by Marc Daniel
The fight didn’t last long. Within two or three minutes, the only vampire left standing was Lucy. As a matter of fact, she was the only one left at all. The others had all evaporated into thin air under the skinwalkers’ fangs and claws.
Daka’s mates were already on their way back home when Olivia, Daka and Lucy met with Irini in front of a closed western art gallery.
“I see you were able to convince them to let Lucy go,” said Irini.
“It wasn’t much of a problem,’ replied Lucy.
Irini nodded. “Well, we’d better get going Lucy. The clock is ticking. We wouldn’t want to be chased out of town now, would we?” The vampire punctuated her question with a wink and an amused look in Daka’s direction.
Lucy hugged Olivia tightly. “See you soon, sis. I’ll keep in touch.”
“You’d better.”
An instant later, Olivia was left alone with Daka.
“Thanks, Daka, for everything,” she said, though the skinwalker clearly wasn’t pleased with the arrangement.
He tilted his head in acknowledgement but remained silent.
“Don’t be upset. We avenged your packmates and Lucy… and the Western Covenant counts four fewer members. This was a good day; there’s no need for brooding.”
“I just let two vampires get away, Olivia. One of which was responsible for the deaths of countless innocents. There is no cause to celebrate.”
“You heard Michael. Lucy isn’t a real vampire, she’s a hybrid. She doesn’t need to drink blood to survive. And Irini just might be the same way.”
“That theory remains to be proven and it doesn’t change the fact Irini’s a cold-blooded murderer.”
“A cold-blooded murderer who saved Michael and Lucy’s lives and quite possibly mine.”
“Which is why we let her go, but this was the only time she could play this trump. If she ever sets foot on our territory again, she’ll be fair game.”
“Don’t worry about this. She’s heading for Europe as we speak.” Olivia sounded sad. “Lucy always wanted to get the grand tour of the European capitals, but I don’t think this is quite the way she’d imagined her trip.”
Daka looked at Olivia in the eyes. “You’ll see her again, Olivia. You can go visit Lucy in Europe, and as long as she behaves, I promise to look the other way anytime she wants to come and visit you.”
She passed her arms around him and buried her nose in the crook of his neck. She took a long, deliberate breath. His scent was enticing.
They silently held each other for a long moment before Daka worked up the nerve to kiss her. This was only their second kiss. It felt so good, so right, Olivia wanted it to never end. But it did, eventually, and she took it upon herself to initiate the third one, and the fourth. Fifteen minutes later, they were still standing on the exact same spot in a now empty street.
“We should start thinking about heading back. It’s a long drive to your dorm,” said Daka.
“But it’s a short walk to that hotel over there…” replied Olivia.
Epilogue
Sheila got out of the water and walked towards Michael who was staring at her from his deckchair. He found her irresistible in her tiny white bikini, the sun catching in her glistening wet hair. She kissed him hard on the mouth before taking a sip from her mojito.
With Katia Olveda and the Fida’I out of the picture, Michael had insisted on the two of them taking a vacation. Sheila deserved it after everything she’d gone through. Predictably, their departure had ticked Jason Parrish off, but Michael considered that an added bonus.
Going back to St. Lucia had been Sheila’s idea, however. Michael had been surprised by her choice but had kept it to himself. She’d probably thought it would be cathartic to go back where she’d almost died.
“I never told you how sorry I was… you know, about what I told you before leaving your cabin the night it all went down,” said Sheila.
She didn’t need to spell it out; Michael knew precisely what she had in mind. She was referring to the comment she’d made about him systematically killing his offspring.
“I never meant anything by it. I don’t even know where it came from. I was so much into playing my part the best I could for the microphone that it slipped out.’
“Don’t worry about it. I forgave you the minute you said it.” This wasn’t exactly true, but she didn’t need to know that. “You were convincing enough to fool Katia, that’s all that matters.”
