by L. A. Banks
“My problem is,” Fox Shadow said through his teeth, warily circling, “that you’re taking sloppy seconds behind a damned demon wolf that she used to deal with and you’ve brought her to—”
He was on Fox’s chest before he’d finished the sentence. The impact knocked the wind out of the man. Hunter had gone from human to wolf with barely any transition time. He’d shifted as he sailed from the shadow he’d been standing in into the light, clothes left behind him in a jumbled pile. The only identifier was his amulet. His wolf had never been as strong, the urge to kill never as fierce as it was now.
“End match! Submit, Fox, submit!” Rabbit yelled out to a paralyzed Fox Shadow, as he backed up. He had never seen anything like Max’s transformation. “Call your grandson off, Silver Shadow. He’ll rip his throat out!”
Snapping, snarling, saliva-slicked jaws growled a warning as two-hundred-plus pounds of furious wolf bore down on Fox Shadow. Massive claws slowly dug into his chest through his coat and T-shirt, causing blood to rise in seeping pools around the depression of each digit.
A whimper finally escaped Fox Shadow’s strained larynx. The sound only seemed to make Hunter crazier and he released a series of fast, vicious barks close to the offender’s face, slinging saliva. Only when Fox closed his eyes did Hunter pull back. Not a sound could be heard except that of the snarling, pacing wolf as it circled the challenger three times. Fox curled into a fetal ball as Hunter loped toward his pile of clothes in the snow, circled them, and shifted back.
He snatched up his boots and clothes, breathing hard as he stood in the clearing in front of his grandfather’s log cabin.
“If you ever fucking call her sloppy anything, I promise you I’ll rip out your throat!” Hunter was still pacing, naked, face burning, eyes wild. “You want a challenge to the death over who holds this pack? Any day, any night, Fox Shadow. But until then, if she gets anything less than VIP treatment, it’s your ass!”
He took the porch steps in two bounds and slammed the door behind him. The doctor looked at his old shaman friend as Fox Shadow slowly stood and loped off with Rabbit Shadow not far behind.
“I think that settles the question of your Sasha’s safety,” Silver Hawk replied in a deadpan tone. “Yes?”
Too stunned to reply verbally, the doctor simply nodded.
SASHA WAS PACING on the porch when Hunter returned. He needed to get her back to his grandfather’s but was glad she didn’t have a full handle on the nuances of shadow culture. He had the hopeful thought that she’d miss the slights.
“How’d it go?” she asked, following him into the cabin as he gathered their weapons and supplies into the backpack.
“Everything went well. C’mon.” His nerves were wire-taut. He knew she’d be able to smell the lie.
She hesitated. “Something’s wrong.”
“The doctor is there. He was in a sweat with my grandfather when you were calling before. There’s things he needs to tell you . . . Please, we need to hurry.”
SHE BEGAN RUNNING, but this time she didn’t require that he hold her hand. Doc was up here, of all places. Had something important to tell her. Her lopes were outpacing Hunter’s and the only reason she slowed down was because she wasn’t wholly sure of the way. But as they got closer, the scent of wolf blood and Doc made her practically strip a gear as she rushed forward and landed on her hands and knees on a cabin porch.
“Safe,” Hunter said, slightly panting.
Sasha stood quickly and walked in a circle, trying to calm down.
Hunter clasped her hand and opened the door. Two elderly men stood. Sasha barreled into the doctor’s arms.
“I’m all right, it’s all right,” Doc said, rubbing her back as she pressed her face to his neck. “There’s so much I have to tell you. Oh, Sasha . . .”
“I have to tell you about Rod,” she said, swallowing hard. She held him away from her. “It was too late.”
Holland nodded and briefly shut his eyes.
“What about the others?” Her gaze searched the weary, aged eyes before her. “Woods, Fisher . . . they left with a whole squad.”
“Crow Shadow and Bear Shadow have been sent to collect them,” a voice she didn’t know said.
