by Jen Haeger
David caught up with her easily and helped her along to his car. He didn’t think that they had been seen, but he was still vigilant as they drove out of Knoxville. Kim was shaken and exhausted by what had happened, and also in a substantial amount of pain. She had included her medications in her bag and downed a couple of the stronger pain tablets with a bottle of water that David provided. He wanted to give Kim a while to recover some, but there wasn’t any time. If it had been the Vulke following Kim, and there was no reason to think that it wasn’t the Vulke, then they had just shot a police officer in cold blood. That was a pretty strong indication they were acting completely outside Wolfkin law. No one was safe now. His first instinct was to call Evelyn to warn her, but then he realized that she was in the lab and the only way to reach her would be via e-mail. Since it was unlikely that the Vulke knew about the lab, David switched his focus to somewhere they were familiar with, Clem’s sister’s house in Sault Ste Marie. He had to call Karen and warn her.
“Kim,” he said digging around in his pocket for his cell phone, “I need you to…oh crap.”
His hand went right through the gaping hole in the pocket of his hiking pants. They must have ripped when he had gone through the window and his cell phone had fallen out at some point between Kim’s building and the car. David felt around the car seat, but came up empty.
“What is it?” Kim moaned tensing up.
“I lost my cell phone. Do you have yours?
Kim looked at him wide-eyed, “Oh, no! No I don’t. I’m sorry David, I forgot it back at the apartment.”
Cursing under his breath, David considered waiting until they met up with Evelyn at the lab to call Karen, but they were still a ways from the parking lot and he wasn’t sure how fast Kim was going to be able to hike. By then it could be too late, so he exited the expressway and pulled into a gas station. He was going to have Kim pump the gas while he made the phone call, but she looked about ready to pass out and her eyes were turning glassy from the pain medication. Also, he didn’t want to cause her more unnecessary physical pain.
“I’ll be right back,” David said as he jumped out of the car, taking the keys and locking the doors behind him.
He was in luck, as the gas station was one of the rare places that still had a working payphone. David dug into his other pocket and retrieved his wallet and first got twenty dollars in change from the night attendant. Unfortunately, he didn’t have Karen’s number memorized, so he had to use directory assistance, and that cost money. After he deposited the requested three dollar fee, David tapped the side of the phone impatiently until the operator came on and helped him connect to Karen’s number. It was well after midnight and the phone rang seven times before a very grumpy sounding Gabe answered with, “Whoever you are you just woke up a very cranky two and a half year old, so this had better be good.”
“Gabe, I’m so sorry, but this is an emergency! It’s David, do you remember me from-“
Gabe cut him off. “I know who you are. Clem’s buddy. What is it? What’s wrong?”
David didn’t beat around the bush. “You have to leave the house. All of you. It isn’t safe. The Vulke are acting outside the laws and they may try to kill you,” he said frantically.
Gabe didn’t respond right away, but he sounded much more alert when he did. “They told us we would be safe.”
“The Wahya…they’re wrong! They don’t know what’s going on. Please, Gabe, you have to believe me, for Robbie and Hank’s sake, please get out of the house. If I’m wrong, I will pay you back double for your expenses, but please just get out now!”
David could hear a woman’s concerned voice in the background and Gabe saying something to her. They spoke for about thirty seconds then Gabe came back on the line.
“After what happened to Clem, I’m willing to go on a little faith here. We’re leaving now, and we’ll be where we stayed with you before,” he said shortly.
“Be careful. Be safe. I’ll call you when I can.”
Gabe grunted in acquiescence and hung up.
David hesitated. He should really call Caroline and warn her as well, even if she didn’t believe him. He couldn’t remember her last name, so he settled for calling the Casino and leaving a message for her and Zachary with the administrative offices secretary. Since he did not want the woman to think that he was crazy, he had to somewhat code the message, he struggled to make it discernible.
“Tell them that cousin Vee is in trouble with the law again and that they should watch out for her because she might drop by unannounced.”
The woman seemed highly skeptical and David felt like an idiot, but it was the best he could do at the moment. He hung up the phone and glanced up at the car. Kim was asleep in the passenger’s seat. Looking at the phone, David couldn’t think of any way to contact Madeline. He had never gotten her phone number and didn’t know her last name, or the full name of anyone else in the Amaruq pack. He wasn’t sure that the Vulke had a strong enough reason to go after any of them directly, but it was widely known that The Scribe had helped Evelyn and David in the past and he was an Amaruq. David decided that he had done all he could do for the moment and filled the car with gas before turning back on the expressway and heading towards the lab.
34
It was a long, soggy trek through the forest, but Evelyn’s determination and a lightened pack of all freeze dried food, caused her to make good time. She texted David upon her arrival and was anxious to get to work. The cabin was still a bit trashed from their previous visit, but there wasn’t any time to really tidy up. Evelyn thought vaguely that it would give Kim something to do once she and David arrived. She secured the door, dropped her pack, wolfed down a granola bar and a few swigs of water, went to the bathroom, changed her wet clothes, and then headed straight into the lab. She intended to stay in the lab working for as long a stretch as possible to keep her in the research zone without any distractions.
