by Laura Taylor
“Send Silas up,” he said, as Caroline glared at him. “If the so-called rogue causes any trouble, Silas will take her out, no problem.”
“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day,” Caroline growled, then stalked out of the room.
The woman on the bed stirred, moaned, then fell silent again. Baron settled in for a long wait. They’d used enough sedative to knock out a horse, and this newcomer was a lightweight compared to most of the residents here. But she had to wake up sooner or later. And when she did, Baron had a small mountain of questions that needed answering.
Mark paused outside the bedroom door, still debating with himself over whether he should be here.
At the time, rescuing the girl from the lab had seemed obvious, the only viable decision in a very bad situation. Leaving her there to die would have been beyond heartless – it would have made him as bad as the monsters who had been torturing her.
But now that they were back home, a whole world of unintended consequences had sprung up, and Mark was on the horns of a dilemma, trying to work out how to deal with them all.
He should never have been in the lab in the first place. Going there, running his own private investigation without Baron’s knowledge or permission, was a gross violation of Den rules. That alone was enough to earn him some serious punishment. But the reason behind his being there was even worse. If anyone discovered what he’d been doing, what he’d been investigating for the last six months… fuck, they’d put him down in an instant. His research had been an act of treason, and Baron wouldn’t hesitate to kill him for risking the safety of the Den in such a reckless manner.
So, in the interests of staying alive, he was trying to figure out the best way to play this.
According to the story he’d given Baron, he’d come across the girl – by all appearances a rogue wolf – while he’d been out shopping. She’d been running loose and covered in blood, so he’d called in a capture squad, tracked the woman until Baron could catch up with her, and then they’d all high-tailed it north, their business in London thankfully at a close. If anyone had taken notice of the van and the blood-smeared woman, then Skip was an expert at covering their tracks, able to hack any database in the world, erase security videos, and cause police case files to get ‘lost’, while Alistair was a master spin doctor, managing the group’s PR and fabricating media stories whenever their activities started to draw too much attention. Even so, they didn’t like to make extra work when stealth and discretion would serve just as well.
But the truth was more than a short leap from that bland story. So Mark was eager to find out what the girl knew, whether she remembered him and could identify him, whether she intended to spill his secret. But the problem was that the very act of trying to cover his tracks could very well draw unwanted attention to himself, and he’d spent the last hour and a half debating whether to come up here and see her, or keep to himself and wait it out.
Deciding to bite the bullet, Mark lifted his hand and knocked on the door. “What?” came the gruff reply. He pushed it open and saw Baron standing near the bed, and Silas on the far side of the room, a knife strapped to his hip and a habitual scowl on his face. Baron’s eyebrows lifted as he saw who had arrived.
“Well, well. Come to check on sleeping beauty, have you?” The smirk on his face matched the sarcastic edge to his voice, and Mark glanced at the bed, disappointed to find that the girl was still unconscious. Damn. No chance of finding out what she knew.
“Just wanted to see how she’s doing,” Mark said, feigning disinterest. “She looked the worse for wear when we picked her up.” And still did, he was dismayed to realise. She was still covered with blood, still wearing green scrubs, and he felt the protective instinct he’d felt in the lab come roaring back to life. “Couldn’t you at least have cleaned her up a bit?” he snapped, not liking the way she lay so still, vulnerable and helpless. She looked tiny on the big bed, her short hair spread out on the pillow like a halo, and Mark felt his gut twist as he looked at her. Okay, so much for disinterest.
Baron just looked amused. “We picked up a potential rogue who looks like she just killed someone. No, I’m not giving her a bath.” Mark scowled at him, which earned him a laugh. “Oh, you like her, then? And everyone says love at first sight is just for the fairy tales. But if you’re trying to get into her pants, I’d recommend at least waiting until she wakes up.”
Mark swore under his breath. “I’m not trying to get into her pants. She’s just…” He gestured helplessly to the bed where she lay pale and still.
“Female?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” The truth was, the barb hit a little too close to home. Not that he had any nefarious intentions towards the girl. He would never have taken advantage of her in any way. But women shifters were few and far between, and a beautiful woman in need of rescuing? Yeah, it had tugged at his heart strings a little.
The door was suddenly flung open and Caroline marched in, glaring at Baron. “Fucking hell, are you still here?”
“I thought this was where you wanted me,” Baron said. “Babysitting the dangerous menace.” He jerked his head at the woman on the bed. “Better call the riot squad. I think she just moved her thumb.”
“The Council called,” Caroline snapped, totally ignoring the girl. “We’ve got problems.”
“When don’t we?” Baron said drily, and Mark groaned inwardly. It was a never-ending battle with these two, with neither one able to give any ground to the other. If Baron hadn’t already had a partner, Mark would have assumed the constant sniping at each other was borne of nothing more than sexual tension. But then again, Baron’s relationship was… complicated.
“I’m serious,” Caroline snapped. “Come and see me when you’ve finished with your prisoner. The Noturatii are stirring up a hornet’s nest again.” The door slammed shut, and Baron let out a muffled curse.
