Beautiful Bargain

by Skye Jones

  I swallowed, finding it hard to speak because of the lump in my throat. “Your wolf is magnificent,” I said eventually. “Big and beautiful and scary as hell to those who don’t know you. That’s a good thing. To me, whether it’s your full wolf, or simply you in a hybrid form, it’s beautiful because it’s you.”

  He pulled me in then and kissed me hard on the mouth. “You’ve saved me, you know that?” His jaw tightened but he pushed on, the words sounding as if he squeezed them out. “I used to think about killing myself because of what happened to me, the change. Now I welcome it. And Ivan has people coming here who do it at will whenever they want. If I can turn it on and off, how amazing will that be?”

  “Very amazing.” It would too, if only because Ben finally seemed at peace with himself. Still bad tempered and harsh when it came to showing mercy to a person like Slim, but at least at peace with himself.

  “You want a drink? Play a game of chess?” He raised an eyebrow. “Pass the time.”

  I could think of other things we could be doing to pass the time, but getting all steamy wouldn’t seem right with Alex and the others heading out into danger. “Why don’t we set up a table for cards. Jackson is getting dressed and coming down, and one of us can go hunt down Doc, plus we can include Angel.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” He stood as if to let me down, but then pulled me harder and closer to him, bent his head to mine, and kissed me. He tasted me, his tongue duelling with mine, and it went on for a long time. So long I forgot my worry, went dizzy with desire.

  When I was about to tell him to forget all about the card game, he set my feet on the ground, swatted my behind, and stalked to the door. “Set the card game up, beautiful,” he tossed over his shoulder with an arrogant wink. “I’ll go round up the others.”

  We played cards and Mum and Dad came into the library, Mum demurring to join in the game but reading a book, and Dad winning his first two hands. It was nice. Cozy even. Unlike my time at the compound, I was aware of the dangers all around, but felt more able to fight them. I had four incredibly strong men who were always close, and my power was coming into its own.

  Still, I couldn’t be completely happy. Simon was still with the Ravens, and whilst I was hardening myself to the fact, Mum seemed more upset by the day. Sienna still lurked out there too, wanting to do me harm. I shuddered at the idea of her hating me so much. In a way though, I couldn’t blame her. She’d had a taste of Jackson and then he’d cut her off, and Sienna didn’t like that one little bit. What sane woman would? Except Sienna wasn’t sane, and instead of licking her wounds and taking it on the chin, she’d taken me instead.

  The noise of the front door alarm beeping had us all looking around. Jackson paused, one hand in the air mid-deal. Ben had a cigar halfway to his mouth. The guys had brought out whisky and cigars, and Ben, Jackson, and my father were indulging. Doc had refused both on the grounds someone needed to keep their head completely clear.

  The library door was ajar, and when the front entrance filled with big men and heavy boots, I looked up and saw Alex’s deep blue eyes and relief surged through me. I shot from my chair and ran to him, almost knocking him back as I threw myself at him, arms around his broad shoulders.

  “I’ve been worried,” I breathed.

  He chuckled into my hair. “Evidently.”

  Ivan and Slim were close to me, and I turned to them. “Did you get it?”

  Ivan gave me a panty-melting grin, and I thought, not for the first time, how much trouble Angel was in. He put his hand inside the pocket of his jacket and brought out a padded envelope.

  I took it, hands shaking, and looked inside. There were four small vials. “It’s not a lot,” I said.

  Alex patted his own pocket. “I’ve got four more, Slim has a bag full.”

  For the first time, I noticed the dark holdall slung over Slim’s shoulder.

  “We took a few vials each in case something went wrong, and the bag got taken. We all have four vials on us personally, and then there must be over a hundred in the bag.”

  “I want to give some to my sister, now.” Slim turned to Alex and Ivan.

  Doc and Jackson had joined us in the hallway, Ben lounging in the library doorway.

  “It might kill her, Slim.” Doc put one hand on the newly turned vampire’s shoulder.

  “I know. I want to try though.”

  Ivan sighed. He looked to Jackson. “Your house, your call.”

