Renegade

by Donna Boyd

  “I can’t compel you,” I whispered. “I won’t compel you. Please tell me you believe this is the right thing to do.”

  I saw her chest rise and fall. I felt the brush of her unsteady breath. I wanted to hold her for the rest of my life. I made myself stand still.

  She said, with her eyes big and shocked and yet somehow wondrously calm, “I would believe it because you do. But even if you did not … I would do this thing because I think …” And here her voice faltered a little, and her brow came together uncertainly, as though she were trying to divine the right words. “We were meant for this moment.”

  I could barely draw breath, so great was my wonder, my love, my relief. How desperately I wanted to believe that. That all the pain, all the loneliness, all the wrong choices and great, brutish mistakes of my lifetime could be redeemed in this one moment, with Lara, for her and by her. Let it be so, I thought helplessly, let it be so.

  I was that desperate, and that foolish.

  There was another burst of sound and color, and Nicholas Devoncroix came through the door. Though he stood perhaps ten feet away, there was no doubt he had heard every word before he came outside. His smile was laced was cool contempt, but his eyes churned darkly with hurt and betrayal. He said, “I’ve often heard it said that the only thing more treacherous than a human is a female. I am disappointed in the one …” His eyes fell upon Lara. “And gratified in the other.” He looked at me.

  Lara stepped away from me, although her fingers still touched mine. I could feel the rending of her spirit, the great churning of her anguish. She said nothing. It was enough that I knew what I had done.

  Nicholas looked again at Lara. He said calmly, “I asked for your allegiance and you replied you did not know me. Let me show you who I am. I could take you from this human now, but I will not. I could seduce you with promises and tempt you with power, but I will not. I could call my guards and take you away by force if I wished, but I will not.”

  He looked at me for a moment and his stare was like an ice pick in my brain; I could feel small vessels burst and hear a rushing in my ears and my eyes watered. His gaze returned to Lara. “He will take you into his intrigue and risk your life, your comfort, your security and all that you hold dear. I,” he said in a voice that was very still, “will let you go.”

  He looked again at me. “I wish you both great happiness in your endeavors. But …” His voice was like ice as he turned to leave, and the fury in his eyes pinned us both. “Don’t get too comfortable with your success. I have never lost twice.”

  He started to turn, and then looked back at her. “By the way,” he added quietly, “I could have loved you, too.”

  I saw Lara’s hand swipe away tears as she watched him go, and it stabbed in my heart. I knew then what I had stolen from her, what I could never replace. But I had no choice.

  I had no choice.

  _______________________

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I used the key card that Alexander had given me to access the building. The lights were still on and the door to the laboratory slid open when I approached. All three scientists were still working, and they barely glanced up at me when I entered. I spent less than three minutes downloading all the data I could onto a portable drive the size of a quarter and I dropped it into my pocket. No one questioned me. I was under the authority of Alexander Devoncroix, and to offer anything less than their full cooperation would have been worse than treasonous; it would have been disrespectful.

  If my heart was beating faster than normal it would not have surprised them. My heart rate, sweat glands and adrenal function had been accelerated from the first moment I was brought into the lab by Alexander. I told Tobias I wanted to collect another tissue sample, and in my nervousness almost knocked an entire stack of sterile kits to the floor when I went to collect one. Tobias shot me a look of mild annoyance but was clearly too preoccupied with the slide he was examining under the microscope to spare me much attention.

  I had noticed earlier that they were keeping David unconscious by means of a low-voltage alternating current that was delivered through the same external electrodes that monitored his brain activity. The IV drip delivered a steady dose of succinylcholine that acted as a smooth muscle paralytic. The first thing I did when I entered the room was switch off the monitor alarms. There was nothing I could do about the fact that his vital functions were monitored on every computer screen in the lab; I could only hope that random chance would be on my side for long enough for me to get him out of the building before one of the scientists abandoned visual analysis for a computer and noticed the discrepancy.

  Two things allowed me to think I could do this: Alexander Devoncroix believed David was strong enough to require two forms of powerful sedation and constant monitoring, and I had seen the data for myself. I believed that the moment he was conscious and breathing on his own, he would be capable of movement and rational thought. If he could move under his own power, I could get him out of the building undetected and into the car that was waiting for him outside. I figured I had approximately three minutes, if all went well, before someone either glanced at a computer monitor or came to look for me.

  I quickly disconnected the catheters and IVs, anxiously watching the monitors for signs that his lungs were trying to function on their own. I turned off the EEG monitor and, with it, the electrical current that had kept his brain in a deep coma. I plucked off the electrodes and when I did his body started to convulse on the table. For a moment of blind panic I froze, and then I realized he was choking on the ventilator tube. Quickly, and not very gently, I pulled it out. He coughed, and a fine foam of spittle flecked his lips. He was breathing.

  And then he opened his eyes. They were Devoncroix blue, they were brilliant with intelligence, and they were mesmeric. There was a moment, as quick and as intense as a landscape caught in a flash of lightning, when I felt the full weight of what I had done, of who he was and what he represented and I felt myself poised, with him, on the brink of a history that could never be rewritten.

