by Laura Taylor
And she was going to be the one to do it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
It was a little after seven o’clock when Mark woke up. Raniesha had disappeared, and Caroline sat in her place, gaze fixed on Gabrielle. The girl was coming around slowly, with small movements and the odd moan alerting Caroline to her progress.
Baron had come down around four in the morning, looking exhausted but determined to fulfil his duties before hitting the sack – though there hadn’t been much to do at the time. Mark’s future was still pending, with Andre in discussions with the Council on the best course of action, and Gabrielle couldn’t be dealt with until she woke up, so he’d soon gone back upstairs, leaving Mark to a fitful sleep.
Caroline noticed Mark stirring and gave him a nod, but her attention was mostly taken up with the girl. Gabrielle moaned again, flailed one arm and coughed, and that was enough for Caroline. She pulled out her phone and had Baron on the line in an instant. “She’s coming around,” was all she said before hanging up, and not two minutes later, heavy thuds could be heard on the stairs.
Baron came through the door but didn’t come any further, no doubt not wanting to scare the girl. They’d not been nearly so considerate of Dee when she’d arrived, Mark thought with just a touch of resentment. But to be fair, he reminded himself, this time around they knew a lot more about the girl’s circumstances, and would have to add some serious concessions knowing that she was likely terrified.
Gabrielle sat up suddenly, eyes wide, a sound that was half scream, half whimper coming from her throat. She looked down at herself, startled to find her arms and legs free, and patted herself all over, checking for wounds, or perhaps for unexpected alterations to her body, given where she had been recently.
And then she noticed the room, and the two people with her, and her fear came back full force. “Why am I in jail? I didn’t do anything! You’ve got the wrong person. I was kidnapped! I’m not a terrorist-”
“Whoa, easy, easy!” Caroline urged her, coming to stand at the bars. “You’re not in jail. This is a private medical facility. We’ve simply put you in an isolation ward because we’re not quite sure what’s happened to you yet.”
Anyone thinking clearly would see through the lie in an instant – isolation wards had glass barriers and air filters and teams of medical staff standing by, not iron bars and leather-clad security guards. But Gabrielle was not processing reality terribly well right now, and she seemed to swallow the story easily enough. She glanced sideways at Mark. “What about him? Why’s he in a cage?”
“It’s not a cage,” Caroline said, a blatant lie designed only to help her keep control of the situation. “And he’s in isolation because he was injured.”
Gabrielle looked Mark over. “You don’t look injured.”
Mark thought fast. He could hardly tell her he was awaiting trial as a traitor, not when Caroline was trying to convince her that this wasn’t a jail. “I was exposed to a toxic chemical,” he lied, tossing out the first plausible explanation he could come up with. “They’re waiting to see if I have a reaction to it.”
That was good enough for the girl, and she turned back to Caroline. “Who’s he?” she demanded, catching sight of Baron lurking in the corner.
“He runs this facility. He just came down to see how you’re feeling. Do you remember what happened?” A good way to stem the flow of questions was to ask some of her own, and the trick worked, Gabrielle coming to a screeching halt as her thoughts suddenly turned inward.
“I was kidnapped. They tortured me in a lab. Were they terrorists?”
“Yes. And do you remember who we are?”
“A girl said you were the police. You rescued me. But why don’t you have uniforms? Police have uniforms.”
“We’re a special operations unit. We do a lot of undercover work, so uniforms don’t really feature in our line of work. Listen, we’re going to help you, but the things the people in the lab were doing were quite complicated, so we’re going to need to monitor you for a couple of days. You can’t go home just yet-”
“There’s a… a thing in my head.” If Gabrielle had been scared before, she was petrified now, white as a sheet as the wolf no doubt started to make its presence known.
“It’s quite possible you’re still hallucinating,” Caroline told her gently, and Mark had to wonder just what the hell was going on. She was behaving as if Gabrielle had a disease that could be cured, that her going home was a real possibility. Mark had never known the Den to lie to its new recruits quite so blatantly, a dangerous practice as it set up all kinds of false expectations that would most likely end up with the new wolf being put down. “The terrorists gave you some odd medications that could mess up the way you’re thinking.”
