by Laura Taylor
“That was more a lucky break than anything else,” Alistair said. “Right place, right time. We do have connections with a number of shady characters – smugglers, thieves, money launderers. You never know when you might need to move something from one place to another. But in this case, no, it was just luck.”
“But there are a dozen families out there who will be sleeping easier tonight knowing that he’s dead,” Baron added, earning a scowl from Dee.
“Too bad my family isn’t one of them.”
“At least they know you fought back in the end,” Alistair said, sounding a touch diffident. “That was part of the plan, you know. You shot the bad guy-”
“Save it,” Dee snapped, turning away from him in disgust.
With one last guilty glance at her, Alistair picked up the laptop and headed for the door. Dee flinched as it clanged shut behind him. Now she was not only caged, but any chance that someone would come looking for her was gone. She could only hope that what Baron said was true, and that she wouldn’t be locked in this cage forever. Otherwise…
“Your family has announced that the funeral will be this weekend,” Baron told her gently. “And hopefully now you can see why we tend to recruit loners and misfits. The sad truth is that most of us never had a family, and those of us that did were glad to be rid of them.”
“Sucks to be you,” Dee said bitterly. “But maybe next time you could pay a little more attention to the effect your lies have on other people, rather than just whether they fit in with your own plans.”
CHAPTER TEN
She was lying on the table, strapped down, the scientist looming over her. There was another shifter in the room. Should she kill it? Could she shift and attack these men? Agreement from her human. Yes! A shift! But who to kill? Who was the wolf, and who were the men? Fear, thick and cloying, anger, hate, too many scents, and the smell of disinfectant clogging her nose… She cowered in the corner, trying to find the wolf, not wanting to harm him… A man in the corner, covered in white, golden eyes fixed on her… He shifted into wolf form. Leapt for the men. Tore their throats out. Blood adding to the cacophony of scent. She stared at the wolf. Golden eyes. Dark fur. Grey ears. Slinking closer as he killed for her… Yes! A scent! Blood everywhere, and a snarl from the male wolf. He was magnificent, powerful, vicious as a wolf should be… but they had to go. Outside. Into the wild forests. Into the open air. The human was needed to escape. Call the human back… girl… wake up…
Dee jolted awake, startled to find herself sitting bolt upright in bed, her wolf already awake and alert. Her eyes darted around in panic as she tried to remember where she was. The dream was vivid, the memories of the lab far too close for comfort.
The blue light above the door lit just enough of the room for her to make out the cages and the sparse furniture around her, and she sluggishly went to turn on her light. She glanced at the clock, dismayed to see it was only a bit after 5 a.m. But after that little trip down memory lane, sleep held no more appeal for her tonight.
Taking deep breaths to steady herself, she splashed cold water on her face, then braced her arms on the sink and closed her eyes, trying to get the images of the lab out of her mind. She hadn’t actually killed anyone, she realised belatedly. If the dream was, in fact, her wolf’s memories of the day, then it meant, much to her relief, that she wasn’t the murderer she had assumed she was.
In hindsight, the decision to let the wolf kill those men had surprised Dee. She’d always thought of herself as a pacifist, a peacemaker. Yet when she’d been trapped there, between the proverbial rock and a hard place, she’d chosen life, and to kill with surprisingly little hesitation.
If someone tries to take your life, they have forfeited their own. The statement seemed to come out of nowhere, and yet Dee could remember it being spoken to her as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Her Grandpa had been a cop. He was retired by the time Dee was old enough to make sense of his occupation, but that hadn’t stopped him from using his skills and knowledge to teach her and her sister how to protect themselves. With their mother’s blessing, he’d spend long Saturday afternoons teaching the pair of them to fight, how to see trouble coming and avoid it, and he’d instilled in them a survival instinct that condoned violence, but only if peaceful negotiations had failed. He’d seen too many women beaten by their husbands, he used to tell them, seen too many innocent people lose their lives to thugs to let his granddaughters go through life without understanding the laws of justice and decency. He’d always insisted they were never to throw the first punch, but then explained that if someone else attacked them first, or broke into their house, then that person had forfeited their right to safety. Grandpa had died when she was twelve, killed in a hit and run accident, but his lessons had apparently sunk in. And it was something of a surprise to look back on that violent episode in the lab and realise that she had no regrets over it. Given the chance over again, given more time to think things through and consider the consequences, Dee realised that she would have made the same decision. The men had tortured her and tried to kill her. So, by Grandpa’s logic, they had forfeited their own right to life.
