Rivals and Retribution

by Shannon Delany

  “Just like us.”

  She sighed so heavily into the phone that it sounded like a gust of wind pushing straight into my ear. “Alexi…”

  “Nyet,” I insisted. “I will do this thing for you. I only need to make sure my plan is completed before yours goes fully into action.”

  “Do not take too long, Alexi,” she said. “This must be done soon or many more will suffer at the hands of this corporation.”

  “I will be as quick as I can possibly be. I am doing this for a most important reason.”

  “So it is for you? Because you used to always be your most important reason for any course of action.”

  “Perhaps you did not ever know me as well as you thought.”

  “Perhaps not,” she agreed.

  “Because you used to be the most important thing in my world.”

  She hung up the phone, and I was left with my cell at my ear and nothing but silence coming back to me.

  Jessie

  Pietr came to help me with the horses, his fondness for them growing as he got to know each of them. We didn’t board and train as many as we had when Mom was alive, but the barn was always full of personality, and of stalls that needed mucking out. And Pietr was not afraid of lifting a shovel. I had to imagine he’d lifted one frequently getting rid of Dmitri and the hunters’ bodies.

  Pushing the thought from my head, I returned to grooming Snap while Pietr checked the water buckets.

  My attention shifted from my work to Pietr when I heard a bucket hit the floor, water sloshing everywhere. “What the—”

  Gabriel was in the barn, the door to the outside shut, my dogs going crazy as Gabe took Pietr to the ground and started pounding on him.

  No longer wolf, Pietr wasn’t even able to defend himself.

  “Gabriel! Get off of him!” I eyed the stack of hay bales I’d stashed the gun case in and did a quick visual tally of the tools I’d decided earlier could be used as weapons.

  They’d all been neatly rearranged in their normal rack on the far wall. Dad had decided to be helpful and clean up after his highly distractible daughter.

  Awesome.

  I dove for the gun case and popped it open, slipping the clip into the gun’s butt until it clicked and then I stood. “Stop! Stop it!” I ordered.

  “Or you’ll do what?” Gabriel yelled, his awkward fist twisted in Pietr’s hair, keeping his neck at an evil angle, ready to smash his face into the ground again or snap his neck.

  Shoot to wound. Show mercy, I willed myself. Give him the chance you’d want someone to give you. “I’ll shoot you.” I steadied my hands, making it clear I’d follow through.

  He laughed and focused on Pietr once more.

  I pulled the trigger. Squeeze, don’t jerk.

  Blood burst from Gabe’s shoulder, and he flew backward with the impact of the shot.

  Pietr’s head flopped forward, and his sides heaved with a convulsing breath.

  Blood covered his face, smeared and black with dirt and stuck with bits of hay. “Pietr…”

  He struggled forward—toward me—his eyes peeping through the mess of his face and focusing on me.

  Gabe was cursing up a storm.

  “Stay where you are,” I warned him as I headed toward Pietr.

  But Gabe wasn’t one to take orders. He lunged for Pietr again even as the blood wept from his shoulder and grew in a bright stain across his shirt. Murder lit his eyes even more brightly than the red of the wolf.

  And then my vision got furry around the edges and I felt the tremble in my brain that announced another lesson from Derek. I spread my feet for balance and locked my knees.

  I would not go down.

  Like a transparent screen laid across the very real and bloody world I lived in, I saw the ghost image of Derek tag Jack and stand him on the railroad tracks, unblinking, the same grin on his face as I’d seen when I’d opened the makeshift bodybag at Pecan Place, the asylum.

  I felt a slowly building power ease into my veins, and my head began to feel light.… “Damn it!” I shouted.

  On the wavering railroad tracks Jack just smiled vacantly and waited for death, and Derek, standing in the trees not far away, caught the surge of Jack’s energy like the best adrenaline rush ever. Two words circled in my brain, chasing each other in a slow spiral.

  Regret.

  No.

  Regret.

  No.

