Though she forced herself to remain calm, her heart stuttered within her chest. No one knew of her nocturnal habits. Correction: the only people who did were either dead or in the Guild, and this guy was obviously neither. “Okay, that’s a start. You have exactly ten seconds to explain to me how you know this or I’m adding another hole to your skull.”
He kept his hands up, his voice soft and calm. “We had a run-in last month, remember?” He paused as if unsure whether he should continue, causing her to move the trigger back another few millimeters. “You were hunting me. It ... didn’t go well for you. I could have killed you, but didn’t.”
If she’d been surprised before, now her heart leapt into her throat. This was the wolf?! Talk about irony. She’d been lamenting her lack of leads almost non-stop, only for the damned thing to seek her out. And it wasn’t even her birthday.
Regardless, if he was telling the truth, then she would get answers from him, learn if he was the bastard who’d taken her father. The problem was, he no doubt knew she couldn’t get what she wanted out of him if he was dead. She had to play this cool, act like she wasn’t desperate. “Well, if this doesn’t beat all. A whelp asking a hunter for help. Is that why you ran out of the hospital? What, were you afraid I was going to pop you right there in front of...”
A flicker of annoyance crossed over his face, the first reaction she’d seen from him. “Will you shut the fuck up for just one second and let me explain? The reason I didn’t kill you that night was because the beast ... something stopped me. When we were fighting, when you looked into my eyes, somehow I wasn’t the wolf anymore. I was me. For a split second, I was me again.”
She raised an eyebrow, wondering what sort of bullshit he was playing at.
“I know I sound crazy, and you have absolutely no reason to trust me, but I did spare your life. The least you could do is hear me out.”
Her mind flashed back to that night, to the abject fear and the anticipation of finally being free of this life. For one brief moment, she’d wanted to die. But she hadn’t, and now the tables were turned.
So many conflicting emotions. She considered beating his head against the wall until he told her everything he knew, but for some reason hesitated. As a wolf he’d bested her, but in his human form the advantage was hers. The past few minutes proved that much. Even though he was taller and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, she had no doubt she could take him in hand to hand combat. There was also the little fact that shooting him in cold blood right here would no doubt attract unwanted attention – not that she intended to tell him that.
She kept her gun trained on him as she ordered, “Keep talking. How can I be of assistance, besides putting you out of my misery?”
“I didn’t ask to become this. I never wanted this life.” He paused as if considering what to say next. “There’s a pack out of Central Park ... they’re the ones who turned me, used me. I’ve been trying to get free from them ever since.”
Ro realized he was very likely rambling to save his own ass, but she wasn’t about to waste the potential for good intel. Hell, in that one sentence alone, he’d confirmed something she and her father had only speculated about. “Go on.”
“They call themselves Los Colmillos.”
“The Fangs? Cute. What else you got?”
“They recruited me against my will.” He pulled up his sleeve, a gesture which caused her to tighten her grip on her weapon for a moment, and revealed the edge of a ragged pink scar. “Their leader, Strike, he wanted me in. Didn’t care to take no for an answer.”
She made a mental note of that name. “Why you? No offense, but you don’t exactly look like a first round draft pick for either the Bloods or Crips.”
He didn’t smile at her joke and she somehow sensed the desperation behind his neutral expression. Her own smirk faded from her face when he answered, “They wanted money. They lured me to a club one night and attacked me while I was too wasted to remember not to talk to strangers.”
Money? She stared at him a beat before realization set in. Something had been nagging at the back of her skull ever since laying eyes on him, and she finally knew what that was. She’d seen him before, or at least a picture of him, in one of Kane’s case files. “Holy shit. You’re Dean Mason. You went missing...”
“...six months ago. Trust me, I know. They bit me, kept me hostage for months. Kept threatening my parents if I didn’t make with the cash. I did everything they asked, but it wasn’t enough for them. The sons of bitches killed my family anyway.” He stated the sentence matter-of-factly, although he couldn’t quite mask the bitterness and, for the first time, a sliver of sympathy eked its way into Ro’s system. “They expected me to be part of the pack, thought I would sign everything over to them and bankroll all the shit they had going on – drugs, weapons, whatever.”
That caught Ro by surprise. She hadn’t expected a pack to be so organized, much less be its own crime syndicate. “Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because this is what you do, right? You hunt down fuckers like them, and...” He mimed a gun and pulled its imaginary trigger.
For a moment, she was tempted to take his story at face value, hear him out, but then she remembered the whole point of why she’d been tracking him to begin with. Whatever sympathy she felt instantly faded away. “Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but my kind doesn’t take requests, especially not from your kind.” She leaned in. “I’ll tell you what we do. We wipe werewolves out ... all of them, including spoiled rich boys with sob stories.”
His eyes grew wide, whether through fear or desperation, she couldn’t tell. “Wait! There’s more,” he pleaded. “Remember what I told you, that night in the alley, when I spared your life, when I somehow became me again? I think it was because of you.”
