Madison's Song

by Christine Amsden

  So what was Alexander’s lackey doing here, of all places? It didn’t take her long to make the mental connections, and when she did, she did not like the picture forming in her mind. Could Alexander or his organization somehow be involved in studying werewolves?

  Madison tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter to cover her eight-dollar meal, then began to edge towards the door without collecting her change. The man... Larry! That was it. Larry kept his eye on her the entire time, but he didn’t make a move. She had almost decided he wouldn’t make one when she turned to push open the door, and froze.

  She had felt this way before. Her half brother, Evan, could do much the same thing, holding a person in place with the power of his mind, but there were a few important differences. First, even when he was being heavy-handed, she knew Evan had her best interests at heart, and wouldn’t hurt her. Second, Evan was much stronger than Larry, whose control kept slipping at odd moments, so that she could suddenly move an arm or a leg before he reasserted his control over that body part. Third, and most importantly, or at least most immediately, he didn’t have the practiced command over the gift it took to really control it. To put it another way – it hurt. The pressure on her chest, in her lungs, made it difficult for her to breathe. The tightness on her limbs pinched, tugged, and pulled like he was trying to tear her apart rather than hold her in place.

  It was all too much. It might be clumsiness, or it might be intentional cruelty, but either way it made tears spring to eyes that felt like they might pop.

  Then Larry came up behind her, put an arm on her shoulder, and whispered a few words. After that, the world went black.

  Chapter 17

  SCOTT SPENT THREE MORE DAYS IN Illinois, dealing with the fallout of his actions. It wasn’t enough that he establish a new pack leader, he also had to answer for his actions to neighboring alphas. Luckily, the neighboring alphas had already expressed concerns, so it didn’t take much to convince them that Isaac had needed killing, but the formalities had to be observed.

  Clyde, Scott decided, would make a decent alpha. Not a great one, but there wasn’t a wolf in the pack he thought would make a great alpha. If there had been, he would have stood up to Isaac. At least Clyde would return their monthly hunting to the woods, but he clearly hated Scott for butting in, and that enmity would define them both for years to come.

  Scott had never felt more relieved to return to his own pack, even if it did mean facing Jessica again. It was time to finish with her, and to hell with what the rest of the pack might think. He would find himself a real mate someday, but in his own good time and not before. He had to quash down images of Madison. That was over. No, it had never even begun. Time to move on, to move past, to...

  Oh hell, who was he kidding? He hadn’t moved on or moved past her in two years, so why would he start now? He didn’t even completely understand what drew him to her so powerfully. There was definite chemistry, he had noticed that right away, but chemistry wasn’t limited to one perfect partner. He’d felt chemistry with other women, but never anything like this. That wasn’t some cheesy line, either. It was almost as if his gift of intuition had kicked in, adding weight to the pheromones. Maybe that was exactly what had happened, his intuition telling him that this was the perfect woman for him, or would have been before he had foolishly gotten himself bitten by a werewolf.

  Scott remembered that day with vivid clarity as he spoke to two of his trusted lieutenants about the lab in Texas, and how they might approach it. Chad and Ben were both much older than Scott, and had both been members of the pack when their former alpha, Sam, had hit upon a brilliant idea. Well, the idea had turned out to be the death of him, but at the time, he’d thought it was a brilliant idea. Sam was not a native of Eagle Rock, nor a sorcerer, but he had always heard rumors. He had never heard of a werewolf sorcerer before, however, and thought the combination would make for an extremely powerful wolf.

  He was right. Scott was an extremely powerful wolf. He had, after all, killed the man who had bitten him during his first transformation and had taken over as pack alpha at the tender age of sixteen, making him the youngest alpha in living memory.

  He shouldn’t have been anywhere that a werewolf could have gotten to him. The pack hadn’t roamed near Eagle Rock at the time, but it had still been dangerous, even cocky of him to go out into the woods alone at the full moon. He had been trying to adapt one of his family’s invisibility spells to get around the modern issue of cameras when the wolves had set upon him. They hadn’t seen him, but they had smelled him.

