Elements 2 - Shifting Selves
Page 28
But first, I needed to at least attempt a solution that didn’t open the door to further insanity. Miriam and I were the only ones still in human form, and she was mainly along for the opportunity to smack someone. It looked like the burden of diplomacy fell on me. As with so many things lately, that could have been planned better.
“What do you want?” I bit out the words, making no attempt to hide my hatred.
“I want you to go away and pretend you never saw me, at least for a couple more weeks, but we rarely get what we want in life.” Her voice was even and reasonable.
Her eyes, however, were anything but reasonable. They were bright and frantic, scanning the entire room. She knew there were more of us. Sera, Simon, Josiah, she’d met them all, and she had no way of knowing they weren’t with us. I didn’t wear a watch, but I knew it would be at least another half hour till they appeared.
Fortunately, if there was one thing I did really well, it was stall and babble and distract. With luck, I could convince her to use the full thirty minutes to share her diabolical plan.
Then Sera could set her on fire for me.
Behind me, I heard a desperate, pained growl. Will stared, not at his nephew, but at a woman stretched out on another bed. Celeste. She was on one of several beds, with the others occupied by children and teenagers, all sound asleep. They lined the walls of this room, white beds against white walls. The dull fluorescents and worn linoleum floor stopped the room from looking pure and clean. It might be sterile, but it felt dirty and ugly.
Eleanor followed his gaze. “Oh, calm down, Will. I’d never hurt my sister. She’s on tranquilizers, just enough to sleep for a bit.”
She didn’t specify whether those tranquilizers were self-administered or if Eleanor had helped her sister to dreamland.
“Why is she here?” I asked, trying to put the final pieces of this puzzle together.
“She came with me willingly, you know.” The words were defensive, but I heard truth in her words. She hadn’t abducted her own sister. Celeste had known where her sister was, and what she’d been doing—and we knew she’d fed her information from Dana. She was still far from innocent, regardless of whether she’d intended for James to be hurt.
Though she spoke easily, even conversationally, Eleanor never moved, and the needle did not waver from Mac’s neck. “Celeste can be naive, and she hadn’t expected things to turn out the way they did. She told me things were out of control. I told her the only thing out of control was her Xanax addiction and, well, you know how sisters fight.” She shrugged, unconcerned.
“What ‘things,’ exactly?”
She stared at me with the absolute focus of the beast that lurked within her. At that moment, I knew with utter certainty that everything else—the occasional appearance of weakness, the bright, mad eyes, the graduate student full of hard-won wisdom—were just acts, reflections of humanity she’d picked up over the years. The truth of who she was lay in the predator’s gaze now fixed on me, the gaze that weighed every strength and weakness I might possess and judged my threat potential accordingly.
She wasn’t ready to dismiss me yet, and I’d never be so foolish as to dismiss her. We were at a standoff.
“Don’t play stupid, Aidan. You’re many things, but that isn’t one of them. The car crash, for instance. Celeste thought it was unnecessary. Your mother. Her son’s poor mental state.”
The reminder was too much for Will. He stood on his hind legs, bellowing his anger, then dropped and took several steps forward. Eleanor pricked Mac’s neck with the needle, her thumb on the plunger.
“No!” I shouted, not even certain who I yelled at. “Stop, please.” Will snarled, but he remained in place, and Eleanor slowly removed her thumb, though she kept the needle in his neck. Mac’s eyes were fluttering, the noise and the pain drawing him to wakefulness. I was both thrilled to see signs of life and terrified he’d do something really stupid in an attempt to help.
“See, I said you were smart. Without even being told what’s in this syringe, you knew you didn’t want me to inject it. You’re right, of course. If I give him this, Mac won’t remember much of anything.”
She cast her eyes toward Will, still staring at Eleanor with her death in his eyes. She was unconcerned. Her absolute confidence set off all my warning bells. The threat to Mac was the only card she had to play, and she couldn’t keep an unpressed needle in his neck indefinitely.
As much as I might wish otherwise, I didn’t think Eleanor was stupid, either. We’d guessed earlier that she had a plan. Control the children, control the families. We still didn’t know the whole story.
Keep her talking. Keep her talking till Simon could drop down on her ugly, deceptive mug and claw her to bits. Keep her talking till Sera could show up and incinerate her. It was damn hard to press a needle while on fire, I was sure. And if Sera never made it, I could do it in her place. It might be signing my death warrant to do it in front of so many people, but I only had to look at Mac and the beds of the other shifter children to know the risk was worth it.
Yeah, I had a plan, too.
“Why?” I asked. Nice and open-ended, letting her share whatever she felt was important. Whatever might inspire her to keep talking.
“Why children? Why Celeste? Or why the drugs? You’re going to have to be more specific than that, Aidan.”
For once, I had the basic sense to keep my mouth shut. Eleanor was proud. I thought the beast inside might be proud, too. She wanted someone to know how she’d outsmarted everyone. My silence might just give her enough rope with which to hang herself.