♦ ♦ ♦
He couldn’t tell if she believed him, especially because she was still holding that damn gun like she wanted nothing more than to see how far she could make his brain matter splatter. She barely blinked and the effect was unnerving. No wonder she was a hunter. Despite the red hair and good looks, she was stone cold, cool and steady. The only grain of emotion was the fire in her eyes, and it wasn’t a sympathetic flame.
When she didn’t respond by way of immediately blowing his head off, he took that as a good sign, and ventured to continue. “I don’t remember much of anything that happens when I turn – close to nothing – only waking up the next morning and feeling ... I don’t know, wrong. But I remember that night in the alley, I remember you.”
“What is that even supposed to mean? So what if you remembered me? Congratulations. I remember you, too.”
He knew what he was about to say was cheesy and more than likely to not help his cause, but he couldn’t think of a better way to word it. He just had to hope she believed him. “It means there’s something about you. I don’t know what it is, but for a brief moment ... you somehow cured me.”
She blew out a snort of laughter. “You’re shitting me, right? Sorry to break it to you, Dean-o, but there is no cure to lycanthropy. Believe me, if there were, we would have found it and made sure your kind were ended once and for all.”
“Yeah, I’m beginning to see that.” He blew out a breath. “Okay, maybe cure was a strong word. See, Strike, the guy in charge of The Fangs, he’s been trying to sell me this drug. He calls it a ‘treatment.’ It’s made out of aconite. Wolfsbane.”
“I know what aconite is and I know what it does and doesn’t do. Don’t tell me you actually bought his bullshit.”
“Enough of it to kill me three times over, if I were still human. But it doesn’t work.”
“No shit. We’ve run our own tests on it. It’s useless once the full moon hits. Best it does is temper some of the feral qualities in the days leading up to the change. It can’t actually prevent you from turning. Nothing can.”
“I know that, but it’s supposed to help me remember, stay in control of myself
.”
The hard look on her face softened minutely. “I’ve hunted enough of your kind to seriously doubt it works that way either. I’ve never seen anything to make me think you’re anything but monsters.”
“Then how do you explain what happened to me that night in the alley?”
For a split second, doubt shone on her face, but she quickly covered it up. “I don’t know. Dumb fucking luck, or maybe you just suck at being a whelp.”
“Why do you keep calling me that? What the hell is a whelp?”
“You are, stupid.”
He gritted his teeth. If he didn’t need her help so much, and she wasn’t holding a gun, he’d have wanted to knock the sarcasm right out of her. “Look, despite what you might think, I don’t want to be a werewolf. Even if I did, I definitely don’t want to be under the thumb of a bunch of blood-thirsty assholes who killed my parents because they want to drain my bank account dry. You may not think there’s a cure, but that’s not going to stop me from trying to find one.”
This time she outright laughed. “You’re fucking nuts, you know that? What makes you think you can find a cure to something that’s been studied for centuries?”
“Yeah, I get it. You guys are hunters and probably know more about this stuff than anyone else. But here’s the thing: we’re not using leeches for bloodletting anymore.” He stared hard at her, refusing to drop his gaze. It was time to shift the ball to his court. “The world has changed. I know science. We’re talking cutting edge here. My dad built a whole fucking company dedicated to curing stuff barely anyone’s even heard of, and I grew up learning it all. I have the knowledge and the equipment, and now I think I’ve found the missing piece of the puzzle. It’s the reason I’m here. It’s...”
“Don’t say it,” she warned.
“You.”
He definitely had her undivided attention. At the very least she wasn’t laughing anymore. He took advantage of the momentary silence to say, “Strike told me all about your kind. He said that hunters couldn’t be turned, that you’re somehow immune to lycanthropy, something that’s passed down in your blood. Is it true?”
She considered his question for a moment as if debating whether or not to answer. Finally, she gave a tentative nod.
“Then stop and think about it. What if that immunity could be distilled, extracted? There would be no more killings, no need for any of this.” He gestured at the gun still aimed at his chest. “We can help each other.”
Her eyes narrowed, the green in them glinting even in the low light of the alley. “You really believe this, don’t you?” She almost sounded like she was beginning to crack.
He nodded slightly, aware that any sudden movement could still cause her to pull the trigger. “I do. And if I’m wrong, if I don’t succeed, you might as well just kill me anyway, because I don’t want to live like this.” He tried to sound sincere on that last part, even if he was hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
“Say I believe you. What would you need from me?”
“Not much. Just some samples of your blood. A couple of vials, maybe.”
“That’s it?”
She sounded skeptical, but he was still breathing, so he went for broke. “It’s a starting point anyway. After I run some tests, we’ll see.”
“And what about the full moon? Bright as you think you are, I doubt you’ll find a cure in a week.”
There was the attitude again, but they were making progress. He wasn’t about to screw it up now by telling her off. “I have a friend. He keeps me locked up.” Dean saw her raise a skeptical eyebrow, so he quickly added, “Yeah, I know. In the past, I’ve managed to break out, like when I met you, but I’ve since tripled security, taken every precaution. I won’t get out again.”
“And your friend?”
“He keeps me in line, gets us supplies, and does his damnedest to make sure I don’t hurt anyone.”
“Sounds like a good friend.”