  Jackson nodded. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

  “You’re helping?” Slim’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Yes. You’re going to need all the manpower you can get to hold her down while you administer it.”

  We headed out to the barn.

  “Not you,” Jackson said, turning to me.

  Oh, no. I was not being sent back to the house like a naughty child. “I’ll hang back,” I said.

  Angel nodded. “Me too.”

  Ivan sighed, but didn’t say anything. Jackson merely scowled.

  We reached the barn, and Ben pulled the door open. Jackson, Ivan, Alex, and Slim all stepped inside.

  Slim turned to Jackson. “Shouldn’t Doc do this?”

  Jackson snorted. “It’s pushing a needle into her arm, Slim. You don’t need a fucking medical degree.”

  I wanted to tell Jackson to go easy on Slim, the man was about to find out if his sister could be saved, but I knew Jackson never would. Not after what Slim had done to me. The man was on Jackson’s shit list. Probably permanently.

  The barn wasn’t lit as I entered, staying right at the back with Angel as promised.

  I heard her first. A low, raw snarl, wet and gurgling. As if she snarled through a ton of mucus and foam. Then the smell hit. Rancid. Decay and death, like the stench of rotting leaves and much, much worse.

  I fought the instinct to put my hand over my nose.

  Slim, Ivan, and Alex went forward, Jackson with them. Ben hung back by me and Angel.

  Doc hadn’t come with us, which struck me as strange, but then I felt another big body sidle in next to me, and there he was.

  My eyes adjusted to the dim light, and I saw her.

  Oh God.

  She was chained to the wall, her arms reaching out toward us, manacles around skinny, wasted wrists, hands in claws that scratched only the air.

  Slim got close and she turned her head. Her neck lolled oddly to one side, as if her skull were too weighty to balance on the skinny pile of sinew and wasted muscle.

  “Be careful,” Doc said.

  Slim paused. Turned to us and grinned. “She can’t turn me now. Ivan beat her to it.”

  “Doc is correct.” Ivan’s low tones filled the room, quiet but so commanding. “You might be immune, but I don’t want you full of dirty bite wounds. Be a bitch to heal, and you’ll need blood, lots of it. We need to find a female as it is; don’t make me go looking for a car full of them.”

  Angel gave a strange sound at the back of her throat. A scandalised little gasp that morphed into a deeper tone, almost a growl. “Over my dead body,” she whispered to me.

  I didn’t tell her that Ivan had better hearing than a bat and had almost certainly heard her whispered words. I smiled to myself in the dark of the room. Girl had it bad for Ivan. If she had her way no female but her would be giving blood.

  Slim slowed his approach and held his arms out, talking to his sister in soothing tones. It didn’t work as she snapped and snarled at him.

  Her eyes were milky. Utterly horrifying.

  As Slim grew even closer, her snapping mouth turned frenzied, biting and clacking shut on empty air. Ivan did that moving so fast I couldn’t track him thing, and then he had her in a hold. She’d been distracted by Slim, and the vampire now had her scrawny neck in a form of headlock. She couldn’t bite as her head was trapped in the crook of his arm, and he must be strong because despite the amplified snarls and cries, she hardly moved at all.

  Jackson approached her to the left and took hold of
one arm, adding his strength to the hold, and Alex did the same from the right.

  “Do it now, Slim,” Ivan commanded.

  Slim pulled one of the vials from his pocket and Doc stepped forward, passing him a needle. Slim went to try to get the needle into the top of the vial, but his hands were shaking so bad he missed.

  Doc put his hand out, touched Slim’s shaking one, and took the vial and needle from him, expertly filling it.

  He pressed it and liquid arced out, then he passed it back to Slim. “Jab it somewhere fleshy,” he paused and coughed. “As fleshy as possible, and then plunge the end down.”

  Slim went for her thigh, visible through the ragged, torn clothes she wore. He stabbed the needle in and she screamed, but Ivan didn’t let go of her.

  “It’s done.” Slim stepped back and almost as one, Ivan, Alex, and Jackson let go and stepped out of her reach.