  The worst of it was, he’d never had the chance to test his spell.

  Chad and Ben both claimed that they had been against their former alpha’s plan. Scott knew they were liars, but they were loyal liars, eager to shift their allegiance to the new and far more powerful alpha.

  Scott didn’t go to Texas alone; he took nearly half his pack with him. Many of them had to take time away from work to make the trip, but Scott could compensate their financial losses, and he only took those who wouldn’t lose their positions for being away. He couldn’t abandon his territory completely, especially not after making an enemy of the neighboring pack.

  Jessica came with him, though he wished she hadn’t. He also brought Chad and Ben, and ten others. They would call attention to themselves if they all took rooms in the small town which largely supported the military base, so most of them took rooms in nearby Houston, an hour away and ready to go if he needed them.

  For now, only Scott and Chad stayed in town. Jessica wanted to, but he put an end to her whining by suggesting that someone needed to lead the backup group. Ben snickered at the idea of having to follow her, but Jessica was convinced enough that she wouldn’t throw a fit or do anything to sabotage the group.

  Despite bringing backup with him, Scott felt fairly certain that he would sneak onto the base and into the laboratory alone. Three generations of Lees had come close to perfecting the art of invisibility, mostly using the talent to then rob wealthy people blind. They weren’t so noble that they turned around and gave anything away to the poor – there were no Robin Hoods in his family tree – but they did choose targets they felt could afford the losses. Scott’s parents had died before he could come up with his own value judgment on their lifestyle, and they had left enough money behind that he didn’t feel the need to follow in their footsteps. At least, after he sold their mansion, several cars, two boats, some jewelry, and two vacation homes – one in Colorado, and one in Florida.

  No, he didn’t judge their lifestyle, especially after he had done far worse than steal. They’d never done anything remotely violent and had condemned violence in almost any form. They actually considered themselves to be pacifists. Scott wasn’t sure if a thief could really be a pacifist, but that’s what they had believed. At least they hadn’t lived to see what he had become.

  Scott didn’t make his move the first night. He spent that time learning what he could of the facilities from the outside, which wasn’t much. The base supported the lab, the lab was top secret. Even the locals didn’t know what anyone did there, although most suspected weapons research or biological warfare.

  On the second night, Scott decided it was time to learn the truth for himself. He spent the afternoon meditating, preparing himself for the potentially exhausting night ahead. Maintaining an aura of invisibility for hours would not be easy, especially away from his home node, but sometime during the afternoon he discovered a smaller node perhaps a mile or so away. It wasn’t his, it wasn’t familiar, and it wasn’t as big as he was used to, but it would help. He spent an hour or so familiarizing himself with its energy before deciding he had prepared as well as he could.

  Strange, he thought as he left his hotel room that night, that there was a node so near this military base. In fact, if he didn’t miss his guess, the node was located directly beneath it. Nodes weren’t exactly common; there were three or four dozen of remotely noteworthy size scattered across the continental US. A
nd there was one here, right beneath the military base.

  Scott drew himself up short. His instincts were trying to tell him something, but he didn’t know what. He only knew this was not going to be a straightforward operation. He considered turning back, but squashed the impulse. Delay tactics would do no good. One way or another, he needed to scope this place out.

  Getting onto the base didn’t turn out to be at all difficult. He walked past the armed guards, who neither saw nor heard him. There were cameras aimed at the entrance, but nobody seemed to be monitoring them. If they had, they would have seen a figure dressed in head-to-toe black and they would have raised the alarm. Scott would have retreated, knowing a bit more about his enemy. He’d more than half expected the night to play out that way.

  Was it possible they were expecting him?

