by Laura Taylor
“But why would you call me that?” Dee asked Baron.
Baron smiled, with an amused but also saddened look. “Legend has it that Faeydir and her human were constantly at war with each other, never able to decide which body to be in, frightening humans with their sudden shifts and fierce behaviour.” He shrugged. “It just seemed to fit.”
Dee smiled despite herself. “I’m not that fierce.”
“But maybe your wolf is.” It was said with a hint of fondness, but also a subtle warning. “Well, this poses an interesting problem.” He sighed and took his seat again. “As I’ve said before, for most of us, there’s no clear distinction between the human and the wolf. We’re conscious of being ourselves in either body. Wolves can travel further on foot. Humans can manipulate objects better with our hands. Wolves have a stronger digestive system and can handle foods that would make a human sick. Humans can climb fences, trees, whatever. So we look at life through the lens of one united being with two bodies. But let’s assume for the moment that you’re right about what you’ve been saying, and you and your wolf are two separate entities.” He fell silent, a deep frown on his face as he thought the situation through.
“We can’t let a wild wolf roam free about the estate. It’s one thing to have humans with wolf bodies running around. They know the rules, they can anticipate problems and make decisions based on human logic. But a real wolf, without human direction, could make a serious mess of things. So, what I need to know is, are you able to communicate with her? If you tell her the rules, will she listen to you, or will she run off and do her own thing? Does she even understand that she’s living in a human’s body half the time?”
Talk about difficult questions. “I don’t know,” Dee answered honestly. “I can communicate with her, to a degree. She seems to understand some things I say to her, but I have trouble understanding her a lot of the time. She speaks in images and scents, not words, so the translation is… problematic. Maybe with practice, I’ll be able to tell you more.”
“Hmm.” Baron’s gaze narrowed a fraction, and Dee had the sudden impression that she’d just walked into a trap. “So has she said anything to you about her apparent fondness for Mark?”
Dee’s eyes went automatically to Mark’s, and Baron made an appreciative sound. “Ah. So she has. What did she say?”
Dee sighed, trying to look frustrated, even as her mind raced. The best lies, she remembered someone telling her, were based on truth. “She recognises him,” she said flatly. “Every time I ask her about him, she gives me a strong image of her wagging her tail. And she knows his scent. But that’s as much as I can understand. Like I said, I can keep trying to talk to her, and see if I can work out anything more.” It was a simple stall for time, while she figured out what was really going on here, but thankfully Baron seemed to buy the vague excuse.
“I was tracking you before the van picked you up,” Mark said. “Could she have picked up my scent off the street, maybe?”
Clever man. As it stood, Dee had no idea how Baron had found her, or exactly how Mark had been involved after he’d left the lab, but he was trying to feed her information in the guise of being ‘helpful’. “I’ll ask her,” Dee said, then closed her eyes, feigning concentration, while mentally telling the wolf to stay calm and be quiet. Mark was in danger, she explained, at the wolf’s quizzical response, which evoked the immediate reply of an image of a wolf ducking for cover. She didn’t want to cause trouble, Dee understood, slightly surprised at how quickly she was picking up on the wolf’s moods. “That seems likely,” she said, after a moment. “She clearly recognised your scent as being that of a shifter, not a human. Maybe it’s as simple as that,” she suggested. “Maybe Mark was just the first shifter she discovered after we escaped. Maybe she just wants to make friends with him.”
Baron didn’t look convinced. But at least for the moment, he seemed willing to let the issue drop. “Well, keep practising,” he said firmly. “And if she tells you anything more, you will let me know?” It wasn’t a question. Dee nodded, hoping she looked sincere rather than guilty.
“Now, there is something else we need to talk about,” Baron said, then glanced at Mark. “Perhaps in private.”
Mark nodded, not offended by the clear dismissal. “Of course.”
He’s going away now, Dee told her wolf, backing up the words with the image of Mark heading out the door. She didn’t want to risk another impromptu shift. But the wolf seemed okay with the idea. She huffed a little and did what Dee assumed was a wolf version of a pout, but that was the extent of the fuss.
Mark excused himself and, moments later, Dee heard the door closing behind him.
“People will be wondering where you are,” Baron said when it was just the two of them again. “You said you were held in the lab for three, maybe four days. Plus four days here is a week you’ve been gone. Skip hacked into the police database, and your family has reported you missing.”
Dee nodded. Her boss would likely have raised the alarm when she didn’t show up for work, and then her mother would have gone over to her flat and found her gone. There would be no sign of a struggle – the men had snatched her off a path in the park where she went jogging. No witnesses, no evidence.
“The longer we leave it, the more difficult it gets,” Baron went on. “So we have to figure out what we’re going to do.”
Dee nodded again, feeling a weight pressing down on her. Over the last few days, both Baron and Caroline had impressed upon her how dire things could get if their unique talents were ever discovered. Historically, the shifters had walked the edge of extinction too many times. The witch hunts of the Middle Ages were an easy example, the God-fearing righteous terrified of a creature they believed to be of the devil. So she well understood the need for secrecy.
