by S. M. Reine
“Good,” Deirdre said. “I don’t want to be compelled again.”
Stark surveyed her closely. “Were you angry when you realized what you had done? What I’d forced you to do?”
The lies came to her more easily now. “I was furious.”
“Then why come to me now? Why volunteer?”
“When I saw your video, I realized what had happened to me in Montreal. I stopped being angry at you and started getting angry at the system that screwed me over. Screwed us over.” She clasped Niamh’s hand in hers. The swanmay squeezed back.
“We used to talk about what we would change if we could,” Niamh said. “Back when we were stuck at the boarding school.”
Deirdre grew more heated. “I’m force-fed werewolf food. I live in a condemned building. I’m given an allowance for clothes, treated like a child, and now this? As if all of that wasn’t insulting enough, the Alpha lies to us?”
“It’s cheap,” Niamh snapped. “Rylie Gresham is a traitor to gaeans everywhere!”
Deirdre didn’t look at Gage to see if he reacted to the insult. She built on Niamh’s furor, fueling it with her own anger. “They live in paradise while we suffer. It sickens me and recompense is overdue.”
Stark’s expression never changed.
“We have to make everyone realize what we’re suffering through,” Deirdre said. “It’s not going to change unless we make everything change. I hate what Rylie Gresham has done to me far more than what you did to me.”
When she was done talking, she felt breathless.
Weirder, she felt…a little relaxed. Like she’d been waiting to let that out.
Stark clapped his hand on her shoulder. Deirdre jerked at his touch, but it was a friendly gesture—not an attack. “That won’t be the last blood we spill together.”
Deirdre swallowed hard. She nodded. “I can’t live like this anymore.”
She caught Gage’s expression out of the corner of her eye. He looked angry, too. Deirdre didn’t think he was feigning the expression. That anger was directed at her.
Well, he was the one who’d insisted on following her hunt for Stark. He was just going to have to deal with hearing people talk about Rylie in less-than-glowing terms.
“That’s you,” Stark said. “But what about your boyfriend?” He made the last word sound like an insult.
“I go where she goes,” Gage said.
“Where did you come from?” Stark pressed.
“He came out of the sanctuary,” Niamh said. “But him and my girl Dee, they’re tight.”
Deirdre’s shoulders tensed. Tight as near total strangers.
“I don’t like what’s happened more than anyone else,” Gage said. “I remember life for shifters before Genesis. I remember what it was like to be free, unencumbered by law. It was liberating. I want that back.”
That was news to Deirdre. She’d assumed he’d been changed after they died, just like she had.
“And you don’t hold any allegiance to Rylie Gresham?” Stark asked. “You’d obey me as Alpha?”
Gage’s glare was pure insolence. “If you’ve got the rocks for it, then sure, my loyalty will be all yours. I’m just not sure you’re Alpha enough to take her. All I’ve seen so far is a guy who’s happy to claim responsibility for murders others have committed.”
“Gage,” Deirdre hissed. “Shut up.”
“It’s fine. I’ll hear dissent.” Stark’s eyes flashed. “If you want proof, I’ve got it.” He stepped back to the stairs, fixing Gage with a hard look. “Shapeshift. Now.”
That last word was like the crack of thunder.
Gage grunted and doubled over, arms folding around himself.
Deirdre’s adrenaline spiked. “What are you doing?”
“Proving that I’m an Alpha,” Stark said. “Words are cheap. Actions are priceless.”
“He could kill us all if he changes,” Deirdre said, her voice rising an octave.
She had heard Gage in his beast form the night before. She didn’t want a live show while trapped in the basement with him.
“He won’t hurt us,” Stark said. “Not unless I tell him to.”
The snapping of bone echoed. Gage’s head fell back, teeth gritted as the change rolled through him.
He clawed at himself, shredding his shirt from the collar to the hem, baring his chest. He was in good shape, as many werewolves were—muscular with low body fat. He was also scarred. Deirdre had seen the scars of healed bullet wounds before, and those were definitely bullet wounds.
