Key to Conspiracy

by Talia Gryphon

  The problem was, Charles Chastel was not a virus-infected Shifter. Since his affliction was the result of a Familial Curse, there was no clear jurisdiction as to who would make the rules about any punishment forthcoming. It was situations like this that made Brant wonder why in hell he hadn’t just taken up painting as a profession instead of dealing with the complexities of modern police work.

  Gillian’s exhausted mind was whirling. She knew Brant was struggling with this and why. It disturbed her slightly to know she and Brant understood each other so obviously, but she’d let that go. Charles’s future was more important than her agreeing with someone she mildly despised. Claire was still asleep so they’d have to wait for her input. Gill thought there ought to be a way out of the situation for Charles but was certain that he and his wife had truly tried every avenue to fix it.

  Since Charles was suicidal, she could try to help him with his depression. A lot of Shifters, and Vampires for that matter, went through a depressed state at some point after their transformation: Vampires and their fangxiety, Shifters and their conversion disorders. She’d speak with him when he came to and see how bad it was. If he was actively suicidal and wouldn’t verbally contract not to take his life, she could have him involuntarily committed for seventy-two hours to a locked psychiatric facility for observation. It probably wouldn’t help but it would buy them some time.

  Goddess, she felt like hell. Her incisions were throbbing, she had a headache and felt like she wanted to sleep for a week. Aleksei was still going to be pissed off; in fact, the whole Vampire group waiting for them in Romania was probably rather displeased with her at the moment. Now she had a suicidal Lycanthrope with a nearly hysterical Fey spouse on her hands and Jack the Ripper on her tail, and she was too tired, too injured and recently had too many chemicals in her system to think straight. For the first time in years, Gillian felt like curling up in a corner and crying.

  It would be so nice to be able to hand off responsibility for a while, even a day, even a minute—not have everyone depending on her decision-making skills, limited as they were at the moment. Life was simpler when she was a soldier. She’d been just a cog in a very large wheel. Being in command of her unit was fine. Even though she made the immediate decisions on assignment, the big choices were made by someone else.

  As a therapist, she helped the client make decisions, followed the rules of her ethical principles. It was a bitch being at the top end of the proverbial food chain. She outranked Brant, even as a civilian; her affiliation with Interpol and the Marine Corps trumped Scotland Yard’s jurisdiction. The buck stopped with her. Shit and double shit.

  Aleksei Rachlav and his large, comforting presence crept into her thoughts. She immediately shoved them back down into the nether regions of her mental basement. No, no and hell no. Thinking about being curled up against that expanse of muscled chest instead of Trocar’s lean form; those powerful arms around her, the long elegant fingers stroking her hair; his deep, resonant, magical voice murmuring in his odd combination of Italian and Romanian to trust him . . . that it would be all right . . .

  “Gillian?”

  “What?” She raised Nile green eyes to Jenna, who was staring at her oddly.

  “Are you all right? You seemed to phase out there for a moment.”

  “Yeah, I’m fabulous.”

  “You are exhausted, Captain,” Trocar reprimanded her.

  “Not any more than anyone else, thank you,” Gill barked back, miffed that anyone noticed her mind wandering.

  Trocar raised a crystalline brow, and she shoved away from him to sit more upright on the divan. He didn’t move, just crooked a finger at her and beckoned her back to her former semireclining position against him. Her answering glare told him she wasn’t in the mood for any more comforting.

  “Please forgive me,” Dahlia chirped, suddenly flustered. “You are all tired and injured, and I am speaking of things that can wait until you are rested.”

  Gillian snorted, “No, it’s fine. This is important and we can rest later. Tonight is another full moon and Charles will be out ravaging the countryside if we don’t figure something out.”

  “We have a room, below the wine cellar, where he normally waits out the Curse.”

  “Why was he not in it last night?” Brant beat Gillian to the question.

  Dahlia blushed prettily. “We had a quarrel. He left to go riding for a while and was caught outside at twilight. His horse came back without him, uninjured, thank the Old Ones, and I secured myself in a safe room that we have upstairs.

  “I was watching the monitors around the property and saw your vehicle drive up. I did not want to risk going outside and hoped that you would drive on . . . Then I saw Charles after you all.” Her eyes welled up and spilled over again. She cuddled her husband’s head against her breast and sobbed.

  “It was very brave of you to come out of the house,” Gillian assured her, shifting her tone and her empathy to a comforting zone for the despondent woman’s benefit.

  “I could do not less. I would like to believe that Charles would retain enough of himself not to harm me, but he has never allowed me to take that chance.”

  “Smart man, your Charles,” Helmut interjected. “It would be foolish to risk yourself in that manner. He cannot possibly remember his deeds while he is in his transformed state. Those affected by a Curse are different from those affected by a true Lycanthrope virus.”

  Everyone fell silent except for Dahlia’s quiet sobbing and the clink of a gilded spoon on fine bone china as Jenna poured another cup of coffee. One could almost hear the noise from all the mental wheels turning as the group tried to think their way out of this mess. They didn’t know Charles Chastel; they only knew what he turned into and what the consequences of that conversion were. Despite his bad timing of tonight and the murders which had occurred over the past year, none of this really was his fault . . . except . . .