“I think Andre should take a look at her, now she’s awake,” Baron said from the corner, then added, for Gabrielle’s benefit, “He’s one of our medical specialists. He’ll be able to work out what drugs you were given and what the effect on your mind has been.”
Gabrielle nodded timidly. “Okay.”
“Are you hungry?”
Gabrielle looked surprised, though more at herself than with Baron. “Yes. Very hungry, actually.”
“I’ll have some food brought down.” Baron disappeared out the door again, leaving Caroline and Mark to hold back the tide of questions.
It was mid-morning when Dee woke up, her dreams of the lab so vivid that she was actually startled to find herself in her own bed. The bite wound on her arm was throbbing, despite having been cleaned properly and dressed before she went to bed. She wandered into the bathroom, finding a packet of painkillers, and quickly downed two tablets.
Faeydir was awake and agitated, hungry, concerned about the new shifter in the basement, wondering what was going to happen to Mark. She didn’t entirely agree that he was a traitor, particularly when her own rescue had been the result of his actions, but she did agree that loyalty and secrecy were important to Il Trosa, so Dee was relieved to find that she had a basic understanding that Mark was in a lot of trouble.
They couldn’t go down to the basement, Dee reminded her – they had to wait until Baron or Caroline invited them down – but she did suggest that Faeydir go get herself some breakfast. It would be a relief to be out of human form for a while, at least until the pills kicked in, and Faeydir seemed happy with the arrangement.
Downstairs, the entire Den was in a sombre mood, either concerned about Tank’s recovery, Mark’s fate, or Gabrielle’s problematic conversion, and there was little conversation in the kitchen, despite more than half the Den having gathered there, waiting for news.
And when it finally came, some two hours later, none of it was good.
Baron opened the door and led a frowning Caroline and a pensive Andre into the room. “Tank’s recovering slowly, but it’s going to be a while until he’s back to full speed,” he announced without preamble. “Mark’s future is still a work in progress. And Gabrielle… sorry folks, but it’s not looking good.” There was a round of muttering, complaints and disappointment filling the room in a low grumble, and then Baron turned to Dee. “Dee? Could we see you in the library?”
Dee’s eyebrow rose in surprise, and then fell in consternation. She’d known about Mark’s betrayal, she reasoned as she stood up, and it was likely that there would be repercussions for her about having kept it a secret. But when she sat down at the library’s long table, the topic of conversation was far from what she’d expected.
“Gabrielle’s not doing well,” Baron began. “She’s currently under the impression that she’s hallucinating the wolf, and Andre’s spent a couple of hours trying to assess whether she’s capable of merging with it.” He glanced over at Andre, who picked up the explanation.
“All indications are that she’s not going to accept the conversion,” he said grimly. “She’s terrified, convinced she’s going mad, and the wolf is already getting antsy about her human. She shifted once, completely unintentionally, and the wol
f was aggressive and couldn’t be reasoned with. If she stays in this state much longer, she’ll end up going rogue.”
Dee stared at the table, remembering the image Faeydir had shown her of a new wolf in the pack, a new friend and companion, and she felt a wave of sorrow at the news. “I’m sorry,” she said, not knowing what else to say. “Do you want me to talk to her?” Her own conversion had been trying, to say the least, and perhaps they thought that if she shared her own experiences-
“I’m afraid that’s not going to help,” Andre said softly. “I’m sure you’d be more than willing to try,” he added, at her disappointed expression, “but I’ve seen enough rogues to know when it’s a hopeless case.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” They wouldn’t have called her in here just to break the news gently. But short of talking to the girl, Dee wasn’t sure what she could do to help.
Thick silence filled the room, and Dee had a vivid recollection of the time Baron and Caroline had asked her to let them find out her bloodline. Something horrible was coming, and Dee braced herself.
