know the person I thought she was, it was hard for me to listen to, also. Instead of forcing them to stick around, I gave them instructions to take my parents to the airport and get them on a plane back home. I called ahead and spoke to Keaton and O’Malley, fabricating a story about how they’d decided at the last minute to come back and extend their vacation, having fallen in love with the mountains. I hated lying to them, but they couldn’t know the whole truth. Mom and Dad knew to keep everything they’d learned to themselves for everyone’s safety.
I asked Keaton and O’Malley to meet them at the airport and give them a ride home. I really wanted them there to make sure nothing happened to my parents again—not that they’d be able to stop them if it did, but I was hopeful that Bobby would be too preoccupied with finding his pet project to worry about my parents.
Last time she went missing, it was organized to happen that way, and I had played right into it. This time, we had taken her on our terms.
I said goodbye to my parents outside the manor, promising to update them as soon as everything was over. Mom was still hesitant to accept everything, and that was okay. I wasn’t going to rush her and scare her off.
Zach had gone with the two of them when I voiced my concern. I wouldn’t put them in danger like that. Alistair offered to go as well, now that the barrier spells were in place and fully functional. That made me feel better.
After they left, the rest of the Pack stayed gathered around the dining room table. Not an inch of the glossy wood finish could be seen as they started leafing through information inside the files we took from the coven’s research lab. We were learning a lot more than we’d anticipated about how they succeeded—it wasn’t just about DNA, but the timing had to be just right, depending on if it was wolf or parasite that was being changed. You couldn’t just merge our blood with theirs; if a vampire wanted to be made a hybrid, it had to be done on the night of a new moon, and for a wolf, the moon had to be full.