by Laura Taylor
The villa was set in a remote part of the country, surrounded by forests and even a few wild wolves. Though small in number, the presence of wolves gave the shifters much greater freedom in their day to day lives; if one of them happened to be spotted by a stray hiker or farmer, they would be dismissed as merely one of the regular wolves.
In the past three years, Andre had completed two and a half of the possible four internships available to him. He’d spent a year with Il Trosa’s science division, seeing in detail the experiments they ran to try and decode the complex shifter magic. He’d spent a year and a half with the historians, learning the ancient language, studying the myths and genealogies, and most recently, he’d spent six months in training with the assassins. It was tough work, mentally as well as physically, and while he now had a renewed admiration for the Council’s last and most deadly line of defence, he also found the whole business to be rather distasteful. It was a noble duty, to be sure, safeguarding Il Trosa from any and all threats, but killing people, sometimes innocent people, and the sometimes gory methods involved – particularly where the Noturatii were concerned – left him feeling rather dirty, if he was honest about it.
Of course, the fourth possible role for him was that of Diplomat, the political geniuses who wooed politicians, lobbied for laws in favour of wolf conservation and the preservation of wilderness areas, cosied up to rich philanthropists… it was all unbearably boring, and Andre had never really given the role of Diplomat more than a passing thought.
But this third internship was not shaping up well, and so in the very near future, Andre was going to have to make a choice about his future. Assassin wasn’t for him, he’d decided, but he was having a tough time deciding between scientist and historian, both roles equally fascinating, both containing the potential to make real progress for their species.
There was also the thought in his mind of a relationship with a female shifter. Andre had met two or three women over the past few years who had caught his attention, though he had yet to develop any serious attachments. Assassins, in general, did not form long term romantic relationships – a consequence of their nomadic lifestyle and the necessary dangers of their job – but it was a serious possibility if he became either a historian or a scientist, much more of his life spent in a safe, stable environment at the villa, and while he still felt himself a little young for a serious commitment, the idea of marriage somewhere down the track was appealing.
As he stepped inside the wide foyer, a white marble floor lending a bright, airy feel to the villa, he found Eleanor waiting for him. She was sitting on the bottom of the stairs, and when she looked up at him, Andre felt his body turn cold, such was the look of desolation on her face.
“Come into the lounge,” she said simply, standing up and leading the way, and Andre’s mind immediately started imagining all manner of horrors that might have occurred. Bad news was on the way, that much was certain, but what? Had a Councillor been killed? Had a Den been raided? Or had one of the other trainees been injured, perhaps? Their training was tough, physical, and at times dangerous, and it wouldn’t be the first time a trainee had suffered a broken leg or a bad concussion. Perhaps the injury had been worse this time…
Inside the lounge, Andre took a seat on the edge of a sofa, waiting apprehensively as Eleanor composed herself, two other Councillors watching on from the side of the room.
“I have some bad news,” Eleanor said, stating the obvious, and Andre simply nodded. “There was an attack involving the Agordo Den. They ran into a group of Noturatii operatives out in the forest. Five wolves died in the battle.”
Andre’s heart sank. While the Council and their emissaries lived in the villa, the main shifter presence in Italy was a large Den to the north. This was bad news indeed-
“I’m so sorry, Andre. Your mother and father have both been killed.”
Andre felt his world tilt, and he actually grabbed onto the arm of the sofa to steady himself. “What?”
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated, stark sorrow in her eyes. “Alessandro, the alpha, was also killed. He did everything he could, and without his efforts, more would likely have died. Your parents fought bravely. May they find glory in the House of Sirius.”
It was an oft repeated sentiment, a mark of respect for those who had fallen and a reminder that this life was not the end of their existence. But as he heard the words now, Andre felt no comfort in them, no relief or bitter-sweet joy in the idea that his parents had returned home to the Great Hall in the divine house of the Wolf God.
He wasn’t aware of the hot tears running down his cheeks until Eleanor reached for a box of tissues and held it out. He ignored it, so she set it on the coffee table.
“You’ll be given leave to attend their funeral, of course,” she said softly, “and remember that we’re all here for you. If there’s anything at all that you need.”
Andre felt like a great, black wave had just swallowed him whole. His parents were dead. Both of them. He could barely process the avalanche of emotion swamping him. Grief, a black, aching sorrow… and an almost frightening surge of fiery rage overtook him, demanding revenge against those who had taken his closest family from him.
It was in that moment that Andre’s future suddenly crystallised into a clear picture, a singular purpose.
The Noturatii had killed his parents. And Council assassins killed the Noturatii. Revenge, as a general rule, was frowned upon in Il Trosa, the Council all too aware that one act of retaliation tended to lead to another, and another, and that was how wars got started.
But to become an assassin was a neat sidestep around that irritating barrier. It was a free pass to hunt down those who had hurt him, those who continued to threaten his pack, and the feeling of power the idea gave him was intoxicating.