“We’d like you to try and remove the wolf from her. The way you did with the woman from the Grey Watch.”
Dee felt Faeydir go still, and knew that her wolf had grasped the implications of the request immediately, though Dee’s own thoughts were struggling to catch up. “You want me to what?”
“You are the Destroyer,” Andre explained, as gently as possible, and Dee had to remind herself not to take offence at the name. “You’re capable of separating human from wolf – the only one with that kind of ability. Now, under normal circumstances, we’d have no choice but to put Gabrielle down. There’s never been another option before. But with you here…”
“If it’s successful,” Baron said, “there’s a chance Gabrielle could recover. Go back to her normal life.”
“But the wolf would die,” Dee said, heartbroken at the knowledge. Faeydir, too, was grieved by the prospect, though she hadn’t yet either agreed to or refused the plan.
“That’s true,” Baron said, the idea clearly weighing heavily on him. “It’s not something I like to ask – and certainly not a decision taken lightly. But the alternative is to kill them both. This is simply the lesser of two evils.”
Dee sat in silence, weighing up the alternatives. The very limited alternatives. “But what about what she knows? She saw me shift in the lab. She’s been inside our Den, met some of our members. That doesn’t strike me as the kind of security risk you’d be willing to take.”
“That part of the decision is not Baron’s to make,” Andre spoke up again. “I’ve spoken with the Council. This is certainly an odd situation – as I said, we’ve never had another option before, so this is new territory for all of us. But Gabrielle never chose to become a shifter. She was kidnapped and it was forced upon her. She knows next to nothing about Il Trosa or the shifters, she doesn’t even know that the Noturatii exist. As far as she’s concerned, she was taken captive by a common, garden variety terrorist group, and she currently believes that they were testing chemical weapons on her which have made her hallucinate. Though she saw you shift, she doesn’t believe for a moment that it actually happened.
“There are risks involved, of course, and we’ll have to monitor her when – if – she goes home, to make sure there are no long-term repercussions from this, but none of us like the idea of killing an innocent girl just because the Noturatii are practising a new form of hideousness.”
Dee let all the implications of the request sink in. “I’ll have to ask Faeydir,” she said finally, knowing that without the wolf’s cooperation, she’d have no chance of successfully separating the girl from the wolf anyway. Hell, she didn’t even know how she’d done it the first time.
“Then do so,” Baron said, the three of them sitting and waiting patiently for her. So she closed her eyes and sent the query to Faeydir, an image of Gabrielle, healthy and well, and a dead wolf on the ground. It wasn’t a request or a demand, a deliberate lack of obligation in the mental question. Rather it was simply a query about what Faeydir thought of the idea.
An image came back, not unexpectedly, of a live and healthy wolf with a dead girl beside it. And in the same vein as Dee’s question, it was devoid of demand. Just a suggestion, a query to better understand the situation.
“I assume that letting the wolf live and Gabrielle die isn’t an option?” she asked. “Faeydir would like to know.”
The three senior shifters looked at each other warily. “I don’t think so,” Baron said, after a moment. “Gabrielle has a life, a family, friends. And as unfortunate as it is for a wolf to die, it comes with far fewer complications. Not the least of which is how the hell would we look after a purebred wolf smack in the middle of civilisation.”
“Maybe that’s something you should think about for the future,” Dee blurted out. “Because this is bound to come up again, but next time it might be a convert who’s had years of training and knows all our secrets. And then maybe you won’t want to deal with the complications of having a human running around who could betray you all to the Noturatii, so in that case, maybe letting the wolf live might be a better option.” Faeydir was all on board with the hypothetical situation. It was fair play, she thought, to let a wolf live then, if one was killed now.
“I’ll talk to the Council,” Andre said immediately. “It shouldn’t be too hard to set up a sanctuary somewhere. Russia, maybe, or Romania. Somewhere with a sparser human population and where wild wolves live already. Something that wouldn’t catch too much attention from the public.”