Michael’s attention was caught by a half-naked, pasty old man walking along the beach in the distance. As the man got closer, Michael’s suspicion was confirmed. The walking stick was a dead giveaway.
“Look who’s decided to come and ruin our vacation,” said Michael, nodding towards the intruder.
Sheila looked over her shoulder. “Oh my god! Is he wearing a speedo?”
“It sure looks like it.”
An instant later they were visiting with the speedo-clad Ezekiel
“Very stylish,” said Michael.
“I try. You know me, I like to keep up with fashion. Just because one’s older than the pyramids doesn’t mean he shouldn’t strive to look his best.”
Michael and Sheila nodded in agreement, but keeping a straight face was simply impossible. This was the first time Michael had ever seen Ez without his dusty cloak and pointy hat.
“What brings you here, Ez?” asked Sheila.
“I was in the neighborhood, so I thought it’d be rude not to drop by. That, and Michael has some explaining to do.”
Michael knew what explaining Ez was referring to but decided to evade the subject. “First tell me how you found me at Helen’s—I mean Katia’s—that night?”
Ez sighed heavily as he sat down on the nearest beach chair. “I wasn’t looking for you. I was tailing the leader of the Fida’I. I’d placed a trace on him and when he showed up in Montana, I thought it prudent to keep a close eye on our fae. He’s the one who led me to you… Now tell me how you ended up at her house. How did you figure out Helen was Katia?”
“Honestly, the evidence was overwhelming, I was just too daft to see it.”
“Would you care to develop?”
“Let’s start with timing. Helen was somehow always involved in anything that went wrong. She was there when the kid was thrown in the hot spring. She was personally attacked by a tiger—and escaped without a scratch. She had her eyes on every bear slaughtered by the Fida’I and collected blood samples from them for DNA analysis—something nobody would ever do unless they had an ulterior motive.”
“What was her ulterior motive?”
“To make me believe she’d uncovered the existence of praeternaturals and the fact I was a werebear. And it worked for a while. But then she got too greedy.”
“Meaning?” asked Ez.
“She wasn’t shocked enough about the whole thing. She’d just discovered that some of her coworkers could turn into wild animals and wasn’t freaking out. Everyone freaks out at first. Ask Sheila…”
The journalist nodded vehemently. “I confirm! When I found out about Michael’s secret, I just about lost it.”
“How did it make her greedy?” asked the wizard.
“Because she tried to use DNA evidence to make me believe I’d just killed my own daughter. And that’s what lost her. At that point I knew that Helen was actually Katia.”
“As usual, you’re making no sense at all, Michael Biörn.”
“Let me spell it out for your ancient neurons. At this point I already knew that Katia was hiding in plain sight somewhere in the park.”
“How did you know?”
“Because the chameleon had taken her place in prison which could only mean one thing. Katia was in the park posing as someone else. That was the only thing that made sense. Why would she need someone to impersonate her in jail? If she just wanted to break out of jail, the chameleon didn’t need to stay behind to play her part for this long. He could just take the form of one of the guards and walk strai
ght out through the front door. The only reason he could have to stay behind was to mislead us into thinking that Katia was still in jail.”
“Why would he want to mislead us? Why did it matter?”
“Because if we thought Katia was in prison, we wouldn’t be looking for her where she really was, in Yellowstone posing as Helen Fletcher.”
“How did she escape, by the way?”
“That was easy. She just had to fire her lawyer.”
Ezekiel gave him an irritated look.
“Fine. Since you’re a bit slow, I’ll tell you. Her original lawyer was a big shot. She fired him to get a much younger, much less experienced lawyer. At first, we thought there was something to that, but there really wasn’t. The new lawyer was picked purely for her looks. She was very beautiful and bore a strong resemblance to Katia Olveda herself. Similar body, nearly identical hair style and color. The chameleon impersonated the new lawyer for an interview with Katia. Since interviews between a lawyer and his or her client can’t be filmed or recorded, they had all the privacy required for the chameleon to morph into a second Katia Olveda and for the two of them to swap clothes. The real Katia Olveda left the prison dressed as the lawyer while the chameleon took her place in jail. It’s plain as snow in the video footage of the lawyer leaving the interview room, as long as you know what to look for.”
