“Don’t do this,” he warned, turning his head just enough that she caught his profile. It was just as harsh and stormy as the sky outside the window, the clouds swirling and tumbling.
“I need to know. I’m tired of us dancing around each other, dancing around the truth. What really happened? What did they do to you? Why did you have to escape?”
“There’s no going back from learning about this. I need you to understand that before I say a word. You’ll never be able to forget what I tell you. There’s no going back. Please, keep that in mind.”
“I am.” And the more he said, the more desperate she was to learn the truth. Was all of this protestation supposed to dissuade her from wanting to learn more? If so, he was doing a terrible job because all he did was spark her interest more and more until she was sure she would explode if she didn’t find out exactly what had happened to him.
“I need to know that I can trust you.”
“You don’t know that by now?” she asked, genuinely interested. “Have I done anything before now that would make you think I’m not trustworthy?”
“This is deeper than anything you’ve learned so far. Maybe bigger than anything you’ve ever learned in your entire life. I don’t know. But what I do know is this: what I’m about to tell you is the difference between my team living and dying. Nothing less than that. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not trying to make things sound more serious than they are just to drive a point home. I mean it. This is life or death.”
He turned to face her again, his arms hanging at his sides now. He looked sort of defeated, and that change in posture struck home in a way nothing else had so far. He was serious. This was very, very serious. No, she wasn’t so sure she could handle what he had to say.
But she had come too far. She wasn’t about to back down now. She nodded firmly, faking courage she didn’t feel. “I want to know.”
“Then I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you why we’ve been on the run, hiding from them all this time. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
There she was, sitting on the bed, thinking she wanted to know, thinking she could handle this.
He almost felt sorry for her. She was naïve, and there was no way for her to know the sort of horrors he’d seen. She might have gone through hell her entire life facing challenges he’d never faced, but he was relatively certain that what he was about to tell her was nothing she’d ever conceived of.
“They did things to us,” he murmured, watching her closely. He could hear her heart pounding, could smell the perspiration forming over her skin. She was so much more afraid than she would let on—and she had no way of knowing how in tune he was with her body’s chemistry. Not for the first time, he felt sort of guilty, like he had an advantage she was unaware of.
She swallowed. “What sort of things?”
“Testing. Experiments. You see, we were all—”
“Wounded. You were all wounded. Right? You were hurt badly.”
Then there he was thinking he was the one who was about to drop a revelation on her. She’d gone and turned things around on him before he knew what to do with himself. “How did you know that?” he whispered, torn between admiration and horror. Just how much did she know?
“Because that’s what they were studying. This… group. These people. That’s one of the few things I managed to figure out as I went over their results. These were people who’d been wounded terribly, and the way the research and the results were framed, these scientists and doctors were experimenting to see whether previously mortal wounds could be treated successfully.”
He dropped into the nearest chair he could find by the window. His legs simply gave out on him out of nowhere. For the first time in forever, the wolf in his head was silent. Even the wolf didn’t know what to make of this, how to react.
“Am I right?” she whispered, chewing her lip.
“Does it look like you’re wrong?” he asked, laughing quietly. He bent at the waist, taking his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees. “I would say I can’t believe it, but I can. I can totally believe all of this. When is it ever going to end?”
“I still don’t understand, though. Okay, so they treated you guys. They did experiments on you, whatever. They saved your lives.”
“I know.” He looked up at her from under his lowered brows. “Believe me, it’s one of the most twisted things I’ve ever faced in my life. Maybe the most twisted thing any of us ever has. We owe our lives to those people—but at the same time, they took our lives. They made us into something we weren’t before. And like I’ve been trying to tell you, they didn’t want anybody to know about it.”
He could practically see the wheels turning in that brain of hers. She was so smart, always analyzing, always breaking things down. She would never figure everything out, not without understanding what those scientists were capable of.
“So, what? What were they going to do to you?”
“Exactly what they’ve been trying to do to you. They were going to kill us. We overheard them talking about it—they tended to forget, I think, the little perks of what they’d done to us. Perks for us, that is, not for anybody trying to keep secrets from us.”
“I don’t get it.”
“No, I don’t guess you would. One of the benefits of what they did was it improved our hearing. All of us. We all hear at a much higher level than we did before. We also see better. We’re healthier. Our muscle mass increased. And we heal very, very quickly from even severe injury.”
He wondered if she knew her fingers were tapping a frantic beat against the bed. No matter how still and composed she tried to make her face, the rest of her body gave her away. She was either starting to understand, or she at least knew that whatever he was trying to tell her was something terrible. Either way, it left her jittery.
He hated what he was about to do, but he hoped it was worthwhile, that it would help him get through to her, that she would understand.
He reached into his back pocket and closed his fingers around the small metal object he’d tucked in there the day before at headquarters. Had it only been a day since then?