His spine arched, vertebrae grinding against each other as he adjusted to his changing form. He slammed onto his hands and knees so hard that the mosaic cracked underneath him.
When he cried out again, it wasn’t a human sound. It was guttural. Animal.
Deirdre took two steps toward him before remembering there was nothing she could do to help. She was weaker than other shifters, slow to heal, and the change that Gage was undergoing wasn’t normal. She wouldn’t be able to do anything but get her ass kicked.
Stark’s hand shot out to clamp down on her wrist, pulling her toward the stairs. “Just watch.”
Deirdre forgot to be afraid of him. “You’re hurting him!”
“It’s natural for the change to be painful, and your boyfriend will know that, if he was a shifter before Genesis.”
“Forget what’s natural,” Deirdre snapped. “He wouldn’t naturally be changing right now if you weren’t making him. Stop it right now.”
Gage’s cry of pain punctuated her order.
“Are you trying to make demands?” Stark asked.
Deirdre faltered. She had forgotten for a moment who Stark was and what he’d ordered others to do.
But it was hard to watch Gage suffering. His face extended into a muzzle and the sudden eruption of bone nearly tore his skin. The swell of muscle within his arms was just as traumatic.
He surged in size, limbs popping, flesh bubbling. He grew to the size of a werewolf, and then kept growing. His jeans ripped and fell to the ground in shreds of denim.
Coarse brown fur swept over his shoulders. Silver claws erupted from his fingertips.
Gage wasn’t a wolf.
He was a bear.
Werewolves were larger than natural wolves, and Gage was even bigger in his animal form. He would have dwarfed a horse. He must have been equal to small elephants when he was standing upright.
Deirdre didn’t want to stick around to see.
“Good gods!” She sprung back as Gage got to his feet, strings of saliva dangling from his jaws. A growl rumbled deep in his chest.
Stark gripped Deirdre tightly. “Wait.”
The bear reared onto his hind legs. He was so tall that he couldn’t rise up to his full height. The scars on his chest from silver bullets remained, exposed as shiny pink scars where no fur grew.
When he roared, the windows shook.
Niamh squealed and darted behind one of Stark’s guards. Deirdre was tempted to join her.
But Stark wouldn’t let her move.
“Look,” he said.
The sound of his voice got the bear’s attention. Gage roared again, and in two steps, he crossed the basement. Nothing could stand in his path. Crates smashed under his feet, scattering packing peanuts across the mosaic tile. Deirdre shrieked, tried to duck.
Gage lifted a huge paw and swung it at Stark.
“Stop,” Stark said.
And Gage stopped.
His paw froze in midair, lips peeled back to bare huge teeth that looked every bit as sharp as a werewolf’s. The hot gusts of his breath smelled like the forest, musky and earthen.
Those jaws were only inches from Stark’s face.
“Am I Alpha enough?” Stark asked. Deirdre realized he was speaking to her. She straightened slowly, still half-expecting Gage to knock her head off of her shoulders. But he was frozen by the compulsion.
She reached out to touch the fur on Gage’s forearm, then thought better of it.
“Change back to a human,” Stark said.
Gage tipped backward, collapsing on his side. It was so sudden—so painful.
But Deirdre didn’t get the opportunity to watch this time. Stark rounded on her. “It’s your turn,” he said. “Show me your beast, Deirdre Tombs. Shapeshift. Now.”
—VIII—
The only sound in the basement was Gage’s shift back into his human form—the crack of bone, his pained groans, the splatter of blood as his body rearranged itself.
Deirdre’s heart pounded so hard that she thought her ribs were going to break.
Shapeshift. Now.
The compulsion in Everton Stark’s tone was obvious. But it didn’t touch her. She didn’t feel a damn thing.
A line formed between Stark’s eyebrows. “Shift,” he said again.
Deirdre shut her eyes, praying to the dead gods, whole body trembling.
