by Kelly Meding
“Alrighty then,” I said. “You guys ready to go snooping? And don’t nod, because I can’t see you.”
Crossing the street felt a lot like lining up for the school bus when I was a kid. Tennyson led us, since he could actually see us a bit, and we used the buddy method of walking hand in hand. I held his with my left and Jaxon’s with my right, and he held on to Chandra. I faintly heard our footsteps and the swish of fabric as we moved, but feeling pressure on both hands, not seeing them at all?
Kind of a mind-fuck. I did not like being invisible. At. All.
Novak had gone ahead, head ducked over a piece of paper with the building’s address on it. He held the front door open long enough for our quartet to slip inside, while pretending to puzzle over the paper. He was supposed to play it all off like he’d written the suite number down wrong, so in case there were security cameras at all, they wouldn’t pick up on the door opening and closing on its own.
The glamoured wall between us and the elevator was gone, and we walked right through it as Novak rang the buzzer for service. A moment later, the elevator doors dinged open, and the same middle-aged man stepped out. He walked around to the desk, while Tennyson led us into the elevator. The doors shut, but it didn’t go anywhere, and we didn’t want to arouse suspicion by pushing a button.
Fortunately, we’d talked this bit out before leaving the office, so we didn’t have to talk too much where it was deadly quiet.
Are you nervous? Tennyson asked.
A little. I don’t like not knowing what to expect.
If all my centuries of life have taught me anything of value, it is that the unexpected can often be the most rewarding experience of all.
Something in his tone gave me the impression he was smirking at me.
The doors slid open, and the receptionist got in, muttering about idiot out-of-towners. We’d spread out with our backs to the rear wall of the car, but he still got uncomfortably close in the large space. He hit the first button on top, and the car rose to the next level. Butterflies erupted in my stomach, and I must have swallowed a bit too hard, because the guy’s head snapped to the left.
No one could see or smell us, but they could still hear us, and I silently screamed at myself for not focusing on more senses than just the eyes when I wrote the wish.
Sweet Iblis, please, no one get hiccups.
The doors slid open. The receptionist got out first, and then Tennyson slipped our chain through the doors before they closed. The hospital-like corridor was quiet, and the man went directly into a small office across from the elevator. He sat in a recliner, put his feet up, and unpaused whatever show he was watching. The room also had a mini-fridge, microwave, overflowing garbage can, and computer monitor showing the lobby, angled toward the sliding glass window.
So this guy’s literal job was to sit around and occasionally fend off nosy people?
Cushy.
Tennyson squeezed my hand twice—the agreed-upon signal that we were going to keep moving from a stopped position—so I passed it to Jaxon. After a pause, Tennyson pulled me down the corridor.
And I say it was hospital-like, because it had the wide hallways, linoleum floors, and numbered doors every few yards. But it also didn’t seem to be occupied. Some of the rooms had beds, others only the electric panels on the walls where equipment would one day go, but none had occupants.
“Guess they aren’t using this one,” Jaxon whispered.
“Makes sense,” I replied. “They wouldn’t want their random security/front desk guy getting an eyeful of their goings-on.”
“Agreed,” Tennyson said. “Let us attempt to find stairs before risking the elevator again.”
We didn’t find stairs, which was definitely a building code violation. But it was also smart on the bad guys’ part, because it left the elevator as the only way in or out—an elevator you needed a key card to access.
“Can you gazelock the desk clerk while I rob him of his key card?” I asked Tennyson.
“Certainly.”
So we went back to the little office and did just that. The guy was mesmerized long enough for us to get back onto the elevator. I chose the symbol that looked the most like it could be a dog or wolf, which was third from the top.
“Should we split up and search?” Chandra asked. “Go in pairs?”
“Yes,” I said. “Explore and return to the elevator in thirty minutes.” After a split second’s hesitation—and because I didn’t need the argument—I released Jaxon’s hand.
“Shi—” he started.
“Go with it.” We didn’t have time to discuss the pairing choices, because the doors slid open to a much more active corridor than two floors down.
Our foursome kind of collided a bit on the way out the elevator doors, but we managed to do it without making noise. Not being able to see myself was discombobulating enough without knowing three other invisible bodies were out there moving around. The hall was the same size and shape as the other, but people were actually moving around up here. Not only a few folks in white lab coats, but also men and women in everyday garb, and it didn’t take long before I recognized faces.
The werewolves.
Tennyson squeezed my hand twice before leading the way. I stuck close behind, and his cloak occasionally brushed my legs. It took a bit of dodging, but we wove our way into the bustle. Everyone seemed free to move about, as we’d been told, but I sensed an air of tension in the werewolves, probably thanks to our interference. Being told you were volunteers and then being denied the ability to leave could shake up even the bravest person.
Werewolves didn’t take well to captivity.
We passed a bit too close to a female patient, and her head snapped to the side. I swore she looked right at me, which wasn’t possible. She shouldn’t be able to see or smell me—but werewolves had sensitive ears, too. My shoes didn’t squeak and my clothes didn’t make much noise, but it wasn’t as if I could stop breathing or slow my heartbeat.
Being a vampire like Tennyson occasionally had perks.
