by Laura Taylor
Sempre had the audacity to laugh. “Like you’ve said, Luna, your head isn’t on the chopping block today. And after that display last night over dinner, it’s perfectly obvious that you’re one of the ones champing at the bit to overthrow me. But for all your high ideals, I don’t see you putting your own life on the line for the benefit of your pack.”
“Fine,” Luna said, making a split-second decision. She spun around to face Linnea. “I offer to trade my life for Lucia’s. She’s an honest wolf and a strong leader, and the pack would be better off with her alive.”
Lucia’s jaw dropped, shock written all over her face. Even Linnea seemed at a loss for words, Luna feeling a wave of triumph as it seemed she had finally managed to crack the woman’s heartless exterior.
“Um, I don’t…” She turned to look at the other Panel members around her. “Is that allowed?”
“What do I care?” Sempre announced, stepping forward and throwing her arms wide in a brazen display of carelessness. “Shoot me if you like,” she said to the nearest assassin. “Whether or not these squabbling pups ever make a decision, it seems I’m still destined for the next world.”
Melissa wandered into the science lab where Dr Evans was working, trying to look casual about it. She’d taken a gamble continuing to fund this project when the money was sorely needed elsewhere, but letting Evans know that her work had been favoured over other people’s would only make the woman more insufferable. Aside from the routine antagonism between the two of them, Melissa has also discovered that she felt a sharp jealously whenever she was around Evans. While she was deeply honoured to have been promoted to Chief of Operations, she was finding she missed the quiet, methodical days in the lab, the slow taking apart of the universe to see how it worked, and resented Evans for the role she still played in the Noturatii’s discoveries.
Of course, that implied she would eventually actually discover something.
But when Melissa stepped through the door, her casual air vanished. The experimentation table was in pieces, electrodes scattered, a faint, burning scent in the air. The main electrical cord was lying on the table, bare wires sticking out of its frayed end.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, her voice just a fraction softer than what could truly be called a shriek.
Evans looked up, while two of her underlings simply ignored Melissa and continued fiddling with wires on various parts of the equipment. “A minor setback,” Evans reported, not looking at all upset. “We just ramped up the voltage a bit too high. Blew out half the electrodes. Nothing’s damaged permanently,” she added, looking a touch apprehensive as she watched Melissa’s reaction. “We just need to replace the damaged parts and we’ll be back to it.”
Melissa glanced around the room, startled to see that the shifter was currently curled up in the corner in human form; he’d taken a dislike to staying in his wolf form after they’d shaved his fur off. “What’s he doing here?” She inadvertently took a step back. Cowed and drugged or not, these beasts were dangerous.
“Don’t worry, he’s chained up,” Evans said, again with that disinterested calm. It made Melissa feel like a silly child who was overreacting to everything. “It was quicker to just stick him in the corner for a while rather than having security drag him all the way back and forth to the cages. He’s sedated for the moment.”
Melissa peered at the shifter, torn between fascination and fear. As a general rule, she didn’t like to get too close to them, vermin that they were, but there was also a niggling curiosity in her mind about them. Her own brother, the brother she had grown up with, the brother she had trusted more than anyone else and whom she had grieved for after his supposed ‘death’, had become one of these creatures. No one could really explain how the shifters changed their bodies so completely, science currently still giving way to mythology on that score, but she rather imagined it was like having an alien parasite living inside you. Disgusting, and untrustworthy, and the sort of thing that should only exist in science fiction movies. The shifter looked like an ordinary man, albeit a battered and bruised one, with nothing apparently remarkable about him when compared to the average human.
No, wait… that wasn’t entirely true. As she watched him, his brown eyes flared with a touch of gold, and Melissa made a mental note of that. Identifying the shifters out of the normal human population had always been difficult. Perhaps the eyes were the key? Could they scan wavelengths of light from the iris? Was there a structural difference that allowed them to change colour? It was a worthy question to be explored another day.
“Have you had any success with the tests?” she asked Evans, keeping her tone light. “Before you blew up the table, I mean.”
Evans chuckled, apparently taking Melissa’s irritation as wry humour. “Not yet,” she replied, her head bent down to peer into the guts of the table. “There’s an almost infinite number of possible variations; the voltages, the frequency of the pulses, the positions of the electrodes on the body. I have a theory on that, though,” she went on, not really paying attention to Melissa. “When he shifts, the transformation begins at the neck, then spreads both down the limbs and up over the head. So whatever initiates the electrical signal must reside somewhere in his neck. We’ve never been able to find any physical structures that are any different from humans, but maybe the nerves simply work differently…”
As she prattled on, Melissa glanced around the room, wondering just how much damage had been done here. Was this the result of carelessness, or of an inquiring mind pushing the boundaries? The frayed electrical cord was still sitting on the table, and she idly reached over to pick it up, wondering how badly it was-
“Don’t touch that!” Melissa jumped back, too startled to even object to the sharp tone Evans had taken with her. “It’s live,” Evans said quickly, breathing a sigh of relief as she saw Melissa was out of harm’s way. “When we blew the electrodes, some of the wires burned out. Collins was testing them to see which ones needed patching.” She nodded to one of the technicians, who lent her a weak smile from where he was now soldering something on a nearby bench. “Sorry, we weren’t expecting anyone else to come in here.”
