by Jen Haeger
David tried not to show any emotion when Evelyn typed in “Russia odd events” into Google and came up with a few articles on Tunguska, the Yeti, and Rasputin. He knew where she was going with this, but wasn’t sure how she expected to find something about the Vulke on the web. Evelyn frowned tapping her index finger absently on the keypad then typed in “Russia odd recent events”. She scrolled down the first page slowly, stopping at the headline of a news article regarding the strange disappearance of a Russian scientist. She clicked on the link to bring the full article up on the screen. David and Evelyn scanned the article together.
The scientist’s name was Dr. Gregori Petorov, and he was one of the lead researchers at the Russian Cancer Research Center in Moscow. According to the article, he was scheduled to give a talk at UC Davis over a year ago and had not been seen since leaving his laboratory the day prior to his presentation. His specialty had been engineering retroviruses to help cure cancer. David saw the word retrovirus and developed a queasy feeling in his stomach. He watched Evelyn as she finished reading through the article, and her mouth fell open.
“Oh my God David, they didn’t find a mutation, the Vulke made one!”
29
Caroline went into her office and closed the door behind her. Compared to Marcus’s old office with its couch and Chippewa décor, her office was sterile. The walls were bare and the desk and chairs were those that could be found standard in any office supply store. She believed most any decorations an unnecessary distraction and had never considered them important enough to waste time contemplating, accumulating, and placing them. Caroline sat down heavily at her desk and allowed herself a rare moment of weakness. She placed her head in her hands and let out a muted sob, then almost immediately straightened and wiped her eyes. Though it was unlikely that anyone would dare enter her office without knocking, she could not afford to show any sign of vulnerability or irresolution. This was a delicate time for the Wahya and the pack needed their Beta to be strong.
Caroline cleared her throat and opened her laptop with a crisp motion. She blamed her brief breakdown on the meeting with Evelyn. That woman always got under her skin. People like Evelyn were constantly thinking that they were too good or too smart to follow the rules, which always irritated Caroline. Evelyn had managed to rub Caroline the wrong way from the start, but her dislike of the doctor had only grown in the past two years, fueled by a number of sources. The Wahya had been entirely too involved in David’s challenge against the Vulke. While it was true that the Wahya pack first had a duty to protect David and Evelyn from the Vulke since they were in Wahya territory, and then afterwards to stand up to the Vulke because of the attack on one of the Wahya safe houses, after The Scribe’s decree Marcus should have distanced the pack at least somewhat from David and Evelyn. The Wahya’s strong connection to the Inali had, unfortunately, been seen as posturing by the other packs.
First there were the whispers and snickers of the other Betas, which began at the challenge, about Evelyn being the new Wahya Beta. Then, shortly after David and Evelyn formed the Inali, Marcus’s petition to add two new members to the Wahya pack had been denied by the Council. They cited that there were already two more Wolfkin in the United States and some of the other packs petitioned against a further increase in Wolfkin numbers, especially so soon after the problems concerning the Wahya. Marcus had taken the news without argument, but Caroline was furious. She wanted to fight the Council, but Marcus vetoed her. They were also having problems with the South American pack for the first time that Caroline could remember. The Alonso had started encroaching on Southern California and parts of the New Mexican and Texan borders, claiming a discomfort with the recent addition of a new American pack.
Caroline knew that it was all just the deep-rooted Wolfkin isolationism rearing its ugly head, but it didn’t annoy her any less. Unfortunately, there was nothing that she could do. The Council had been formed to keep the peace between the Wolfkin packs and one of the ways that they had managed to do that was through isolation of the packs. Any collaboration between packs was highly frowned upon, as this had been a precursor to the Wolfkin war. Meetings of the Betas were considered to be a rare chance to interact with other packs, but not social events, and most Betas tried hard to never side with the same pack twice in a row. Caroline always prided herself on her upstanding, professional level of involvement in the Beta meetings which had garnered her a decent amount of respect from the other packs in the past. Lately, that respect had been replaced by a coolness with an undercurrent of derision. Now with Marcus gone, it was more important than ever to regain that esteem in order for the Wahya to remain a strong pack.
Caroline began sending out e-mails to the other members of the Wahya pack. Most of them had already been notified about Marcus’s passing and Zachary becoming the new Alpha, but Zachary felt that it was absolutely imperative for all of the Wahya members to meet as soon as possible. This meeting was to make his appointment to the position formal and make certain that there were no objections. Caroline doubted that there would be any objections since Zachary was the most ambitious current pack member, and there were historically very few Alpha challenges in the Wahya pack since they euthanized their aging Alphas before there was need for a challenge. However, she did see the value of bringing the pack members together during this tumultuous time.