But her actions in the lab were pretty much the only thing she didn’t regret, she acknowledged to herself painfully. The rest of her reality was rather stark. Her family and friends thought she was dead. She had a foreign creature in her head, constantly messing with her thoughts and emotions, and she was trapped in a cage for the foreseeable future, with no clear idea of what she needed to do to get out of it. Life was looking pretty grim from where she was standing.
Her breaths started to come in shaky gasps, her arms shaking, her eyes stinging, and before she knew it, the inevitable flood of tears had started, with no sign of abating in the near future.
Mark wandered into the kitchen, heading straight for the coffee pot. He was pouring himself a cup when Caroline appeared at his elbow, and he groaned inwardly as he braced himself for another ear-bashing from the alpha female. He’d been in her bad books lately, and no doubt she was here to give him another earful about something or other he’d done wrong. On top of that, he’d dreamed of Luke last night, a vivid fantasy in which they’d been running through the forest, the thick scent of vegetation in his nose, playing, jumping, splashing in a river. It had seemed so real. And then he’d woken up to the cold realisation that Luke was dead and he was never going to see him again. Not the best start to the day, and a run-in with Caroline wasn’t going to make it any better.
“I have a favour to ask.” Caroline said, not even bothering to say good morning. “I’d like you to go down and talk to Dee.”
Mark snorted. Normally, he’d be thrilled at the chance to see Dee again, but after his dream last night, and given that the request was coming from Caroline, his already foul mood simply took another plunge. “Another ‘test’ to see how her wolf reacts to me? Come on. We already know she’s fixated on me, we’re no closer to figuring out why, so how about you just let it be?”
Caroline hesitated. Unusual for her. “That’s not why I want you to go down there. Dee’s upset. Skip took her breakfast a little while ago and said she looked like she’s been crying for hours.”
That sparked a wave of concern in Mark. But he was on thin ice where Dee was concerned, given what she knew about what he’d been doing in the lab, so he opted for an air of indifference. “What’s that got to do with me?”
“Well… it can’t be easy for her, having to give up her family, her life. And I thought... You went through something similar when you arrived here. So maybe you could talk to her. Make her see that life here has a good side.”
Was she serious? But more to the point, why did she care so much? Caroline wasn’t known for getting all warm and fuzzy with new recruits. So was this just another test she’d concocted? “You want me to play Agony Aunt to a woman who’s had her entire life ripped out from under her, and who’s only ever met me twice, for a grand total of fifteen minutes?”
“Yes.�
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Mark sighed and set his cup down. Sometimes, talking to Caroline was like hitting his head against a brick wall. “Fine. I’ll talk to her.”
Heading down into the basement, he let himself into the cage room, deliberately making some noise about it. If Dee was in fact crying, she might like a little warning that she was about to be interrupted. While a part of him was eager to see her, he didn’t want to inadvertently embarrass her in the process.
Sure enough, when he came around the corner she was sitting on her bed, cross-legged in a pair of sweatsuit bottoms, and trying to discreetly wipe her nose on her sleeve. Mark felt his heart lurch at the sight of her. She’d been so strong over the last few days, but the strain was clearly starting to get to her.
“Hey. How are you doing?” he asked gently.
She shrugged. “Bored. And claustrophobic. The whole ‘this is for your own good’ mantra is starting to wear thin.”