“You still haven’t told me how you figured out that the chameleon had replaced the real Katia in prison.”
“I have you and Daka to thank for this. Thanks to your little experiment with the whistles, I knew there were no chameleon among my nearest coworkers, so what was the chameleon doing? Later on, Daka was talking about Lucy and told me that I might not recognize her because she’d dyed her hair black. That made me realize I’d been working on the wrong assumption. From the beginning we thought the chameleon had been sent to pose as someone else and get close to me, but Daka’s statement made me see that you don’t need to be a chameleon to pose as someone else. Anyone can do it with plastic surgery and hair dye. And if Katia was jumping through hoops to try and kill the people I cared about under my very eyes, wouldn’t she want to be around to witness the impact of her plan first-hand?”
“Maybe…” said Ez dubiously.
“I was already fairly certain of my theory when I went to see the fake Katia in jail. Which is why I’d asked you to talk to Gwendoline about my special request.”
“What was in that syringe, by the way?” asked Sheila. This was a part of the story she’d never heard.
“An amalgam of mercury and iron. The mercury kept the iron flowing, therefore injectable. The mixture is lethal to faes since it contains cold iron but would have been mostly harmless to a werewolf. When I injected the fake Katia with it, she looked panicked until I told her it was wolfsbane. She then relaxed and smiled at me. I knew right there I’d been correct. The real Katia would have been terrified by the idea of a wolfsbane injection, but not a fae who had nothing to fear from the plant.”
“OK. So you knew Katia wasn’t in jail but how did you figure out that Helen was the real Katia?”
“As I was telling you, she betrayed herself trying to convince me I’d killed my daughter when I attacked Kewanee’s bear. The DNA evidence claiming Kewanee was my daughter had to be fabricated since she couldn’t be my daughter. A werebear cannot have a skinwalker offspring. That’s simply not possible. But Katia didn’t know that apparently. When she told me her big news, I just about strangled her on the spot. I don’t suspect she knew about my son so it was just a lucky shot, but had it worked as she’d planned it, her claim would have driven me insane.”
“Of course, Katia also ignored that Kewanee wasn’t dead,” said Sheila with a wink.
“What happened between you and Kewanee? Did you or didn’t you fight each other?” asked the wizard.
“We did… but not really. The whole thing was staged in case anyone was observing us. Sheila and I had long figured out that we were under some type of surveillance. We’d checked our phones and they weren’t bugged, but the enemy was able to somehow keep tabs on us. This was confirmed when I accidentally stumbled upon the microphone Katia had hidden under my kitchen table. I’d dropped a small screw and found the mic while retrieving the screw. From that point on, everything we said inside the house was meant for our enemies’ ears. When we really wanted to communicate, we’d step out for a few minutes.”
“So the fight between you and the bear was all fake?”
“Not entirely fake. I suspected someone might be watching so it needed to look real. My attack could have been fatal had I applied more pressure, but I didn’t. I was careful to only break the skin. A wound deep enough to leave blood for anyone looking for it to find, but shallow enough to heal in a week or two.”
“How did you get Kewanee to play along?”
“Actually, Leka convinced her for me. Based on the evidence we found in Michigan, it was pretty obvious Kewanee was a skinwalker.”
“What evidence told you that?”
“Her mother’s picture, mostly. I immediately recognized her as Enola, an old friend of mine. A friend of mine who was a bear shifter… I hadn’t seen Enola in probably twenty years, but I recognized her right away in that picture. We dated for a short while in the nineties, but I was in the army then and not really available, physically or emotionally. She moved on to a nice guy: Kewanee’s father. I met him and Kewanee one summer when I was back on the reservation to visit some friends. We took a group picture of about thirty of us. In the picture I’m standing on Enola’s right and she’s holding a two-year-old Kewanee in her arms. Kewanee’s father can also be seen standing beside Enola, on her left.”
