by Imogen Rose
“My daughter’s life has been threatened. I’m going.” His tone said his decision was final.
The Smelt’s mouth twitched as though she was about to protest, but the snarl King Sebastian emitted clearly warned her not to, so she simply nodded.
“I’ll walk them over,” I offered, hoping not to be left behind. I’d already been up there once, so Mason would already know that I’d been snooping—no harm in going again. Plus I wanted to know more about the woman who’d been there, and the king definitely seemed to suspect someone. I also wanted to watch while the Trackers did their thing. Who knew what else they might sniff out? The more I found out about Mason, the better I could protect Faustine and myself.
“That’s not neces—” The Smelt started.
“Thank you, Cordelia,” King Sebastian interrupted. “It’ll be very helpful to have you show us where you heard the voice coming from. That’s okay with you, isn’t it, Frau Schmelder?” His tone was hard.
“Yes. That’s fine.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll call Jagger and find out if Mason has gone to class.”
Ten minutes later, King Sebastian and I were following the two Trackers down the empty corridors and up the steps to Mason’s room. So far, the two Trackers hadn’t said a word. They seemed to know what to do without receiving any particular instructions. Frau Smelt hadn’t said anything to them, just nodded at them when it was time for us to leave. I wondered if they could even talk. Perhaps they couldn’t, but I wasn’t much interested in finding out, especially since they seemed totally disengaged. They hadn’t acknowledged or even made eye contact with either Faustine’s father or me. Maybe it was because we were demons and they couldn’t stand being in our midst any more than we could in theirs. But I didn’t trust the Trackers, even though they worked for The Smelt. They were shifters, after all.
Walking side by side with King Sebastian felt familiar in an odd way. For a while, I thought it might be because he was a demon king, like my father, but then it dawned on me that he exuded the same kind of aura as Jagger—dark.
We must have been a strange sight—two demons following two crazy-looking bloodhound shifters. Thankfully, everyone was at class or at their sessions. Once we reached Mason’s floor, I stopped and showed them where I had been standing when I heard the voices.
King Sebastian nodded. “I can’t imagine you mistaking an old woman’s voice for anything else at this short distance. All right, let’s go inside.”
The Trackers slipped the key The Smelt had given them into the lock and then opened the door. Once the door was firmly closed behind us, they walked to the center of the room and stood back to back. I glanced over at King Sebastian, waggling my eyebrows. He shrugged and put his finger to his lips, shushing me.
I looked over at the shifters again. They had closed their eyes. Their noses started twitching, and I could hear their sharp, shallow intakes of air. The nose jerking became more agitated, with them looking even crazier than before. I could barely contain my amusement, and I noticed the king was having the same problem. I wished The Smelt had warned us. I finally succumbed, letting out a muffled snort when their noses actually started elongating and growing wide at the ends, becoming more and more pronounced, until they took on the shapes of funnels. The skin on the outside of their now-hideous noses had gone gray and was mapped with bumpy red capillaries. They looked totally disgusting. I was happy to forgo a good sense of smell if that was what it took. The two shifters twitched their extended noses around in the air, inhaling deeply.
I was so enraptured by the proboscis circus that if I hadn’t peeked over at King Sebastian to see his reaction, I’d have missed his sudden change in demeanor. He’d gone from being an interested, amused audience to looking as if he was about to have a fit.
He had partially transformed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and then exhaled loudly, his face bathed in fury. He held up his hand. “Stop!”
The Trackers instantly opened their eyes and glanced over at him, their eyes wide.
“Leave.”
The Trackers looked at each other, clearly unsure of what to do.
“You may leave.” King Sebastian waved them to the door.
Obviously unhappy about the situation, one of the Trackers must have felt compelled to question. His voice was surprisingly effeminate and high. “Sir, I’ve got a scent. Do you—”
“Thank you. I’ll take it from here. Go back to Frau Schmelder and tell her that I’ll update her later. And that is all you will say. Understood?” King Sebastian said, his voice uncompromising. “Thank you for your time.”
The Trackers glanced at each other, then shrugged and left.
“I’ll take you back to the demon quarters, then I have to go,” King Sebastian said brusquely, ushering me out after the Trackers.
“What happened? Why didn’t you want them to finish doing their sniffing thing and find out who’s been in there?”
“There’s no need,” he said as we took the steps three at a time.
“Does that mean you know? You must! You recognized the smell. Who was it? You have to tell me.”
He stopped and turned to face me. “Cordelia, I will deal with this.”
“What about Faustine? Is she safe from whoever was in the room with Mason?”
King Sebastian answered through clenched teeth, “No, she is not.”
“Will she know who it is?”
“No.”
“Well, you really do have to tell me, then,” I insisted.
“There is nothing you can do with that information, Cordelia. If you want to help, keep doing what you have been doing. This is family business. I’ll take care of it.” Then he turned around and disappeared down the corridor.
Family business?
It was almost time to begin Mason’s first session in the dOME lab. I had arrived hours before and been poring over Mason’s file, familiarizing myself with everything. Well, everything that hadn’t been blacked out. Over three quarters of the sheets in the file contained large sections that had been thoroughly disguised by someone using a black permanent marker, making whatever was written underneath indecipherable. I tried every which way to try to get a peek, even holding the sheets over a light box. No luck. Unfortunately, those were the sheets from his Initiate sessions at Boone Academy.