She gowned up and then began the long, arduous task of sequencing more segments of viral DNA. In the times when she had to wait for the machines to run she carefully went over all of the sequences from the samples that she already had, entered notes, and filled in spreadsheets on the computer. It was tedious work, but Evelyn knew that the key to finding proof of the Vulke’s hand in engineering the mutant strain might be right under her nose. She tried not to think about the fact that they had no Vulke sample to compare yet, but instead focused on finding any differences between her and David’s viral DNA and the viral DNA she had sequenced from The Scribe’s sample and the councilman’s sample.
At first the electropherograms and lines of genetic code all looked exactly the same and Evelyn was checking and double checking previous assays to make certain that she had not missed anything. It took her nearly four hours to go over the previous work until she was satisfied that she had not overlooked something important.
Evelyn then took a short break, e-mailed David, and came back into the lab just as the next round of results were coming up on the sequencer. She printed them and then immediately prepared the machine to run another sample that had just finished replicating in the PCR machine. It took roughly an hour to get the sequencer up and running again with the new samples and Evelyn’s mind wandered to thoughts of David. It had been about six hours since she had last heard from him, so when she sat down with the fresh results at the computer, she checked her e-mail. There were no new messages either from David or from their Council contact. She wondered now if any of the Council members had survived the “incident” at the manor house. Then she realized that without their benefactor’s resources, the lab wouldn’t be productive for very much longer. She tried to push those thoughts out of her mind and get back to the task at hand, but now that she had not heard from David and the lab’s future was in jeopardy, she was finding it much harder to concentrate.
*
Evelyn was running through the burning manor house searching for David. People were running and screaming, and every now and agai
n Evelyn would have to step over the charred remains of some unfortunate person. The flames rose higher and she wasn’t sure that she would be able to make it out of the burning building, but she couldn’t leave without David, so she just pressed on through the maze of rooms. Suddenly Kim appeared and grabbed Evelyn by the arm preventing her from entering the next room, and dragging her back towards the rooms that Evelyn had already searched. Kim kept shouting, “No, no, it’s too late for you, but I’m a swimmer!”
Evelyn finally broke free of Kim’s grasp and was able to run forwards again. She then began to recognize the rooms she was in and knew that David must be in the back drawing room where he used to meet with Marcus and Clem. She bolted forward and made it to the door just as a huge burning beam fell behind her. At the door stood Marcus holding hands with Katie who was wearing her bathing suit. They were both sucking on large, blood-red lollipops. As Evelyn approached the door Katie smiled at her and waved, “Privyet!” she chimed.
Evelyn looked up at Marcus who was giving her a large toothy smile. “You’re not who I look like,” he said cheerily.
She brushed past him and forced the door open. Relief flooded through her as she spotted David staring out the window on the far side of a parlor with all red velvet lined chairs and couches. The room wasn’t yet burning, but the tattoo on his shoulder was on fire, illuminating his muscular, bare back in the darkness. David didn’t seem to notice, so Evelyn rushed forward to try to put out the flames, but he turned around and then he wasn’t David, he was Christoff. “Well, who did you think he was?” Christoff sneered and then lunged at her, opening his mouth wide and exposing rows and rows of sharp, shark-like teeth.
Evelyn jerked awake with a start and sent papers scattering onto the floor of the lab. She had fallen asleep sitting up at the computer and it took an effort for her not to fall out of her chair. Come on Evelyn, you don’t have time to be snoozing. She stretched her stiff neck and checked her e-mail again to see if David had messaged her. Still nothing. She checked the internet connection, but it was still connected and everything appeared to be working normally.
She let out a heavy sigh and began to pick up and organize the papers. It took her quite some time to reorganize the printouts and then figure out where she had left off. She resettled herself and then continued comparing the viral strains. An hour passed with no breakthroughs when Evelyn suddenly sat up straight in her chair. She checked and double checked the sequence from a section of viral DNA from The Scribe and the Councilman. They were definitely unique, but in a totally different place than the mutation in Kim and Katie’s DNA. It was a subtle difference, but Evelyn felt that it was more than enough. She didn’t yet have those sequences from Kim and Katie’s DNA done, but Evelyn compared her and David’s viral DNA at the pack difference site and found that she and David had the same sequence at that loci but that their sequence differed from that of both The Scribe and the Councilman. Now all she had to do was isolate that sequence from Kim and Katie’s samples and make sure that their DNA at that location matched each other’s and was the same as that same sequence in the viral DNA of a member of the Vulke pack.
They still did not have a Vulke sample, but Evelyn didn’t let that stop her. She began to put together a PowerPoint presentation to explain her findings to Caroline and the other packs. She was going to have to call a meeting of the Beta’s. Theoretically she knew how to do that, but she just hoped that they would respect her enough as a new Beta to actually agree to come. It was a dicey proposition at best, especially if all of the packs were cut off from Council guidance and trying to deal with strays and possibly the Vulke. She also had to hope that the Vulke were not tipped off about the meeting or they might be able to stop it or stop Evelyn from getting to it.
