by Laura Taylor
Finally, they’d both fallen asleep, tired and satisfied and comfortably warm, with Faeydir a sleepy presence in Dee’s mind, commenting that her sense of smell was sufficient for once, the musky scent of Mark’s skin a soothing balm that put the feisty wolf to rest.
Now awake, Dee simply watched Mark sleep, a surreal kind of joy filling her, one that made her question whether this was reality, or just a particularly vivid dream. Surely one person couldn’t be allowed to feel this much contentment? How quickly life could turn around and surprise you.
Finally, though, Mark stirred, letting out a contented hum as he turned towards her, wrapping an arm around her waist before opening his eyes. And then a self-satisfied grin broke across his face. “Morning.”
“Morning,” Dee replied with a grin of her own.
“Sleep well?”
“Very. I dreamed about France. A shifter’s initiation ceremony. It was beautiful.”
Mark leaned in and kissed her. He craned his neck to look at the clock, then fell back onto the bed with a groan. “We should get up.”
It was nearly nine o’clock. Dee moaned in protest. The bed was just too warm. “Do we have to?”
Mark let out a throaty chuckle. “Don’t tempt me…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two weeks later, the first real thaw of spring arrived. Melting snow turned the ground to slush and every single wolf got an earful from someone or other about tracking mud through the house. Caroline yelled at Baron, Baron yelled at John, George yelled at half the rank and file – apparently cleaning the kitchen floor was one of his duties – and after that, it became a game, various members of the Den deliberately lurking in the foyer or the kitchen, waiting for people to come inside just so they could shout about the mess on the floor.
Spring was a dreadful time for house work – each member of the Den was assigned a room to clean on a regular basis, and spring meant not just mud, but fur as the wolves shed their winter coats all over the furniture, the carpet, and the antique rugs. So when Dee was summoned to the library for a meeting with Baron, she wasn’t surprised to find John in there, vacuuming the carpet and making a hell of a racket as he rattled the nozzle in and around the bookcases.
Tank and Caroline were sitting with Baron at one of the long tables and Dee took a seat, waiting for the latest news or instructions.
“It’s time we got you vaccinated,” Baron announced, once she was settled. “There’s a doctor we use out east – sometimes it’s better not to do these things too close to home- For fuck’s sake, John, will you give that a rest?!” he yelled suddenly, glaring at the boy.
“What?” John yelled back, clattering the nozzle about more loudly.
“Shut that fucking thing off!”
“I can’t hear you,” he replied blithely, moving on to the next shelf.
Baron leapt up and yanked the cord out of the wall. “You can vacuum later, you fucking princess-”
John grabbed the cord and plugged it back in. “You said you wanted the fucking house clean, so I’m cleaning it.”
Baron yanked the plug out again. “That doesn’t mean right this instant, you little-”
A tussle ensued, the sight almost comical as Baron’s massive figure wrestled with John’s slender form, and Dee watched with wide eyes, not at all sure whether this was a real fight, or…
Moments later, Baron had John pinned up against the wall, tongue down his throat, John almost hidden from view by his much larger opponent, and Dee felt herself blush as a faint but distinct moan drifted across the room. Baron whispered something in John’s ear. And the younger man let out a chuckle, the first one Dee had ever heard from him, and lithely extracted himself from Baron’s grip.
“No problem,” he said sassily, and smoothly left the room, a smirk on his lips.
“If you two lovebirds are done?” Tank prompted, as Baron just stood there watching him go.
Baron cleared his throat and returned to his seat. “Where were we?”
“Vaccination?” Dee said meekly. Neither Tank nor Caroline seemed to find anything odd about the exchange between Baron and John, so she figured her best bet was to simply ignore the incident.
“Faeydir’s been reacting well to her outings,” Baron picked up the conversation. “Have there been any problems we need to iron out?”
“Nothing serious, no. So long as I prepare her properly first, she seems fine with having to behave for a little while.”
“Good. Because this trip’s going to be longer than the others. It’s a two hour drive each way, and then there could be a fair wait in the surgery.”
Dee immediately conveyed the information to Faeydir, who responded with consternation. Why are we going? she seemed to ask, and Dee tried to mentally express the sense of a terrible disease, which would be prevented by going on a long trip and seeing-
Faeydir recoiled at the image of a man in a white coat, a flat refusal, snarls and bared teeth in Dee’s mind, and she gripped the table as a wave of dizziness took over. “No, Faeydir’s not happy with that,” she said quickly. “Not the long trip, I mean, that’s fine. She doesn’t want to see a doctor.”
“It’s a necessary evil,” Caroline said, not particularly helpfully since Dee knew that already. “And an absolute necessity if you’re ever asked to travel overseas for Il Trosa.”
“Let me work on her,” Dee said, knowing it was partly her own fault. Doctors didn’t necessarily wear white coats these days, normal civilian attire far more common, but she’d been trying to explain a complex issue in simple images, and the stereotypical ‘doctor’ had been an easy, if misguided, choice. “Let’s talk about logistics,” she rushed on, needing time to figure out how to explain the rest to her wolf.