“It actually didn’t start with me. Growl at me all you want, Will, but it was your wife who put this in motion. Celeste loves James, but he wasn’t ever going to be a doctor or lawyer when he fought the need to shift every time he smelled blood or got angry. He’d be trapped here, in this small town, for the rest of his life—just like the rest of us. We all know there’s no escape. She wanted human children. Brandon will get to do whatever he wants in life. She wanted the same for her other son. James is supposed to go to college next year. She wanted him to go far away, and to go as a human, though she knew it wasn’t possible.”
“But you’d talked to Brian.” The words brought a heavy weight to my chest. Even dead, I wasn’t free of my former friend’s crimes and betrayals.
“It’s amazing what truths come out over a bottle of vodka, especially when you think you have common goals. He wasn’t much a fan of shifters.” No, he hadn’t been. He’d made my father look like a paragon of tolerance when he spoke of them.
“So he gave you the serum, and I’m guessing you wore a red wig to every meeting, making it just a little harder for anyone to connect you to the drugs. But I still don’t get why you did this. If you were just trying to help Celeste, why the other children? Why all the side effects?”
She studied me for a second, considering what to tell me. In the end, she seemed to decide it didn’t matter what I knew. “Why would I go to all this trouble for one boy? I told Brian I’d use it to rid the world of shifters. He was an arrogant man, and he never believed anyone could outsmart him. He didn’t give me shifter deaths. He gave me control over every shifter in Tahoe. That is why I did this.”
Without another word, she shoved the contents of the plunger deep into Mac’s neck.
CHAPTER 23
The response was instantaneous. Without the threat of the needle holding him back, Will leapt forward, knocking Eleanor to the ground. She landed flat on her back, her head cracking against the hard linoleum floor. He held one threatening paw above her face, claws extended and razor sharp.
I heard someone screaming and distantly knew it was me, begging him to spare her at least long enough to learn about the antidote. Despite his rage, I didn’t need to remind him. Even as Will menaced Eleanor, his son was never far from his mind. Once she was immobile, he was content to hold her hostage, willing to wait for a more appropriate time to disembowel his sister-in-law.
With Will looming above her, Carmen watching carefully from the side, and Miriam bouncing on her toes, looking for any excuse to show off her left hook, Eleanor was, quite simply, screwed.
I crouched beside her snarling face, much closer than was altogether sensible, but I wanted to enjoy gaining the upper hand. “Need some help?” I asked.
While I was too busy gloating to be of any use, Carmen was thinking ahead. She shifted back to her human form and started sorting through the supplies at the bedside, finding several plastic tubes she began braiding with neat, efficient movements.
“It makes them harder to break,” she said, in response to my questioning look. “You know bears are strong, right?” She tied Eleanor’s left wrist to a leg of Mac’s hospital bed, then repeated the motion on the other side. Will slowly backed away, dark eyes watching for the smallest unauthorized movement.
Carmen nudged her roughly in the ribs. “Talk.”
Eleanor should have looked at least a little nervous. She was restrained and surrounded by a bunch of people who could, individually, send her to the hospital. Collectively, they could rip her into tiny pieces and spread them throughout the greater Tahoe basin. She had no advantage I could see. And yet, she was smiling.
Nerves crept along my spine, calling to my magic. Be ready, they whispered. She isn’t done with you yet.
“Sure. I’ll talk.” Eleanor turned to me. “I told you I was a permanent student, remember? It’s a funny thing. You spend enough time in school and people stop caring what degrees you’re even bothering to get. They stop asking, particularly if they think you’re just wasting your life and the family money. For the record, Will, the last one was a PhD in pharmacology & toxicology from UC Davis.”
My breath caught, the nerves intensifying. I wasn’t going to like what she said next. “You know Brian stumbled across a mix of drugs that controls the magic. It’s a basic opiate/tranquilizer combo, with a couple of inhibitors that affect the central nervous system. Basically, it tires you out and makes sure your thoughts don’t ever reach the magic. Simple stuff that wears off fast, and I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t think of it first. But I did put my stamp on his creation, once he gave it to me. A few tweaks here and there, mix it with the right technology, and you’ve got a slow release system.”
My blank face didn’t offer the response she was looking for. Her words were full of scorn, but she continued her explanations. “You lot spend so much time obsessed with your magic that you forget science is just as powerful. A tranquilizer got them here, then an experimental amnesia drug made sure they had no memory of their time with me, at least for a while. That one’s not mine, I’m sorry to say. They’ve been working on that for years at Harvard, and I just borrowed it. With James, I only wanted him to forget a couple days, not his entire family. I confess, with Pamela, I was curious what a larger dose would do.”
Carmen didn’t say a word, but I watched her claws slowly extend, and her slitted eyes narrowed on Eleanor’s jugular. Will placed a paw on her upper arm. For restraint or comfort, I didn’t know.
“Oh, calm down, Carmen. It should eventually wear off. I mean, it is still experimental, so I can’t make any guarantees, but she’ll probably remember you, some day.”
My eyes went straight to Mac, wondering how large a dose he’d received. He was asleep, his body processing whatever mix she’d just given him. “Everyone in here’s been given a nice, hefty dose. That’s the thing with scientists. They always want to push just a little bit more, don’t they?”
