by Tate James
“I’m fine, Aus. Shut the fuck up,” he mumbled, avoiding eye contact, and I snorted a laugh.
“See, asshole, Wes is fine. And your head hurts because of how many times you got hit yesterday,” I retaliated, and Cole vibrated with a silent laugh as Austin scowled at me with his bruised face.
Our verbal sparring was interrupted by the re-entry of the bosses, and Jonathan gave me a pointed look. He shook his head at where Cole’s hands rested under my shirt, and I smiled back at him unapologetically.
“Right, well, it looks like you boys will have your hands full then.” Jonathan directed the comment to River, obviously continuing a conversation from outside, but gave Cole a decidedly father-like frown. “Kit, Mr. Morgan has requested you remain under his team’s protection until you register with the new recruit class. I expect you won’t cause them too much trouble?”
“Of course I will,” I assured him. “You should know better. I intend to keep searching for information on my mother. Dupree got away too, so I would guess she’ll still be gunning for me.”
“Hmm, I figured as much. Well, in that case, you’re probably in the best hands....” He nodded but his mind seemed elsewhere. “Right, well then. One last order of business for you, kiddo. A couple of hours ago, Cobra Team detained a woman attempting to leave the country under false identification, and we have reason to believe this is your Dupree.”
My jaw almost hit the floor, all traces of earlier joking gone. “What? Where? You’re just telling me this now?” I scrambled out of Cole’s lap and onto my feet. “Where is she? I want to see her.”
“I figured as much.” Jonathan scowled. “Normally I wouldn’t dream of letting you—in fact I wouldn’t have even told you until later—but evidently she wants to see you too. Cobra Team just called while I was speaking with River, saying she is refusing to speak to anyone except ‘Miss Davenport.’”
“And you’re just going to give her what she wants?” Cole’s voice was deathly quiet, and I didn’t need to look at him to know he had his killer face on.
Jonathan arched an eyebrow at him, then turned back to me. “Go get dressed; I have a helicopter waiting at the Cascade Falls air strip. Maybe we can find out why this woman felt the need to target you, hmm?”
47
As it turned out, the helicopter that Jonathan had waiting was actually a Black Hawk, which worked out well seeing as none of the boys were willing to be left behind and it had enough seats to accommodate us.
We landed at what looked to be a navy base on the coast near Vancouver, and I prodded Jonathan in the side to get his attention over the roaring propellers.
“This is a government site.” I pointed out the obvious. “I thought you said it was your team that caught her?”
“They did.” His voice crackled over the radio. “But this was the most secure location close to where they found her, so the Navy is kindly allowing us the use of their space.” I nodded in understanding as the propellers slowed and we were allowed to unbuckle our harnesses.
Scooting across the seat, I wobbled a little bit when I stepped out of the chopper, but luckily Austin was there to steady me with his strong hands on my waist. What the hell is going on? He must have taken more blows to the head than we realized.
“Thanks…” I said, but he had already turned away from me to follow Jonathan across the tarmac. I shrugged to myself and followed as well, waiting while each of them scanned their Omega Group IDs with a uniformed guard. Jonathan motioned me forward, and I was presented with a visitor’s pass on a lanyard.
“Okay, kiddo. When we get in there, if you don’t feel comfortable being in the same room as this woman, you don’t have to be. Okay?” Jonathan was frowning as though concerned for my delicate sensibilities, but my soul was screaming out for Dupree’s blood.
“I’ll be fine.” I smiled with all the innocence of an angel, not wanting to alert them to my violent thoughts. We all followed another uniformed guard down a long corridor until we reached several closed doors with heavy-duty looking locks.
The guard opened the first one for us, and we walked into a viewing room with a huge window on one side showing the next room. I assumed it was one-way glass, like in cop movies. Despite my guardian being the head of a secret intelligence agency, I had actually never set foot onto any of his company properties so was basing my knowledge solely on TV and movies.
