Callan: Outback Shifters #2

by Chant, Zoe

  Drawing in a deep breath, Ella tugged at it, and it came free relatively easily. The pendant was still on the chain, and Ella held it up, inspecting it. She swallowed heavily when she realized what she was looking at: clearly, Jason and Ant had wanted to be sure they had the right thing, and half of the black stone of the pendant had been chipped away, exposing what Ella now knew had always been hidden inside it.

  A microchip.

  Small and encased in some kind of clear protective shield, the edge of the tiny chip was now visible where the pendant had been broken.

  It was there all this time, Ella thought wonderingly. And I never knew.

  The microchip contained the other half of her father’s research – and whoever had it would gain access to powers Ella wasn’t sure anyone should have. She shuddered as she thought over the consequences of Hargreaves ever getting hold of it again.

  But there’s really only one way to make sure that never happens, she thought.

  Swallowing, she glanced up at Callan. He seemed to be able to read her misgivings in her eyes, and he nodded, reaching out to put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Ella. You were the one this research was entrusted to. It should be your decision what to do with it.”

  Ella bit her lip, staring down at the pendant and microchip in her hand. “It’s too much responsibility,” she said. “But I guess I’m the one who has it.”

  “If it helps, if it were up to me, Hargreaves never would have started that research in the first place,” Callan said softly. “And no one else would ever continue it.”

  Nodding, Ella closed her fist around the necklace. In her heart, she knew Callan was right. Who knew what inhumane experiments would be carried out on innocent people if this research ever fell into the wrong hands?

  Opening her hand, she let the necklace fall onto the concrete floor of the warehouse. And then, lifting her foot, she brought it down hard – crushing the pendant and microchip beneath it. She ground the microchip into the concrete for good measure, feeling it disintegrate beneath her tread. When she lifted her foot again to check if the job had been done thoroughly enough, there was almost nothing left of either the pendant or the chip – just bits of metallic dust on the concrete.

  “You did the right thing, Ella,” Callan said, nodding at her, his eyes warm.

  “I know,” Ella said, taking a deep breath. Raising her eyes, she smiled at him. “And thanks for backing me up.”

  “Anytime,” Callan said, returning her smile.

  A groan over to their left caught their attention. Ella turned to see Trent, visible in the thinning green haze, sitting up, his hand on his head.

  “Fuck me. What the hell happened?”

  “You should be so lucky, Trent,” Callan called out, sounding mildly amused. “But no.”

  Trent staggered to his feet. “Don’t talk to me. I feel like I’ve been hit by a logging truck. Fuck.”

  “You can say that again.” Brooke’s voice echoed through the warehouse next. “How come you’re so bloody chipper, Callan?”

  “You know me, I’ve always been an early riser,” Callan said, his laugh low and hearty. “Now come on, you two. We’ve got a man here who needs first aid. And we need to call this in. Get a medical team down here to –”

  “Holy fuck, what the hell is that?” Trent was staring down at Jason’s twisted form, his expression one of total horror.

  “Like I said, get a medical team down here to sort this out,” Callan finished calmly. “Trent, how about you go do that?”

  Trent nodded numbly, still staring, before he made a move for the door. Brooke was already crouched on the ground next to Ella’s father, checking his pulse. Ella sank down next to her, watching as her hands ran efficiently over his body, gently pressing, checking, assessing.

  “Is he going to be okay?” Ella barely dared to ask.

  “He’s got a couple of broken ribs,” Brooke said. “No neck or spinal injuries. No serious head trauma, but he may have a concussion. Something to watch for when he wakes up.” Her hand slid down. “A broken leg. He’ll be in hospital for a while, but with decent care, there’s nothing life-threatening here.”

  Ella felt like she might collapse from relief. She stared down at her father, emotions warring in her chest.

  You abandoned me, you worked for Hargreaves. Who knows what things you’ve done? But in the end, you chose to do the right thing. And – and you saved me.