He withdrew it, holding it up, letting her see it clutched between his thumb and forefinger. A lead slug, a bullet. The one Doc had pulled from his back.
“You asked me if I was injured yesterday. Remember? I doubt you could forget.”
She stared at the bullet, eyes narrowing. “What is that? Why do you have that?”
“This is a bullet that lodged itself in my back yesterday. Yes, I was shot. I lied to you when I said it was just glass that had cut me, and I’m sorry for lying. I didn’t want to, even though lying has sort of become second nature. We lie all the time, the team and I. There’s no choice. Either we lie about who we are, who those men and women turned us into, or we leave ourselves open for… God, anything. Being killed. Being treated like animals in a zoo. There’s no way any of us would be able to live anything near a normal life if we didn’t protect ourselves, each other. And even then, I don’t think anyone would call our lives normal. We’ll never be normal. That was taken away from us.”
“You mean to tell me,” she whispered, her voice trembling, “that you were shot in the back yesterday? And the bullet you’re holding was in your back? You expect me to believe that? When I’ve seen you walking? When there was no blood pooling from a wound? I mean, you didn’t even bleed in the car—yeah, I checked,” she added when his brows jumped in surprise. “I looked. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going crazy. You managed to convince me it was nothing but flying glass that had cut you. And now you’re telling me you were shot. How am I supposed to believe that?”
“It’s the truth. This is one of the results of what they did to us. I can be shot just about anywhere other than my head and heal like this.” He snapped his fingers. “Does it hurt like hell at the time? Sure. I’m not impervious to pain. But once the damage is done, it fixes itself pretty quickly with no help from
me. All I have to do is sit back and let nature take its course. I had to be reopened just to get the bullet out—I’d already healed up. But it’s not like we could leave that thing rattling around inside me.”
“You’re insane. Do you know how insane this sounds?” It was her turn to hold her head in her hands. “What am I supposed to do with this? How am I supposed to believe any of it?”
“I’m not asking you to understand, but I am asking you to believe. What reason would I have to make this up? Do you have any idea how much I would love for none of this to be true? How much I would love just to be a man again? At the same time, what they did to us opened a whole new world. It’s like this constant sense of being pushed and pulled in opposite directions. Part of me loves being who I am now. I can admit that to you, and I hope you understand. Part of me absolutely loves it. And part of me hates it, too. Do you have any idea how much I want to hold you? How I want to make a life with you? Yeah, I know,” he added when her head snapped up. “I’m leaving a lot at your feet right now, but we don’t have much more time to solve this. Things are coming to a head—I feel it in here.” He tapped the side of his head, staring at her. “He feels that.”
“He? You’re speaking in the third person now? Who is he?”
“The other part of me. The part that didn’t exist before I almost died. I remember being in a tent, being worked on. I remember feeling myself die or at least in the process of dying. I knew it was over, that I would be gone in no time.” He snickered, shaking his head. “I wanted to tell them not to bother with me, that there was nothing they could do. Then I drifted off, in darkness, and it’s crazy but I remember thinking that was the end. I was dead. But then, I woke up.”
He stood since he couldn’t sit still anymore. He’d never spoken of this, not even with the team. None of them ever went too deep into their mental processes during those first days. It would leave them too vulnerable, which wasn’t something any of them particularly enjoyed feeling.
But if it meant her believing him and understanding, it would be worth it.
“Have you ever heard of shifters? Shapeshifters, I mean? I’m just going to come out and tell you they’re true, they’re real. They do exist. They live on the fringes of society, in their own little enclaves. They protect each other. People fear them but not everyone. Some people are greedy. Greedy people always analyze the situation, looking for how it can benefit them. There are people out there who know what shifters are capable of, and to them, a shifter’s blood is worth more than gold. Shifter blood means shifters are capable of almost instant healing from even the most severe wounds.”
He paused, watching her, careful not to dump too much on her at once. He feared the horse had already escaped the barn on that one, though—she looked completely devastated, absolutely stunned, beyond horror-stricken.
That was before light flashed in her eyes, and everything came together at once. Any confusion on her face cleared up instantly. “That was what they treated you with. That was the point of the experiment. All the dosing and the keeping track of how much you’d been given and what the results were, it was shifter blood. That’s why they were able to heal you. Dammit, that was killing me. I was wondering.”
He knelt in front of her, leaning against the bed. “What did you find out?”
“I didn’t find out anything. They wanted us to make neat little reports on each test subject. They made it sound like this was some sort of drug they were going to give wounded soldiers.”
“It was, in a way,” he nodded. Now that she was starting to understand, looking at it from the angle of a highly intelligent person, excitement coursed through his veins. He’d been so afraid she would scream, that she would flinch away from him, that she would tell him she never wanted to see him or hear his voice again.