Niamh cleared her throat. “Um, Stark…?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He gripped Deirdre’s head in both of his hands, and she clearly imagined him crushing her skull between his fingers. “Look at me, Deirdre Tombs.” She opened her eyes. Stark was so close that all she could see was the intensity of his golden eyes again, just like when they’d been on the street. “I told you to change forms,” he said, searching her face. “Why aren’t you changing?”
“She’s Omega,” Niamh said. “She can’t.”
“You can’t shift?” Stark asked. When she didn’t immediately reply, he said, “Answer me.”
Deirdre wished he would release her. He was only squeezing tighter, and it hurt. “I’ve never been able to. I don’t even know what my animal is. Nobody can tell.”
“Jacek,” Stark said.
One of his guards stepped forward, offering Stark the knife from his belt. Deirdre was relieved when he took it. It meant that he had to let go of her skull.
Stark slashed the knife down her arm.
Deirdre jerked back, clutching the wound. “Hey!”
He didn’t let her retreat. He held her wrist, forcing her to extend her arm so that he could watch the cut. It stung—he’d cut deep, and she could feel the itch all the way into the muscle. Blood poured freely down her elbow.
The healing fever swept over her. Her skin heated, becoming so hot that Stark had to release her. He hissed from between his teeth.
Within moments, the flow of blood slowed and the edges of the wound began to mend.
Deirdre clapped her hand over the injury. “What was that for?”
“You’re a shifter, and you can’t shift,” Stark murmured.
“You just summarized my life’s dilemma, yeah.” She peeled her bloody fingers away from the wound. It was completely closed now. “Did you have to cut me to find that out? I could have just told you.”
“Words are cheap,” he said again. Stark sucked her blood off of his thumb, looking thoughtful. “I’ll take you. I want your help, Deirdre Tombs. But I don’t have a use for your boyfriend.”
Gage was human again, shivering on the floor in a puddle of his own sweat. His clothes were shredded and useless. Every inch of his skin, scars and all, were exposed to the cold basement air.
Deirdre was tempted to agree with Stark. It would be an easy way to have Gage sent home.
But she was scared. Even more scared than she had been before leaving to find Stark in the first place. Deirdre didn’t want to be alone with those people.
“I’m not staying without him,” she said.
Anyone else would have said that was fine. Deirdre was Omega. Who needed her anyway?
Stark nodded, though.
“Fine. Niamh, show them to their room.”
Gage took a minute to dress himself, putting on a clean outfit from his backpack. Then Niamh took Deirdre and Gage to a bedroom upstairs. It took three flights of narrow, creaking stairs to reach the door, which was one among a dozen in the hallway.
The doors were metal with narrow windows cut into them. They reminded Deirdre of a prison.
“This is it,” the swanmay said, standing aside so they could enter. “It’s not much, but it’s a home.”
Deirdre stepped into the room. It looked disturbingly like the nightmarish illusion that Gutterman had showed her. The wallpaper, colorless and old, was peeling from the wall to bare water-stained boards underneath. The floor was warped with moisture damage, too. But the furniture looked clean, albeit broken, and they even had an old TV with rabbit ears.
“One bed?” Deirdre asked. It wasn’t even a big bed. Maybe a full size.
“Space is limited. Since you two are a couple, it’s not a problem, right?”
Deirdre exchanged looks with Gage. She expected him to have some speedy quip in response, but his eyes were dull. Exhaustion hung from his bones.
“We haven’t moved in together,” she said. “It’s just a big step.”
Niamh chucked Deirdre on the shoulder. “If you’re joining a rebellion together, I think you’re serious enough to cohabitate.”
“What would they say about us?” Deirdre asked in a mock-Southern accent. “Us two kids living in sin?”
“They’d probably say, ‘hey, have fun in prison for the rest of your lives, because that’s what we do with terrorists and people who sleep in the same beds as their boyfriends.’” Niamh walked along the edge of the room, tracing her finger along the top of the bookshelf. “Vidya was in here before you guys.”
“And now Vidya’s dead?”
“Arrested. It hasn’t been on the news yet, though. Who knows what the OPA’s done with her.”