  We all huddled at the back of the room and watched as nothing changed.

  “Now what?” Angel asked.

  “We wait and see if it works. Might take hours or days. Maybe we should all go to bed,” Doc said with a yawn. “Come back and see how she is doing in a few hours.”

  As he spoke though, something changed. The ferocious snarling and clacking of her jaw grew silent in the room.

  “Emily?” Slim pushed away from the wall and approached her.

  Emily. Hearing the way he said her name, so heartbroken, suddenly made her real. Not simply a rotting bag of smelly flesh, but a real person, trapped by a vile disease.

  I clenched my jaw as hatred for the people who had done this surged bright and hard. Our government, the people meant to take care of us, had turned on their own people and done something so wicked it defied belief. They hadn’t killed us, which would have been bad enough; instead, they had trapped us in disease-ridden bodies. Made half-dead, walking corpses out of millions of us. Those men in London deserved to die.

  For a moment, I wanted nothing more than for us to be the ones who did it. Me and my four men swooping down on them like avenging angels. Then I looked at Jackson, who winced as he moved out of Slim’s way. I knew his wounds still hurt. His side and head both, and my desire for vengeance fizzled out like a sparkler on a wet night. I wanted those men to pay, but I wanted Jackson alive far more.

  Ivan was right, love did trump revenge and hate. Every time.

  Somehow, I needed to persuade the guys to find a way to fight without being in the fray. They’d more than done their bit, and surely, they could use their skills in other ways. I needed to figure out how.

  As Slim neared his sister, she lifted her lolling head and snarled. It wasn’t like the others previously, this one was half-hearted. She snapped the air, once, twice, and then her head lolled again, and this time didn’t come back up, not even when Slim got right to her side.

  “Emily?” He reached out and took her arm, shaking it. No response.

  “Emily?” His voice came out higher than usual, panicked. “Emily!”

  He lifted her head and she gave no response. “Shit, is she dead?” he turned wild eyes to Doc.

  “Let’s get her down and take her into the house.” Doc moved toward her. “Ivan and Alex, can you two get her chains off the wall, but bind her hands and feet? If she suddenly wakes up again, hungry, I don’t want her able to move.”

  Ivan and Alex went to work and did as Doc said. The moment they freed her arms from the manacles holding her up, Emily slid to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

  Ivan pulled her arms behind her back and bound her as Alex did the same to her feet. Then Ivan hauled her up and over his shoulder and marched out of the barn with her.

  We all followed. Angel, Ben, and me bringing up the rear. Ben had barely left my side, and I smiled to myself. The big bad wolf was protecting me.

  We got to the house and Alex opened the door for Ivan, who took Emily into the room where the guys sometimes played computer games and laid her on the comfy sofa there.

  In the bright light, I took in her ravaged face, wasted flesh, mottled purple skin. How could she come back from this? Even if the cure took the virus out of her body, wouldn’t she immediately die from malnutrition?

  Doc knelt next to her, and I realized he had his bag with him. He took a slim torch from it and lifted Emily’s eyelids, shining it into her eyes.

  Where before there had been nothing but milky paleness, now they were a clear, beautiful green.

  “Emily.” Slim gasped and sank to his knees.

  He looked around at us wildly. “She’s back, those are her eyes. She’s back. Oh my God, it worked, she’s back.”

  Doc put his hand on Slim’s shoulder. “She’s back, Slim, but she might not survive. It has ravaged her body.”

  “Yeah, but not as badly as the ones gone for years. She’s not got flesh so emaciated you can see sinew and bone. We can feed her.”

  “That alone might kill her,” Doc warned. “When people were given food after being in the concentration camps in the second World War, a lot of them died. Her body could reject it.”

  “What about blood?” Slim asked.

  Ivan frowned. “Oh, no. I am not turning her. I’m sorry, Slim, it’s too damned dangerous. Don’t know what could happen. Plus, it would be weird because then she’d be mine in a way you’re not. She’s a female, it isn’t…it would create…” For once Ivan ran out of words.

