Stronger Than Blood

by Genevieve J. Griffin

  And I knew, to my dismay, exactly what that meant.

  “We’ve got to get to a hospital,” Grey said, but I shook my head fiercely. He stared at me like I’d lost my mind. Raoul, fortunately, backed me up.

  “Don’t you recognize this?” Raoul demanded, pointing at Cee. “The kind of bite this is? If it doesn’t kill her—”

  Grey’s face went stone-hard. Under my hands, Cee suddenly jerked, making an awful sound. Her eyes dilated so wide I couldn’t see any color anymore, only an all-consuming black. I moaned. It snapped Grey out of his silence.

  “The clinic, then,” he said, yanking the car door open. “There’s something back there. Dr. FitzP said—”

  Despite everything, I gaped at him. “You spoke to him?”

  Grey looked haunted. “He was there. He knows. Always has. And he said…he’s got what we need.”

  I wished I knew how to react. I just felt numb, and there wasn’t time to wade my way free of it. Grey was getting into the truck, patting his pockets for the keys, but he couldn’t find them. “Shit,” Grey said, casting a look behind him. “I’ll have to—”

  Then I heard a roar.

  It was all an awful blur: the silver-brown shape of Brandon’s wolf form lunging for Grey’s legs. I howled so loudly it nearly blacked his scream out.

  Don’t bite him, don’t bite him, please don’t—

  Grey yelled and twisted himself around. He missed Brandon’s snapping jaws, but only just. In the second he had to retaliate, he pulled his legs back and then kicked, hard. It caught Brandon across the forehead. Grey slipped from his seat in the process, though, hitting his head on the way down.

  I cried out, straining forward. Grey’s eyes were open but dazed, and a thin line of blood trickled down from his forehead, right over the old scar. I wanted to go to him. I wanted to reverse all of this somehow, make this just not have happened. but I couldn’t even get up. I couldn’t leave Cee.

  All I could do was scream at Brandon, “Leave him alone!”

  Brandon snarled up at me, his eyes wild. It was then that Raoul grabbed him, and tugged him just far enough away that the real attack could come. It wasn’t what I expected at all.

  Antonella Carra had completely changed her mind.

  And she came out swinging that baseball bat at Brandon with all the force of a wrecking ball.

  I’d never seen anyone—not any of us, even Pandora with all her tree-flinging proclivities—hit anything that hard. Antonella came out, this itty-bitty cheerleader with maybe a hundred pounds on her, and decked a werewolf so hard that he fell out of form and flat onto his back, gasping.

  “Bastard,” she yelled, in between her own desperate gasps of air. “Saying we could do…what we want…is different from slaughtering people!”

  The next crack knocked him out cold. I kept gaping at her, especially when she stared up at me with eyes so bloodshot I half expected them to pop.

  Then she threw the explanation at me in the form of an empty bottle. One of the very bottles Grey had just brought up from the clinic.

  The world dropped out from under me. She’d taken our drugs. What the hell were those doing to her?

  Antonella grabbed Raoul and practically threw him into the truck. Then she went to Grey and hauled him upright. He was conscious, but he looked like he was having trouble focusing. Antonella gave him a sharp once-over and put him into the back of the truck with Lacey.

  “I’ll watch them,” she said, slapping something into my hand. It was the keys. “You drive.”

  “Me? But I—”

  “I’ve got to get back,” Cee murmured suddenly, stopping me short. Her eyes were unfocused, her speech wandering. “My father…so scared…” She turned and blinked at me. “I’ll miss my birthday.”

  “We’ve got bigger problems,” Antonella muttered. She was ripping a strip of cloth from her own t-shirt to replace Grey’s bloodied hoodie. Finally I saw how hard her hands were shaking. “I can’t drive like this. And Grey sure as hell can’t. You’ve got to.”

  Cee made a low and feeble sound when Antonella’s hand clamped over the wound. “You’ll hurt her!” I cried.

  Antonella shook her head. “Go!”

  I did what she said. I didn’t look behind to see what had come of Brandon. I just clambered into the cab, shut the door and tried my damnedest to remember how to put the beast into gear.