“Tank will go with you. And Silas,” Baron said. “Tank will need to go into the surgery with you, so the easiest way is if he poses as your boyfriend. Silas will stay outside – just for backup, in case you need it.”
“That seems a little heavy handed,” Dee protested, her mind a swirling mess of questions and emotions from Faeydir. “Are we likely to run into trouble?”
“The Grey Watch have a strong presence in the east,” Caroline explained. “That’s one of the reasons we go out that way. The Noturatii know they’re there, and we try to maintain the illusion that all the shifters in England live in the same area. It creates a few inconveniences for us – like having to travel a few hours whenever we need something that the Noturatii might be tracking-”
“Rabies vaccines being on their list,” Tank interrupted.
“But it also means that they’re less likely to come sniffing around our back door. The less they know about the Den, the better. But that creates two problems. One, we’re far more likely to run into Noturatii operatives out that way, and two, there’s always the odd chance that you’ll come across one of the Grey Watch. They tend to be very reclusive, but even they have to venture into town now and then to buy food, or the odd bit of clothing they bother to wear.”
“Right,” Dee said. “Hence the security detail.”
“Right.”
In the end, it took a full five days for Dee to convince Faeydir that a trip to the doctor was a good idea. She spent the time looking up images of rabies-infected dogs on the internet, gave the wolf a list of symptoms, went through what was likely to happen inside the surgery in detail, and emphasised that this doctor was nothing like the ones in the lab. The injection might hurt a little, she admitted, but it was a much better option than contracting an infection that could kill them both.
Mark got on board as well, explaining to Faeydir that he’d had a vaccination himself, detailing what it had felt like, what the doctor’s surgery had looked like, and generally trying to convey his approval of the idea. Faeydir still took his opinion more seriously than anyone else’s, and in slow degrees, the wolf relented. But if anyone tried to harm them other than the one single injection, Faeydir strongly cautioned Dee, she was more than willing to retaliate.
When the day for the visit came, the drive out was uneventful, Dee relenting to Faeydir’s continued requests to feel the wind by finally putting the window down and letting the cold air blast over her face. Faeydir loved it, responding with impressions of wagging tails and playful bounces, and Dee promised her a repeat performance on the way home, if she managed to behave in the clinic.
All too soon, Tank was pulling the van into the clinic parking lot, and Dee took a moment to remind Faeydir of the rules and the consequences of breaking them. Silas got out and surveyed the parking lot, then gave the nod to Tank. He retreated to lean against a wall and fiddle with his iPhone – a convenient pretence while he kept a sharp eye on the goings on around him.
Tank and Dee hopped out of the van, Tank’s arm instantly around Dee’s shoulder, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “You’ll be fine,” he said, already in character, and Dee simply concentrated on keeping Faeydir calm, grateful that her role in this charade was simply to look uncomfortable and nervous.
Inside the clinic, the waiting room was crowded, and Dee hovered in the background as Tank spoke to the receptionist. Arrangements made, they settled in to wait, Tank taking Dee’s hand as he casually scanned the waiting room.
As they sat there, the thought occurred to Dee that she had no idea what to look for in a Noturatii operative. How did one tell the difference between them and regular human beings? What was Tank looking for? Weapons? Uniforms? No, that would be too obvious. Highly trained government operatives wouldn’t give themselves away so easily. So the unsettling truth was that they could be sitting directly opposite one of their enemies and never know it until it was too late.
Then again, how did the Noturatii recognise a shifter? Did they have a way of detecting them, like the way Faeydir seemed able to sense the wolf in other shifters? Each shift was preceded by a burst of static electricity. Could the Noturatii detect the minute charges in the air?
“Caitlin Moss?”
“That’s us,” Tank whispered to her when Dee didn’t move, the unfamiliar name lost in her swirling thoughts, until she remembered the false identity Alistair had given her, and stood up abruptly.
“Hey, take it easy,” Tank murmured, taking her hand and leading her into the doctor’s office.
The appointment went fairly smoothly, not that Dee was paying much attention. She was trying to concentrate, trying to remember far too many details about her fake trip to Asia, giving false answers to questions about family history, any medication she was on, while half her attention remained on Faeydir, the wolf alert and searching for any hint of betrayal or danger, to the point that when the sting of the needle finally hit, Dee hardly felt it.
“Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” the doctor said genially, and Dee managed to summon a weak smile.
“Thank you,” she said politely, then glanced at Tank. “Are we done?”
“All done,” the doctor told her. “Best of luck with your trip.”
“Thanks. Thanks again.”
Dee couldn’t get out the door fast enough, Faeydir demanding they leave immediately now that it was over. She took a deep breath the moment she stepped back into the cold air, so relieved that it was finished that she wasn’t really paying attention. Silas pushed off the wall and moved towards the van, and as Tank was closing the door to the clinic, Dee paused at the roadside, waiting as a large SUV entered the parking lot. There weren’t many spaces left, and the car stopped in front of her, blocking her view of Silas for a moment. She glanced back at Tank, the tension of the whole trip making her anxious and vaguely paranoid.