  If her father hadn’t pushed her out the way and taken the brunt of Jason’s attack on himself, Ella knew she’d most likely be dead right now. Jason didn’t seem like the merciful type, and one slash of his massive teeth would have been the end of her. She wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  “Hey. You okay?”

  Ella raised her eyes to see Callan looking down at her. A moment later, his hand came to rest on her shoulder, warm and large.

  Ella wasn’t sure what to say. She looked back down at her father’s pale, clammy face. Brooke was still checking him over, pulling his eyelids open and urging him to wake up. After a moment, his eyes fluttered and he took in a deep breath, before grimacing in pain.

  An expression of confusion crossed his face, before his gaze found Ella, and they locked eyes.

  “Ella.”

  His voice was little more than a wheezing rattle.

  “Don’t try to talk right now,” Brooke told him, her voice crisp and efficient. “Help is on its way. For now, you need to stay still, and don’t say a word.”

  Maybe he didn’t hear her. His lips moved, forming more words.

  “I’m – I’m sorry, Ella. I’m so sorry. For everything.”

  Ella sat back, numb, as Brooke hushed him again. She felt herself standing, but her head was so light that for a moment it seemed to her almost as if she was floating away.

  At least until she felt Callan’s hand on her shoulder again, anchoring her, bringing her back down to earth.

  She turned to look at him, eyes wide. She didn’t know how to answer his earlier question. There was too much pain and confusion in her heart for words.

  Am I okay? I don’t know – I just don’t know.

  Perhaps Callan could read her uncertainty in her eyes. In any case, he simply nodded, leaning forward to gently kiss her forehead.

  “Give it time,” he said, voice soft and low.

  Ella closed her eyes, allowing herself to lean against him, feeling the heat and solidity of his body against hers.

  She didn’t know if she was okay right now, but one thing she was certain of was that, with Callan by her side, she would be.

  I’ll be just fine.

  Chapter 19

  Three days later

  The Agency had put Callan and Ella up in a hotel nearby to the hospital where her father was staying – but Ella still hadn’t come to visit him until today.

  It hadn’t just been that she’d had to spend some time mentally preparing herself for it. The hospital hadn’t been allowing him visitors until his condition had stabilized, and he’d been deemed fit.

  Ella honestly hadn’t realized how nervous she’d be at going to see him, though, until she’d arrived. Now, as she walked along the pristine hospital corridor, Callan by her side, Ella caught herself holding her breath again, her stomach churning with both fear and anticipation.

  What do I even say to him?

  She wanted answers. They’d already guessed a lot on their own, but hearing the full truth from his own mouth…

  Ella wasn’t sure why it was important, only that it definitely felt that way. It would be a chance for her to see him clearly for the first time in years – and perhaps to make a decision as to whether she wanted to let him back into her life.

  She took a deep breath as they arrived at the door of his hospital room. There were two plain-clothes guards standing outside, but from the way they nodded to Callan, it seemed as if they knew who they were and had been expecting them.

  Callan glanced at her, before reaching over and givin
g her hand a squeeze.

  “Need me to come in with you?”

  Ella wanted to say yes, but in the end, she shook her head. “No. I think this is something I need to do by myself.” Turning, she smiled up at him. “But thank you.”

  Giving her hand another quick squeeze, Callan nodded. “All right. I’ll be out here if you need me, though. Take as long as you need.”

  Gratitude swelled up inside Ella’s heart. She could already feel her nervousness subsiding. Just knowing Callan was here was comfort enough.

  Taking yet another deep breath, she pushed open the door to the hospital room.

  Doctor Henry Woodson was propped up on his pillows, an old magazine in his hands, halfmoon glasses perched precariously on the edge of his nose. Ella paused in the doorway, biting her lip, blinking.

  The man in the hospital bed looked different from her childhood memories. Twenty years had passed since then, and her memories had been extremely vague to begin with. But he also looked different from the man she’d seen at the industrial estate, with his ashen, clammy skin and hollow cheeks.