  The thought wouldn’t go away, a sign that his intuition had kicked in. Strangely though, he didn’t feel the urgent need to flee. He felt more a sense that he needed to be ready for anything because while he might end up in trouble tonight, tomorrow night would be worse. They’d be more ready for him then.

  Scott found the lab about a half mile from the gated entrance, an unimposing structure that looked innocent in the waning moonlight. He didn’t trust it.

  Getting in the lab wouldn’t be as easy as walking past a guard. Entrance required a keycard and a fingerprint scan. He might have taken the opportunity to slip in after a worker, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t work. His instincts were on alert again.

  He made as little noise as possible as he rounded the building in search of a window, careful to steer clear of cameras. He could mask sounds through illusion, but fooling a person’s eyes was easier than fooling their ears, so it was best to keep quiet.

  The lab was a one-story complex, so finding a window he could reach was no problem. Finding one that showed anything interesting, on the other hand, proved a far more difficult task. The first room he found looked like a break room, with a solitary man eating a late dinner while watching “The Tonight Show” on a small TV in the corner.

  Scott moved past that window to another, which showed some kind of workroom with a long, metal table in the center and a row of cabinets along one wall. No one was in there, and nothing leaped out at him to tell him what the room’s usual purpose might be.

  No other windows along the side of the building showcased anything of interest. Scott was rounding the corner to the back when he heard something rustling in the grass. He froze, back against the wall, waiting for whoever or whatever it was to make another sound, but nothing happened.

  Scott sniffed the air. If there was something back there, it would be downwind of him, so he wouldn’t be able to smell it. Whatever it was might be able to smell him, though. He could go back around the front of the building and try to approach from the other direction, or he could wait here in case whoever it was revealed himself.

  He took a deep breath, and let his instincts guide him. They told him to wait, to be patient, something he excelled at. He used the skill in wolf form when stalking prey – it wasn’t even a higher level function, but a deeply ingrained instinct.

  His patience paid off, but not immediately. It wasn’t in the nature of patience to pay off right away. Nor did he know precisely how long it took, since he didn’t dare move to look at his watch. Judging by the position of the moon, he waited perhaps an hour, maybe an hour and a half, but finally he heard the sound again.

  A soldier came around the corner from the back, his rifle in the lead, his posture screaming that he expected trouble. He didn’t see Scott, hidden by his shroud of invisibility, and he didn’t smell like a werewolf, but he sniffed the air as if he could detect something. Most humans did not have such a keen sense of smell, forcing Scott to wonder if this was some new kind of magical creature. If he was, he smelled perfectly human, which would make him all the more dangerous.

  The rifle swung past Scott, the man moving forward to take a closer look along this side of the building. He sniffed the air again, but evidently decided his nose was playing tricks on him, because he ended up returning to the back of the building.

  He was guarding something back there. Or setting a trap. Scott felt it as a bone-deep certainty. He hoped it was the former, because the idea that they had set a trap suggested they expected him, or someone like him, to come here. And why would they do that, unless...

  Unless Clinton had been bait.

  He didn’t like his new line of reasoning at all, but at least he wasn’t certain of it. Something was off here, but he didn’t have a clear logical path to an answer yet, not without more evidence. Anything else was simple conjecture, and if he wasn’t careful, he might miss the truth because he had bought into an incorrect conclusion.

  The question before him now was: Fall back or push forward? He recognized the danger if he kept moving, and not just from the soldier he had seen. If he had seen one, there were likely others. But at this point they didn’t seem aware of his ability to make himself invisible.

  Besides, what would he accomplish by returning the next night? The soldiers would still be there, and he would still be alone. He couldn’t lead his wolves into a trap, and while he had considered calling upon Evan for help, he knew now that he couldn’t do that. Evan was strong and capable, a fierce opponent in battle, known in magical circles as a man not to cross. But that didn’t mean he could out himself to the world at large without consequences, which is precisely what would happen if he went up against the US army. It wasn’t about keeping the larger secret – the military had known about the existence of magic for years; studying werewolves was just another offshoot. But there was magic and then there was Magic. Few sorcerers of Evan’s caliber existed, fewer still with his insights as to how to use it.