  With a lurch that I was sure would hurt Cee worse than she could afford, the truck made its way forward. Its crunching wheels covered what sounded like the beginnings of a scream.

  After that I just shut my ears and drove.

  I’m still amazed I didn’t drive us into a ditch or a tree somewhere, considering I was busy waging a one-woman war against the vagaries of a manual transmission. As I drove, I kept worrying about our passengers. How much blood had Cee lost? Was she going to change or not? Would werewolf healing kick in…or would that be even worse than the alternative?

  I drove faster.

  The road, unfortunately, was a mess. Downed branches from recent high winds made everything an obstacle course. I jerked the truck over a bump, hitting it harder than I’d meant to, and heard a cry rise from the back. The wheel twisted in my hands. I had to fight for control again, and could only dart desperate looks into the rear view mirror.

  “What’s going on back there?” I asked Raoul, who sat beside me.

  He turned around. From the sounds of it he was slamming the narrow window open, swearing as it strained his bruised arm. The news wasn’t good.

  “Seizures,” he said grimly.

  That much I remembered. The same thing had happened to me.

  I threw all common sense about my lack of driving ability out the window and slammed down on the accelerator.

  We made it down to the city roads, finally. I wrenched the truck up a gear—it didn’t destroy the engine this time, but it sounded like a near miss—and sped through an intersection, heedless of the red light. Someone slammed on their brakes and blared his horn. I kept my head down and drove. “Careful,” Raoul said, tearing his attention away from Antonella and Lacey. “Don’t get us hit!”

  I called him something impolite, remembered suddenly where I needed to turn, and screeched around a corner. The clinic was just up ahead. “Hold on!” I hollered.

  Antonella took me a little too literally. I could hear metal crunching beneath her fingers when she gripped the side of the truck.

  Then I was steering into the clinic’s parking lot, coming to an inelegant, slanted stop across two parking spots. Even with no other cars in my way, I still managed to crunch the front bumper into a post. The truck sputtered to a stop.

  Raoul spared me the driving critique. He just opened his door, tumbled out, and hurried to get Cee from the back. Grey got to his feet on his own, albeit unsteadily.

  “I’ll take her,” I heard Raoul say. Grey looked as though he regretted having to hand over the task, but he conceded. “Antonella, get the door.”

  Antonella’s eyes were wild, her hands bloody, and she looked like she barely comprehended him, but at last she got the idea and went for the entrance.

  I’ve taken doors off their hinges in my time, but this was the first time I’d watched someone fling it halfway across the parking lot once she was done.

  “That stuff’s going to kill her,” I breathed. Antonella slumped halfway over in the aftermath, her hands braced against her knees. She was breathing too heavily. Raoul heaved Cee up into his arms, not breathing too well himself.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” he said. I didn’t argue. Grey and I, supporting each other, limped into the clinic.

  There are few things stranger than intentionally breaking into a place you’ve been trying to avoid for most of your life. I tried not to think about that, but failed, as I searched for light switches and threw spotlights onto one memory or another. Me at age eleven on that very seat in the lobby, screaming with growing pains that were completely at odds with my transformation pains.
Or me in this same hallway, arguing with Grey in badly coded conversation about what we could tell Dr. FitzP.

  And as it turned out…he’d always known.

  Caught between feeling appalled, furious and lost, I hurried after the others. Cee was shaking in Raoul’s grip, making a violent twist that nearly tore her from his arms. The cloth Antonella had been holding to her neck fell free, and I saw an ugly, seeping scab there, the sort of wound that should have needed stitches—or should have killed her, a good while ago now. Werewolf healing. Shit.

  I knew exactly what she was feeling. The bite, the seizures, my body fighting the awful restructuring of its entire genetic code…

  Lacey screamed. It splintered a ceiling light clean apart.

  When Raoul stumbled, Antonella rushed forward to help him. I stepped ahead and led them down the hall while ticking off numbers on examination rooms. Dr. FitzP had always, oddly, seen me in the exact same room. We’d just arrived at its door. Room 112.

  Grey and I stared at it in mutual recognition.