  Beneath the shadowy train track murder scene Pietr and Gabe fumbled back into focus, Derek superimposed on Gabriel. No. He—they—had Pietr and this time there would be no mercy. Regret.

  No regret.

  My body buzzing, my eyes wide with horror, I took my shot, screaming, “I don’t want this lesson!”

  Gabe’s head exploded in bits of bone, blood, and gray matter and I fell to my knees, feeling something rip away from my brain like a whirlwind bursting loose and evaporating in the cold winter air.

  I dropped the gun, sick at what I had done.

  What he made me do.

  What they made me do.

  I vomited into the hay, and my body quaking with the heaves, I dragged myself to Pietr and the awkward mess that was the remnants of Gabriel. Shoving the corpse aside, I rolled Pietr over and tugged at my sleeve so I could wipe the grossness away from his eyes.

  “Pietr,” I whispered. “It’s over, Pietr.” I said it with such certainty. I knew it was true. There was no more voice of Derek in my head. And there was certainly no more Gabriel. I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to look. I’d taken his life. I would have a multitude of regrets. “I’m here.”

  “Jess,” he groaned, one hand reaching clumsily for me. He pawed my cheek and then fell back to the dusty and bloodstained floor.

  He groaned more than breathed, his body convulsing.

  “We need to get you inside. Get you patched up. Get rid of … the body.” I didn’t want to attach a name—a nearly human identity—to it anymore.

  But before I could reach down to help him to his feet, he began to change.

  Again.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Alexi

  Finding the information Nadezhda required was not as difficult as I had feared once I set Feldman to work. She looked every bit the part of the doddering and harmless grandmother, happily telling the employees their future from her silly deck of cards if they just told her an interesting fact about the company.

  The company that never paid them quite enough to maintain their full loyalty.

  Feldman had an amazingly sympathetic ear, and the employees loved every moment she spent with them. Somehow she did not short me in her devotion to completing the cure, either, and I wondered how she worked so much so tirelessly.

  When she handed me a file she had managed to sneak out of an office when the employee had gone to warm her coffee, I asked her how she did it all. Did she not get tired?

  She shrugged. “My time is short. I choose to spend as much of it making up for my past mistakes to you as I can.”

  After that I didn’t send her out on additional errands but kept her at my side in the lab, where I could make sure she did not exhaust herself.

  Jessie

  It was when Alexi had returned home briefly from the city to collect tissue samples and additional DNA swabs that I overheard his plan. The moment he set down the phone, I was in his face.

  “Alexi—no, you can’t do it. You can’t just sacrifice Wanda.”

  “The hell I can’t.… That woman betrayed my parents. Killed my father…”

  “You don’t know that she pulled the trigger.”

  “She did as good as pull it. That woman, that woman your father loves, betrayed my parents, brought about their deaths either directly or indirectly. She broke our family and ruined my life.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “What?”

  “Bullshit,” I repeated, folding my arms before me. “She didn’t ruin your life—no one’s ruined your life, and no one can. Except you. Besides, your life’s
just begun. You have plenty of time to ruin it all by yourself. Several times over.”

  “Shut up, Jessie,” he urged, scrubbing his hand across his forehead. “Just shut up. The decision is mine—was mine,” he stuttered. “And frankly, there was not much of a decision to be made. Pietr’s life, Max’s life, and Cat’s life for her life. Do you understand? Pietr’s life, Jessie.”

  My knees turned to water, and I squeezed my eyes shut. “I understand your motivation, Sasha,” I said, grating the words out. “I do. I want the cure for them—maybe more than they want it for themselves right now. But there has to be some other way. You can’t bargain with Wanda’s life.”

  “Give me one reason why. Why I cannot barter away a traitor to save my siblings.”

  “Because she wasn’t the traitor. She was manipulated.”

  “Manip—”

  “Manipulated.”

  “Impossible. Utterly inconceivable.”

  “I have proof.”

  “Proof? Nyet. It’s inconceivable.”