She also checked to see if there was any more news from France regarding the unspecified occurrence at the Council manor, but all she found were the same vague rumors about “something” having happened there. She wondered if the origin of the rumors wasn’t one of the ridiculous French pack members, who were quite prone to exaggeration. Not hearing back from the Council for a week was not all that unusual in itself. Council members were not required to stay in contact with the packs at all times and often left the manor on personal agendas. Typically the Betas left messages for them through one of their many message services and depending on the urgency of the matter, the Council would respond in due time. Still, Caroline considered the strays to be an urgent matter, particularly in light of what happened with David and Evelyn, and had expected a quicker response. Zachary had tried to reassure her by saying that the Council was likely dealing with stray matters in Europe first and relying on the Wahya’s fresher experience with strays to deal with them on their own. He even forbid her from trying to contact them a second time, saying that it might make the Wahya look like they were trying to rock the boat again, and contacting other packs directly to discuss the strays was even more incendiary.
Caroline then stopped for a moment to consider what Evelyn had said now that the irascibility of their meeting had faded. She had to admit that there were certain coincidences that insinuated Vulke involvement in current events. However, the Wahya could not be the ones to accuse the Vulke of something untoward, not this time, especially not without proof. That would most definitely be seen as warmongering by the Council and the other packs, and Caroline had no idea what the repercussions might be. The Council was fierce when it came to maintaining the peace between the packs, even in so far as to look the other way when word of Vulke transgressions reached their ears. She did not think that the Council would go so far as to disband the Wahya as a pack, but with things so volatile right now, there was no way that Caroline was going to risk it.
*
“I’m such an idiot! I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. It makes so much sense!” Evelyn made a frustrated noise, got up abruptly, and began pacing.
“It does?” said David tentatively.
“Of course! The Vulke tried to quash finding a cure for the virus, but that didn’t work, so what better way to fight a cure than to mutate the virus and make it worse!”
“But if they could change the virus, why not make it so they were bigger and stronger or so that they could transform at will?”
“Because it’s extremely difficult to do anything useful at all with the virus, and most of the changes that they would make would eith
er be fatal for the virus or…” Evelyn stopped pacing with an unexpected look of horror on her face, “…or fatal for the person infected.”
Evelyn went back to the computer and did a few more searches. Her fears were all but confirmed. The missing persons rates had skyrocketed in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Mongolia over the past year. It was officially attributed to “ongoing terrorist activities”. Evelyn felt sick. They all thought that the Vulke had gone back to Siberia and sulked after their losses at the Council meeting, but they had been very wrong. If anything the Vulke had become entirely more dangerous.
David looked pale.
“So after a lot of…testing…they came up with a viable strain that was easier to transmit, which is helpful for them growing their numbers I guess, but then why are they making strays all over the place?”
Evelyn stared off into space thinking. Yes, why? Surely it was easier to secretly grow their numbers back in Siberia and train/brainwash people there. Although…there weren’t that many people in Siberia, and if they really were building their numbers they wouldn’t want just anybody, thought Evelyn.
“Well,” she began, “they would mainly want young, healthy individuals, and they would get more of their target demographic by expanding their recruiting radius.” She thought about it some more. “Also, the Vulke might be able to grow their army in relative secrecy in Siberia but moving great numbers of people around the world surreptitiously would be a lot more difficult. If they already had large numbers in place all over the world…then they would be able to coordinate a simultaneous attack of multiple locations.”
David nodded slowly. “But even if you’re right, Evie, we still don’t have any solid proof. That scientist disappearing is just another strong piece of circumstantial evidence.”
Evelyn deflated a little and placed her head in her hands. David was right. She was sure that not only Caroline, but the other packs as well would be skeptical of her and her motives and also reluctant to do anything to stop the Vulke without the Council’s go ahead. And that was not even taking into account the fact that Evelyn would not only have to convince many of the packs that werewolfism was a virus and that the Vulke had manipulated that virus for their own nefarious purposes, she would also have to convince them to allow her and help her to research a cure so that the Vulke didn’t overrun them with numbers. How could she get proof? She had not found any differences between her and David’s strain and the sample she had gotten from the Council member, or the sample from The Scribe’s blood, in essence no pack strain differences to prove that the mutant strain had started out as the Vulke strain. However, she hadn’t sequenced the entire retroviral genome yet, and she’d had no real reason to search for the more minor differences between the pack strains prior to the appearance of the strays. As far as a cure went, she’d been looking at the large parts of the virus that were the same for all Wolfkin. But even if she did find differences between the pack strains, she didn’t have any Vulke samples to compare to the mutant strains.
Evelyn wracked her brain for a way to get a hold of a Vulke strain to compare. A way that wasn’t likely to get both her and David killed, that was. Hard as she tried she couldn’t come up with a plan to get a Vulke sample that wasn’t risky bordering on suicidal, and really, it might not even be all that helpful if she couldn’t find any differences in the pack strains. So the very first thing that they needed to do was to get back to the lab and for Evelyn to see if she could find DNA sequences that were unique for each pack, and they had to do it fast. The Vulke could stage their attack for as soon as the next full moon.