  “Wait a minute. You said you found out about Charles’s . . . er . . . problem several years ago.” Gillian had a thought suddenly, and it wasn’t a good one.

  “Yes, that is correct,” Dahlia agreed.

  “Brant, when did the Yard say that the murders in this region began?”

  He looked confused for a moment, trying to remember exactly what Claire had told them in the car, then visibly straightened to look Gillian directly in the eyes. “She said over the last few months, I believe, Dr. Key.”

  A very cold, sick feeling suddenly exploded in her stomach. Charles was suicidal; that was already established. He had exhausted all known methods of solving his problem. There was no cure, no hope. Gillian knew of a phenomenon recognized in American colloquial speech as “death by cop.” Someone who had nothing to live for but who didn’t want to actually take their own life occasionally went ballistic and intentionally set up a circumstance where they would be killed by law enforcement. Death by cop had been practiced for a long time; it had just taken modern psychology a while to catch on to it.

  Gillian turned to Dahlia. “If you both knew what he was, and you say that tonight’s activities were a fluke, how do you explain the vicious murders which have occurred in the past few months? The reports say that the victims were literally torn apart. It would be very difficult to do that if you have him barricaded in a safe room, now wouldn’t it?”

  Dahlia began crying again, rocking Charles against her and shaking her head. This was going to be very bad, Gillian could tell already.

  “He wants to die,” Dahlia blubbered. The Fey woman managed to look positively ravishing even with tears and mucous smeared on her face.

  “Shit,” Gillian said under her breath.

  “Indeed,” Helmut added.

  “Death by cop?” Brant interjected. When Gillian and Helmut looked at him, surprise on their faces, he supplemented, “I do try to keep abreast of things, you know. It is my job.”

  “Dahlia,” Gillian said as gently as she could, focusing a peaceful, calm aura toward the woman, “we ha
ve to figure this out together. If you are helping him in any manner, you are an accessory to those murders. I can’t help Charles and I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth.”

  It took some coaxing but Dahlia explained as best as she could. She hadn’t figured it out herself until recently what Charles was doing. Every month since the discovery of his affliction, on the afternoon of the full moon, she would lock Charles in their safe room, returning for him after a full forty-eight-hour period to make sure he had shifted back to Human form. This had gone on for over two years, a mourned and hated routine to keep her husband and the populace safe.

  Lady Chastel was as pragmatic as she was lovely. She had fallen in love with a Human, married him, and had resolved herself to outliving him, but she’d be damned if she would be robbed of one moment of time for them to be together. Both of them spent time researching Charles’s condition through various avenues. Charles was the curator of a small museum in Rouen, giving him time and professional resources to investigate his ancestor and the Loup-Garou Curse. Dahlia had connections with the Fey, whose network of knowledge was immense indeed.

  They had managed to track down several other families who had been afflicted by the Curse. None, however, had been to Africa during the height of the slave trade and none knew anything about a particular tribe with a Shaman who knew Blood Rites well enough to place a generational Curse on anyone. For reasons unknown, the Loup-Garou Curse was unique to France or French-held territories. Further study showed that each of the families affected was of purely Western European lineage; no influx of different heritage was shown.

  Charles seemed to be the only one consigned to the gigantic horror that he had become. Most of the Cursed were normal Shifter sized—about that of a Welsh or Shetland pony and resembling an extremely large, traditionally thought of wolf. His shifted form was the only anomaly from the pattern.

  The Twilight Court of which Dahlia was a minor noble had looked into it for their fallen sister. She wasn’t well thought of, marrying a Human, but they considered it a minor issue that would be resolved when Charles died after a Human lifespan and Dahlia came back into the fold. They had no more luck than the Human researchers. All of the Loup-Garous were innocent victims of ancestral Curses. Sometimes the Curse was generational, sometimes it was gender based and occasionally, as in Charles’s case, it was both generational and gender-specific—grandfather to grandson. Most of the families opted for letting the Curse die with them at some point in their lineage.

  Charles and Dahlia had decided not to have children at all, rather than resort to abortion of a male fetus if she were to become pregnant. He didn’t want to run any risks of a descendant of his having to deal with the lack of information his own family had provided. No one had talked about his grandfather except in hushed tones. There were no family reunions, no birthday or Christmas cards.

  The Chastel family had been as tightly locked down as Buckingham Palace for information. Charles hadn’t known he had a paternal grandfather until, at eighteen, he was taken to a lonely, overgrown cemetery near a tiny village in the region and shown a simple iron cross with the name “Chastel” on it. Under the name “François Chastel” was “Burdened of the Beast.” His father explained that his grandfather had suffered from delusions and became very violent monthly. Since Paramortal disorders weren’t fully comprehended at the time, Grandfather had been branded a “lunatic” and buried away from the village, outside of Holy Ground, owing to the likelihood of evil possession and possible contagion from mental illness.

  It had been a nice, neat, tidy explanation package that Charles had wholly bought into . . . at least until he turned thirty and found out just how real Grandfather’s problem was. By that time, his own parents were dead, killed in a light plane crash three years prior. There were no known family members to contact, no loose notes or secret panels containing wall safes that could tell him about his heritage. When he met Dahlia at an antiquities auction several months after his parents’ death, he fell in love with her and the idea of a normal, stable family.