Tank shot her a reassuring smile as he stepped out across the footpath… then his smile vanished. Behind her, Dee heard a car door slam, heard a shout from Silas, and Tank’s hand disappeared into his coat, reaching for his weapon.
A hand grabbed Dee’s shoulder and she spun around, finding herself face to face with a tall, solidly built black man who seemed as shocked to see her as she was to see him. “Dee?” he said, and that’s when the panic really hit.
“Dee, get down!” Tank shouted, rushing forward, while Silas burst out from behind the SUV. Two rapid shots took out two of the men from the SUV, the guns deafening in the quiet of the town even with the silencers on them. And then the gunshots were eclipsed by the ‘thud, thud’ of two bodies hitting the ground. But the black man stayed standing, until Tank barrelled into him, slamming the big body into the side of the car by using his own even larger frame as a battering ram. There was another man in the car, Dee realised, and he had a taser. Faeydir sharply remembered getting hit with one of those when Baron had first found her, and suddenly there was no more controlling the furious wolf. Static electricity burst over her skin and Dee knew she had just shifted, powerless to stop the change as Faeydir took control. And they were off, bolting out of the carpark and along the road at a dead sprint.
Oh shit, they were in public, Dee thought frantically as Faeydir ran. They were in a town, people everywhere, and God knew if anyone had seen them shift. But Faeydir liked being around humans even less than Dee. She took the first exit she could find off the street, a narrow path into a park, and then out the back into a small woodland.
Nose to the ground, she searched out the path that smelled the least like human, and then another turn, over a stream, under a fence, then a headlong sprint across an open field. Hopefully if anyone saw them, they would just think she was a large dog. Faeydir climbed a small rise, then jumped up onto a garbage bin, then a brick wall… there! In the distance, a forest. Trees. Cover. And the chance to kill those who pursued them.
Were they even being pursued? Dee wondered, trying to get her bearings. It was near impossible with the onslaught of scents, of sounds that Faeydir was processing, the memories running hard and fast of what an empty forest smelled like, of the sounds that meant safety and the scent of fresh leaves and moss.
Faeydir jumped to the ground again and took off, heedless of Dee’s suggestions, then demands that they stop and reassess the situation. Faeydir didn’t even know if they were being followed, Dee pointed out sharply, only to be shoved back, an image of a taser vivid in her mind.
And it was only then that she realised Faeydir wasn’t just angry at being attacked, wasn’t just driven by the need to protect them both.
She was terrified. She’d hated the lab just as much as Dee had. She’d felt the frustration of being caged more keenly. She’d objected with sound logic to the trip to the doctor today, and in the wolf’s mind, all of her concerns were now completely justified. They’d gone to a place with men in white coats, and the Noturatii had tried to kidnap them again. So, for the time being, she was done with listening to Dee.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Baron was sitting at his desk working on his computer when his phone vibrated, and he frowned as he picked it up. There were few people who ever sent him a message – the Council would send occasional cryptic instructions or requests, with more sensitive information handled via more secure channels, or any of the wolves out of the estate might send a message if they ran into trouble. Tank and Silas were late back from taking Dee to the doctor, but they were his two most capable fighters, so trouble was hardly likely to-
Holy shit.
Due to complications at home, we have sent our package early. It is postmarked appropriately.
It was from the Council, and as cryptic as usual. The only ‘package’ they should be sendin
g was an emissary to assess Dee as a new recruit, and the ‘postmark’ could only be the Council brand that marked all of their operatives. The emissary hadn’t been due until later in spring, but Baron was just as glad to get it over with now. Visits from the Council tended to be complicated. He’d tell Dee as soon as she got back…
“Baron?” John said from across their bedroom. He was sitting in front of a computer console playing some video game or other, a clear view of the front lawn from his vantage point. “There’s some joker in a bad suit standing at the front gate.”
Baron was out of his seat in a second, leaning over John and his slice ’em dice ’em character on screen to peer out the window.
“What the hell? How about a little notice, you pompous shits?”
“Yeah, good luck with that one,” John said disinterestedly as Baron dashed for the door. He shifted on his way along the hall, bolting down the stairs in wolf form and making it to the ground floor in record time. He was in such a hurry he barely managed to shift back to human form before he was out the front door, and then it was a battle to know whether to run for the gate to keep the emissary from waiting, or to maintain a dignified walk, a show of poise that could just as well piss the guy off.
In the end, he opted for a brisk walk, greeting the man with a tight smile. “Morning, sir. Can I help you?” Text message aside, no one, but no one got through that gate without the proper authority.
The man didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he held up his left hand. A pale brand sat in the centre of the palm, no more complex than three straight lines at an angle to each other, the sort of thing that could easily have been caused by a burn during a careless moment in the kitchen. But it was the official mark of the Council, branded onto each and every member chosen to directly serve the shifter version of aristocracy, and the mute display had Baron keying in the access code and opening the gate as fast as humanly possible.