The window displayed a smaller room that was devoid of any furniture except a metal chair, which looked bolted to the concrete floor. Sitting in the chair was an elegant looking woman, somewhere in her seventies, wearing a ridiculously out of place tweed suit and heels. Her hands were out of sight behind her back, but I imagined they were handcuffed.
“So, is this her?” Jonathan asked after giving me a moment to take it all in. I glanced around me to find all five guys had created a sort of semi-circle around me, as though standing guard.
“I wouldn’t have a clue,” I told my guardian bluntly. “I never saw her, only spoke to her on the phone. Simon wasn’t with her when she was found?”
Jonathan grimaced. “Cobra Team reported there were several others who did get away, as their primary objective was to secure the woman. So he could have been one of them.”
“Has she said anything at all?” River asked with an air of authority in his voice, the same one he used when giving commands to the boys.
“Nothing.” This answer came from the uniformed guard who was still in the room with us. “From what I understand, when she was first brought in she asked to speak to Miss Davenport here and then clammed up. Not a word since.”
“Well then,” I said, rolling my shoulders. “Let’s see what she has to say for herself.”
I waited impatiently, bouncing a little on my toes, as the guard unlocked the door to the next room for me and swung it open. A huge hand nudged me gently in the small of my back when I paused, and I glanced up to see Cole had followed me.
“Don’t worry, Vixen. I’m here with you.” He breathed the words into my ear, barely audible. “Just don’t let her get to you.”
I gave him a tiny head nod and straightened up my shoulders. I stepped further into the room under the glacial gaze of the woman in the chair.
“Well, well.” She chuckled, eyeing me up like a hungry shark. “The security footage really did you no justice, Christina dear. The resemblance to your mother is just… uncanny.” I scowled at her, saying nothing in response. Don’t let her get to you, Kit. Don’t.
“Tell me, dear, how is your little friend getting on? The one with that god-awful blue hair. Such a shame it had to come to that; I do so despise resorting to violence.” She clucked her tongue as though I had forced her to try and kill my best friend. Something snapped in my brain, and before I realized what I was doing, my fist had already connected solidly with her face. Her nose erupted in a spray of blood, and there was a sickening crunch under my knuckles as her nose shattered and I got a grim sense of satisfaction.
Cole’s much larger hand wrapped around my wrist from where he had been standing behind me, but instead of reprimanding me for losing my cool, he simply adjusted my fist so my thumb was on the outside. “Never forget, thumb goes on the outside or you risk breaking it,” he murmured with a small smile, and I smirked back, ignoring the wailing cries coming from Dupree.
I stepped back and took a couple of calming breaths, just in case I killed her, then turned back to the sobbing, bloodied woman handcuffed to the chair.
“Don’t you ever touch my friends again, or I will fucking end you,” I promised her in a low voice and was rewarded with a flicker of fear in her reptilian eyes.
“You probably don’t want to kill me until you hear what I have to say,” she goaded, regaining a bit of her confidence, and I gestured to her to elaborate. “Aren’t you wanting to know why I have been chewing through hundreds of thousands of volunteers in my experiments? Don’t you want to know what I was trying to achieve?”
“I already know. You th
ink you can give yourself immortality; Simon gloated all about it back in your labs.” I looked at her in pity and disgust; the woman was clearly delusional. An idea that was reinforced when she began to cackle hysterically.
My fists clenched hard, and I ground my teeth, desperately trying not to smack the laughter off her face. Cole must have seen my struggle because he laid a calming hand on my spine. “Calm down, Vixen,” he whispered. “You can do this.”
I took a couple more breaths, blocking out Dupree’s continued cackling. I can do this. She has information I need, so I can’t kill her. Yet.
“Judging by your reaction, I take it he was misinformed,” I said in my very best calm, coaxing voice. “Why don’t you enlighten me? After all, you’ve got to know you’ll never escape here. Don’t you want to fill us in so the secrets don’t die with you?”