  Apparently she felt the same because, Fey or not, she consented to marry him within a month. The couple settled into a quiet comfortable life in Rouen. Charles was curator of the family museum, while Dahlia kept herself involved in the intricate politics of the Twilight Court and with organizing beautification projects for the lovely hamlet. All was rosy until he stayed late in the museum the night after his thirtieth birthday. He had no memory of leaving the office, only of opening the exterior door and stepping into the glowing light of a full moon.

  He woke the next morning, naked in a field—no car, no clothes, but with a bad taste in his mouth, and his feet and hands nearly in ribbons from cuts, gashes and gouges. There was a tiny home in the distance so Charles limped there, found a terrified couple who ushered him in, gave him something to wear and warned him about the Beast of Gauvodan who had risen again and was stalking the land. They gave him a ride back to the museum. His car was there, his keys still in the door, which was wide open.

  Charles called the police immediately. They investigated, determined that he had been the victim of an attempted kidnapping owing to the defensive wounds on his hands and the damage done to his feet and sent him home. Dahlia was waiting for him, frantic and loving. Both of them missed the headline in the paper about the murdered family, nearly a province away.

  They hired extra security for the museum and installed a safe room in their house, complete with steel bars at the windows and extra locks on the doors. Life went on as usual until a month later. Dahlia was gone to a Twilight Court function and Charles was alone, securely locked in their home. He awoke the next evening to a completely ravaged and decimated home.

  Again, he was naked, and again, the police were called. They could find no forced entry, no damage to the outside of the home at all. With shifty eyes and patient explanations, they suggested that Charles might “get some help” for his obvious trauma over his recent kidnapping. Charles knew he was being shuffled off, so he waited until they left before viewing the security tape from the various cameras around the home.

  What he viewed both horrified and sickened him. Watching his own transformation into an unspeakable Beast threw him into a complete mental breakdown. Dahlia returned to find him gone, no note, no explanation. After weeks of searching, she found him in one of the numerous cave systems of France, naked, shivering, and quite out of his mind. Loving care, decent food, and her unswerving devotion healed him to the point where he could communicate what had occurred and show her the tape.

  Instead of packing her things and returning to Fey-ville, Dahlia showed extraordinary character. It was a bad situation—in fact, it sucked—but she took her vows to Charles seriously. For better, for worse, she was staying, even after Charles pointed out that there were no words pertaining to “for when your husband turns into a monster once a month” in their wedding vows.

  When it became apparent that no hope was available or in sight, Charles’s depression took a turn for the worse. He decided that if he couldn’t cure it, he would end it. Dahlia was to lock him in as she had done for years, but Charles would have a way out. He refused to tell her where the key was or where the opening to the outside lay. To him, it was now in the hands of fate. If he died, it was justice. If he lived, he became vengeance. She was at her wit’s end to convince him otherwise.

  Gillian and the others listened intently to the story. All of them were looking for holes in the explanation, any glossing over of the facts, but Dahlia was straightforward and Gill could feel that she wasn’t lying. What to do? What to do . . . ?

  Gill unconsciously tapped her front teeth with her finger. Jenna handed her a cigarette to supplement her oral fixation. She took it, ignoring Trocar’s raised eyebrow.

  “We’ll wait until he comes to, then I need to talk to him alone.”

  “All right,” Dahlia agreed. “But first rest, please. Charles will likely be asleep until the evening.”


  They declined her offer of separate rooms and dozed where they sat. Brant moved over to hold Claire so she didn’t roll off the divan and break her delicate nose. Peace fell over the household except for the quiet bustling of the servants as they went about their daily tasks.

  CHAPTER 11

  GILLIAN awoke to the sound of crying. It took her a moment to realize that it was herself and that Trocar was patting her shoulder comfortingly as she leaned trustingly against him. Abruptly she shoved away and glared up at the spectacular beauty of the Dark Elf.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Forgive me, Petal. But you do not appear to be fine.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “As you wish, Gillyflower.”

  Exasperated, she jumped up and was rewarded with a wave of dizziness. Trocar thoughtfully caught her before she could face-plant into the richly woven area rug.

  “I suggest you remain seated or reclining, Captain, until you are fully healed.”

  “Fine.”

  “Gillian—”

  “I said, fine.”

  Trocar sighed and arranged his former commanding officer on the couch, then went off to locate sustenance for them. Jenna, Helmut, Brant, Pavel and Claire were all still sleeping. Dahlia and Charles were nowhere to be seen. He easily located the kitchen from the distant sounds of onions being chopped. The staff was more than accommodating and promised to send a meal out to them directly.

  His inherent ability as an Elf and as an accomplished assassin allowed him to transverse the entire interior of the estate without detection in search of their hosts. When he had established that Charles and Dahlia were not within the house, he moved his exploration outside. The car was where they had left it, at the gate. The gate itself was still broken and hanging by a single hinge on one side. Two men were working to stabilize the heavy iron and reattach it to the stone wall.