“I find all this reminiscing very moving, but is there a point to your story? I only asked how you knew Kewanee was a skinwalker.”
“You also asked how I got her to play along. That’s the point I was trying to make.”
“Fine. Carry on.”
“I happen to still have that picture in my possession. I called Leka from Michigan and asked him to go show it to Kewanee.”
“Why Leka?”
“Because if my assumption was correct, Kewanee had been the bear who’d attacked Olivia and Daka. In which case, it was much better if the news didn’t come from them. Plus, Leka has that elvish charm that women seem to appreciate.”
Ezekiel and Michael turned towards Sheila who shrugged evasively. “I haven’t noticed anything special about him,” she said in a purposefully unconvincing tone.
“Anyway, Leka showed Kewanee the picture and she confirmed everything I’d been suspecting. Her dying mother had told her about her real father, me, and asked her to come and meet me. Except that it hadn’t been her mother at all but the chameleon impersonating her after kidnapping the real Enola.”
“And how did you know that?”
“For one thing, the real Enola would have never told such a lie. She knew perfectly well I wasn’t Kewanee’s father. Enola’s doctor had also never heard of her sudden illness. That only made sense if someone had played the part of a dying Enola. Someone convincing enough to fool her own children.”
“But to what purpose?”
“Katia wanted Kewanee to come and introduce herself as my estranged daughter before killing her in front of me. But Kewanee never told me she was supposed to be my daughter. Instead she observed me from a distance and started resenting my relationship with Olivia, a werewolf.”
“That’s why she attacked Olivia.”
“It was probably a contributing factor, but not the main reason. Kewanee was roaming the woods in her bear form when she witnessed Olivia’s wolf entering a cave that served as a den to a black bear and her cubs. The sow attacked Olivia to defend her cubs and cornered her. Olivia had no choice but to defend herself and kill the bear, but that’s not the way Kewanee saw things.”
“Where’s Kewanee now?”
“She went back to Michigan. I believe she feels a bit ashamed about some of the things she’s do
ne. Even though she redeemed herself in the end. She even went as far as storming out of a meeting after bad-mouthing me in front of all her peers.”
“What for?” asked the wizard.
“Just to see which one would come and comfort her. This was her own idea, I never asked her to do that.”
“Did it work?”
“It did. Alexei came to her, agreed with her about me being a jerk and egged her on.”
“Smart girl,” said Ez pensively. “Well, it’s all over now. Even your legs are back to normal.”
“It took them long enough,” added Sheila.
“As soon as I stopped poisoning myself, things got better.”
“Poisoning yourself?” asked Ez.
“The hot spring I jumped into was laced with wolfsbane, courtesy of Katia. That’s why they didn’t heal right away. To make matters worse, I kept applying the ointment she’d given me and which was also laced with wolfsbane.”
“How do you know? Did you get it analyzed?”
“No need for that. I figured it out shortly after breaking a DMSO bottle in the office of Enola’s doctor. He explained to me it was a solvent used in the old day to get drugs into a patient’s blood stream. When we got home and Sheila handed me the jar of ointment, I remembered its weird garlicky smell. I took a whiff and immediately recognized the DMSO odor. The wolfsbane odor was there too, it was just difficult to pick out under the overwhelming smell of the solvent. With my nose the way it had been these past few weeks, I had completely missed it. I also suspect she fed me wolfsbane in every cup of tea she ever gave me, and there were quite a few.”
“That will teach you to keep away from pretty women,” said Sheila, smirking.
“Where’s Lucy?” asked Ezekiel. Michael suspected this was the real reason behind the wizard’s visit. He was about to reply when a chiming phone sound escaped from their beach bag. Sheila retrieved her phone from under the beach towels and smiled before turning the screen towards Michael.