She was starting to like Andre, Dee realised, as his suggestion came out sincerely and thoughtfully, and she believed that he had every intention of seeing the issue through.
“And what does Faeydir think of the current situation?” Baron prompted her, and Dee fell silent again, her thoughts turned inward. Long minutes later, after a heartfelt conversation with her wolf, she lifted her head. “Faeydir agrees to kill the wolf,” she said, her voice catching with the knowledge of what she was about to do.
“Then let’s get this done,” Baron said, standing up. “The sooner Gabrielle is well and off this property, the better for all of us.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Dee trod the steps down into the basement with trepidation. When she’d done this before, it had been a spur of the moment thing, a battle for survival against a vicious and angry foe.
Now, though, she was about to kill a creature that was confused, lost and innocent. It was a gut-wrenching contrast, and Dee had to fight back a wave of nausea as she opened the door.
The first thing she saw when she entered the cage room wasn’t Gabrielle. Nor was it Caleb and Heron, sitting outside her cage, trying to keep her calm. Rather, the first thing that grabbed her attention, and hung on with a force that pushed the air from her lungs, was Mark.
He was sitting on his bed, calm and serious, no doubt fully aware of what was wrong with Gabrielle, though whether he’d been told what Dee was about to do was another matter. He came to the bars, relief, hope and sorrow all warring on his face.
Dee went over quickly, ignoring the glares from Caroline and Baron, and took his hand, giving it a quick squeeze. “I have to see to Gabrielle first,” she said, by way of apology.
“Gabrielle?” Mark looked predictably confused. So they hadn’t told him. But then realisation struck, and he looked both horror stricken and relieved at the same time. “You’re going to…” He glanced at the girl, knowing he couldn’t say more, not openly. “I mean, Fenrae is…”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck…” That one, softly breathed word said it all.
Forcing herself away from Mark’s cage, Dee turned to Gabrielle. The girl had clearly taken a turn for the worse. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bars and rocking herself, Heron sitting beside her, just outside the bars, trying to keep her calm. “It’s in my head,” Gabrielle repeated like a mantra. “I can’t get it out, and it
’s crazy. Noise. Sounds and pictures and… God, it’s like my body is trying to crawl out of my skin.” She scratched at her arms reflexively, and Dee could see there were already raw gouges where she’d been clawing at herself. It was distressing to see how much the girl suffered, and confronting to imagine that Dee herself might have ended up in a similar state, had fate turned out just a little differently for her.
“Gabrielle,” she said, approaching the bars and crouching down to talk to the girl. “My name’s Caitlin. I’m here to help.” No sense using her real name, but giving her some sort of name to call Dee by would help Gabrielle see her as a real person, rather than just another stranger sent to poke and prod her.
“It’s in my head,” Gabrielle told her pleadingly. “They said I was hallucinating, but I can feel it.” She looked down at her arms, and then suddenly they were paws, a shift coming over her fast and jarring. The wolf seemed just as distressed as the girl, letting out a yelp, then a series of pained whines.
“Dee? Do your thing,” Caroline ordered, and it was only months of practice at reading her moods that allowed Dee to realise that she was just as stressed as everyone else in this, her grief and concern manifesting as anger, as most of her emotions did.
Dee nodded and let Faeydir come to the fore, not completing the shift, but holding just on the edge of it, skin tingling, body tight and uncomfortable. Faeydir reached out and felt the two halves of the girl easily, human and wolf, and began to pull, separating the two-
“Stop!” Dee shouted, jerking back from the cage, startling the wolf and everyone else in the room. “You can’t do it like that.” Just as had happened with the wolf from the Grey Watch, Gabrielle’s wolf was gaining strength, while the human side of her was fading. And the problem became obvious after a moment’s consideration. She waved Caroline over, holding a murmured conversation so that Gabrielle couldn’t hear her – if she could even understand them, now that she was in wolf form. “If we’re going to kill the wolf, then she has to be in human form,” she informed Caroline. “Otherwise it’ll work the opposite way.”