  “You keep using that word,” I chided. “I do not think it means what you—”

  He growled and scooped up the nearby lamp, hurling it against the wall so that it shattered. “There is no one alive who is capable of that sort of mental manipulation…”

  I nodded. “You’re absolutely correct. There is no one—”

  “Alive,” he concluded, staring at my head as if he could peer directly into my skull. “Oh. Oh, no.”

  Alexi

  “I’ve called Sarah and Sophia. There’s something you need to know before you hand Wanda over to the big bad,” Jessie said, powering up her cell phone and making her calls.

  “I cannot imagine what you could possibly show me that might change my mind.”

  “Just quit arguing and sit down, Sasha.”

  I did as I was told, sitting on the love seat. Sarah and Sophie sat on either side of me, our legs touching on the small couch.

  “After you see this you’ll know Wanda didn’t want to hurt your mother, or your father. She was friends with your mom.” Jessie knelt in front of me, her hands out for Soph and Sarah.

  “When Derek shot all his memories into us, we were all touching.” She nodded at the other two girls and they set their free hands on my shoulders.

  “Nice manicure,” I told Sarah.

  She beamed.

  Jessie rolled her eyes at me and continued. “I think if we do this right, you’ll be able to see what I see.…”

  “And what if I do not want to see?” I asked.

  “You’ll want to see,” she assured me, closing her eyes. “And don’t worry, we’ve tried this before.”

  Sarah snorted. “Once.”

  “Once successfully,” Jessie clarified. “Twice, if you count the time our heads wanted to split.…”

  “As promising as this all sounds … The wheels are already turning, Jessie. What if this is destiny?”

  She snorted at me, opening one eye. “You don’t believe in destiny, remember? And wheels can always be stopped. Close your eyes,” she ordered.

  I obeyed.

  “Sarah and Sophie, think of Derek.…”

  I gasped when I felt something slide inside my head. Images flickered there just behind my eyelids like a stuttering reel of black-and-white film. Things stabilized; the black and white bled into sepia and then other colors, the images moving.

  We stood in a long hallway, our hands linked.

  “This is Wanda’s head.” Jessie’s voice came to me through a thickness clouding my ears. “This is the way her brain lays out. Each door is a gateway to a memory or potential future. Hold on, let me get our guide.…”

  A filmy figure slowly gained substance in the hallway before us and became a blond boy in his mid-teens.

  It took me only a moment to recognize him.

  “Derek,” Jessie confirmed. “Only a few years ago. Back when your mom would go for her daily jogs. Just before she disappeared. Take a minute and absorb the setting. We’re not staying here long, just long enough for you to glimpse the before.”

  I examined the space before us as only someone with my interest in body language might. Everything was angular here, everything neat and orderly and unremarkable, with a look of military efficiency and a simplicity that a Spartan would aspire to. There were no frills here, no elements of design, nothing that marked Wanda as anything but the result of a government agency.

  It was as remarkable as it was terrifying.

  Jessie turned to nod at me, and the walls fell down around us, slipping away into the floor so that we were standing on a narrow throw rug of stark design, floating in a great dark space. I nearly lost my footing except that Sarah and Sophie held on to me. “Sorry about that,” Jessie apologized. “It only takes a moment, but … You might want to close your eyes. It can be disorienting.”

  “Are my eyes not already closed?”

  “In one place and time, yes, but in the library of Derek’s memories they are as big as saucers. Hold on,” she warned.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the floor beneath us tremble.

  “And now … after,” Jessie announced. “You can open your eyes.”

  Derek again oozed into existence before me like a slick creeping across a damaged ocean, and then, complete, he froze.

  “This is what she was feeling immediately after she turned over your parents.…” Jessie motioned all along the length of the hall. “Go ahead. If you ever doubted how Wanda felt about what she did—what she was forced to do—take a good, hard look. We have a few minutes before the memory folds.”