A very familiar voice drew us toward one of the rooms. Alice and Raymond Anderson were speaking with a Floridian couple in hushed tones, so we inched into the room. Raymond looked in our direction briefly, then returned to the intense conversation. I caught enough to know they were discussing leaving the clinic. Alice mentioned Chandra’s name, and I nearly spoke up. But a disembodied voice would probably cause a ruckus that might bring doctors or guards down on us, and Tennyson and I needed to remain undetected.
More and more of the werewolves appear to be in favor of leaving, Tennyson said.
Good news for us. Now we need to a plan to get them out.
We need to acquire more information about this facility.
No kidding.
Curious about something, I focused on Alice and pushed into her mind the same way I had with Jaxon this morning. I didn’t know her well, but we’d spoken and I knew a few things about her. If I could reach her mind . . . there. An image of three toddlers, all under the age of five, with bright, smiling faces. Raymond and Alice wrangling them in a professional photography studio, the family in cute, matching outfits. No words or sense of emotion, only their joyful quintet.
I pulled back, and in that same moment, Alice looked at me. Not directly in the eye, but exactly where I stood near the door, Tennyson’s hand cool in mine. She stood, and I held my breath. Instead of my position, Alice poked her head out the door.
“Something wrong?” the other female asked.
“I’ve got the strangest sense of being watched,” Alice said.
“I got that sense, too,” Raymond added. “But I don’t smell anyone nearby except us.”
“It’s bizarre.” Alice was close enough to touch me if she moved six inches to her left. “Then again, everything about today has been bizarre.”
Tell me about it.
Inside my head, Tennyson chuckled.
Once they resumed their conversation, I double-squeezed Tennyso
n’s hand so we could keep moving. We circled the entire floor and found only werewolves and the occasional person in a lab coat. No obvious guards anywhere, and only a few security cameras that I could easily spot. We waited by the elevator, and Tennyson brain-shared when Jaxon and Chandra joined us.
We should wait and follow one of the lab coats, I said.
Agreed.
Jaxon’s flinch indicated Tennyson shared the information, and the softest sound was probably Jaxon whispering it to Chandra. With Tennyson’s guidance, I found Jaxon’s hand again; he squeezed tight.
We waited a little longer than I would have preferred, considering we only had a little over an hour of invisibility left. Should have asked for longer than two hours, but it was too late now. Finally, a dark-haired woman with a small metal tray approached the elevator. The tray held four labeled blood samples.
Score.
She swiped her key card, and the elevator dinged open. After she entered the car, Tennyson led us inside, sticking close to the walls. She went down one to the floor we’d skipped. It had the same basic shape, but instead of rooms, the corridor held a series of both open labs and secured metal doors that reminded me of solitary confinement cells.
We trailed the lady to one of the labs, where she handed over the samples to someone else, before returning to the elevator. Five people were working in the large lab, which looked like the set of an apocalyptic movie right before the deadly virus was accidentally released on the unsuspecting populace.
In other words, it was creepy as hell. I’d hated chemistry in school, so I didn’t know a beaker from a Bunsen burner, but all the familiar equipment was there, along with computers, dry-erase boards covered in numbers and weird words I didn’t recognize, and a refrigerator full of blood samples and other things.
No one here was really talking, though, and we couldn’t access a computer with so many eyes in the room. We moved past the first lab to one of the sealed doors. It had a window with a cover you pulled back to peer inside. My hands were full, but the cover slid very slowly open, thanks to Tennyson. He made a startled noise that didn’t bode well for whatever was inside, and when he gave my hand a single squeeze, I nudged him aside to look.
On a torn mattress on the floor, a creature lay moaning softly. And when I say creature, it’s because I wasn’t entirely sure what I saw at first. A man’s bare torso was really the only easily human part of him. His muscled arms ended in furry, clawed hands, and his legs were basically those of a brown wolf. No visible dick, just a brown thatch of fur covering his groin. And his head was . . . grotesque. Human nose and mouth, but the rest of him was pointed ears and wolf fur.
An experiment. Either a werewolf trapped during a shift, or a man turned werewolf. The former was awful, but the latter was downright horrifying.
This is insane.
Agreed. Let your friends look, but we must keep moving.
I tugged Jaxon toward the little window. His hand gave a startled jerk. I knew when Chandra looked, because she couldn’t hold in a startled gasp. Inside the room, the creature growled. The window cover slid shut.
Three more rooms in a row contained similar creatures in varying stages of transformation, all of them men. We passed another lab with half a dozen scientists—doctors? researchers? Whatever. Again, a lot of quiet and not much information. More cells and hybrids.
Our invisible time was quickly winding down when he finally hit pay dirt. Nearly back to the elevator was a propped-open door that said “Morgue.” The interior looked like any city morgue, only the refrigerated lockers were bigger, and in the far corner, two women were performing an autopsy, while a tall man in a lab coat watched. The dead body was mostly human, but both arms and legs were furry, clawed, and wolf-like.
They’d split the man’s chest open.
“. . . most successful so far for what we want,” the man said. “I want to know why he fell over and died in the middle of an exam.”