“Yeah, I get that.” He sighed, considering how to handle this. As much as he would have liked to, he wasn’t in anything like a good enough mood to manage the warm and fuzzy route that Caroline seemed to have had in mind. “Listen… Caroline asked me to come and talk to you. She said you were upset.”
“You are unbelievable.”
It was said with such venom that it stopped Mark in his tracks. “What?”
Dee stood up, came to the bars and pointed a finger at him. “You were in the lab. You rescued me, and Baron doesn’t know that, and I’ve spent the last week trying to pretend I know nothing about it. And then you just ignore me for days, like nothing happened, and then come down here to try and have a chat like it’s all hunky dory, no explanation, no apology for sticking me in the middle of someone else’s soap opera? Maybe I should just come clean, tell Baron what I know, and-”
“No! You can’t!”
“Why not? What have I got to lose? If I tell them I can communicate with my wolf, they might actually let me out of this god-forsaken cage.”
“If you do, they’ll kill me.”
That pulled her up short. “As in…?”
“I’m not talking metaphorically, Dee. If they find out, they will execute me.”
Dee’s hand went to her mouth, shock written all over her. “Oh.”
“I haven’t been ignoring you. I’ve spent the last three days trying to come up with any plausible excuse I can think of to come and see you. But Baron and Caroline are suspicious enough as it is, and I didn’t want to draw extra attention to myself.”
“Why would they kill you?”
“Breaking into a Noturatii lab without permission is considered an act of treason against Il Trosa.”
“Then why the hell did you do it?”
Mark looked down, struggled to find the words to explain. “I was looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“It’s complicated. And I know this has screwed up your life, but that was never what I intended. I just saw you there, and I couldn’t leave you to be killed. I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out great for you, but please, don’t tell Baron.”
Dee stepped back, her anger fading as quickly as it had arrived. “Sorry. I don’t blame you for this,” she said, her voice small. “You saved my life, and it seemed ungrateful to rat you out without at least knowing why. But what am I supposed to tell Baron? Faeydir thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread, and I don’t know how to explain that without giving you away.”
“Faeydir? I guess the name stuck, huh?”
Dee shrugged. “She seems to like it.”
“Look, the official story is that I came across you running about London after you left the lab and called in a capture squad. So, tell Baron that Faeydir picked up my scent somewhere along the way and is just grateful to have joined a pack of shifters, so she wanted to thank me.”
Dee frowned. “That means I was in wolf form outside the lab. And I wasn’t. The only time I shifted was before you killed the scientists.”
“But Baron doesn’t know that.”
“What if someone saw me? You can’t have a wolf running around the streets without someone noticing.”
Mark’s mind raced, trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle into a story that seemed plausible. “The warehouse district is pretty quiet. Particularly in the middle of the day. Maybe you… I don’t know… Faeydir led you to where there were more people, and then you turned human again to avoid any problems. Does that work?”
Dee considered the idea. “Yeah. I think I can work with that.”
Mark sighed in relief. “So you’re not going to tell him the truth?”
Dee shook her head. “No. I owe you too much for that.”
“Thank you.” They lapsed into silence for a while. Well, that had gone badly. He’d been sent down here to cheer her up, but instead he was just scrambling about trying to cover his own arse. Some hero he was turning out to be.
“So what was it Caroline wanted you to talk to me about?” Dee asked, after a moment.
Oh yeah. This was supposed to be about Dee, after all. “About your family,” Mark said awkwardly, not expecting Dee to want a heart to heart after that rather abrupt opening. “And adjusting to living in the Den. When I first came here, I was in a situation a lot like yours, and she thinks hearing about it will help.”
Dee frowned at that. “A situation like mine? I thought most people came here willingly. No family, no ties, plenty of psychological trauma.”
It was said wryly, and Mark smiled, despite the seriousness of the conversation. “True. I was something of an exception.”
