Wolf's Choice

by Laura Taylor

  Baron was front and centre outside the manor, Tank and Caleb beside him. Heron was there, a look of horror on her face, and Caroline, who looked like she wanted to kill someone. Probably him, but that was the least of his concerns.

  He got out of the van and went around to the other side, opening Skip’s door for her.

  “She’s not hurt,” he said to Heron, as she came forward quickly, then turned to Baron. “Didn’t have time to clean up,” he said grimly, “so there’ll likely be a report on a multiple homicide on the news. Get Alistair on it. It’ll take some serious explaining to make this one go away.” Simon arrived out of the front door, but when he saw Heron attending to Skip, he sighed, and left her to it. “Gear’s in the back,” Silas told him, aware that he looked a wreck, and seeing there was nothing else useful for him to do, Simon opened the door and set about unloading the equipment.

  “Skip?” Heron was saying, trying to coax the girl out of the van. “Can you come out? I’ll take you inside, and you can take a shower, or you can go to bed… You’re safe now, sweetheart. Please, come on out…”

  Skip shook her head, and her wide, fearful eyes met Silas’s over Heron’s shoulder. The look seemed to plead with him, and, astonished by the silent request, Silas went over, gently guiding Heron out of the way. “Come here, sweetie,” he said, astonished all over again as Skip finally let go of the seat and eased towards him. He slid an arm around her back, and then she launched herself into his arms, legs wrapped around his waist as he picked her up again, much as he had the first time.

  Beneath Heron’s astonished gaze, and Caroline’s outraged one, he headed for the house, carrying the girl up the stairs and into her bedroom. He set her on her bed, aware that he was probably leaving blood stains on the sheets, and gently unwrapped her limbs from around himself. “Sweetie? You’re home. You’re safe now. Heron’s here. She’s going to take care of you, okay?”

  There were tears now, when her eyes had been dry for the entire trip home, and she nodded, wiped her nose on her sleeve and transferred her grip to Heron’s arm, instead of Silas’s.

  “Don’t go away,” she whispered, as Silas eased off the bed.

  “I’ll be right down the hall,” he said gently. “I’m not going far. And Heron’s going to stay with you.”

  Another nod, then Silas let himself silently out of the room.

  Caroline was waiting for him in the hall, and he braced himself for an earbashing about how he could have exposed Skip to that kind of danger.

  Caroline looked him up and down, then glanced at the closed bedroom door, no doubt imagining what Skip looked like, curled up in a ball on her bed, hot tears running down her cheeks.

  “It seems I was wrong about you,” Caroline said finally. “I won’t make that mistake again.” With a wry kind of a smirk, she turned and walked away, leaving Silas with the feeling that this was the weirdest fucking day of his entire life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  May 11th

  “Nine…” Silas counted slowly, as Skip fought to complete the last few push ups in the set. “And ten. Excellent. Well done.” He helped her to her feet, giving her a moment to recover as she caught her breath. “Enough for today?” he asked, as she stretched the tired muscles in her arms, and Skip nodded. Since their run-in with the Noturatii, she had suddenly started taking her training a whole lot more seriously. Rather than the playful laughter of her previous sessions, she now fought against Caroline with a hardened focus that left even Silas impressed. It was now a regular routine that he worked with her on strength training twice a week, took her for long jogs up the hill, keeping his pace slow as Skip struggled to keep up, took her through sets of push ups, sit ups, lunges, until her muscles were screaming for a rest, but her mind refused to give up, pushing her on until she was wilting with exhaustion. He’d made an effort not to push her too hard at first, but had quickly realised that if she didn’t feel she’d done enough for the day, she’d just go back to her room and do more, another set of push ups, ten more squats, more practising her kicking from her martial arts lessons.

  To give her a break from the more physical side of her training, Silas had another plan in mind now, one that he’d cleared with Baron just that morning.