In the back of his mind, he knew was perfectly possible for that to happen. That once the thrill of putting together a mystery that had bothered her for so long passed, she would start to see the reality all around her. For now, this would have to be enough. The fact that she was still speaking to him, still thinking rationally, would have to carry him through for the time being.
And he was so proud of her then, so awfully proud. She was so brave, so smart.
“Sure. They wanted to see if humans could heal the way shifters did by being injected with shifter blood. Of course, it makes perfect sense.” She threw her hands into the air, almost laughing. “And from what I remember seeing, they were successful. Weren’t they?”
“To a degree. They were successful to a degree, but there were complications they couldn’t have foreseen.” He stood, shrugging. Jamming his hands into his pockets. “Or maybe they could’ve seen the complications if they’d been able to see past the end of their noses. If they had looked at the bigger picture and really thought things through before they went ahead with the experiments, they might’ve understood that something else was possible. A deeper change. Another side effect of being injected with blood from an entirely different species. This wasn’t your normal transfusion, you understand. It wasn’t like we were accepting blood from donors. It would be like me putting, I don’t know, cat’s blood in your veins and expecting you to turn out okay.”
“What happened to you? What side effect was there?” Her eyes were wide with wonder, her mouth hanging slack as possibilities turned and swirled in her head.
Maybe she had already pasted it together but was afraid to voice her guess, or maybe she needed to hear it from him. He knew she was smart enough to figure this out without him, but he felt at the same time that given the way he needed her, their connection, it would be better for him to explain it, to come clean about who he was, what he was.
Which was what gave him the strength to say, “They turned us into shifters, Marnie. That is why they needed to kill us. The fact that they would go to a third party to process the results of their research blows my mind, but the things you’re telling me now prove that you have an understanding of the experiments they conducted. There’s no way you could know the sort of things you know if they hadn’t turned to you for help. Maybe they ran out of staff to do it for them. I don’t know. I don’t know how these people think, honestly—we can try to profile them all we want, but they’re just as much a mystery to us as they’ve ever been. All I know is they panicked when the experiments resulted in these unexpected side effects, and from what we understood, they were going to destroy everything. All records, all proof of what had been done. If we’d healed up and stayed human, they probably would’ve been called heroes. Some of them were probably already working on their speech for the Nobel award ceremony, but they panicked when they saw what they turned us into. I guess I would’ve too. Nobody expects to watch a man turned into a full-grown wolf—bigger than that, even. We’re bigger than average wolves. Just like we’re bigger than average men.”
Her tongue darted over her lips, moistening them after they’d gone dry. He was losing her; he could feel it. It was like she started to unplug herself, one plug at a time. She was disconnecting. She could accept everything he’d told her but this.
Whether that was because she didn’t believe she was in the presence of shifter or because she didn’t want to believe that someone she cared for wasn’t entirely human, he couldn’t say. He only knew he had to bring her back.
“Marnie, this is just who I am. Like I said, I have to know I can trust you with this. All of our lives are at stake. We escaped the lab, those of us able to do it—some of us were left behind, and I’ll never forgive myself. I don’t know what happened to them. They got sick, something went wrong with them. We couldn’t move them—they would’ve died without the machines they were hooked up to keeping them alive. I only hope that wherever they are, they forgive us. But the rest of us, my team? We’ve been hiding from them ever since. It would be the end of these monsters if anyone found out what they’d done, which is why they’re after you and your team. They have to tie up loose ends.”
“Give
me a second.” She closed her eyes, breathing deeply in and out. He knew better than to interrupt her just then. She needed a minute to herself. In this fragile, upset state, even the slightest push could send her over the edge.
It was torment waiting to see how this was going to play out. Whether she could accept this. The chance was always there that she’d reject him because it was too much for her to handle. What would he do if that happened?
Simple. He’d have no choice but to accept it since he couldn’t force her. Even if it were possible to force a mate to accept their role, he wouldn’t do it to her.
But whatever it was would have to happen later, separate from the trouble they were still in.
The breath caught in his throat when her eyes opened, and they found him immediately. “Okay. What do we have to do about this right now? How can we keep you guys safe?”
He should’ve known she would immediately think of somebody other than herself. There he was, expecting her to say she couldn’t be in his presence anymore, and she went and surprised him. “No, that’s our problem, not yours.”
“But it is my problem because you need to be safe if I’m going to be safe. What can we do? Is there anything I can do?”
“Marnie, you don’t—”
She held up a hand, cutting him off. “Please, don’t tell me what I do and don’t have to do. I need to feel like I’m doing something. Is your team working on trying to decode the data?”
“Yes. I don’t know what good they think it’s going to do, but that’s something they’re working on.”
“I might be able to help.”
He tipped his head to the side, curious now. “How?”
“One of the contacts we were working with accidentally sent me the wrong file one time. It was back in the beginning when we first became involved with them. In that file was sort of a decryption key, something that they were using on their side to help them make sense of how they’d kept track of their findings.”
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 70