Sasha’s gaze jumped to the elderly man with white hair plaited in long braids that hung down his chest. “I’m sorry, I—”
“My grandfather, Silver Hawk, once Silver Shadow,” Hunter said. “Just as to the pack I am Wolf Shadow.”
“No apologies needed,” the older man said, coming to Sasha. “We all understand the heart is full, the losses deep.”
Dr. Holland nodded. “He is a dear friend . . . Sasha, there’s so much that’s happened, but now more than ever before, you have to trust me. The general doesn’t understand what he’s doing . . . the project went haywire, none of this was ever supposed to occur. The only ones left from the pack are you, Woods, and Fisher.”
Confusion tore at her; she could feel things pulling at her that didn’t make sense. Hunter’s gaze held hers for a moment and slid away, and then he left the room.
“What’s happened?” She watched in fear as the old man named Silver Hawk placed a supportive hand on Doc’s shoulder and also left. “Doc?”
“Sasha . . . the others—”
“What happened to all those men?” she whispered, covering her mouth and closing her eyes. Her hand fell away, but she didn’t open her eyes. “Did they . . . hurt anyone?”
“No,” Doc said carefully, so carefully that it made her open her eyes.
“They’re dead.”
Holland nodded. She turned away.
“Rod Turned on the team . . . the evac helicopter was given orders to eliminate all contagion, if there appeared to be a clear and present threat of the virus spreading. Only Woods and Fisher escaped. They’re now on the run and in hiding.”
“Oh, God . . .” Tears filled her eyes and she let them fall. “Those men should at least have been given the chance for medical treatment.” She whirled on the doctor, his image blurry through her tears. She wiped them away and shook her head. “Were Woods and Fisher bitten? Where are they?”
Dr. Holland crossed the room slowly. “I want you to listen to me very carefully, Sasha, hear every word I say. It is imperative, if at no other time in your life, that you hear me.”
He waited. She held her breath and nodded.
“Rod’s DNA was compromised by something different than what you, Woods, and Fisher have in yours.” He rubbed his palms down his face. “But the general didn’t know that, doesn’t know that. Only I do, and for good cause.” He stared at her hard and then looked away. “They knew that poor young man was in crisis. For the last six months the serum was less and less effective.” He turned to face Sasha. “I sent him to Afghanistan right after Nicaragua without a break in between! It was I who convinced the general to send him into vacant caves . . . when I knew the inevitable was about to happen. I wanted him far away from the others, far away from any civilians . . . someplace where he couldn’t harm himself or others, a place too far to traverse in one night . . . a place uninhabited due to the bombings from before. Daisy cutters had razed the area. Then, we could pick him up and I would have another month to help him.”
“Doc, why . . . why wouldn’t you lock him up in a lab and—”
“I wanted him away from you!” Holland shouted. “Sasha, you’re like a daughter to me, and you’d never seen a Turn, have you? Have you!” He walked up to her quickly when she turned away. “Not someone you know, not someone who was like your brother—you haven’t seen it. And if I had had Butler in a lab and he got out like the one before him, he’d go straight for you. You’ve got shadow wolf female in you, Sasha. You’re a natural enemy but also a very natural draw for that particular beast. I couldn’t chance it! I refused to chance it, not my baby girl.”
“I saw it,” she said quietly, tears filling her eyes. “I put a full clip in his chest in his apartment.”
“Then you know why I d
idn’t want to chance it.”
She looked away and swallowed hard, unable to argue against the truth.
Tears coursed down the doctor’s face and his words were thick and garbled by mucus as he spoke. “Oh, God, Sasha, I hate this damned project. The general wanted to protect his investment and see what would happen under live conditions—so he sent those boys with Rod . . . Woods, Fisher, to see if Rod’s Turn would spike one in them. He sent them in as bait, lab rats, as well as the others. Every man was under thirty—just kids! Johnson, Gonzalez, Sherwin, they never made it.”