He turned back to Mark, fixing him with a sardonic glare, his mood apparently having taken a rapid downturn. “Look, Romeo. She’s still unconscious, so how about you take your arse back downstairs and find something useful to do. She’ll wake up when she wakes up; you can wait it out, just like everyone else.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Mark let himself out of the room, annoyed and frustrated. He’d used up his only real opportunity at learning anything more about the girl, and had gained exactly nothing for his efforts. Fuck, he thought, as he headed down to his workshop, deciding to finish the latest set of furniture he was building. Far from finishing the day as a hero saving a damsel in distress, this could well turn out to be one of his worst days ever.
Dee struggled against the fog in her brain, trying to figure out where reality was. She heard voices and wondered where she was. Had she fallen asleep at a friend’s house? Or maybe she was at home and had left the television on. One of the voices was shrill and female, and there were others, male, one calm and placid, another deep and rumbling. She tried to remember if she knew those voices.
And then reality came thundering down on her – images of the lab, her abduction, the pain and terror screaming back into her consciousness, the presence in her head, the blood – and her eyes snapped open.
The room was stylishly old-world, with a thick rug covering wooden floorboards, an open fireplace, and beautiful paintings on the walls. She thought maybe she was having a bizarre dream.
But then one of the lines she’d heard echoed in her mind. ‘Come and see me when you’ve finished with your prisoner’.
Prisoner? She was their prisoner? After all she’d done to escape her last captors, was she right back where she’d started?
There were two men in the room, two large, imposing, dangerous men, and she felt a new wave of terror, followed by a most perverse kind of relief. Okay, she was still a captive, but this time she was somewhere far different from the lab. And the cold glares and open intimidation of these men were strangely preferable to the nameless, faceless scientists who had tortured her without speaki
ng a word.
The man closest to her was huge, with thick muscles standing out from massive biceps, a wide chest, and thighs like tree trunks. His arms were folded across his chest, and black hair and a short beard added to the impression of menace.
Then Dee got a look at the second man. He was shorter and more wiry, leaning nonchalantly against the wall, but he had the look of a man who would gut you and laugh about it as he painted pictures with your blood. He had olive skin, a bald head, and a scar running from his left eye to his collar bone. Tattoos climbed from his wrists to his shoulders. He held a long dagger in his left hand, silently tossing it in the air and catching it again.
Dee sat up, backing away across the bed until her hip hit the wall. “Are you going to kill me?” Presumably not, she thought, even before she had finished the question. If they were, they would have done it while she was unconscious. But she was asking just to open a dialogue and gauge these men’s reactions. To see if they would speak to her at all.
“Haven’t decided yet,” the larger man said. The leaner one quirked an eyebrow upwards and stroked the handle of his dagger.
Okay, not the worst start ever. They hadn’t threatened torment and pain, nor tried to rape her, nor demanded ransoms or rewards in exchange for her freedom. It was a small silver lining, but given what she had endured for the last few days, any upside was a blessing.
As she sat there, trying to get her bearings, the creature inside her stirred. It woke up, tested her limbs subtly, still uncertain of this new body, then it seemed to scan the room, though whether it was by scent or sound or some other means she couldn’t quite tell. But the reaction of the creature to its new surroundings was startling. She felt its tight apprehension and ready aggression ease. The creature was withdrawing, relaxing. Why the hell would…?
But when the reason struck her, it filled her with terror.
Oh hell. These men… whatever it was that was inside her, whatever it was that she had become, they were like her. They were infected with the same strange energy, and her own beast was communing with theirs. They were killers, that much was certain.
But then, so was she, after the massacre at the lab.
If they didn’t mean to kill her, then maybe they could explain what she was, what the presence in her body and mind was, and tell her how she might be rid of it again? If such a thing was even possible.
Dee had never given much thought to religion, never considered what might exist beyond what could be seen and heard and touched, but… Demon. The word lingered in her mind, and the thought that she had been possessed terrified her. God help her, what was she to do if that was true? Could a priest exorcise it? Could she be cured? Or was she to become a deranged killer, preying on the weak and innocent?
And then another thought struck her. “I need to call my family,” she blurted out. “To tell them I’m alive-”
“No,” the larger man interrupted.
“My mother will be frantic,” Dee went on, heedless. “I’ve been missing for days.”
“No.”
“Please, I… Please?”
“No.”
Perhaps she’d escaped from the frying pan only to land straight in the fire, then. The implacable calm of the man was daunting, and Dee fell silent, contemplating her options. She looked down at her hands, saw the dried blood on them. “What am I?”
Both men looked startled, as if she had suddenly stripped naked in front of them. “Excuse me?” The look of bewilderment on the larger man’s face was almost comical.
“You’re like me, aren’t you? The… the thing inside you?” The man nodded, a slow, cautious gesture. “So what am I? What is this thing?”
“How did you-” the leaner man asked, but the bigger one quickly shushed him.
“How did you get… how did you acquire the presence?” It was carefully phrased and rephrased as the question was asked, a deliberate attempt at avoiding giving away any new information.