Dee sat patiently, waiting for a further explanation, while Mark felt his gut churn. It had been a traumatic period, and given his current dissatisfaction with life in the estate, digging up a lot of old memories was not going to help his frame of mind.
“I had leukaemia,” he said, deciding to just cut to the chase. “It started when I was fifteen. I joined Il Trosa when I was seventeen. So, two years of drugs and chemotherapy and hospital visits. All the way through I’d been determined to beat it, no matter how bad it got. But nothing was working. In the end I was stuck in a hospital bed, looking at the very real probability of my own death at the age of seventeen. Then one day, this ‘pastor’ shows up, says he wants to talk to me about whether I had considered my ‘future destiny’. I was expecting a lecture on God and heaven and all that, but instead it was Simon, one of the shifters. He told me there was another option and offered me a new life, health, adventure, mysteries of the sort I could only dream of. But it came with a catch.”
“You had to leave your family behind,” Dee filled in, and then frowned. “Hold up… you had leukaemia, right? So, what, becoming a shifter is a magical cure for cancer? Publicise that, and you could make a fortune.”
Mark shook his head. “It’s not so much a cure as a work around. Canines and humans aren’t generally affected by the same diseases. If one side of your physiology is susceptible to a disease, the other half is probably immune to it, and will compensate accordingly. There are a few exceptions – rabies, for example. You should probably get vaccinated for that,” he added as an aside. “But in practical terms, it means that shifters are immune to most diseases.”
Dee looked fascinated at the news. But then she shook her head, focusing back on the story. “So you accepted his offer? You became a shifter and left your family to think you’d died, when in fact you’d discovered a miracle cure.”
Mark sighed. Nope, this was not the easy-fix solution that Caroline had expected. No surprises there. “They were going to lose me anyway. And I don’t mean that as coldly as it sounds. But I was seventeen and I’d had a couple of years to come to terms with my own death. I was going to lose them, they were going to lose me. And then suddenly I was offered a world of blue skies and a strong body and crazy adventures. What seventeen-year-old wouldn’t take the opportunity? And without looking too closely at the fine print.”
“That comes up later, right?”
“Righ
t. When you’re lying in your bed alone and thinking that one day your sister will be thirty-five and she’ll have children, but you’ll never even get to see a picture of them, because all forms of contact with your previous family is forbidden. Yeah, it’s the sort of thing that keeps you awake at night.” Fuck, this wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. He was supposed to be cheering her up, not making her more depressed. “So you’ve seen the down side, right up front,” he went on, determined to put in the effort to make this better for her. “But what you haven’t seen is all the positives.”
“Excuse me for sounding ungrateful here, but even if I was allowed to go outside, what are the perks, exactly? I get to turn into a wolf so I can sniff who’s pissed on which tree and run fast so I can chase rabbits? And spend the rest of my life hoping no one notices, or I might just get shot?”
She had a good point. “In the day to day details, it can be hard to see the big picture. But we can give you two things that most people spend their whole lives searching for, and some people never, ever find. Belonging, and purpose. As a shape shifter, you belong with the Den. And I don’t mean that you’re obliged to stay here, I mean you belong. You were here less than a day and Skip lent you her clothes. Caroline lets you stay, despite very real fears that you’re a danger to us all, because she feels a certain kinship with you. A wolf in Romania would willingly spend three weeks researching a rare, ancient Greek text for you, for no better reason than that you’re a member of Il Trosa. You belong with us, in a way that most people never feel they belong anywhere.”
Dee looked sceptical. “I doubt some of your friends feel the same way. Silas refuses to even speak to me when he brings me food.”
Mark let out a chuckle. “Yeah. He’s a grumpy bastard. But if your life was ever in danger, he’d risk his own to save you without a second thought. He’s the most loyal wolf I’ve ever known.”
Dee made a disgruntled sound, her resolve cracking slightly. “And the purpose side of things?”