“Thank you,” he said respectfully. “I’ll head north this afternoon. But before I go, there is just one other thing…” He glanced around, seeing the grim expressions on the Councillors, the stark sorrow etched in hard lines on aging faces. “I’ve made my choice about which guild I would like to join,” he told them, knowing this was a sudden change of topic, and registering the surprise it caused. “I have decided to become an assassin.”
CHAPTER TEN
Present Day
“Tank?” Baron had found the man out on the back patio, sitting on a wall and staring at the moon. It was faint, hazy behind a thin layer of cloud, and the air was cold this time of night, their breath misting in the air. “We need to talk.”
There were a number of reactions Baron had expected. Tank might just storm off, refusing to speak to him. Or he might get upset and swear at him, annoyed at being treated with kid gloves. But thankfully, he did neither, taking the route that Baron had been hoping for. Tank was a smart guy, after all, well versed in the long term effects of intense trauma, and it was good to see that he was still capable of seeing past his own pain to recognise the symptoms he was displaying.
“I know.”
Baron sat down on the wall beside him, staring off into the dark forest. A long moment passed, and neither of them spoke. “So talk to me,” Baron said at last, and Tank let out a long sigh.
“It’s not the torture,” he said finally. “I know everyone thinks it is, but it’s just physical pain. It’s unpleasant enough, and I’ve had my share of nightmares over it, but the wounds heal and the memories fade, and that’s that.”
“So what is it?”
Tank made a noise of reluctance. “Two things. Neither of which are put to rest quite so easily. Number one: they drugged me.” Tank paused, then forced himself to continue. “The whole thing was surreal. Like being in a dream, and not knowing who’s good and who’s bad, not quite knowing even who you are any more. You try to believe that staying silent is the best thing, and that you’re fighting on the side of good, but they’ve got their propaganda and their ideals about protecting humanity and reality seems to have turned sideways; you come out of that with a whole pile of guilt
about who you are and what you’re doing. And it lingers. I have dreams about killing shifters. About killing Noturatii. And never knowing if what I’m doing at the time is right or wrong.”
Baron considered that, then gently asked a question, immediately dreading the answer. “Are you having second thoughts about us? About the shifters?”
A quick denial would have been comforting, but not entirely believable. So it was something of a relief when Tank hesitated, chewing on the idea for a moment. “It’s not that I think we’re evil or that I agree with the Noturatii. But we’ve always known that in this war, there are innocent bystanders who get caught in the crossfire. I guess this just put that into a new perspective. Every innocent life that is taken in our quest to stay alive is a life too many. And at some point, you have to wonder how much blood there is on your hands, and how much more there’s going to be, and how many lives are worth the price of our survival.”
“The Endless Dilemma,” Baron said, not nearly as flippantly as the simple statement might have implied. “Which goes hand in hand with the Endless War. If we could end this fight tomorrow, we would. You know that. But the Noturatii-”
“We can’t just blame the Noturatii for everything we do,” Tank interrupted. “They are the cause of a lot of it, certainly, but they don’t force us to pull the trigger. We have a certain amount of responsibility for our own actions. I don’t know of any other way it could be at the moment, but it makes you think, you know?”
Baron nodded, making no effort to dispel Tank’s lingering sense of guilt. It was a dilemma he’d wrestled with himself often enough, and as Tank had said, there were no simple answers.
“And the second thing?” he asked, after a while, remembering that Tank had said there were two things bothering him.
“They took my blood. And used it to make new shifters. Those women had no say in the matter, they didn’t volunteer, like we did, they didn’t even know what was happening. Their bodies were taken without their consent and used for evil purposes far beyond their control. I feel like-” He broke off, the words sounding strangled in his throat.
“You feel like what?” Baron asked softly. He had no misconceptions about what was going on here. Tank was a warrior, one of the strongest wolves in the Den, and not just physically. The man had been in the military before joining them, and had witnessed things, done things, that had a strong tendency to produce post traumatic stress in former soldiers – something that Tank had fortunately never suffered from himself. Whatever was bothering him was no doubt a most serious issue.
“I feel like I raped them. Violated them. In the worst possible way. And I know that, logically,” Tank rushed on before Baron could say anything, “it wasn’t me, it was the Noturatii. But it’s like if someone stole your semen and used it to make a bunch of random babies all over the world, and then you find out years later, and on the one hand, it’s nothing to do with you, but on the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of tiny people running around who are actually your children. And it would be so easy to spend the rest of your life wondering how they are, and whether you should try to do anything to help them, and worrying that they’re in danger or that someone’s hurting them.” He sighed, staring at the ground. “These are not the sort of ghosts that are easily laid to rest.”
Baron sighed. In a way, it was Tank’s own kindness that was slowly killing him from the inside. His sense of honour had been betrayed, his compassion unable to let go of an act that was not his fault, but that, by his own logic, remained his responsibility.
Two of the women who had been converted were now dead, and Baron had nothing to add to that situation that would be of any use. But the third woman had survived, had successfully been returned to her home after Dee had removed the wolf from her.