Images of the lab flashed through her mind, the terrors and fears and implicit threats, and suddenly she was tired of being the pawn in this macabre game. “Okay, how about this,” she suggested, making an effort to sound confident. “I want to know what I am. You want to know how I got this way. Maybe a little give and take is in order?” It was a bit of a shock to find herself trying to gain back some ground, to negotiate with these thugs, rather than just giving in to whatever they asked of her. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t her putting on this brave front, but the beast inside her. It was alert and awake now, paying attention to details, and it seemed almost eager to lock horns with this huge man.
Her captor regarded her shrewdly. Silently. And then he suddenly smiled, looking at her with open amusement. “Fine. I’m Baron,” he said. “And you are?”
“Dee.”
“Dee who?”
“You first.”
Baron rolled his eyes, as if talking to a particularly stupid child. “Joseph Baron.”
“Dee Carman.”
“Pleasure to meet you. So, you want to know what you are?”
Dee nodded.
Baron smirked. “Better hold on to your hat, then. Because this one’s a doozy.”
He stepped back and glanced at the other man, who nodded, palmed his dagger, stepped away from the wall and fixed his gaze on Dee, as if they expected her to do something violent. Then Baron turned back to Dee and a strange energy filled the room, like static electricity, making her hair stand on end and her skin tingle, and then the huge man in front of her blurred, shifted, changed into…
Dee stared at the huge black wolf that now dominated the room and let out an ear-piercing scream.
CHAPTER THREE
Dee sat trembling on the bed, a glass of whisky in her hand. Whisky? She never drank whisky. She glanced over at Baron, back in his human form, and remembered the huge black wolf he had turned into.
She quickly drained the glass, wincing at the taste. She was a… She was…
Baron pulled a chair up closer to the bed, turning it around to straddle it. And she imagined that beneath the scowl and the beard, he was feeling concerned for her. “Take a deep breath. Don’t want you panicking again.”
As if that hadn’t been embarrassing enough the first time around. But a little shock was justified, she told herself, as she fought to regain a small dose of pride. She was a… “I’m a werewolf,” she stated flatly. Maybe hearing it out loud would help.
“No. Not a werewolf.” From his tone, it sounded like she’d just insulted Baron. “A shape shifter. A wolf, and a human. Not a half-breed of either.” His eyes narrowed. “But what I’m far more interested in is how you came to be… one of us.”
That sounded ominous. “How does it usually happen?”
Baron hesitated, and Dee knew that whatever he said next was going to be a hedge. “In a variety of ways. But it’s always voluntary. The convert knows exactly what they’re getting into and accepts it wholeheartedly. To my knowledge, being converted against your will isn’t even possible. So how did you manage to have a wolf on board without even knowing what it was?”
Dee considered her answer carefully. It sounded like Baron was far from happy with her so far, and admitting to being kidnapped, admitting that she’d been turned into this thing against her will? It was like admitting you’d snuck into an exclusive club through the back door. And that was always right before the bouncers escorted you straight back out again. Which, in this case, was likely to happen at the pointy end of a knife.
But what else was she going to say? She didn’t even know how it had happened.
Besides which, these men, for all their cold intimidation, were turning out to be the lesser of two evils. The scientists had tortured and experimented on her, while the men in front of her had looked after her, got her out of harm’s way, put her on a soft bed, tried to keep her calm and comfortable.
“I was kidnapped,” she said finally, hoping that honesty was, indeed, the best policy. “I don’t know who they were, but
they held me in a lab for days and tortured me. Tried all sorts of experiments. I’m guessing they were trying to implant the… wolf.” Damn, but it was still so difficult to put that into words. But the presence was still there, alert, waiting. Watching.
“What kind of experiments?”
She explained it as best she could, fighting back terror at the memories, detailing the needles, the surgery, the electric shocks. Halfway through, Baron refilled her glass, waiting patiently while she sipped the strong liquor, waited for her hands to stop shaking, until she found the courage to continue.
“The last experiment,” she said finally, staring at the bedspread, telling herself this would all be over soon. “That was the one that worked. They took a sample of my blood. Took it away, then came back later and put it back into my vein. I don’t know what they did to it, but then suddenly I had this thing in my head offering to kill them all.”
Baron was listening with rapt attention. “What exactly did it offer you? How did it communicate with you?”
“It was like a series of images in my head. Ideas. Emotions, maybe. It was very angry and showed me a picture of the scientists dead on the floor, covered in blood.”
Baron regarded her suspiciously. “You don’t strike me as a particularly violent sort,” he observed carefully.
In contrast to Baron himself, Dee thought, who looked like he was quite capable of ripping a man limb from limb. She glanced down at herself, still wearing scrubs, dried blood coating her hands – what a sight she must make. But it wasn’t surprising that the truth was so glaringly obvious. She had trouble even killing spiders, preferring to catch them and release them outside. “Not usually, no.”
Baron continued to watch her, perplexed, curious. “So a wolf was forced to merge with you, and then it offered you an act of violence that you would normally find utterly repugnant.” He shook his head. “You should be stark raving mad by now.”