Melissa recovered from the shock smoothly – she was getting rather good at that, she thought, having survived not one, but two attacks by the shifters. A near-electrocution was a trifling thing to worry about in comparison. “How long will it be until you’re up and running again?”
Evans shrugged. “An hour. That’s before we can use the table again, but if we want to try out some of the higher settings, we’ll need to redesign the full array, or it’s just going to fry the wiring again. That could take anything up to a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks!” Melissa shrieked, abandoning her efforts to play it cool and calm. “Weeks more until we have anything like a solid result from this colossal mess?” She flung her arm out to encompass the entire lab. “You’ve been studying this one simple problem for months, and you have nothing to show for it!”
In a fit of pique, Melissa snatched up the live wire from the table. Damned scientists! Damned experiments! And the god-forsaken damned shifters! She hated the lot of them! Without a second thought, she spun around and jammed the live end of the wires into the back of the shifter’s neck. Evans thought the neck was the key to the shift? Well, why not see if they could prove it, then? An instant later, Melissa realised there was a good chance she could actually kill him, but in all honesty, she didn’t care. The world would be a better place with a few more of these vermin dead!
The man’s body convulsed as the electricity shot through him, then, with a rough jolt, the human huddled at her feet disappeared, to be replaced with a naked and ridiculous looking canine, who screamed and darted away from her, as far as the chain around his neck would allow.
It took a moment to sink in, Melissa’s eyes dropping to stare at the bundle of wires in her hand in astonishment, and then her jaw dropped as she realised what she’d just done.
“What
the hell was that?” Evans’ rough exclamation dragged Melissa’s attention away from the wolf, and she looked as shocked as Melissa felt. “How did you…? I don’t…. What did…? How did that happen?” And then Evans brightened. “And more to the point, can we do it again?” She lifted a hand, reaching for the computer-
“Don’t touch that!” Melissa screeched, stopping Evans in her tracks, her hand hovering only an inch above the keyboard.
“What?”
“Don’t touch a thing,” Melissa snapped again, dropping the cable and dashing over to the desk. “Is this thing switched on?” The screen showed its usual array of readouts.
“Yes, of course,” Evans said, looking confused. “What-?”
“Record everything,” Melissa snapped at her. “The voltage, the number of wires that were active, where on his body I zapped him. Right down to the ambient temperature of the fucking room. Everything.”
Evans looked around dumbly. She glanced at the other scientists, then at the computer, and then eventually reached for a simple notepad and pen. “Um… right. On it. Guys? Let’s get this all written down.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Assassins were not easy to intimidate, Sempre mused, as she watched the one in front of her eye her coldly. Nor was it possible to goad them into making stupid mistakes. The man facing her now did indeed draw his gun, but rather than using it on her, he instead turned to the Council, waiting nearby, the ever-obedient dog asking for permission to proceed.
The rest of the group had calmed down a touch and had fallen back at her brash announcement; as she had said, there was little to stop her execution being carried out, regardless of how the drama about the rest of the pack played out.
Eleanor glanced at Linnea, who nodded, then at the other two Councillors, who did likewise. “Go ahead,” she said to the assassin.
Sempre stood patiently, looking the assassin in the eye. It wasn’t any kind of intimidation tactic. The Council’s assassins didn’t have hearts, were hardly in possession of their own minds half the time. If the Council told them to shoot something, they shot it, whether it was a tin can sitting on a wall, or a newborn baby.
But there was a reason Sempre was still alive after so long as alpha. There was a reason why she’d survived the attack by the Noturatii, all those years ago when they’d wiped out more than half her pack. And there was a reason why she’d survived not one, but two assassination attempts from within her own pack. She was well aware that the majority of her wolves hated her, but fortunately for her, there was little they could do about it. Killing her had consistently proven to be rather more difficult than they had imagined.
After all, Genna and Lita were not the only ones to have inherited one of the mystical powers of the shape shifters.
As the assassin raised his gun and aimed it squarely at Sempre’s chest, she activated her own ability. The shifter magic was all centred around electromagnetic energy; electric currents, magnetic fields, various forms of radiation. Even their ability to change forms depended on the correct dose of electricity at exactly the right moment. So with little more than a thought, Sempre generated a powerful magnetic field right around herself, invisible to the naked eye and totally undetectable… unless you happened to be holding something made of metal.
The assassin pulled the trigger, and the bullet hurtled towards Sempre… until it hit the barrier she had erected and ricocheted off at an angle, leaving her completely untouched-
“What? NO!” Even as the sound of the gunshot echoed off the surrounding hills, Feng’s anguished scream cut through the clearing. Every eye turned to look at him as he dropped to the ground, hands frantically trying to stem the flow of blood rushing from Eleanor’s chest. Paula joined him, frantic efforts soon proving futile, and it was obvious what had happened. The bullet had bounced off Sempre’s force field and hit Eleanor instead, a perfect shot right through the heart.
It seemed there was a god, after all.