But that left her with no easy answers to her current situation. She couldn’t just walk back into her old life, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to. A tiny flat in central London was no place for a wolf. But neither could she just abandon everything that had been hers. Her friends, her job, her belongings. Baron probably wouldn’t even let her go back to collect her things: her hockey medal from high school, the old photo of her cat that hung on the wall above her bed, the dog-eared copy of Watership Down that she’d had since she was eight. She’d been planning a holiday to Spain next month with a friend, and she felt a wave of sorrow at the realisation that their trip would most likely never happen. She’d had a career planned out; two more years working as office assistant for a computer company, then the owner had said he’d pay for her to do a marketing course, better qualifications, a pay rise… Long-term goals that were rapidly crumbling to dust. The silence stretched on, and Baron made no move to fill it.
Dee stared at the floor, the truth a cold weight in her chest. “I can never go home again, can I?”
Baron was silent. Then he shook his head.
“So, what do I do?” She felt tears pricking at her eyes and blinked them back. “Can I stay here? Do I have to stay here? How long do I have to stay in the cage?” One tear escaped, and she felt her wolf nudge her, a small gesture of concern. “The wolf hates it in here, and… What am I supposed to do?”
Baron was rather quick with his answers and, in hindsight, Dee supposed they must have had to deal with this sort of thing before. Nonetheless, it was a shock to hear it all laid out so stark and bare and simple. “For the short term, you’ll stay here. Until you learn to control your wolf, or at least get her to cooperate with you. And you’ll stay caged until your shifting becomes a little more predictable. For your own safety, as well as everyone else’s.” That much, at least, wasn’t a great surprise. “As far as your old life is concerned…” Baron hesitated, then gave her an apologetic frown. “For your family’s peace of mind, as well as the safety of the Den, I think the best thing we can do is figure out how to fake your death.”
CHAPTER NINE
Dee felt her jaw drop. “Fake my death? That’s a crazy idea! How
is that supposed to give them peace of mind?”
“Compared to spending the rest of their lives wondering what happened, because no one ever found your body, there was no murder scene or explanation for the fact that you simply disappeared into thin air? What we can do is wrap it all up nicely and give them closure by letting them know your ‘killer’ is also dead, so they don’t waste years chasing some misguided form of justice.”
If anything, that only added to her dismay. “So I’m going to be ‘murdered’, then? It couldn’t be a nice, old fashioned, accidental death? Falling off a cliff? Crashing my car? You seem to have all the answers prepped and ready to go, so I have to ask, how often do you do this, exactly?”
Baron gave her a wry, apologetic look. “We have a database full of ideas for how it could be done. Lists of the tools needed, synopses for what kind of scenario requires what kind of death – murder, accident, suicide. We try to keep this sort of thing to a minimum, but when we have to do it, we don’t generally have a lot of planning time.”
“So what tagged me as murder victim?”
“It has to be something that can be readily identified as you, but that doesn’t actually leave a body lying around. Fires and drownings are our favourites for that sort of thing, but since you’ve already been missing for a week, it’s hard to make that kind of ‘accident’ pop up out of nowhere. A murder, on the other hand? Alistair handles all our PR, so once the scene’s set up, he’ll drop the appropriate clues to the local news stations, make sure the right people find out about the right details, and the rest takes care of itself.”
Dee nodded, starting to feel a little numb at the idea. Or perhaps that was nausea. She had a flood of questions with no idea where to start, as well as the desire to protest against this crazy plan, but she had no viable alternative to offer.
“What about my things? My car? My bank account? If I’m dead, then my family will inherit everything and I’ll have no money.”
“The Den will provide everything you need. Everyone is given a monthly allowance. And some of the shifters work part time jobs to earn extra cash. One of the women works as a travel agent. One of the men writes articles for nature magazines.”
Dee felt completely overwhelmed, dismayed and lost. “What if my sister has children? I don’t get to see them grow up. I don’t get to send them birthday cards. This sucks.” That was the understatement of the year.
“Yes, you lose your family,” Baron said soberly. “But you also inherit a new one. Every single member of this Den would give their life to save yours. You become part of a culture that’s six hundred years old and a legacy that can be traced back nearly three thousand years. In ancient Greece, we were revered as gods, and devotees placed gifts at our feet on a daily basis. In ancient Britain, we were worshiped as forest spirits. Most of our history has been far more open and profitable than the way we’re currently living. You’ll have your eyes opened to the secrets of nature in a way that most people don’t even believe exists. There is a heavy price to be paid, I’ll give you no argument there. But the rewards are worth the cost.”
Dee snorted at the grandiose description. “You make this sound like something out of Men in Black.”
Baron grinned despite the severity of the situation. “It’s not so far removed.”
Dee tried to smile and wasn’t surprised when it came out a little wobbly. “Let me think about it. After all, once I’m ‘dead’, there’s no going back.”
“All right. But we’re on a time limit here. Like I said, the longer this takes, the harder it gets.”
A knock on the door made Jacob look up from his laptop, and he felt his mood lift considerably as he saw Melissa standing in the doorway. Since the massacre at the lab, she had proven herself to be resourceful, intelligent and capable – just the sort of employee he liked best. Of course, they also needed their share of ruthless thugs, prone to violence and maliciousness just for the sake of it, as well as fanatics who would run themselves ragged chasing the slightest, most menial task if they thought it was ‘for the cause’.