“That’s what we’re looking at,” a woman replied. She had bright auburn hair, so she got designated Red. “His heart is incredibly enlarged, so it’s likely the stress of the protocol ended in heart failure.”
“So we need to adjust the protocol to account for that.”
“Yes, Dr. Ferguson.”
Son of a bitch. That was the guy in charge of the fertility treatments.
Another man entered the morgue, and our group had to shift quickly out of the way to avoid a collision. “Dr. Ferguson,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt, but I thought you’d be interested to know that there’s a group of Para-Marshals in town.”
Ferguson looked sharply up, his weathered face pinched in a frown. “Are they responsible for the power surge earlier?”
“I believe so. According to Office Murphy, they’re here chasing down a rogue werewolf, and they’ve taken over an office in the municipal building. There was a report made of a large dog-like creature on the east side of town, so that’s likely true.”
“Perhaps, but too many unusual things have happened already today. A random couple wanting treatment from us, that magical surge, Para-Marshals, and now one of our werewolf volunteers wants to go home? No. Have those Marshals watched, Hiller.”
“Yes, sir,” Hiller replied. “Already on it. So far, they haven’t left the municipal building. Oh, and they have a vampire with them.”
“A vampire?” Red asked. She’s paused in the process of removing and weighing a kidney. “In Gabriel?”
I could practically see Tennyson’s smirk.
“That’s unusual,” Ferguson said. “I don’t like it. We’re too close to perfecting our protocol. I won’t allow interference in our plans. I don’t care who they are. If any of them comes near this building again, kill them.”
“Yes, sir,” Hiller said.
Guess we got under his skin.
Time grows short, Tennyson said. We must allow ourselves time to leave the building unnoticed.
Yup.
After Hiller left, we backed out of the morgue as quietly as possible. Even though we’d only searched three out of five floors, I’d seen enough to know the place was bad fucking news, and whoever this Damian person was—and DM Clinic, really?—he was twisted. We waited as long as we could for someone to use the elevator, but we were already cutting it close, so when no one came, I swiped the keycard when no one else was in the corridor.
It took a minute to arrive, and then we were headed down. With no time to return the keycard—hey, it might be useful later—we went right to the ground floor, opened the main door as little as possible, and left. Tennyson led us directly across the street to the municipal building. Banged open the door to our office, and we’d only just released each other’s hands when the power of Jaxon’s wish shattered.
I blinked my own body back into focus, before looking around. Yup, all of us were there, and we all appeared to be intact.
“That was a mind-fuck I don’t want to do ever again,” Jaxon said.
“Agreed,” Chandra replied. “Being invisible to my own body was highly disconcerting.”
“It was fucking weird,” I agreed, “but we got the information we needed.”
“Which is?” Kathleen asked. She was clearly agitated and bored, even though she could have spent the last two hours looking for Gideon, instead of moping around the office with my mother.
Wait.
“Where’s Novak?” I asked.
“Looking for your missing werewolf,” Kathleen said.
“But that Hiller guy said none of us had left the building.”
“Who?”
Our quartet—okay, so mostly me and Jaxon, but the others chimed in a little—detailed our surveillance, ending with the morgue conversation.
“My God,” Mom said. “They’re creating made werewolves?”
“Yup, and everything Ferguson said confirmed it,” I replied. “They call it a protocol, and apparently, he’s nearly perfected it.”
The danger in creating a serum to turn adult
men into forced wolves was staggering, no matter who possessed the technology. The only way to force someone into being a werewolf required a painful bite from a shifted, born wolf and a near-death bleed-out by the human. The transformation was also incredibly painful, and few survived the change. It was an ineffective way to create a shifter army for anyone, but this?
This was some serious shit.
“Ferguson is also highly suspicious right now,” Jaxon added. “Especially of us being here, so we need to make a better show of actually looking for Gideon before dark.”
“We also need to figure out if this place has a motel,” I said, “because there’s not really enough room for us to sleep on the floor in here.”
“I can take care of that while you continue your discussion,” Mom said. “I need a bit of air, anyway.”
“Be careful.”
“I always am,” she said, throwing my words back at me.
Seriously, Mom?
“So Damian is creating another army for himself,” Kathleen said after Mom left. “Just as he paid for the necromancer to steal a vampire Line and bend it to his will, he wants werewolves who are obedient to him.”
“Pretty much. And it’s all been happening under our damned noses.”
“Bumfuck, Kansas, isn’t exactly on our radar, Shi,” Jaxon said. “They’re remote for a reason.”
“It just doesn’t seem possible no one knew what was going on here.”
“Damian has a long reach,” Kathleen said. “Let us not assume no one else knows about this facility.”
“Like who?”
“Such an army is attractive not only to the private sector, but also the more public.”
I was at a loss, but Chandra helped out with, “Such as the US government?”
“Precisely.”
“Wait,” I said. “You think the government is sponsoring this research?”
“It isn’t entirely beyond the scope of believability. Can you imagine the United States equipped with an elite unit of soldiers as fast, strong, and deadly as werewolves? Able to shift and move on land at ten times the speed of the best human SEAL? Generally immune to conventional weapons? No opposing country would challenge us ever again.”