  “I have a surprise for you,” he said, leading Skip out of the gym. But instead of heading upstairs to the foyer, he led her down the long hallway and into the old cellar that the Den used for their firearms practice. The dirt walls insulated the sound, keeping the neighbours from getting alarmed, and also provided a safe place for practice without the need to spend a fortune on a custom built facility.

  “Now, this,” he said, unlocking the gun cabinet and selecting a weapon, “is a twenty-two calibre semi-automatic handgun.” Skip’s eyes opened wide, utterly captivated as she stared at the weapon. “In normal everyday use, this is not powerful enough for anything we’d need it for. But it’s an ideal gun to learn on, because it’s light and it has minimal recoil.” He spent a few minutes going through some basic gun safety, showed her how to hold the gun and explained how it worked, and Skip listened with solemn attention all the way through. He showed her how to load it, and re-emphasised the importance of not aiming it at anything that she didn’t actually want to shoot. Then he took out two pairs of earmuffs, handing her one, and putting the other on himself.

  Skip looked torn between fascination and fear as she took the small gun in her hands and stepped up to the firing line. She lined up the shot carefully, as he’d shown her, bit her lip, held her breath… and pulled the trigger.

  A squeal of glee left her mouth, and she put the gun down and ripped off her earmuffs, bouncing up and down in excitement. “That’s so awesome!”

  Silas brought the target forward. The shot was well off centre, not surprising, given this was her first shot, but Skip was excited at seeing the results of her work nonetheless. “Not bad for a first try. Let’s give it another go.”

  May 12th

  Caroline was aware of Silas watching her and Skip in their latest sparring session, and for once, he looked pleased with the girl’s progress. Skip had gone from a timid, awkward girl to a poised fighter, her stance becoming more grounded, her focus sharper, each of her blows being made to count. And while she still had a long way to go, Silas had told her just yesterday that he was confident that one day she’d be able to hold her own in a fight against the Noturatii.

  “She’s improving,” Silas said to Caroline, once the lesson was over and Skip was heading back towards the house. “As are you.”

  “I have a good teacher,” Caroline said gruffly. Since the incident at the computer warehouse, she’d lost some of her usual antagonism towards Silas, and their regular training sessions had progressed more quickly because of it. And if she was honest, Caroline was finding that her skills had improved considerably. Since beginning the extra training, she’d challenged both Luke and Simon to status fights, and won both rounds. Now she was ranked just below Raniesha. But Raniesha was a firecracker, tough, determined, and every bit as gutsy as Caroline. And given that the fight wouldn’t affect the ranking of any of the males in the Den, Caroline was in no rush to challenge the woman.

  But as she wiped herself with a towel and gathered her things, she caught Silas watching her, an odd expression on his face. “With the number of new recruits we’ve got going on, there are bound to be a few reshuffles in the ranking over the next year or two,” he said speculatively. “It would be as well to see how far you could climb the ranks now. Just to escape some of the squabbling later.”

  Caroline tilted her head, suspicious as to his motives. Why did it matter to him where she was ranked?

  “You could easily best Raniesha,” he mused, feigning disinterest. “Possibly even Heron.”

  And then Caroline saw where he was going with this. She glanced around to check that no one else was nearby. Conversations like this could easily lead to trouble, and since she was nowhere near ready for what Silas was talking about, there was no sen
se in making waves. “I’m not challenging Anna for alpha,” she hissed, annoyed that he would even bring it up. “No one would support me. And besides which, I’d have to beat you in a fight to get there, and we both know that’s not going to happen.”

  “I’m not saying you should go all gung-ho and head for the top job right now,” he said, rolling his eyes at her. “A little realism, please. But Anna’s not going to be alpha forever. So sooner or later, there’s going to be a gap at the top of the ladder. And someone’s going to have to step up.”