“We’ve been keeping tabs on Gabrielle,” Baron told Tank quietly. “I hadn’t mentioned it because I didn’t think you’d want to keep being reminded about that, but…”
“How is she?” The question came out with a heartfelt urgency, and Baron wasted no time in filling Tank in.
“She’s doing well. After she got home, she went to stay with her brother for a while. He’s got two children, and spending time with them seemed to help. Now she’s back home, back at work – part time only, but it’s a good step forward.”
Tank seemed to relax with the news, a faint smile settling on his face. “Good to hear,” he said softly. “She shouldn’t have to put up with being caught in all this madness.”
“And yet the Endless War rages on,” Baron said, a sad acknowledgement that for every piece of good news, there was plenty of bad to go around.
“That it does.”
The Grey Watch’s northern camp was dismal. It had been drizzling for days, small trickles of water dripping from every leaf, flowing down every rock. The ground was permanently wet, the dampness creeping into the wolves’ fur and making them constantly uncomfortable, most of the pack becoming irritable and grumpy as a result.
Now that she was getting more of a handle on her life as a shifter, Genna had started to take note of small details in their daily lives, things she had missed earlier because she was too busy just trying to survive.
One of the often quoted rules was that the shifters had to spend the vast majority of their time in wolf form – an imposition that Genna found extremely difficult. Staying as a wolf for more than twenty-four hours was uncomfortable, like constantly having an itch you couldn’t scratch. And after three days, the effort became impossible, wolves invariably shifting in their sleep, much to the derision of their pack mates, or sneaking off into the forest to shift in secret and spend a few hard earned minutes in human form.
The more senior wolves seemed to have less of a problem with it, and indeed it was they who most commonly scolded the younger ones for their failures, something Genna had taken at face value in the first few weeks of her life here.
But now she’d learned to watch more carefully. To look past the words and put more weight on the actions of those few elite.
And the reality was that every single one of the senior wolves managed to find a reason to shift every single day. Sempre, in particular, spent a great deal of time as a human, constantly needing to have ‘meetings’ with the other senior females, or using her status to make use of the privilege of pulling one of the few males into the tent to have sex – something that was always done in human form, never as a wolf. There were constant requirements to look up some passage in the few ancient texts they carried with them, or make an urgent phone call to another pack in Europe, or issue commands to the younger wolves – all things that needed either human hands, or a human voice, and once she’d finally seen the hypocrisy of the alpha’s rules, Genna couldn’t decide whether she was furious, or amused by it all. The endless charade, the belittling comments, the mocking and scolding… it all seemed far less weighty and much easier to deal with when she realised that she, herself, actually spent far more time in wolf form than Sempre did. According to Grey Watch rules, she was better at being a wolf than their alpha was!
But there was another aspect to the rule that was equally ridiculous, but far less funny. Not every wolf managed to climb the ranks, and the lower ranking wolves had less excuse to shift – no important meetings to attend, fewer opportunities to spend time with the males – so that some of the longer running members of the pack were still quite low ranking, and had spent years being forced to stay in wolf form.
And some of them, Genna had learned, by quiet observation and subtle eavesdropping, were beginning to lose themselves. When in wolf form, they were less able to reason as a human would, finding it more difficult to put aside their animal instincts to make logical decisions, rather than those based purely on hunger or fear. And when in human form, the results were even more scary. Those shifters seemed to be losing their human selves entirely, gaps in their memories of things they had done as a human, difficulty remembering people’s names or the importance of particular dates. It was not
a fate Genna envied at all, and so she had begun the long, slow process of climbing the ranks herself, to gain what privilege there was to be had, honing her fighting skills, challenging wolf after wolf to status fights, becoming more aggressive in battles for food or for dry places to sleep. But in the process, Genna acknowledged sadly, she was losing herself anyway, becoming more confident, yes, but also more aggressive, more angry, more prone to justifying her desires and greed to herself, when every step up the ladder she took was at the same time condemning another wolf to more years locked in their animal form, more risk that they, too, would end up losing themselves to the wild.
As a human, Genna had been naturally sociable, generous, if perhaps a little lazy, and willing to assist others in need. Her invitation to join the Grey Watch had been on the basis not of an antisocial nature, as a lot of their recruitments were, but rather on a lingering sense of displacement. She couldn’t find a career that appealed to her, floundering in her role as checkout worker with little ambition to move forward. She couldn’t see the appeal of many of modern society’s pass-times; team sports held no interest, she had no musical talents, television and modern movies seemed banal and pointless, and the interests of many of her friends had been unbearably dull, as they spent hours at the hairdressers or getting a manicure. Getting her eyebrows waxed? What the hell was that about? She had been raised in a small town, where the general expectation seemed to be that she would find a man, get married and start having children, and she’d been struggling to break out of the entrenched social order.
So when the shifters had come along, the wilderness had appealed, a chance to step back and reconnect with humanity’s more spiritual origins. It was a source of deep disappointment to her that this pack was more consumed with their own internal politics than with rediscovering the wonders of the natural world around them.