But the real brains of the organisation – not the intellectual morons who ran the labs and developed the weapons – were people who could strategise, look at the bigger picture, work around obstacles. And Melissa was shaping up rather nicely in that department. The Noturatii was a rather convoluted organisation, funded by more than a dozen governments across the world, under varying guises of anything from ‘Science and Research’ to ‘National Security’ to ‘Health and Medical Care’. They didn’t exist on any official level, and yet politicians and spy organisations from Europe to America to Asia all had fingers in various slices of the pie.
“What have we got?” he asked, trying not to sound too eager.
Melissa didn’t waste any time with small talk – another trait he liked about her. “The lab managed to decrypt the files, and I’ve been through Andrews’ notes. He had eleven test subjects, including the missing one. The other ten are dead, most of them in the lab’s morgue, two of them still on the table. The first four were males. I’ll email you the full report on them, but they died almost immediately when they were transfused with the shifter’s blood. The females lasted longer. One in particular was interesting, subject eight. Andrews suspected he was successful in converting her, but she suffered a cranial haemorrhage shortly after the infusion, so his notes remain inconclusive.”
“What about the original shifter captive?”
“Dead. He hung himself in his cell, probably on the same day that the massacre went down. And on that subject…” She stepped forward and handed him a flash drive. With a raised eyebrow, he inserted it into his laptop.
“Miller was right,” Melissa told him as they waited for the file to load. “The security videos were stolen. But the neighbouring warehouse has an outside security camera and we asked if we could take a look. We told them we’d had a break-in and wanted to see if anyone came or went who shouldn’t have.”
Melissa came around to Jacob’s side of the desk and watched over his shoulder. The video was grainy, but when the timer reached 12:13 p.m. – twenty-three minutes after the last entry in Dr Andrews’ notes – a dark blur raced past the camera. Jacob hit pause, then backed up a few seconds, pausing the shot on the misshapen grey object.
“A wolf?” There was no disguising his excitement this time. “The subject survived? And escaped?”
Melissa cocked her head slightly, not a yes, not a no. “The tech lab has enhanced the image, and it could be a common dog, but given the circumstances, they’re betting on it being a wolf. But that’s not the only thing.”
She pressed play again, unfreezing the image, sped through another few minutes, and then let the video play from nearly five minutes after the wolf had dashed past the camera. It was unmistakable this time…
“Fuck me!” Jacob was on his feet, hands gripping the desk, bent down to peer at the video. A young woman staggered past the camera, dressed in scrubs, looking pained and confused and struggling to stay upright.
“Conclusive proof that the subject survived, I would say,” Melissa said smugly. “But that leaves a rather prominent elephant in the room.”
Jacob filled in the rhetorical question. “If that was the subject, then who the hell was the wolf?”
“And what was a wolf doing inside a Noturatii lab?” Melissa added.
Jacob’s eyes narrowed as the weight of that revelation sank in. “We’ll double security,” he said after a moment. “Give everyone new access codes. Install iris scanners as well as fingerprint IDs.” He looked up at Melissa, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “These wolves are getting far too clever for their own good.”
Dee sat on the cot in her cage and stared at the screen of the laptop in shock. When the video finished playing, she hit replay and watched the macabre scenes from the news channel play out all over again.
She was dead. It was official.
She glanced up at Alistair sitting on the cot beside her, then over at Ba
ron and Caroline waiting outside the door of her cage. They’d brought the laptop down to show her the report – less than forty-eight hours after she’d agreed to ‘die’, a decision based largely on the fact that she had little other choice – and it was on every channel. A small boat had been found floating off the English coast. On the seat and the side rail were smears of blood – her own, thanks to the full syringe that Caroline had carefully extracted from her arm. In the cabin was a set of bloody clothes, the jeans pocket containing a battered driver’s licence with her name on it – a perfect replica of the real thing, given that her real one had been lost somewhere in the lab where she’d been held prisoner.
And then there was the dead man found still in the boat. Greg Hinge, a serial rapist and murderer, shot with a gun that was presumed to have disappeared overboard, along with his latest victim.
It was the perfect set up, even if she was horrified to admit it. According to the news report, she had been kidnapped and likely brutalised, but then she’d apparently fought back, taken Hinge’s own gun from him and shot him. Speculation was rampant about how and why she’d left the boat, whether intentionally or having accidentally fallen overboard, perhaps in rough seas, and it was assumed that she’d drowned as a result.
Dee fought the urge to vomit. “So this ‘peace of mind’ you spoke of includes me being raped?” she spat at Alistair. “This was supposed to be a story to put my family at ease, a simple shooting maybe, or a mugging gone wrong. Not a kidnapping and rape and who knows what else. And you killed a man! Because of me! That is not what I agreed to!”
“Hinge was a convicted rapist and murderer. I hardly think you need to carry a guilty conscience over his death,” Caroline said.
“And he was on the run from the police,” Dee added, continuing right on with her rant. “So you just happened to find him when the entire British police force couldn’t?”