Henri had tasked me with creating a flowchart summary of whatever I could find that would help plan his next sessions. I looked down at my work, my empty chart. Clearly, I sucked at my new job. Or rather, there just wasn’t any information worth noting. I sighed and flicked through the file again, desperately looking for scraps of information I could use so I wouldn’t look like a total moron on my first day as an apprentice.
A cough from behind me indicated that my time was up and that I had officially failed at my first task. I turned to look into Henri’s bespectacled eyes.
“How goes it?” he asked, peering at my empty sheet.
“Not good. There seems to be a lot of blacked out portions in the notes, most of it, in fact,” I said accusingly. He’d have known that before he gave it to me. Way to waste my time. I felt a bit annoyed.
“Yes, that was aggravating, but it was done by Boone to keep Mason’s sessions there confidential. We’d have done the same, which is why even the sessions he had here are redacted. I did that before we sent his file to you. However, I have copies of those on my computer, so I’ll forward those to your iPad. They aren’t that useful, though. We only had a couple of sessions, and not much happened.”
“No disappearances?”
“No, that only manifested at Boone Academy. And those sessions, which would have been interesting to get an insight into, have been omitted from the file.”
“Since those have been blacked out, how do we know for a fact that the disappearances even happened?”
He scratched the back of his neck and sat down opposite me. “Professor Bern brought up that question, too. It could be that it was all made up, just so he could return to Bonfire Academy. T
hat would be a convoluted and costly way to get back here. Anyway, at least as far as the disappearing thing goes, we can look into that here.”
I nodded.
“So, there you go. Your morning was not totally wasted. I can tell that you are a bit frustrated. It’s what you don’t know that forces you to come up with plans on how to proceed. What we don’t know from his files is whether he really needs this containment chamber or not.”
“So, we really need to test him in a regular chamber first?”
“Yes.”
“Why are we here, then? Shouldn’t we just get one of the other laboratories ready for Mason? He’ll be here soon.”
“Ah. Politics mostly. His father did have this chamber constructed just for him, at an exorbitant price, I might add.”
“I guess. But doing his initial tests here won’t help us figure anything out.”
“Hmm. Remember, we can’t have him suspect that we doubt his story. Today, let’s just wing it. Let’s put him in the chamber and run some basic tests, just to record his vitals, etcetera. Then, for the next session, we’ll plan to take him up to the other labs, and—”
The buzzer to the main doors silenced us. Mason had arrived. I waited to find out which Mason we were getting as the doors slid open.
In flew an eagle, who then proceeded to circle around the dome, flapping his enormous wings around, causing a draft. I hadn’t expected the eagle, nor had Henri by the look on his face. We watched Mason loop around the dome numerous times until he finally swooped down and perched himself on top of the containment chamber.
“Care to transform?” Henri asked him.
The eagle let out a high-pitched screech.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Henri mumbled. “Oh, well. I guess we’re testing the eagle.” He stood up, went over to the keypad in the floor of the test chamber, and tapped the combination so that the floor slid open to reveal the staircase. He turned and asked Mason, “Ready?”
Mason screeched, but not as loud.
Henri glared. “It’s time for your session. Please enter the chamber. I suggest that you don’t try to fly in; your wings may get damaged. Walk or hop, or whatever it is you do. Chop, chop.”
I couldn’t help but smile at Henri’s tenacity. Considering those enormous wings, I fully expected Mason to come to his senses and transform so he could walk into the chamber in one of his human forms. To my surprise, the insane bird slid down the glass dome, hopped over to the stairs, and bounced down the steps. Henri rolled his eyes and then followed the bird. I wondered if I should go with them, but decided to watch from outside. I didn’t really want to deal with Mason in bird form if I didn’t absolutely have to. I could only imagine the stench within that small basement under the chamber.
I sat and waited for what seemed like forever, getting slightly worried about Henri after a while, wondering if the bird had pecked out his eyes. I was just about to make my way down to check on them when I spied the armchair slowly rising out of the base of the chamber. I stood up to get a better look. Mason—still in his eagle form—was perched on the arm of the chair. He was covered with the shiny discs that were part of the data-gathering system specially designed for the unit. Biological measurements were collected by the discs and transmitted wirelessly to the computer units on the table behind me.
As Mason squawked impatiently, Henri emerged from the stairs and sat down behind the main monitor. He looked slightly flushed.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I was hoping to have him do this in his human form; he is slightly less annoying then. He pecked me a few times.” He pulled up his sleeve to show me the red marks.
I rolled my eyes. “Ouch. Are you okay?”
He nodded.
“Will it matter for the test? I mean, him being in eagle form.”
“Oh, no. We’re just going to record his vitals. They will be slightly different when he’s in this state. But it’ll be good to have baselines for both. Come and sit down, so I can explain and show you what’s going on. I wish he would stop screeching; it gets his heart racing. I’ll turn off the speakers so we don’t have to listen to it.”