*
David and Evelyn prepared to get on the road later that night. There hadn’t been much time to wash their clothes from the previous visit or pack, so Evelyn was just glad that it was the springtime and shouldn’t be cold enough in the woods to require too many layers. They were going to have to make a stop at David’s apartment to pick up some freeze-dried meals that he had stocked up on so that they didn’t have to carry too much heavy food with them. Evelyn also had to beg off work again and call in a relief vet for the few days she was scheduled for the coming week. She thought idly that she would likely have to dip into her meager savings to make rent that month.
As they headed over to David’s apartment, Evelyn was feeling tense and distracted. The news of Marcus’s death was finally beginning to sink in and she felt like she was just barely holding herself together. It did not help in the least that his successor, Zachary, had given Evelyn a really bad vibe from the moment she laid eyes on him. Everything was just so wrong, again, but at least Clem was safe.
They pulled into David’s parking lot and Evelyn told herself to put all that on the back burner of her brain and focus on the task at hand. Grab the food and supplies, get back on the road, and get to the lab. She mentally shook herself as David parked the car and both of them got out and headed up the outer stairs to David’s dingy, little apartment. If they hadn’t been in such a hurry, they might have noticed that the curtains were drawn a little tighter than usual, but as it was, David unlocked the door and they both stepped through the threshold and into the barrel of a shotgun.
30
“Shut the door. Slowly.”
The man that stood before them was around David’s age though quite a bit shorter and more rotund than David. His hair was dark and cut in a severely short style that smacked of the military. He had blue, watery eyes outlined by thick bushy eyebrows, and his face held an expression of quiet confidence. His commands had been in a calm voice, and it was clear that he expected them to be obeyed. Evelyn could not fault him for that expectation since he was the one with the shotgun.
David didn’t move. “James?” he whispered.
The name sounded familiar to Evelyn coming from David’s lips, but she could not quite remember why. Perhaps the shotgun was distracting her.
“Shut the door or I make your pretty little friend’s face a whole lot uglier,” James replied evenly.
The color ran out of David’s face, but this time he complied and shut the door to his apartment.
“Lock it.”
David engaged the deadbolt.
“Good. Now both of you move over to the couch there and sit down. No sudden moves. I’ve had a lot of coffee today and I’m feeling a bit twitchy.” James motioned with the shotgun towards David’s worn, tan couch.
Evelyn glanced sidelong at David who nodded slightly, so she made her way over to the couch and sat down. David followed her cautiously, keeping his eyes on James and placing his body between James and Evelyn. James then followed them over, keeping a step outside of David’s reach. He pulled two pairs of handcuffs from his belt, tossing one pair to David and one pair to Evelyn.
“Handcuff each other.”
David looked down at the handcuffs with trepidation. “James, I know you’re…scare-worried about me, but please, let me explain,” he said hopefully.
“Sure, no problem, you can talk all you want after you put on the handcuffs. We can have a nice long conversation then, or we can have a very short one now that ends poorly for you and your girl.”
David sighed but then nodded to Evelyn. Evelyn gave him a wide-eyed look but then turned her back towards him with her hands behind her holding the handcuffs. David did the same. Evelyn struggled to extend her fingers and space them out as wide apart as possible as David applied the handcuffs to her wrists. When she put his cuffs on, she deliberately placed them higher up on a thicker part David’s arms, so that they would be looser around his wrists. She need not have bothered with such measures, though, because James promptly set the shotgun aside, pulled out a pistol, and tightened both of their cuffs snuggly around their wrists while keeping the muzzle to David’s head. He then moved away from them again and sat in a wooden chair from the kitchen table that he had flipped around so that it was facing backwards. He kept the pistol trained on David.
“There we go now. Wow, you guys really suck at putting on handcuffs. T
hank goodness I’m a professional,” James tutted. “Now by all means David, explain.” He made a showy gesture with his free hand.
David’s brows furrowed. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Hah! Certainly not now you won’t,” James replied primly. “But don’t you think for one minute that I don’t know that you came after me when you killed Tommy.”
Evelyn now remembered James. He had been David’s friend and had been present the first time David changed and accidentally killed his friend Tommy while in the throes of the rage that accompanied the transformation. James had fled and taken David’s only leads to what had happened to him, a journal and a tiny vial of werewolf blood, with him.
“I didn’t come after you, you took the book. I thought it could help me.”
“Sure, right. You wanted the crazy wolf book and wolf juice. You thought that they hadn’t caused enough insanity, enough death.”
“I never meant to hurt Tommy. It was an accident,” David whispered.
James sighed and shook his head sadly. “I know that you didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead, does it?”
“Killing me won’t bring him back.”
“Of course not, but it will bring justice! Eye for an eye!” James spat, then visibly calmed down and continued, “And besides, who knows how many others you have ‘accidentally’ killed because of your delusions.” James turned to Evelyn. “Did you know, Precious, that he thinks that he’s a werewolf?”
Evelyn did not respond immediately. James was obviously volatile and she was certain that the truth would fail to accomplish anything good. She needed to lie, but she wasn’t sure which lie would be the most believable.
“He hasn’t thought that for a very long time. David told me all about his past…mistakes, and I’ve forgiven him. He’s a different man now.” Evelyn was careful to hold her voice steady.