  The man looking up at her now looked… well, more alive, for starters. His skin wasn’t pale and sweaty, and his hair was neatly groomed, pushed back from his face, his graying temples visible. His eyes weren’t sunken, and, looking at them now, Ella caught her breath as she realized how similar to her own they were.

  Once upon a time, Ella would have vigorously resisted the idea that she had anything in common with the man she considered her father in name only.

  But now…

  Well. Now, she wasn’t sure what she felt.

  “Ella.”

  His voice was soft when he spoke her name, and Ella sucked in a breath, her fingers tightening on the handle of the door.

  “I – I wanted to come visit you,” she said, as she closed the door behind her. “But I can come back later if –”

  “No. No. Please. I’m glad you’ve come.” Her father shook his head as he took his glasses off. “Though God knows I don’t know what to say to you.”

  Ella walked across the room, sitting down on the chair by her father’s bed. “You could start at the beginning,” she said, swallowing heavily. “I just… I just want an explanation.”

  “And you deserve one. I’m sorry, Ella.”

  Ella stared down at her hands, bunched into fists. Her heart was beating wildly.

  “You’ve said that already. I don’t need to hear it anymore. I just want to know why you did what you did,” she said, before biting her lip. She tried to relax. “But I do understand now you were trying to protect me.”

  “I wanted to.” Her father’s voice was soft. “I realize it may not have seemed that way to you at the time, but…” He broke off, his voice cracking. “But no, that makes it seem like it was your fault, like you didn’t understand me. The fact is, I was the one who put you in danger in the first place, when I agreed to work for Hargreaves.”

  Ella licked her lips, forcing herself to look up into his face.

  “Why did you do it?”

  She knew her voice sounded harsh, but it wasn’t totally unjustified. Had her father really been so ignorant about what kind of organization they were?

  Doctor Woodson grimaced. “Stupidity. Greed, I suppose. And arrogance. They sent someone to the place I was working at the time, swelled my head with talk of how they’d heard of me, and knew my work well. I was used to being headhunted, but this was different. The possibilities they offered me for my research… it sounded too good to be true. I didn’t believe it at first, until they had me visit their labs and showed me what they were working on.”

  “So… it was just that, then? You couldn’t resist a good sales pitch?” Ella asked. She remembered what Jason had said to her, and how hollow it had all sounded. She was disappointed that to her father, it had seemed like a good opportunity.

  “You have to understand, Ella – what they were doing with ribozymes, what they had discovered… twenty years ago, ribozymes were barely even understood. What I saw there in those labs – it was an opportunity to be at the forefront of something new and amazing. It was clear they were light-years ahead of anyone else in the field.”

  Ella narrowed her eyes at her father’s rapturous praise for Hargreaves’s research projects. She cut him off with a shake of her head.

  “But did you know?” she demanded. “Did you know what kind of place they were? What they were doing?”

  “Not then, no,” Doctor Woodson said, voice hesitant. “But… I could have found out, if I hadn’t been so blinded. I could have tried harder, dug deeper. But I –”

  His voice cracked, and when Ella looked up at him, his eyes were wet. Her throat felt tight, her chest constricting. She wanted to demand more answers, but she held back, letting her father continue.

  “I kept working. I worked hard for them. I advanced their research quickly. It should have made me feel triumphant. But instead, every new discovery just made it harder and harder to deny the truth. I knew I couldn’t stay there.” He paused, clenching and unclenching his fists. “Leaving Hargreaves isn’t so simple, though. And they valued the work I’d been doing for them.”

  “You were figuring out how to give shifters extra powers,” Ella said.

  “Yes, but that wasn’t the only thing. I was also working on how to give shifter powers to non-shifters, and how to take powers away from shifters. They’d already begun all this work when I joined them. But what they had was… imperfect. As you saw.”

  Ella thought back to the way Jason’s body had writhed and collapsed on the floor as he’d tried to shift that one last time, and shuddered. Callan had said from the first moment he’d seen him that there’d been something unnatural about the way he shifted, and he’d been completely right. But it was obvious now that his powers were unstable.