“Of course I want to tell you, you stupid girl. Why else would I have asked you to come here?” The blood was now running freely down her creased face, and as she spoke, flecks of it flew through the air. “I know I won’t make it out alive, so I may as well drop a grenade before I go. So here it is, Christina. You’re not human. Your mother wasn’t human, and neither was your father.” An involuntary gasp slipped through my tight lips, and Dupree’s eyes lit up in satisfaction. “Oh yes, I knew your father too. He was another one of my volunteers for quite some time.”
“Okay.” I humored her because she was clearly insane. I mean, I knew I was a bit extra, but surely that was just from a bit of genetic manipulation. Like that extra juicy sweet corn they grow out of modified crops. But “not human” was a bit of a stretch. “So if I’m not human, then what does that make me?”
“I never could get a specific name out of Bridget for what freaks like you and her are called, but suffice to say you’re of the supernatural variety.” She did a little half shrug with one shoulder, as much as her restraints would allow. “Even after all the years Blood Moon had your mother, we still couldn’t place her into an exact species.”
“Species?” I sneered. “You mean like…” I trailed off, frowning. I had no idea what she meant.
“I mean that as far as we could tell, she wasn’t a shapeshifter, or a witch, or fae, or any other of your garden variety supernaturals. She was something other, which was what made her so very valuable.” Dupree’s eyes gleamed as she stared at me, as though she honestly thought she’d make it out alive and recapture me for testing.
“Hold the motherfucking phone. Are you seriously trying to tell me that these magical creatures actually exist?” I scoffed and cast a glance at Cole. His face was a blank slate though, which just confused me further.
“Well, not so much now as there used to be, but I assure you, dear, they are very much real.” She smirked at me with bloody teeth from where her nose was still dripping freely. “And it’s not as big of a secret as you might think. Would you like me to tell you a story, Christina?”
I honestly wanted nothing more than to walk away at that point, but curiosity wouldn’t let me refuse. “Sure, I had nowhere to be today anyway. Tell me your story.” Despite the forced casualness to my words, my body was thrumming with tension. Enough that I was almost shaking with it. Surely it couldn’t be any more insane than “you’re not human” and “magic is real”?
“Very well.” Dupree’s grin was the stuff of nightmares. “I’ll make this brief as I am quite sure you have all sorts of fun plans for my death that you’re itching to enact.” Shit, how did she guess. “Around four hundred and eighty-odd years ago, magic was everywhere. Supernaturals outnumbered humans, and they made no secret of their power. They were the master race, and they knew it. After all, how could an ordinary human compete with beings that could change their form at will, or cast fireballs, or read minds?”
“So what happened? And why does history not remember any of this?” My curiosity pushed the words out of my mouth faster than I could grab hold of them. Stupid, Kit. Stop playing her game!
“Greed happened. A small group of powerful humans became tired of being inferior and somehow coerced a young but very powerful witch into helping them. Their goal was to siphon off the magic from a select group that they had held captive and redistribute it into themselves. Their plan actually worked, too. At least at first. Unfortunately, their witch, Tasha, didn’t fully understand what she was doing and ended up causing a sort of magical plague. The power drain didn’t just stop at the intended victims; it kept spreading until almost the entire supernatural population had been drained of all their magic.”
“And the humans? What happened to them; did they get all of this power?” Despite my better judgment, her story was dragging me in.
“They did,” she confirmed, “but the human body wasn’t designed to hold magic, and they all spontaneously combusted within a week of the plague outbreak. In an attempt to cover her tracks from the millions of supernaturals calling for her blood, Tasha then cast a sort of erasing spell. The memory of all things magical was eradicated from history, and the only ones who kept the knowledge were the scarce few who’d avoided the plague.”
“Okay, I don’t get it,” I said, rubbing my face with a tired hand. “What does this fairytale have to do with me or with your barbaric experiments at the labs?”
She gave me a pitying look, like I was a simpleton. “Oh my dear, trust me. This is no fairytale. Why, just ask your father when you meet him. He himself is one of the few shapeshifters who survived the plague, so he can give you a firsthand account. But to answer your question about my experiments, Blood Moon was a facility set up by my great-grandmother in an attempt to find a cure for the magical drain. All that power can’t have just disappeared, so there must be a way to utilize it, don’t you think?”