  So Scott was on his own, which suited him best anyway. If he had to kill someone tonight, he wanted it on his conscience alone.

  The wind stubbornly refused to switch directions, so Scott decided to go the long way around and approach the back of the building from the other side. There was a brief moment of tension around the front when he thought another soldier smelled him, but the man turned the other way, and Scott continued to pass unnoticed.

  Scott checked the windows along this side of the building as well, not wanting to leave a stone unturned. The first three held as much interest as those on the other side, but the fourth and final window held precisely what he had been looking for. He felt an eerie prickling sensation running down his spine as soon as he saw the bars. He recognized Clinton from pictures Madison had shown him, though he had never personally met the boy. He wasn’t sleeping. Instead, he stared blindly into the darkness, yellow eyes glowing in the night.

  Yellow eyes?

  Scott looked again. The boy’s eyes weren’t the deep brown from his picture. Instead, they were the wolf’s eyes, hungry and yellow. That was the first thing he noticed. After that, other elements began clicking into place – his eyebrows were thick, dark tufts of fur, more hair lined the backs of his hands, and his fingers ended in sharpened claws.

  He wasn’t the wolf, but he wasn’t human either. He was something else, something Scott didn’t want to consider. If he had to put down Madison’s brother...

  What? If he had to put him down, she’d never speak to him again? She probably wouldn’t anyway after Clara.

  Scott backed away from the window, worried those sharp eyes might somehow penetrate his disguise. The wolf wasn’t as easily fooled by illusion magic as the human. Time to beat a strategic retreat until he could formulate a plan.

  Scott was just about to pull away from the window when those penetrating yellow eyes focused on him, and in that instant Scott knew Clinton could see him. There was recognition there, and more intelligence than he usually saw in the golden eyes of the wolf.

  Clinton stood and let out a long, low howl. It was an alarm, Scott realized. Clinton was sounding the alarm. Scott wanted to think he had made a mistake, but even if his intuition wasn�
��t screaming the truth at him, in the next instant Clinton slammed his fist against a button set into the wall. And sirens screamed.

  Scott whirled around, ready to flee, but before he had a chance he felt several points of sharp, stabbing pain in his chest and arms. He was almost more surprised than hurt. He looked down, thinking he would see bullets, thinking too that none had penetrated his heart. He might recover, but it would take time, and in the meanwhile he couldn’t hold the illusion.

  They weren’t bullets, though. They were darts. He pulled one out of his torso just before the world faded, and went to black.

  Chapter 18

  SCOTT WOKE QUICKLY, HIS HIGH METABOLISM making short work of the sedative used in the darts. He did not, however, open his eyes right away. First, he used his other senses to gather information about his location.

  He lay in a bed, soft mattress and sheets beneath him, while a blanket covered a body that had otherwise been stripped of its clothes. Lack of clothing might make escape awkward, but if he could bring illusion magic to bear, it wouldn’t be too bad. The question was, had they bound his powers?

  It took him longer than he would have liked to discover the answer. He drew in several deep breaths before finding his quiet place amidst the pillows and softness. Somewhere in there was his source of magic, but it took far longer than usual to find it, at least in part because he feared he wouldn’t. When he did finally latch onto the thrum of energy he felt such sweeping relief that he let it fill his body, even though he did not have a purpose for it. It had been a long time since he had wanted nothing more from the magic than to feel it, hold it, and let it reassure him. He probably hadn’t done that since he was a child.

  He was indoors, in some kind of sterile environment, judging by the strong smell of disinfectant. Someone was in the room with him, a human female who foolishly did not smell afraid. She should be; she had not even tied him down. Did they really think they could hold him with his magic intact, his strength intact, and without so much as simple restraints to bind him?