“What did we get into?” Gage muttered at nobody in particular.
Niamh actually looked sympathetic. “It’s not always like that. Stark’s not a bad guy.”
“He cut me,” Deirdre said.
“You healed.”
“He also forces other shifters to kill people.” Deirdre lifted her hands in a defensive gesture. One palm was still crusty with blood. “Not judging, but I don’t think we can say he’s not a bad guy. That’s all I’m getting at.”
“Then we’re all bad people. But that’s what it takes, isn’t it? Concentrated badness. Things aren’t going to get better on their own.” Niamh stepped back into the hall. “I’ll let you lovebirds get all snuggled in, huh? Probably want to rest after…you know.”
“Thanks,” Deirdre said.
It looked like the swanmay was going to continue speaking, but then her gaze focused down the hall, and her spine straightened.
Deirdre could tell that Stark was coming just by that posture.
Whatever he wanted, it probably wasn’t good.
“Stay in here and get some rest,” Deirdre said, shoving her backpack into Gage’s arms and leaving the room.
He opened his mouth in protest.
She shut the door on his face.
A moment later, Stark arrived. He had washed Deirdre’s blood off of his hands. There was still a smudge on his beard that he didn’t seem to have noticed, though. “What do you think, Tombs?”
Oh, she had a lot of thoughts. Very few of them were favorable. “About the house, you mean? All I’ve seen are a couple of staircases.”
“A tour, then.”
“I’ll take her around,” Niamh said. “Show her the chore charts and the armory and stuff.”
Stark waved her off. “I’ll take care of it.”
Niamh’s eyes widened to saucers. “You’re going to show her around?”
“Should I grab Gage?” Deirdre asked.
“No,” he said.
Her skin crawled, prickling at the back of her neck. Stark seemed to have taken a special interest in her. The kind of interest that could be very dangerous. Maybe even fatal.
Well, it wasn’t like she’d thought she was signing up for a cruise to the Bahamas when she agreed to infiltrate his pack.
He strode away, and all Deirdre could do was follow him.
The we
ird, prison-like doors made sense as soon as Everton Stark started showing her around.
He lived in an old asylum for the criminally insane.
Deirdre couldn’t have picked a better place for him to lurk if she’d been trying.
The exterior windows had all been boarded up and the doors chained. There was graffiti on everything, and Stark clearly had no interest in cleaning it up. The tags made the asylum look like it was still abandoned. At least, that was how he explained it to Deirdre.
“The chains are to prevent people from stumbling on us when looking for a place to squat,” he said.
“Or to prevent your followers from escaping,” Deirdre said.
She knew it was dangerous to poke at him like that, but he reacted to the jab as much as he had to everything else. Which was to say, not at all. Stark was downright serene as he led her toward the kitchen. “My followers have no reason to escape. But it does help keep people from stepping outside accidentally. Too much activity would make us easy to find.”
Several dining room tables had been crammed into the kitchen, which had industrial fixtures that must have been very modern in the sixties. The tables weren’t being used for food preparation at the moment—they were being used to load guns and sharpen knives. Deirdre gave a quick head count of the room’s occupants.
A dozen. A dozen in one room alone.
“How many followers do you have anyway?” Deirdre asked.
“At the asylum? Almost fifty, now that you’ve joined us.”
“And everywhere else?”
“Not nearly enough,” Stark said. “More are coming.” She couldn’t press him for specific numbers without sounding suspicious, so she dropped it. But if there were fifty in the asylum alone, then she imagined he must have had hundreds on his side.
The problem was even worse than she’d suspected, and she’d suspected it was pretty bad.
“Is that video you released bringing many new people in?” she asked.
“None as interesting as you.”
Shame burned in Deirdre’s gut. “There’s nothing all that interesting about an Omega.”
“We’ll have to disagree on that,” Stark said. “Niamh told me about you. She told me that you lived in twenty different group facilities, boarding schools, and foster homes before you turned eighteen. Twenty different locations in six years. You must have had the highest transfer rate of anyone in the system.”