  The doors were there, as were the rug and the walls and simple tile ceiling, but now crucifixes hung almost everywhere. Filling most of the spaces between each in the long bank of doors. But, upon closer inspection I noticed there was something wrong with them. I balked at the realization. Hanging from each crucifix was not the Christian Savior Jesus, but Wanda.

  Wanda crucified in her own mind.

  Sarah snorted. “Even that weird painting by Klimt that all the college girls hang in their dorm rooms is cooler than that.”

  Sophie batted at her arm.

  Past door after door and crucifix after crucifix I went, my steps faster as I neared the end of the hall and a huge painting.

  Before me, in the world of Wanda’s brain, da Vinci’s Last Supper hung.

  But, like the crucifixes, the painting was somehow wrong, too, and it pulled me up short as I stared at it to try to determine the difference.

  There. In the place of Judas Iscariot, the man who had betrayed Jesus with a kiss, was Wanda.

  A traitor in her own mind. And not just any traitor, the biggest traitor of them all.

  “Take me out of here,” I told Jessie, grabbing Sophie’s and Sarah’s hands and squeezing my eyes shut. “Take me out of here now.”

  The sense of disorientation only magnified when I was hurled back into my body, my consciousness slamming into my skull.

  Sarah let go of me and stood, stretching, and Sophie set her hand in her lap. “It’s like a roller-coaster ride at the end.”

  “Roller coaster from Hell,” I hissed, gagging as I vaulted to the bathroom. But Jessie’s show-and-tell had done the trick and as soon as I had rinsed my mouth out thoroughly with mouthwash I called Nadezhda to change the timing of the raid on Wondermann and to pull Wanda back from the frontline position she would want to take.

  Jessie

  I heard the pounding before I saw what was making the noise, and I took the steps to the Rusakovas’ basement—and Amy’s makeshift bedroom (before it was the pack’s makeshift lodging)—two at a time, my curiosity getting the better of me.

  At the stairs’ base, I pulled up short, cocking my head as if a different view would explain what I was seeing.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, seeing sawdust and an assortment of nails, boards, and hammers. “What are you building?”

  Max set down a two-by-four and looked at Alexi.

  A
lexi in a workbelt.

  “Am I losing my mind?” I asked, looking at them both.

  Their gazes still locked on each other, they both swallowed, simultaneously.

  What had I said?

  “Okay. Let’s try this again, this time without you shutting me out.” I cleared my throat. “You two, doing construction? Why?”

  I examined the structure they were creating in the basement. They were thickening the walls. “Are you trying to increase the R-value of the insulation?” I asked, instantly regretting supplying them with a viable excuse.

  Max began to slowly nod his head.

  But Alexi shook his. “Nyet,” he said, setting down his hammer.

  I scanned the rest of the room. Yes, there was wood, but there were also sheets of metal—steel? “What are you really doing down here? What are you building?”

  “Jessie,” Alexi said, slipping his hand around my upper arm and steering me away from the impromptu construction site. “Pietr is … not doing well. You have noticed some changes in his behavior, da?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding my head. “Of course. Ever since Gabriel…” I looked away. “Since Gabriel nearly killed him and forced Pietr past the cure again.” And since I’d killed Gabriel to save Pietr. “Yes, he’s been different.” Forgetting things. But I was trying to forget things, too. Running with the pack more. But I was clinging more tightly to my friends and family, too. “We both are.”

  Alexi’s eyes closed a moment, and I knew he was thinking.

  “It is more than that. Think about it, Jessie. Even if you do not want to. You have noticed, da? Both Pietr and Marlaena…”

  I tugged my gaze to the ceiling, hearing their names linked like that. “Yes. They’re acting weird. Sick again, too. But it’s just some illness, right? You said it might be something brought in by the new pack—like a werewolf flu.”

  “I had hoped so,” Alexi said.

  It was the closest he could come to admitting he was wrong about something—admitting he’d hoped it was a different way than it was.

  “But if it’s not some bug…”

  Alexi’s eyes were huge and soft. Sad.

  Max was watching me, too. He licked his lips. Nervous.

  “But what could it…?”