  “Bring her in here,” he said, stepping inside and flicking on the light.

  Raoul and Antonella got her onto the examination table, despite Lacey’s thrashing. One arm flung out, looking out of joint. Only Antonella dared to fight her down, using the straps I grimly pointed out at the side of the table. I was pretty sure in retrospect that they weren’t standard issue.

  “Can’t we sedate her?” Antonella asked, her voice cracking dangerously, as she held Cee’s legs down. Her grip was so tight I feared she’d break something, but Cee’s cry, worryingly, was more angry than pained.

  “She’d metabolize sedatives too quickly,” Raoul said. “We just have to stop this. Grey, what do you know?”

  All eyes turned to my brother. He was clutching his hands in his hair, looking weary and nauseated. “He said it was back this way—”

  “What was?” I demanded.

  “Everything. All his research. Some new formula he’s been working on—he said it was the fifth version.” Grey hauled in a breath. “He’d been working on it with that other guy, Johnson, the one who got killed. Their lab…it’s been here for years.”

  Grey turned, opened a drawer, and rooted frantically for anything that might help. “He said everything we needed was all back this way, in our usual spot. But this is just a normal room. I don’t know how it could be in here.”

  I didn’t know either, but we had to start somewhere. I stumbled to the countertop along the east wall. Before me was Dr. FitzP’s computer, an assortment of gloves and disinfectants and random paraphernalia, and above that a series of clouded-glass cabinets. One good smash through the pane obviated any need to find the keys. I read every label on every damned bottle and box, but they all looked completely ordinary.

  Cee stiffened suddenly, her back arching and her throat tightening in an inhuman shriek. Raoul rushed forward, trying to hold her down. “B, hurry!” he shouted. I nearly wailed in desperation. Cee was coming apart in front of me, and I had no idea where to look or what I was even trying to find.

  Then I saw the door at the far end of the room, the one obscured with an innocuous calendar full of baby animals. I jiggled the handle, but it was locked—and suddenly I didn’t trust that puppy’s innocence in the least. Since it was the last thing I could think of to try, I gritted my teeth and went for it.

  I slammed myself against the door, knocking both it and myself down. My shoulder radiated spikes of pain—I’d clearly broken something—but the slice of light from the examination room was enough to illuminate shelves full of books, notes, ledgers, and a seemingly endless array of cryptically-labeled bottles. I got up to stare. Then I saw the tables full of equipment, machines, and cold-storage boxes.

  This was an entire laboratory.

  A lab devoted to cases like mine, ten feet away from where I’d spent my childhood deceiving my way out of the benefits.

  You could have ended up like Marcus, I thought, while I turned in place and stared in horrified fascination. There was just so much. Racks of supplies. Charts all over the walls. X-rays on light boxes, one of them showing what looked like a partially-transformed arm. You could have ended up poisoned like the Elder. If Dr. FitzP had ever used you as a guinea pig, the way Ilsa did…

  None of that made me feel better. I shuddered, overcome by everything that surrounded me.

  So I heard the crash behind me too late.

  I staggered against a table, my voice stuck in my throat. Lacey was in the doorway, her hair in a wild cloud and her whole body radiating pain, rage and a hunger that I recognized too well. She was going to change next, and I could tell from the way she was shaking that she couldn’t handle it. The transformation would tear her apart.

  I tried to think. The new formula Grey had spoken of—surely it would be here. And it had to be labeled. I just had to find it. I flung myself at the nearest refrigerated cabinet, seeing rank upon rank of needles already prepared for injection. I almost turned away, but the handwritten labels caught my eye. There were names here. And what looked liked version numbers.

  Given the rattling, smashing noises behind me—Lacey was knocking things to the floor, breaking them heedlessly—I really, really hoped these were the right ones.

  I yanked the door open.

  One needle in the middle was labeled 5.3.

  I had no idea what was going to happen. My memory was flinging images of Marcus at me, and the knowledge of everyone who’d broken or died thanks to treatments gone wrong. But what choice did I have? Lacey couldn’t control this on her own, and I surely couldn’t make it any worse.