He covered his face with his hands and spoke to her, broken. “Woods and Fisher had quicker reflexes and unloaded an entire clip of silver shells, but they just maimed him, they were so spooked they didn’t get him in the heart . . . then they called for an extraction, called what was supposed to be the cavalry, and a Black Hawk, one of ours, fired on them—the general’s orders. Shoot to kill if there’s any blood on uniforms.”
“No . . .” The horror of it chilled her, shock sent shivers through her limbs until they shook. Nausea roiled in her stomach.
“Here’s the pity of it,” the doctor said, collapsing against the back of a living room chair. “If they think you know, for the sake of secrecy, they’ll eliminate you.”
“Not if I get to the bastard first.”
“Do you know how high up in the food chain this goes?” the doctor asked calmly, obviously trying to get her past the emotion into a strategic state of mind. “I didn’t, at first . . . I can’t even imagine now. The money, the power, it’s beyond presidential levels. The general is following orders from someone, and then that someone is following orders . . . why do you think I’ve stayed around so long?”
Fury and frustration were making new tears rise in her eyes. “Why?”
“I owed it to your mother,” he rasped. “Owed it to her and William.”
“Doc, you’re scaring me,” Sasha whispered.
“I’m scaring myself, honey. I’m scaring myself.”
Quiet tension fell between them for what seemed like a long time. Finally Sasha pushed off the wall and looked at the man who’d been like a father to her.
“They didn’t die in Rwanda, did they?”
Xavier Holland shook his head. “They were Black Ops, Paranormal Unit . . . and part of the requirement was to donate reproductive cells, in case there was an accident. Twenty-five years ago, those cells were the baseline for individual antidotes, a serum that bonds to the specific DNA structure of the infected host. I was working on a vaccine with Dr. Lou Zang Chen . . . and he was close to a breakthrough, when there was an accident in the lab.”
The doctor pushed away from the living room chair and began to slowly pace with his hands behind his back, speaking to the floor as though dictating into a microphone before a student lecture. “About four soldiers came back from the Colombian Disasters infected from demon wolves. The first two Turned within months of returning, the other two seemed to respond beautifully to the treatments. Then a year later the third soldier Turned. A year after that the fourth soldier Turned. But when that last one Turned . . .” The doctor shook his head and ran his palm across his thinning gray hair.
Standing very still, Sasha reached out to his pain with a quiet question. “Doc, what happened in the lab?”
He stopped pacing and looked up to meet her gaze. “Everyone was slaughtered except me.” Never taking his eyes from her he slowly reached beneath his ivory cable-knit sweater and extracted a silver necklace with an amber amulet she recognized. “Two seconds of hesitation from the beast allowed me to lift my arm and squeeze a trigger. None of my colleagues had that chance.” His voice became a hard whisper as new tears rose to fill his eyes. “Your mother and father were on the wrong side of the glass.”
“But you saved me,” Sasha said, a sob so close to spilling out that she placed her hand over her heart. “You couldn’t save them, but you saved me.”
He turned away from her. “I did what I could, child . . . pulled you out of the grip of madmen.”
“They were going to kill me, weren’t they? Just like Hunter’s clan would have put him to death as a baby, were it not for you.”
Xavier Holland shook his head. “They were going to do something so much worse than kill you, baby . . . I couldn’t let them.”
Something dark slithered into her psyche, keeping her rooted to the floor where she stood. Then she was pure motion and had crossed the room in milliseconds to grab her adopted father by both arms. She had to see his eyes, had to see his face.
“What happened?” she demanded, hysteria bubbling within her and spilling into the small space between them. “What did they make you do to me? When you took me from her dead body, what was I?”
“I didn’t take you from her body. She wasn’t even pregnant, then,” he whispered, tears coursing down his weathered brown face. “I took you out of the freezer before they did . . . and bought you a chance.”
She dropped his arms and backed away, stumbling over furniture, and then dry-heaved.