  But it was only an instant, and then the part of my brain that could feel the time ticking away took over, and I took his shoulders, helping him to sit up. “Listen to me,” I said, low and quick. “I am your friend. You’ve got to leave this place.” I remember wondering distantly if he understood English. “I have someone waiting to take you to safety but we have to move quickly and you have to do exactly as I say.”

  I had worn a rain coat into the lab and had pretended to be too distracted to take it off when I came in; now I shrugged out of it and pushed his arms inside. “You should be getting the feeling back into your limbs by now. Try to stand. Damn.” I realized then I hadn’t brought him any shoes, and a man in a raincoat without shoes was bound to attract attention. I struggled out of my boots and pushed them onto his naked feet. They were too big for him and went on without too much trouble. Still I was breathing hard as I straightened up and grasped his arm to help him off the table. “I guess you need these more than I do.”

  He looked at the boots, and then at me. He said, “Thank you.”

  The sound of his voice caught me off guard; I don’t know why. I stared at him. He stepped down from the table as though he was awakening from a short nap, tightening the belt of my coat around his nakedness, shaking back his light hair. The gesture struck me as absurdly mundane, the tightening of the belt, the straightening of the hair, and there was a moment, just a moment, when I wondered how I had come to be in this place doing such an outrageous thing, and how this could possibly be real. Some fleeting, uncaptured thought about Dr. Frankenstein flashed across my mind and was gone.

  His eyes were quick and alert as he glanced around the room, and then moved unerringly toward the door. He stopped, his head cocked, listening to what I could not hear. “There is a disturbance outside,” he said.

  My heart lurched. The room was soundproof to my ears, but I didn’t doubt his. I moved quickly past him to the door. “Stay her
e,” I said, and ran, silent in my socks, out into the corridor.

  I hadn’t gone half a dozen steps when I heard it—the crash of glass, a roar of fury, a choked off death scream. There was a smear of blood on the wire-reinforced window in the fire door that separated the lab from the corridor, and beyond it was chaos. Shattered equipment, overturned tables, electronics crushed and sparking. On the floor was a tattered lab coat soaked in blood, and beside it the form of a dark wolf, its abdomen open and its intestines spilling from the wound in a glistening pile. Not ten feet from where I stood gasping before the window, two massive wolves were engaged in combat, and as I watched the throat of one was opened by the teeth of the other, and blood spurted in an arc.

  I spun away from the door, and David was behind me, watching the proceedings through the window with a detached interest. I grabbed his arm and pulled him with me, running toward the exit at the front of the building and the car that was waiting for him there. I felt it before I saw it: a gush of air and then a great black blur and as I turned blood spattered over my face and hair, in my mouth and eyes, and I saw David throw the attacker back against the wall as though he were nothing more than a child’s plaything that had gotten in his way. I realized then that it was David’s blood, not mine, on my face. The gash on his arm had already begun to heal itself but the sleeve of my raincoat was bloodied and torn. Hardly had I taken note of this than the creature sprang again toward us with a killing roar. I saw hard muscles and bloody teeth and wild yellow eyes, and I saw David’s arm shoot out and snatch the wolf from the air mid-leap. With a casual twist of his wrist, he snapped its neck and dropped the body on the floor.

  When I looked at David, he was gone. In his place was a brown skinned and sloe-eyed male with close cropped brown hair wearing my raincoat with its torn and bloodstained sleeve and my cowboy boots. That is what I saw. And then there was David again with his pale hair and Nordic features and brilliant blue eyes, and I said, I think I said, “Hurry.”

  We reached the elegant reception room with its blood-smeared silk wallpaper and broken-spined books and the body of the loup garou who had tried to defend this place crumpled on the floor. We pushed out into the foggy night, the cobblestones cutting my feet through the socks, and went through the gate. During this time I glanced at David on three separate occasions. Once he was dark haired and olive-skinned, and then, chameleon-like, he was limpid-eyed and brown and four inches shorter, and then he was strong-shouldered and bald with a wide flat nose and full lips. And then he was blond again, as I first had met him.

  That is what I saw.

  We reached the curb just as the dark sedan pulled up. Lara’s eyes flashed with alarm when she saw me but she could smell the blood was not my own so I did not have to reassure her. I opened the back door and urged David in. “I don’t know, something happened, I don’t know what, just go, go.”

  And, because she was Lara and she loved me, she did not hesitate or question. She pulled out into traffic even as I was slamming closed the car door. I never saw David Devoncroix again.

  Nicholas Devoncroix was with his father, furiously demanding that my activities be investigated, when the red security light on the pack leader’s telephone began to flash. The two of them entered the scene of the massacre together, and when Nicholas found my scent there he let out a cry of fury, anguish, and desperate, raging impotence that shattered glass, that stopped the swing of clock pendulums, that pierced the heart of every loup garou within hearing distance. Alexander Devoncroix took his son away, and told him the truth at last. Perhaps he would have preferred to take the secret to his grave, but after the slaughter he had no choice. Nicholas was the heir designee to the pack; the truth was his birthright and its consequences were his to resolve. When Alexander was finished, David the hybrid, assisted by perhaps the only person alive who could navigate the worlds of men and loup garoux with such effortless ease, had disappeared. A ragged dawn had broken, and the world that he knew—that all of us knew—would never be the same.