I looked over at Mason. Even though I couldn’t hear him once Henri switched off the speakers, I could see him opening his beak and throwing back his head.
Henri handed me a headpiece with an attached microphone.
He adjusted his and then spoke into his mic. “Mason, we’ll get done a lot quicker if you calm down.”
I covered my mic with my hand and whispered, “Can he hear everything we say now?”
Henri shook his head. “Only when you hold this down.” He pointed to a little pin-like lever on the mic. “I’m going to turn the speakers on again, so we can hear him, even though we won’t be able to understand his squawks.”
“What are all those numbers on the monitor?”
“Those are his pulse, his temperature, and other vitals. Each column records a different vital, but we’ll switch to the graphic depictions. It’s easier to decipher real-time changes on that one.”
I nodded, not really understanding, but I assumed I’d pick it up as we went along. “How did you know where to place the probes?” I figured I’d probably have to take over that task at some point.
“I didn’t. And even if I did, it was impossible to hold Mason down with his wings flapping all over the place and him taking shots at pecking my eyes out. The discs can actually be attached anywhere, as long as you get all the main twelve ones on the torso, the four red-colored ones with one on each limb, and the green one on the forehead. It’s usually easier in the human form, especially the limb probes. Birds are particularly challenging.” He looked over at Mason, who’d calmed down and had his head buried under his left wing.
“Is he asleep?”
Henri looked at the monitor. “His rhythm doesn’t indicate so, but he could be. It would be good if he were; it would give us ideal baseline levels. Let’s ignore him for a while and just observe. Take note of any thing of interest on the pad in front of you.”
We sat in silence for about half an hour. Mason didn’t move at all, and the readings on the monitor remained constant. I was fairly sure he was snoozing. I couldn’t help but yawn.
Totally bored, I asked, “Shall we wake him?”
“Yes, in a minute. Did you make a list of possible stimuli from the information in his file and from what you know about him personally? Can I see it?”
“Um, no. Was I supposed to?”
“I clearly remember asking you to.”
“I’m sorry. No, I didn’t.”
“In that case, let Mason keep sleeping for a while longer, and you can get on with the list.”
“Things and situations that may make him transform?”
“Not so much transform, but elicit a physical reaction, like an increase in heart rate.”
I picked up the freshly sharpened pencil from the pad and jotted down Faustine’s name, then mine on top of the list. Since he’d fallen asleep in my presence, he probably wasn’t the least bit fazed by me. I put a question mark next to my name. Next, I added Jagger and Quinn to the list. After those, I was a bit stumped. I didn’t know Mason well enough to guess what else might rile him.
What did I know about him that might help? He was Ryker’s brother. I wondered if Ryker could share anything that might help. Probably not. Ryker had been protective when I tried to kill Mason last year, so he was unlikely to share any of Mason’s information with me. But perhaps he’d share stuff with Jagger. After all, they were half brothers.
My thoughts digressed to Jagger, with an increase in my own heartbeat. As close as I felt to him, I knew so little about him. Jagger hadn’t shared anything about his and Ryker’s father with me. I wondered if his father was responsible for the faery part of Jagger. That would make Ryker a Wanderer-faery. Or maybe Jagger’s mom was the faery. That would leave his dad’s type completely open. I really ought to try asking him again. Whenever I had c
asually asked him anything about his family, he’d steered me into discussing other things. Although it was possible both of Jagger’s parents were faeries, I had felt something else. But he’d never manifested any powers in front of me that were un-faery-like.
I focused back on Mason. Mason was just Ryker’s adopted brother. I had no idea why he’d been adopted. We knew that Mason’s biological dad was Monsieur Drasco, the shifter sovereign of Paris. His biological mother wasn’t listed in his file. Could she have been the old woman in his room? She’d sounded too old, but pretty much all paranormals could mate and deliver offspring for as long as they wanted. I scribbled “Old lady” on the list. Perhaps presenting Mason with a sound bite that sounded a bit like the old woman in the room would get him going.
It occurred to me that Ryker’s mother could also be Mason’s biological mother. Just because he had been told that he was adopted didn’t mean that it was true. Maybe he’d been a secret pregnancy. That sort of thing happened all the time, and it would make Mason part Wanderer, which would explain his disappearances from the chamber at Boone—if that story were true.
With what I had learned through Faustine’s sessions, it would be easy enough to test if Mason wandered. It would be a bit harder, however, to figure out if he did it on his own or if someone helped him, as Ryker did with Faustine. Still, if Ryker’s mom was his real mom as well, why the lie? That didn’t make any sense. What made even less sense was that Mason lived with a Wanderer family when he was the son of such a prominent shifter. Who was Mason’s real mother? And why had she given Mason up to Ryker’s mom? Were they related?
“Cordelia, are you still with us?” Henri nudged me with his elbow. “I’ve finished going through Mason’s file, but didn’t come up with much. He doesn’t seem to have any recorded phobias we could exploit. What about you? Did you come up with anything? Let me see.” He dragged my pad over for a look. “Is that it?” He looked disappointed.
I shrugged.
“You’ll have to think a bit harder. Start with the obvious. Who do you see in the chamber?”