“Just the mad ones,” I said. She looked amused. I might have complimented her, for all I knew. “And then you gave them Brian’s adapted cocktail.”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head, happily continuing her story. We weren’t intimidating her into telling the truth. She wanted us to know. Josiah was right—she’d always planned on this moment. She might have wished to tell us on her terms, rather than while tied to the legs of a hospital bed, but she was adaptable.
“Then I implanted the drug. Doesn’t a verb make such a difference? If I just gave it to them, it would wear off in the time it took to work its way through the body. Even slow release wouldn’t last more than 24 hours. But a single, tiny drop, released once a day, and my patients won’t be able to shift for the next five years.”
More than enough time to turn them completely into beasts.
Her eyes flicked over my shoulder. I followed her glance and saw a large digital wall clock. Any minute now, our backup should arrive.
Unfortunately, I doubted that’s why she wanted to know the time.
“What have you done?” I backed away from her. I didn’t know what I was protecting myself from, but I was certain I needed distance from something.
“It would have been irresponsible of me to implant a magic suppression without also implanting its antidote, wouldn’t it? Microchip controlled, of course. Those things are so handy. You can even set a timer on them, did you know?”
Behind me, I heard a snarl. It was loud and unmistakable. Only one animal made that sound—a brave, vicious animal. “Wolverine,” said Carmen, and the word sounded like a curse. Wolverines were considerably smaller than mountain lions and bears, but their ferocity was legendary. They were basically the honey badger of the mountains.
“Well, I know I’m staying in human form,” said Miriam. I thought that was a damned good decision.
All around us, teenagers and children were returning to their animal form, gratefully shifting after days or weeks of being denied what their bodies craved. I saw a coyote, a badger, a bobcat, and a beaver, all slipping easily from their beds. A moment later, they were shrieking, forced to turn back into humans. It hadn’t been long enough, the shift. They needed more. Around the lab, I watched young shifters fall to the ground, scared and dejected, many of them sobbing in desperation. It was heart-wrenching.
“Don’t you see?” Eleanor asked. “I had more than enough time to program their implants when I heard that window break. They’ll shift when I decide, and only then. And if you don’t allow me access to my equipment—all carefully password protected, of course—your children will be lost to you.”
“Why?” I repeated my question from earlier, not sure I was any closer to understanding. “Why is it so important to control shifters?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She glanced at Will and Carmen. They both stood several feet back from Eleanor, but despite the pure hate that sharpened their features and set their eyes blazing, they could do nothing. They could not harm this woman so long as she held their children’s future in her psychotic hands. They wouldn’t stop trying to find a cure, but in the meantime, some of the most powerful shifters in the area were under her command.
She spoke as though her reasoning was self-evident. All I saw was a power-mad woman. However, I also knew that those who craved power for its own sake were the most inclined to abuse it, so it seemed a safe bet she wasn’t going to use her newfound power to implement a shifter family game night.
She snorted. “You really have no idea, do you? Even you, surrounded by Josiah and your mother and raised by the old ones? You know exactly what they say about us. How they hate us. How they deny we exist. How, no matter where I went in the world, they were there first, claiming what should belong to us.” Her voice evolved into a snarl, the beast adding its voice to her words. “We were born from the same magic as you. We are not lesser. We are more. We are human and animal and magic. We are life, and you do not get to look down your nose at us. You do not,” she repeated, the words bitten off one at a time.
She st
opped, fighting for control. I saw her own claws extend and recede. She was unwilling to give the beast free rein, not while there was still work to do.
When she spoke again, her voice was calm, almost conversational. “Do you know there are at least five times as many shifters as elementals? Unlike you, our blood does not weaken through our matings with humans. We are strong. And yet, we let you make all the calls. What the humans know or don’t know. You think we wanted a bunch of FBI agents sniffing around? But you lot get involved, and then I get to worry every day that I’m going to end up being experimented on in some government lab.”
She seemed completely unaware of the irony. Or that it was a shifter who’d involved the FBI. I suspected such pesky facts wouldn’t make a dent in her version of reality.
“So, what, you think if you control the shifter families, they’ll take power from the elementals?”
“I think if I control the shifters, they’ll do whatever I want, and I want the elementals dead.” She smiled at the thought. “I’m sure most shifters wouldn’t need much encouragement. We’ve been wanting an excuse to give you what you deserve for years. You are not better than us. You are not superior. Tahoe belongs to us, and family is all, Aidan. It is the strongest power in this world. We will do anything to protect our own.”
“The way you protected James?” Perhaps I shouldn’t bait her, but she’d just detailed her role as the architect of an elemental-free utopia. It was safe to say she started it.
She snarled. I could call her a crazy bitch all I wanted, but the minute I questioned her family loyalty, I’d crossed a line. “They are safe. They’re all safe. I was going to announce myself in another week, anyway, and the children all would have made it that long. So long as their families don’t fight me, the children will be able to shift as normal.”
She still spoke in present tense, certain that despite being found out, she retained the upper hand. In many ways, it really was a diabolical plan, impressive in its scope and its high ranking on the evil mastermind scale.