  _____________________

  Chapter Thirty

  I went back into the building, and into the restroom at the back. I must have stepped in blood because later my socks were hard and crusty. I spent a long time vomiting into the bowl, then I washed my face and hair with lavender soap until the water no longer ran pink. The blood had soaked into my leather jacket, leaving dark stains that were impossible to remove. I didn’t try.

  The panic was gone from my chest, leaving only a certainty, and a heavy sorrow. It wasn’t simply that I knew what I had to do; I had always known that. It was that I knew now I could no longer delay. I found a 4 ml syringe and drew up enough succinylcholine to kill three men, or one werewolf, and I tucked it into the lining of my jacket. I walked outside and hailed a cab.

  When the doorman at the Trump Towers saw my wet, slicked back hair, my white cheeks and shoeless feet, he reached for the security phone. I told him that Prince Fasburg was expecting me and it probably says something about the kind of company the prince was accustomed to keeping that, after barely another moment’s hesitation, he rang me up.

  The prince had plenty of time to prepare himself for my arrival, so whatever surprise he might have felt on seeing me was not evident when I came in. It was after midnight, but he was on the phone, casually negotiating some deal or another. He was wearing a crimson dressing gown with a velvet collar and, with his long dark hair and the glass of brandy in his hand, he looked like a movie star of old. He had the courtesy to end his phone call when he saw me, and he greeted me with a small grimace.

  “You reek of death,” he observed. “Feel free to use my shower.”

  It was a luxurious suite, with a spiral staircase leading downstairs to a conference room, and another stair leading to an upstairs bedroom. The lights of New York glittered through the floor to ceiling windows like a fantastical wonderland. The plush ivory carpet was like down beneath my feet, and the opulent furnishings reminded me of home. His home, of course, not mine. Never mine.

  I came into the room, my hands in my jacket pockets. “No thank you. I won’t be staying.”

  He poured me a drink from a cut glass decanter, but when he held it out to me I did not reach for it. He returned the glass to the console and sipped his own drink, looking me over, using those extraordinary senses of his to fill in the pieces of the story he did not already know. His black eyes showed absolutely no expression, though his lips smiled thinly. “So Alexander wins our wager. Humans are indeed treacherous. What a pity he will not live to collect.”

  I said, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Prinze-Papa.”

  He acknowledged my apology with a slight incline of his head. “I did expect more of you. But you are still the same idealistic fool who faced down the Devoncroix pack on hunt night to protect a weakling who could not keep up.”

  I struggled mightily to keep my voice steady. “That weakling was your daughter.”

  He sipped his drink. “And you were as much a son to me as any human could have hoped to be.”

  I said, “You been waiting all these years for this moment to take over the pack. Has it all been about ambition, then? Was there never anything else?”

  “Among the loup garoux,” he agreed, “there is rarely anything else.” And his expression gentled, just a fraction. “But I did love you, little man, in my fashion.”

  “You sent the werewolf to the lab to kill me.”

  He looked momentarily regretful. “Had you succeeded in your mission, there could be no witnesses. Had you failed …” He looked at the bloodstains on my jacket. “Well, you could not be allowed to fail.”

  “You miscalculated.”

  “So it would appear. And you, my dear young fellow, have been manipulated by the master.”

  “I would say we both have been.”

  “Perhaps.” He sipped his drink. “I never doubted your ability to perform the task, of course. As enraptured as you were by my daughter all those years ago, you betrayed her trust a
nd broke her heart for nothing more than the opportunity to impress me. You have betrayed your own people a dozen times over the years in order to gain honor among mine. Certainly you possessed the ruthlessness that is necessary for a properly trained scientific mind. Of course, I believed that your obsessive fascination with the Devoncroix would add weight to your orders, which is why I chose Alexander to deliver them. And I believed that he was wise enough to know the danger we all would be in if the mission was not carried out.”

  “Alexander Devoncroix would never sanction the murder of his own flesh and blood. He gave the order as you instructed, because to have done otherwise would have alerted you that he was aware of your plans to use this incident to take over the pack. But he also knew that humans rarely do what they are told.” And so he had led me to the Plaza Hotel, and to Lara, the only person in the world who could assist me in defying the Brotherhood.

  And he had reminded me of my vow. A brother will do nothing to disturb the balance. What nature has created, we must preserve.

  “It was a bold scheme,” the prince agreed thoughtfully, and with a hint of admiration, “and risky. But it had those very elements in its favor—that and the factor of unpredictability. I did not suspect. I am now well taught. Next time I will be more vigilant.”

  “Alexander must have known from the time he aligned with you that your real ambition was to overthrow him.”

  “Of course he knew. It has never been a secret between us. But over the years we have maintained a balance of power … until his mistake tipped the scales in my favor.” He smiled and raised his glass briefly, just as though the night’s mission had in fact been a success, just as though he did not know that even now the entire balance of power was in danger of collapsing around us all.