“So why experiment on humans? You just said the human body wasn’t designed to hold magic, so what is the point?” I demanded, growing increasingly frustrated with this insanity.
“Who said they’re all human?” she challenged. “I mean, they could be. I have no way of really knowing. But the law of averages suggests that a solid percentage of the people I test on would be carrying the potential to be other. The only problem was, nothing that was tried ever worked. It seemed like the magic was gone for good—until Bridget. Loads of others can heal themselves, but she could heal others.”
She stared at me then, like that was the grenade she had been waiting to launch, but I still wasn’t following. Maybe I have taken too many knocks to the head lately.
“Oh for God’s sake, I have to spell it out, do I?” She sighed. “During her time with us at Blood Moon, a young man was injured quite gravely during an experiment. He was left in the medical bay, assumed dead, and Bridget was sent to clean up the mess. We liked our long term residents to help with the cleaning, you see. Anyway, within minutes of her entering the room, the young man was not only healed of all his wounds, but tests later revealed he was a wolf shifter. Before Bridget, he was showing to be nothing more exceptional than any normal human.” She paused, and it took a moment for the information to sink through my brain, but when it did, I couldn’t help a small gasp from escaping. “Ah see, now you get it. Bridget not only healed his physical wounds, she healed his metaphysical ones too.”
“So, why the continued experiments? Surely that was the answer you were looking for? I saw the files; they said you held her captive for over a hundred years…” My head was spinning with all this impossible information, and I could hardly believe I was buying into it. But I was.
“Frustratingly, she refused to cooperate. Much like you in that regard. No matter how many people died in front of her, she never healed them. Oh sure, she put on a big show about it, sobbing and crying, putting her hands on them and pretending to try, but nothing ever came of it and they all died, one by one. Only on one other occasion did she actually heal another patient, and he too regained his genetic heritage as a supernatural, so we knew it hadn’t been a fluke.” Her casual disregard for all those poor people’s lives made my stomach
churn, and my hands tightened into fists at my sides. Fuck, I wanted to hit her again.
A warm hand ran down my arm and grasped my wrist, startling me. I had totally forgotten Cole was in the room with me, let alone the boys and Jonathan watching through the glass. I gave Cole a grateful smile, as he had just saved me from resorting to more violence.
“Okay, so why tell me all of this now? What can you possibly stand to gain from this?” I demanded with a heavy dose of suspicion.
“You didn’t think I was the only one trying to capitalize on this opportunity for power, did you?” She barked out a laugh. “Don’t be so naïve. When power is up for grabs, all sorts of snakes will come out of the sewers. My personal mission might be over, but at least I can make it harder for my competition. As they say, knowledge is power, and you, my dear, are now armed just a little better. Well then, that all said and done, I do feel I need to apologize. I know you or your glowering boyfriend there probably have a painful death planned for me, but I really prefer to be the mistress of my own fate.” She stared hard at me, clenching her jaw tightly and grinding her back teeth so hard I thought they might break.
“Shit! Stop!” Cole roared, diving past me and grasping Dupree’s head in his huge hands as the door to the room burst open and River rushed in, the other boys close behind him.
“What the fuck…?” I asked as I saw Cole desperately clawing at Dupree’s face, trying to pull her jaws open. She continued staring past him at me, and I saw a thin line of white foam leak out from between her bloodied lips.
“Fucking cyanide capsules,” River cursed as the elderly woman began convulsing in her restraints, the foam now pouring from her mouth and her eyes rolling back in her head.
48
After Dupree was taken away in a body bag, I found myself shaking slightly but wrapped in Caleb’s warm embrace as we stood in the corridor outside the interrogation room. Jonathan and River had gone to deal with whatever was required when a prisoner died in custody and had told us to wait for them to come back. I imagined Jonathan probably wanted to talk about all of the craziness that Dupree had just spouted before killing herself, but I couldn’t imagine what he would say. The whole thing was fucking insane.