  “We could give her blood from one of us,” Doc said. “In the old-fashioned way. Set up a transfusion.”

  “Oh, what with all the high-tech medical equipment we have on hand?” Jackson asked.

  “Don’t need much. I’ll happily do it. Give her my blood. It might kick start the healing. We can also get fluids in her. That’s as far as I can go without having access to an actual hospital. If we got her in one of the wards still open in some of the compounds, they’d most likely intubate her, and tube feed her.”

  “They’d kill her,” Jackson said simply. Slim looked at him. “Sorry, but we can’t take the risk. I think they’d kill her. See her as still diseased, still a danger.”

  Doc sighed. “Possibly. It’s pie in the sky anyway because dawn will break soon and Slim, Ivan, and Alex will need to stay inside. Anyway, we can at least give her fluids here and some blood.”

  Doc busied himself setting up what he needed, and Ivan helped him. Angel hovered in the room, her brow furrowed as she watched the men.

  Jackson, Ben, Alex, and I went to the kitchen with Tils hot on our heels and made hot chocolate with the cheap powdered stuff. It still tasted like heaven on my first sip. I felt sorry for Emily. A woman who, through no fault of her own, had been given the most horrific disease ever seen.

  “Ivan says he’s got friends arriving in a day or two who can teach me to change at will,” Ben said, blowing into his mug and looking at Jackson. “But I think I already can.”

  “You can when there’s heightened danger to one of us,” Jackson said. “But you need to replicate it even when there isn’t.”

  “You mean like this?” Ben stood, went to the far end of the room and methodically took his clothes off, revealing his powerful fighter’s body.

  He stared at me, his eyes bright, intense, focused. Then it began, just like in the library but quicker this time. Bone snapped, tendons and sinew bent and stretched. For a moment he stood in front of me the same half-human, half-wolf creature of the library, and then there was the huge black wolf again from the other day.

  “Holy shit.” Jackson stood so quickly his chair fell back. He stared at the wolf, and the wolf stared back.

  “Erm, Ben, you in there?”

  Ben gave a low rumble.

  Jackson looked at Alex. “Fuck, does that mean yes? Is he going to attack us?”

  Alex shrugged. “No clue. Why don’t you go pet him and find out?”

  “Pet him?” Jackson stared at Alex, back to Ben’s magnificent wolf, and then back at Alex.

  He didn’t move.

  “I’ll go first,” I sai
d. I wasn’t scared of Ben. Not in his hybrid form, or his beautiful full wolf form. I walked to him, careful to take it easy, no sudden movements. I reached Ben, and he nudged me with his great head.

  I sank my fingers into the thick fur at his ruff, bent and gave him a kiss on the snout.

  Ben returned the favor by licking a stripe up my cheek.

  I laughed and turned to Jackson. “Come on over.”

  Jackson did, hesitantly, and it made me smile to see him not fearless for once.

  He reached Ben and stood there, unsure.

  “Pat him,” I said.

  Jackson reached out a hand and patted Ben twice on his side and then stepped back. Ben didn’t do anything at first, but then he took two steps forward and nudged Jackson’s hand.

  “Shit.” Jackson laughed and patted Ben again.

  Tils came over, head down, sniffing cautiously. I watched Ben like a hawk; if he made one wrong move toward my baby, I’d knock him out myself. Use one of the chairs if I had to.

  I needn’t have worried. As Tils got near, Ben dropped down into a play bow, and she barked in delight. They took off careening around the room.

  “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” Jackson said. His face lit up with a big grin. A truly happy grin, and an expression I wanted to see more of.

  Alex yawned, and I looked to the window to see the first tendrils of dawn creeping into the sky.

  “Ben,” I called, and the huge black wolf stopped tearing around the room and looked at me.

  “Why don’t you change back, and we can go fetch Doc and all go to bed?”

  He gave Tils a final nudge with his nose and then bent his head. The cracking, stretching, and tearing began, and I looked away because it sounded horrifyingly painful.

  A few minutes later, Ben stood before us, his chest heaving. “Christ,” he panted. “It’s exhausting. I’m worn out, completely.”