  I grabbed the needle and whirled around, praying my shaky hand wouldn’t drop the thing, only to come face to face with Lacey. When her mouth opened, revealing fangs too long and sharp for a human mouth, the howl that emerged sounded absolutely terrified.

  I gathered up what strength I had left and rammed the needle through her bite wound, pushing the plunger down as far as it would go.

  The howl became a scream, and her arm swung wide, slamming me into a table so hard I collapsed to the floor in a blaze of pain. I hit my head when I landed. Then I stopped feeling anything, and finally passed out.

  *

  I don’t know how much time went by before I truly came to. It was quiet, and cold, and the deep gray around me stretched for what felt like miles. It would have been easy to let go and not worry about it anymore. But I kept thinking of my brother, and the more I pictured him, the more I remembered everyone else—Lacey, Raoul, the rest of the pack, even Antonella. I knew I had to wake up.

  It just didn’t happen easily.

  I dreamed, I think. Hallucinated might be a better word. Fractured memories, not all of them mine, faded in and out. Words spliced together into sentences that made no sense before going silent. Then something jarred me closer to reality.

  Gray…cold…a hard surface beneath me…

  I slowly put things together.

  The cold air spilling onto me was from the refrigerated unit above, its door still open. The gray below me had patterns, a network of lines. It looked like tiles laid out side by side. I couldn’t move yet, couldn’t feel anything properly beyond the low, dull pain, but eventually I saw something familiar. It was a face above me, and a hand reaching down to cradle my throbbing head.

  B, someone said. It sounded like Raoul. I wanted to reach out for him, seize his hand, but all I could do was listen to him saying, B, you’ll be okay. You will. Hang on.

  Then the real noise began.

  I suppose there wasn’t any way we could have avoided setting off alarms. The sound jarred around my head like a pinball machine gone berserk, tripping bells and whistles and screaming lights. All I could do was try to twist away from it. It almost worked. My muscles were starting to obey me again. I felt a hand on my shoulder, though, trying to hold me in place.

  “B,” I heard. “B, it’s Police Chief Barron. We’ll get some help for you, all right?”

  My eyes t
ruly snapped open.

  It really was Barron, squatting amidst the broken glass and displaced tables. He moved to help me up, but I beat him to the punch, sitting up with a dizzying lurch.

  “Lacey,” I said. My voice was pretty much ripped to shreds, and I had to try it again. “Lacey. Is she here?”

  Barron looked over his shoulder. Behind him, two medics were crouched over someone on the floor I couldn’t quite see.

  “Please. Help me up.”

  “B, you probably have a concussion. Don’t push yourself. They’ll be back in a minute to—B, wait!”

  I wasn’t listening. I’d grabbed his shoulder and propelled my queasy self into a standing position. I quaked on my feet and wanted to puke, but at last I could see Lacey.

  The wound at her throat had mostly closed. Strange little lines radiated from the injection, but they were faint, possibly already fading. Her body seemed relaxed and her breathing was shallow, but she still was breathing, and her slightly-open mouth showed nothing but normal human teeth. Her hands were bruised and badly cut, but they were human, too. And as I leaned closer, prompting the paramedics to try urging me into a chair, I saw Lacey’s eyes flutter open.

  “B,” she whispered. “Where—”

  “Try not to talk,” interrupted one of the medics as they hoisted her stretcher up onto its wheels. I’m not sure whether the advice was meant for me or her, but I ignored it anyway.

  “Lacey, you’ll be all right, I promise.”

  Barron caught me then, for I’d tilted off center. Once Lacey was out of the way, he led me through the door, to where another medic tended to an even less conscious Antonella. One more was pushing Grey out the door in a wheelchair. I tried to catch up, but they were out the missing front door and gone before I could even move.

  Raoul was nowhere in sight.

  Barron was already beginning to ask me questions. I guess that was his job. I didn’t answer much of anything, however, until he said, “How about we talk in the car on the way to the hospital?”

  The truck, as it turned out, had already been towed, so there wasn’t much choice on that score. At least, I thought as I headed off with Barron, some organizations in this town had their shit together.