“He is. Coop’s a great guy and he wants to stop all of this as much as I do. He probably wouldn’t be happy with me telling you this, but it’s personal. His sister worked for my family, too. Los Colmillos killed her along with my parents.”
Another flicker of recognition in her eyes. He suspected she knew who he was talking about. Coop had been mentioned in the papers along with him, and it was obvious this was a girl who’d done her research.
Despite her iron exterior, he got the sense that she wasn’t as cold-hearted as she was letting on. After all, there were far easier professions to make some extra cash than her chosen day job. He decided to use that knowledge and go in heavy. “Look, you’re a hunter, but you’re also a nurse. If you had the cure for cancer, AIDS, any of that, wouldn’t you want to share it with the rest of the world?”
She appeared to consider this, again offering a tentative nod. “And you actually think you have a shot at finding a cure?”
“Contrary to what you might believe, they don’t just hand out PhDs in biomedical engineering because your parents happen to be loaded.”
The corner of her mouth ticked up in a ghost of a smile. “All right, Dr. Jekyll, I’ll play along. So how does this work? Do you have a secret laboratory in your bat cave or something?”
“Something like that.” He could tell by the glimmer in her eyes that he had her. “I could show you.”
The smile on her face broadened. “Nice try, but my spidey sense is telling me no.”
If he weren’t so anxious about her being trigger happy, he might have actually laughed. “I get it, you don’t trust me. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t trust me either.”
“Fair enough. Speaking of medicine, though, let’s talk about the hospital. Am I supposed to believe it was just coincidence that brought you there earlier? That I just happened to be your nurse?”
He smiled sheepishly. “You got me. Not a coincidence. I was specifically looking for you.”
The grin on her face faltered and her expression became unreadable. “How did you know to find me? Nobody there knows about ... this.” She gestured to the gun in her hand.
“Another hunter told me. He tracked me down, much like you did. We got into a...”
Her whole body stiffened and the fire in her eyes blazed momentarily before she seemed to explode in a flurry of motion. Before he knew it, she’d dragged him to his feet and pinned him to the side of the building with her forearm against his throat and the barrel of the pistol shoved painfully into the underside of his chin. “This other hunter. What does he look like? Who is he?”
He could barely breathe. For someone so slight, she sure was strong. “An older guy – fifties or sixties, short beard, green eyes.” Realization dawned as he stared into the same green eyes he was remembering. The old man hadn’t said anything about their relationship. He’d been too out of it to provide anything more than a basic location.
He’d thought them merely partners, maybe a master / apprentice relationship. But now he saw how wrong he was and how much danger he’d just put himself into.
He heard a soft click as she cocked the hammer of her gun.
“Tell me what you’ve done to my father.”
7
Every instinct within her screamed that she should stop listening to his bullshit and end his miserable lying life, but if there was even the slightest chance her father was still alive...
“Tell me what you know right now or I swear I will unload every damn bullet I have into your goddamned skull.”
“Okay, okay. Calm down. He’s alive and safe. We’ve been taking care of him.”
The admission shocked her and she backed away a step, though she kept the gun trained on him. “What do you mean you’ve been taking care of him? Is he hurt?”
He nodded. “You have to understand. I couldn’t control what I was doing as a wolf. He ... was bitten.”
“He what?” Ro readjusted her grip on the gun. The temptation to pull the trigger was almost overwh
elming.
“You have to believe me. We’ve been doing our best to take care of him, but he’s been really sick – an infection, I think. He’s still fighting it.”
“Take me to him.”
“But...”
“Maybe I wasn’t clear.” Her voice lowered to a dangerous pitch. “That wasn’t a request.”
He hesitated for a split second before responding. “Okay. I will. I’m parked downtown.”
“You drove here?”
“Mass Transit doesn’t go to where we have him.”
♦ ♦ ♦
She didn’t trust him on the subway – too many bystanders this time of day – so they took the bus back toward the hospital. He kept his hoodie up to cover his face, which was good. No way did she want anyone to recognize him and call the cops before she got what she needed from him.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he nudged her in the side. “This is our stop.”
She nudged him back much harder. “It better be.”
At some point during the bus ride, he seemed to have lost his nervousness. In fact, he seemed almost eager as he stepped off the bus. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. He was getting what he wanted. She was going with him.
Of course, his grandiose plan probably didn’t count on her finishing him off, depending on what condition she found her father in. That was still to be determined.
She watched him warily, ever aware that the unknown was a dangerous thing. There was an inherent trust in allowing him to take her to her father. She was leaving herself vulnerable, but the knowledge that he was alive trumped her own safety.
She realized this Mason fellow had probably figured that out and mentally kicked herself for allowing him to exploit her weakness. He’d gotten the drop on her weeks ago in that alley and now she’d allowed him to do so again in his human form. For all she knew, this was nothing more than a trap, planned well in advance ... one which she was falling for hook, line, and sinker.
“Stupid, stupid,” she muttered under her breath.
“What was that?” he asked, slowing his pace.
Lycan Moon: An Urban Fairy Tale (Lycan Evolution Book 1) Page 6