One of the men from the Panel pulled out a gun. “Gythfoel!” he shouted, an Old Language word that meant demon, raising his pistol to shoot her, but Kajus grabbed the gun away before he could.
“No! She’s got some sort of barrier around her.”
Pandemonium broke out quickly after that, a thoroughly predictable reaction, and although Sempre hadn’t planned Eleanor’s death, it did provide a convenient distraction that she was more than happy to exploit. She glanced around, found her target, and took off across the lawn at a sprint.
Tank heard Feng’s cry, saw Eleanor go down, and took two steps towards her before he’d even thought about it. But then the rest of the situation caught up to him, and he stopped dead in his tracks. Feng and Paula were already beside Eleanor, and Baron and one of the assassins were both making a beeline for her. With chaos breaking out all around him, he could probably be of more use elsewhere in the-
A dark blur rushed past him and slammed head on into Genna. He spun around and grabbed Sempre by the scruff of the neck, jamming his fist into her mouth until she was forced to release Genna’s arm from her teeth. She shifted right there in his hands, punching him hard in the face. But he refused to let her go. Holding her hard by her hair, he punched her right back. He didn’t know what kind of magic she’d used to deflect that bullet, but right now it didn’t matter. She didn’t seem able to stop bare fists, and he’d be damned if he was going to let her do any harm to Genna, when she’d just-
A gunshot rang out, deafeningly loud, making his head ring, and then he realised he’d let go of Sempre…
Oh. His right arm flopped to his side, all but useless as a red stain spread out across his shoulder. She’d shot him. His vision swam, his legs collapsing beneath him as he desperately thought that there was something he should do about it, some way to stop the bleeding, but he couldn’t for the life of him think what it was right now…
Genna screamed as she saw Sempre shoot Tank, and with his own gun, no less. She staggered to her feet from where she’d been knocked over by Sempre’s initial attack, totally ignoring the raw agony in her arm from where she’d been bitten.
With Tank out of her way, Sempre turned back to Genna and raised the gun, slowly stalking towards her as Genna backed away. Where the hell was everyone else? Was no one going to stop this madwoman? But a split second glance around the lawn gave her the answer – everyone else had gone just as mad, some of Sempre’s pack attacking the Panel, Baron’s pack split between defending them and mouthing off about their own anger. The three assassins had formed a defensive wall between the Council and everyone else, and even now the female assassin was trading idle blows with Meili, though why anyone would be stupid enough to try fighting an assassin was beyond Genna.
“This is your doing,” Sempre snarled, not the slightest bit distracted by the chaos around them. “You betrayed us all, and now you blame me for it? You mangy half-breed, you should never have been converted.”
She was going to die, Genna thought, heart pounding, mind racing… Suddenly the gun in Sempre’s hand simply vanished, and it took Genna a moment to realise that she was the one who had made it disappear.
Sempre, too, seemed to take a moment to realise what had happened, staring at her empty hand in confusion, before turning back to Genna with an angry snarl. “You mindless hyena!” she shrieked, then threw herself at Genna, her greater weight and strength knocking her to the ground, her hands wrapped tightly around Genna’s throat.
Luna watched the gathering around her fall to pieces, dismayed at the way everyone was losing their minds. Eleanor had been shot and needed urgent medical attention – if she wasn’t already dead – and someone should be focused on apprehending Sempre, to stop her causing any more trouble. She could still pull this off, Luna told herself urgently, stumbling as someone ran into her on their way to start yet another fight. If everyone would just calm down, she could still reason with the Panel and convince them not to kill half her pack.
“Get down!” A heavy, male body slammed i
nto her, knocking her to the ground as yet another gunshot rang out.
“Get the fuck away from him!” a female voice yelled, and Luna peered up from where she was now hugging the lawn to see Raniesha pointing her gun at Skye, who had been going after one of the Panel members with a knife.
What the hell were they all doing? Did they honestly think that killing the Panel was going to improve the situation?
“Tank’s been shot,” someone else yelled, rushing across the lawn. Luna winced; she heard a bone crack as the lean, wiry man shoulder-slammed Rift – not because she was causing any trouble, but just because she was in his way.
“Are you okay?” a gruff voice asked, as the weight on top of her moved away, and Luna looked up to see Kajus poised above her.
“Fine. Just a little winded,” she replied.
“Are you armed?”
“No,” she said, wondering just how many people were. Aside from the assassins, was it normal for so many people to be carrying guns?
“Then get yourself out of harm’s way,” Kajus told her, hauling her to her feet and pushing her towards the manor. “Take cover somewhere and keep your head down.”
“No,” she said firmly, standing her ground, even when he pushed her a second time, backing up the shove with an urgent “Go!”.
“I am not going to stand by and watch my pack be destroyed,” she said, looking around for some way to end the chaos. Then her eyes fell on Genna, who was lying on the ground, Sempre on top of her, the older woman trying her hardest to choke Genna to death.
“Genna!” she screamed, taking off across the lawn, heedless of Kajus’s shout for her to stop.
“Damnit,” Kajus muttered from behind her, then he was back by her side, easily matching her pace as she ran, drawing a long knife from the sheath by his side.