“Before the accident, five embryos had been created from the demon-infected soldiers,” the doctor said, his voice clinical, detached, sharp enough to make her really hear him. “The fourth soldier had been responding well to the adjustments in his medication and the brass wanted to move ahead with its ultimate goal: the creation of their own genetically engineered soldiers. But when the accident happened the lab had almost been destroyed and all the embryos had as well. Except one. That was Rod. And they wanted to create more, despite our failures at keeping the subjects from Turning. But zygotes were on hand, already cleared, legal waivers signed, which meant military participants, their samples were fair game. I smuggled your mother’s out and destroyed your father’s . . . no child of my dear friends would be tampered with—it was heresy.”
As he began to pace, her eyes followed him. “I am a scientist, but this went beyond the realm of science. Yet, I knew if I balked, if I went against the grain, they’d shut me up and shut me down and would get someone else to do it. For twenty-five years I watched Rod Butler grow up, waiting for what was in him to take him over . . . I just couldn’t see that happening to you, baby. No.”
Xavier Holland stood by the window, looking older and more haggard than she’d ever seen. But what he was saying was so horrific that she couldn’t even form questions in her mind.
“So I came here,” he said plainly. “I had spared the life of a friend’s grandson . . . I asked that he help me spare the life of a child that would be made one way or another. If all the cells were destroyed, they would suspect foul play. I’d disappear, but the project would go on . . . with available donors in prison, the military, unsuspecting donors in fertility clinics . . . you have no idea the lengths.”
“They gave you shadow clan DNA,” she said flatly, her voice distant, her mind numb.
“It’s so close to the werewolf strain, it bonds to the genetic spiral just like the toxic demon virus . . . but as you’ve probably learned, it’s so different.”
He paused and stared at her, regret and love brimming in his eyes. “I wanted you to have a chance. They gave me a sample from a male who shares no bloodline with Max, Sasha. You’re of his pack, same clan, but not a relative. I gave you your mother’s maiden name—Trudeau . . . She was from New Orleans, not Alabama, like Bill. It was the other way around. I never wanted you to find out. Not like this.”
He paused and let out a long exhale that sounded as though he’d exhaled the weight of the world. “The shadow DNA came from a fallen clan warrior, one who gave his life that fateful night protecting Max’s mother’s body, keeping a predator from eating her remains. Wolf Shadow—that’s why Hunter’s grandfather passed him that name, in his honor. He fought the monster for the struggling, suffocating, living thing in the snow—Hunter.”
“The others, the rest of the pack . . . you said you didn’t let anyone else get the demon wolf virus added to their test tube.” She didn’t care t
hat his eyes looked pained. It was what it was.
“I wish you wouldn’t refer to the start of your life that way.” He released another tired breath and briefly closed his eyes. “Woods and Fisher are diluted strains—shaman familiars, natural wolf. As I perfected the tests, I could mask you kids from the insanity. Rod was the first, though. All eyes were watching and there was nothing I could do.”
She punched the wall, taking out a chunk of it. “But I don’t understand! Why did they keep this a secret? Why didn’t you just tell us?”
“Because it was all about control, Sasha . . . and covering their own asses. The psychologists,” he said sneeringly, “thought that your loyalty to the government would be suspect if you actually knew you had been created solely to be a supersoldier. That thinking of yourselves merely as experiments would work against us as opposed to for us. Feeling like you’re part of the human race was invaluable. They also didn’t know how you children were going to turn out, and if something went horribly wrong, they didn’t want the responsibility of your existence to be traced back to them.” He shook his head. “All those years and all those lies. And I couldn’t say anything or I would be taken out! And then who would look after all of you?”
A sob racked Sasha’s body so hard that she hugged herself to hold another one in. “They played God, Doc! What gave them the right to play God? They put me in a position to have to exterminate Butler like he was a disease after they’d watched him like a culture under a microscope—he was my friend! They grew me out of a goddamned petri dish, Xavier! Yes, I heard you! They put me in foster care, because I had no mother and father!” She paced back and forth as though trapped, tears streaming, mind on fire. “I know why I was there,” she said, sputtering. “In foster care.”
The doctor had mentally retreated to a still place and his voice was so calm that it made her shiver.