  Caroline was reluctant to admit it, but Silas was right. She glanced around again, seeing Raniesha loitering near the edge of the lawn. She was a tall woman, but lighter than Caroline. She had refined skills with explosives and guns, but her combat skills, particularly in wolf form, had never been her strong suit. Perhaps Silas had a point after all. It would be nice to sidestep some of the status fights that would be inevitable later in the year. And if nothing else, it would be nice to test out her new skills, to see just how far she was able to go.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, not wanting to make any firm promises, and particularly not willing to weigh in on the debate about their current alpha for the time being. But later tonight, or maybe tomorrow… it wouldn’t do any harm to track Raniesha down and challenge her to a fight…

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  October 20th – 17 months later

  Skip stood in the centre of the circle of shifters, shaking with fear. It was two years since Heron had found her in the park, two long, blissful years in which she’d lived with her new family, learned the lore of the shifters, developed new skills and confidence, and put some of the ghosts of her past to rest. Nia, her therapist, had stayed on for just over a year, holding therapy sessions three times a week. Skip’s panic attacks had decreased from once a week, to once a month, and then to once every two months, and it was now four months since she’d had one at all. She’d drawn pictures and written stories about her old life, breaking down the shame and fear she felt about her past and the things she’d had to do to survive.

  And now, after two years of training and education, the night had finally arrived when Skip was to take the final step in becoming one of her pack, being converted into a shape shifter.

  The idea itself was thrilling. Skip had seen enough of the skills and tricks of the wolves over the past two years to embrace the conversion wholeheartedly. The shifters had performed a beautiful ceremony, with chants, incense, storytelling and the sharing of spiced mead, along with prayers to Sirius, the Wolf God. Skip had actually been brought to tears a few times throughout the ceremony, touched by the deep care the pack showed for its members and the intricacies of their spiritual life.

  But now it was time for the final part of the ceremony, and Skip was terrified.

  Silas and Caleb had set up the conversion machine around her, a wide circle of wires and metal pillars that was going to inflict a small electrical shock to her wrist. Tank stood beside her, her chosen sire, whose blood was to be mixed with her own in order to catalyse the conversion. And Heron stood before her, holding a long, sharp knife in her hand, waiting for Skip to acquiesce to the final trial before she could become a wolf. Heron was going to slit her wrist, a long, deep cut that would let her blood flow freely, mingling with a matching cut on Tank’s wrist.

  Thinking about how much it would hurt was horrifying.

  Skip stood still as a statue, breathing hard, trying to work up the courage to offer her wrist to the woman who had become her adoptive mother. Without being cut, she couldn’t become a wolf…

  The shifters stood silently around her, waiting patiently. Not one of them made any attempt to hurry her up. This ritual had been explained to her in detail. She’d even seen it done before, when Eric had been converted, and she’d firmly declared her intention to go through with it. But now that it was time to actually do it, she found it harder than she had imagined.

  “Courage, little sprite,” Tank murmured to her, waiting to take the knife from Heron and cut his own wrist. “It’ll all be over soon.”

  That was the key, Skip realised. The anticipation was almost worse than the cut itself, and so she held her breath, closed her eyes and thrust her wrist forward. Heron wasted no time, just held her wrist firmly and made the cut quickly and cleanly, while Skip clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. A moment later, Tank had repeated the action, and placed his wrist over her own. Heron wrapped a wide cuff around their joined arms, then retreated out of the circle. Skip felt a sharp zap of electricity, and then the cuff was being removed… and she dared to open her eyes for the first time. Heron was back beside her, Silas and Caleb already packing up the machine, and Skip waited, nerves taut, trying to detect any change within herself. The conversion worked ninety-nine percent of the time, but there was still a small risk something could go wrong…

  What the hell was that? Skip felt a surge within herself, a sudden wave of courage, a fierceness at odds with her own tremulous fear… and an odd sense of protectiveness that came from within, and yet was not a part of her.

  The wolf. She had to merge with it, she knew, accept it wholeheartedly and embrace its desires and demands as her own. But that was impossible, when the wolf was wild and confident and powerful, and she was so small and timid and fearful.