  “I was obsessed with finding a solution to the problems we were encountering,” Woodson said. “Shifter powers are mystical, mysterious – but Hargreaves seems convinced they can be replicated with science. But the more I looked into it, the more I became convinced it’s not true.”

  Ella blinked. “You mean, the research you hid – it’s worthless after all?”

  “Not worthless,” her father said quickly, and for a moment, Ella caught a flash of the prideful man, enamoured of his own work, his own genius. “Even if it can’t replicate shifter powers perfectly, it would still be enough for Hargreaves to do plenty of damage. And it’s the closest anyone has come to a solution. I know that much at least.”

  “So they still needed you,” Ella said.

  Her father nodded. “The more I worked, the more I was lying to myself, telling myself I was only a scientist – that what people did with my work was out of my hands. But eventually I knew I couldn’t live with myself any longer if I continued to help them.”

  “But…” Ella said, voice soft. She had a feeling she knew what was coming.

  Her father nodded. “But. Like I said, leaving Hargreaves isn’t so simple. They could threaten me – by that time, I didn’t value my life so highly that it was much of a threat, to be honest. But you… you were another matter.”

  Ella’s breath caught in her throat. Of course, she’d already begun to suspect her father’s reasonings for sending her away all those years ago. But to hear him say it out loud…

  Her father reached out tentatively for her hand, and Ella, after a moment’s hesitation, took it. Her heart swelled at the contact, and she suddenly found herself fighting down tears.

  “I couldn’t let them threaten you, Ella. You were the light of my life – the only bright spot I had to hold on to, by that time. It seemed incredible to me that I could have had anything to do with creating something as beautiful as you. But whenever I looked at you, I knew I was putting you in danger.”

  Ella gritted her teeth. “And that’s why you had to send me away. Because you…”

  Because you loved me.

  “It doesn’t make up for anything,” her f
ather said, voice catching. “I caused the problem in the first place. It was the only thing I could do to try to keep you safe.”

  Ella bit her lip. She could feel tears trying to escape her eyes, but she pushed them back.

  “And… the research… how did…”

  “I couldn’t let Hargreaves have it,” her father said. “I knew what I had discovered, and what Hargreaves would do with it. The things my research would have allowed them to do – the shifter powers, the healing factor, the ability to remove shifter powers – it all would have made them unbeatable. I had to find a way to keep it from them.”

  “So you sent it here,” Ella said. “Some of it with me, some of it with…” She frowned. “Okay, how did the research papers get out to the middle of nowhere like that?”

  “I hid them there.”

  Ella looked up in surprise. “You… you came to Australia? To hide them? And you didn’t –”

  Perhaps it was irrational, but a sense of betrayal flooded her heart. Her father had been in Australia, but he hadn’t contacted her?

  Woodson nodded. Perhaps he saw the hurt in her eyes, because he hurriedly continued. “Let me explain. I’m certain Hargreaves suspected I was sabotaging my own research for some time. I knew if I was going to do something, I’d have to do it quickly.”

  “So you took what you’d done, and ran,” Ella said, as things slotted into place in her mind.

  He nodded. “I’d already hidden some of the research with you. It was the only way I could covertly get it away from Hargreaves. This time, however, I didn’t need to be so subtle. I deleted everything, trashed everything. Destroyed everything I could get my hands on. The notes I took with me could only be completed if someone also had the necklace – and I was the only person who knew that.”

  He paused, pulling in a deep breath. Ella waited. She was brimming over with questions, but she forced herself to be patient.

  “Of course I knew they’d come after me, but I was shocked at how quickly they moved. I realized that going to you would only lead them right to your doorstep – and to the necklace. So I hid the notes in the remotest place I knew of. It was only a day or two after I made it back to Sydney that they found me. I’d wanted to contact someone – anyone – to tell them where to find the research, and to warn them about Hargreaves. But I had no idea who to turn to.”