The presentation was about half done when Evelyn noticed movement out of the corner of her eye on the surveillance monitor. She looked up and saw Kim and David approaching the door to the cabin. They both appeared to be limping and covered with mud. Evelyn saved her work quickly and headed out to see what had happened to them. She was just exiting the bedroom when David and Kim came in through the front door.
“Are you okay? What happened? Why haven’t you e-mailed me?” Worry laced Evelyn’s words as she helped David out of his pack.
“Long story. We’re fine though, more or less. I twisted my ankle hiking in and fell down a muddy slope. Kim had to help me back up,” David said.
Kim gave him a small smile. “Well, I might have helped a little, but mainly I just tried not to make matters worse.” Her voice was strained, she looked pale and was holding her side.
Evelyn asked them what had happened at Kim’s apartment as they took off some of their wet, muddy clothes and their boots. So much for tidying up, thought Evelyn. David explained to Evelyn about the van, the policeman, and their flight from the apartment building. Evelyn frowned when David described the officer’s death.
“If they’re murdering civilians, then…”
“All bets are off,” finished David. He told her about how he lost his cell phone but had tried to warn both Karen and Gabe and Caroline and Zachary. “I don’t know if they will take the message seriously, and I don’t know if the Vulke will directly attack any of the packs right now, but I didn’t want to risk it, especially not with Clem being out of commission.”
Evelyn nodded. “No. I think you’re right. They could’ve even killed Clem and his sister’s family and blamed it on the werewolf hunters and no one would be the wiser…except maybe us.”
At this point Kim had slumped over and almost fallen to the floor and David had to scoop her up and lay her down on the couch.
“You know, this couch isn’t as comfortable as you may think,” Kim said weakly.
Evelyn checked her healing wounds. They both looked swollen and bruised and were very tender when Evelyn gently palpated them. She didn’t think that anything too serious was wrong, just that Kim needed a lot more rest and recuperation and a lot less crawling through windows, running from would-be assassins or kidnappers, and pulling David out of muddy ravines. She made Kim drink a little electrolyte solution and wash down some more pain medication before tucking her in and turning on David.
“Let me see your ankle.”
“It’s fine, Evie,” he insisted, throwing himself down into one of the cushioned chairs.
Evelyn did not waver. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
David sighed heavily then took off his sock and propped his foot up on the coffee table for Evelyn to examine. It had already started to swell. Evelyn determined that it probably wasn’t broken, but it was quite a bad sprain. She got David an ice pack and then wrapped it to his leg with gauze. By the time she was finished, Kim had dozed off again. David looked at Evelyn seriously.
“How goes it with you?”
Evelyn’s face brightened a little. “Well, I think I’ve found a slight variation in the viral DNA of the different packs. It is a much smaller difference than the mutation in Kim and Katie’s viral DNA, so that’s a good sign. The bad news is that we’ll need to get our hands on a Vulke DNA sample to prove that the mutant strain started out as a Vulke strain,” she finished forlornly.
David thought about that for a while. “Well, maybe we can present what we have to Caroline and then maybe they can help us to get a sample to verify what you’ve found?”
Evelyn was dubious. “Maybe. Look I’ve still got some things going in the lab, so why don’t you get some rest and keep that ankle elevated. We’ll try to figure something out in the morning.” She turned to go back into the lab and then glanced down at Kim and turned back to David. “How is she handling things?” she asked in a low voice.
“O.K. considering she was just in a near fatal accident then found out that she has contracted a virus that makes her into a monster, but then we told her that everything was going to be alright and then it immediately was really not alright,” David rambled.
Evelyn raised her eyebrows at him. “Good point.”
>
35
“Damnit!” Evelyn cried as she threw the papers across the lab in disgust. She had toiled away in the laboratory comparing viral sequences for hours, but although the sequence that she’d finally isolated from Katie and Kim’s DNA samples and thought might be unique to each pack were different from the viral DNA of The Scribe and the Councilman, the sequence was exactly the same in her and David’s DNA samples. All of her labor was for nothing if this sequence couldn’t tell the difference between her and David’s pack and the Vulke. Evelyn was close to crying and leaned her head on the lab bench. She closed her eyes and focused on the coolness of the hard surface as she pressed her head more firmly into it. She tried to let her mind go blank, but one thought refused to leave her brain. Her and David’s pack, the Inali, was different from The Scribe’s and the Councilman’s, but where did our virus originally come from? Evelyn opened her eyes and raised her head. It had come from a phial and that phial had come from…
“Siberia,” Evelyn said aloud. “We’re Vulke.” At first Evelyn smiled in jubilation because it meant that they had proof that the mutant strain originated from the Vulke strain, but the smile evaporated as she thought more about her revelation. It was a dangerous proposition to go before the other packs and present what she had found and then blame the Vulke when she herself had been researching the virus in secret. Who was to say she hadn’t created the mutation accidentally during her research or on purpose to get back at the Wolfkin for ruining her life or something equally crazy.
Evelyn screamed in aggravation. Minutes later David came rushing in with a look of such concern on his face that he appeared almost comical, and Evelyn’s emotions were so raw that she began giggling. Her reaction did nothing to lesson his concern.