  She felt a wave of electricity creep up her spine, a strange presence entering her mind, and felt an odd sense of reassurance from a much more powerful being. Peace, the creature seemed to say. Courage. Embrace the night, and become one with the wind and the trees and the stars.

  The stars were bright tonight, Skip realised, looking up. The air was crisp, the leaves beautiful in the dim light of the dozen torches that burned all around them. The power was not her own, she knew, but she could accept it, embrace it as it covered her, protecting her, promising to hold her safe. Her hands touched the grass, and Skip realised they had become paws. She scented the air again, receiving a thousand subtle messages on the slightest breeze, her new wolf senses a hundred times sharper than her human ones. And as she looked out into the darkness, she could feel the shifters around her, feel their very souls with her own, deeper and more complex than they had been before.

  The wolf wagged its tail, bounded over to Heron and barked once, a joyful sound full of strength and richness. The Chant of Forests started up around her, a solemn pledge from her pack to guide her and protect her all the days of her life.

  An unspoken question from the spirit of the wolf, and Skip replied with a wholehearted ‘yes’. Welcome, wolf-kin, she told the spirit. Welcome to the night, to the wilderness, to the Endless War and the quest for a brighter future.

  SHIFTERS OF THE LAKES DISTRICT DEN

  PRESENT DAY

  PART TWO

  PRESENT DAY

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jack Miller sat on his couch in his flat in east London, a glass of whiskey in his hand and a sick feeling in his stomach.

  The past few days had been an unmitigated disaster, and he’d been granted two weeks’ leave from his job as security guard for the Noturatii as a result, time to regroup and deal with the serious losses the organisation had sustained. Losses that were a direct result of Miller’s actions.

  A few days ago, Jacob Green, the head of the organisation’s British Division, had found evidence that one of the shape shifters on their records was in Scotland; a man whom the Noturatii had captured early in the year, and who had subsequently escaped during a violent raid by the rest of the shifter pack. Eager to recapture their escapee, Miller had put together a team and launched an attack on the remote property, expecting it to be a relatively straight forward exercise. They’d taken fourteen men on the raid, more than enough for the anticipated handful of shifters they were likely to find.

  Instead, they’d stumbled into a god-damned shifter convention, fifty wolves banding together to defend their territory with relentless force, and Miller’s entire team had been slaughtered. Thirteen men, some with wives or f
amilies, dead because of his mistakes. Miller himself had only escaped with his life due to another tragedy – the death of a young hiker who had wandered onto the property and been caught up in the battle, and he’d been allowed to leave so that he could use his connections in the Noturatii to sweep her death neatly under the rug.

  Guilt at all the deaths on his hands had been gnawing at him, and he’d requested leave on the official grounds that he needed time to come to grips with his own mistakes.

  But the truth was far more complicated than that. In addition to the guilt of the loss of his team mates, he’d been harbouring doubts about the Noturatii’s agenda for months, small clues as to the shifters’ true nature adding up to weigh heavily on him. In Scotland, he’d seen convincing evidence that, far from the mindless beasts and dangerous terrorists that the Noturatii painted the shifters to be, they were, in fact, kind, intelligent and compassionate people. Which brought Miller’s entire future into question.

  The Noturatii worked underground, a covert organisation with the highest levels of secrecy, and once a member of staff knew the truth about the existence of the shape shifters, the only way anyone ever left the organisation was in a body bag.

  But knowing what he did now, Miller couldn’t continue to work for them, his conscience plaguing him, his nights sleepless, his days a quagmire of doubts and guilty thoughts.

  So now he had two weeks in which to concoct a plan that would allow him to escape the organisation’s clutches. An organisation who treated detractors with a brutal policy of torture and bloodshed. An organisation with access to some of the most highly trained assassins the world had ever seen. An organisation who had a long reach, with offices right across Europe and extending into Russia, China and the United States.