by S. M. Reine
She rubbed her sore arm, considering the question.
Jacek was scary, sure. If Stark had asked about fear factor, she would have immediately endorsed him.
But strong?
“He’s brittle. He pulls the trigger too fast. Everything makes him lash out. To me, that says weakness. It doesn’t matter how strong a guy is if his armor is full of cracks, you know what I’m saying?” The heat of the lethe was fading, and where it faded, sluggishness remained. She felt like she was speaking in slow motion.
“You don’t think he’d be a good Beta?”
“No. I don’t.” She shrugged. “But it’s not like I’ve been in a pack before. You shouldn’t listen to me about anything. Nobody else does.” Sweat beaded on Deirdre’s forehead. Her whole arm felt relaxed, like she couldn’t tense the muscle. “I don’t feel any animal yet.”
“Give it a minute.” Stark picked up another cube, rolling it between his fingers. The blue glow lit up his face. It made all the little scars on his temple and nose shine. “You took bullets for me. It wasn’t necessary and you shouldn’t have done it.” He glared at her across the table as though she’d delivered some great insult by getting shot by those police officers. “But I owe you.”
“Whoa there,” Deirdre said. “That must have hurt coming out.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow. I want you and your boyfriend on this mission.”
The heat had spread through her whole body. She couldn’t hold still anymore. She stood, pacing to the other side of the room, head cradled in her hands. “What’s the privilege we get to share in this time? Going to strap bombs to our chests and blow up a shopping mall? Drive a semi into a bus of school kids?”
“How do you feel?” Stark asked.
She felt like the floor was slipping underneath her feet. Like the whole building was starting to ooze around her.
A giggle slipped out of Deirdre’s mouth. She tried to catch it with her hand, but too late—the sound was out there, too bright and cheerful for such a dark room.
“I feel so strange,” she whispered.
“That’s normal.” Stark set the syringe back into the box, closed the lid. “I don’t understand you, Deirdre Tombs. You’re strong. I see it in you. You might be the strongest of my followers. Why are you wasting your time on a berserker?”
“Strong.” The word unspooled from her lips, hovering in the air just outside her reach. “I’m weak. I’m so damn weak.”
“Far from it.”
He was standing in front of her. She hadn’t noticed him move from the chair, so she stepped back, startled.
Deirdre swung a half-hearted punch at Stark a few seconds too late.
He caught her fist, pushed her arm down, and took her by the shoulders. He wasn’t being rough, but the fear was choking.
“Let me go,” she said.
He didn’t fight her when she stepped back.
She wasn’t really in Stark’s room anymore. She was in a thousand foster homes and a thousand more orphanages with people who hated her, thought she was weak, no better than the trash clogging the storm drains on the streets of the many cities she’d lived in.
“Why me?” Deirdre asked. “Why don’t you treat me like an Omega?”
He didn’t respond. He was watching her. Evaluating her. Probably trying to decide how to hurt her next.
She didn’t care anymore.
“You know what happened in Genesis?” Deirdre asked.
Stark’s brow creased. “Everyone died.”
“Everyone died. Everybody in the whole damn world died.” She swayed on her feet. It was too hard to remain standing without support, so she opened the curtains and pressed her forehead to the glass of the window. She didn’t see the courtyard outside. She saw a vast wall of black that roared like death itself come upon them. “But most of us came back.”
“Not everyone,” Stark said.
She barely heard him.
“He went to pick me up from school. That’s why he was outside—he realized something was wrong, so he was going to pick me up from school. He thought he could save me somehow. If he’d stayed inside and waited, he would have come back.”
“Who?”
“It was a broken fence,” Deirdre said. “It snapped out of the ground and got thrown by the wind. It was moving almost as fast as a bullet. That’s what my former neighbor told me when I came across her after Genesis. If it wasn’t for her, I never would have known.” Her whole face was hot. It wasn’t tears on her cheeks, but fire—liquid fire rolling out of her tear ducts, pouring all the pain in her heart down her face. “Daddy died trying to save me.”
She wasn’t in the asylum at all anymore. She was a thousand miles and ten years away.
The last time she had seen her father, he had been rushing out the door to go to work. He had been running late. It wasn’t surprising—Deirdre had heard Daddy moving around the house the night before, slamming around in the cabinets, stomping through the kitchen. He hadn’t been angry. He never got angry. But his job had a lot of pressures, and it meant he was often on edge, just like that.
He’d been busy the next morning, so Deirdre had been forced to make breakfast herself and stand at the bus stop with the neighborhood moms while her dad rushed into work. He’d given her a brief kiss, barely more than a brush of lips on her forehead.
Then he was gone. He was gone forever.
“I kept waiting,” Deirdre said, gripping the windowsill so hard that the wood groaned under her hands. “Some people took months to regenerate after Genesis. I’d hear about it on the news at the orphanage. Another family found. A man in Florida. Some people in Japan, a big cluster of them. I thought if those people could come back late, then so could my dad. He’d look like something different. Like he’d probably be something powerful and rare. Something that could save me.”
“Deirdre,” Stark said.
“He didn’t come back,” she whispered.
Ten years, and he hadn’t come back.
She wasn’t facing the window anymore. She was facing Everton Stark, and he could have been on the moon for all the space that seemed to be between them, though his golden eyes were vast.
He pressed the back of his hand to her forehead.
“I might have given you too much.” It was strange to see self-doubt in him. Strange, but humanizing.
“You kill so many people,” Deirdre said. “So many people whose daddies aren’t going to come home.”
“Lie down, Deirdre.”
She was flying through the room. The walls were unfolding around her. The floor was warped, a whirlpool trying to suck her under.
“I thought this was supposed to feel good,” she said. “The lethe doesn’t feel good.”
Deirdre was on her back. She was looking up at the ceiling. She was out of her skin, out of her body, out of her mind.
Stark was inside of her skull.
“We all lost people in Genesis,” he said. “The story you tell is everyone’s story.”
“No!” She tried to sit up, reaching through the void in search of something to grasp. “It’s mine! You can’t have my story.”
Something pushed her back down.
“Okay. Keep your damn story. Just relax. The only way out of this is to wait. Your body should metabolize the drugs quickly.”
She heard the words, but either they didn’t make sense or she just didn’t care. It was hard to tell at this point.
Do you feel different?
Can you change?
Is there something inside of you?
Deirdre wasn’t certain if Stark was asking those questions or if she was just thinking them.
She drifted through time and memory, traveling over so many miles as her body remained still. She was in ramshackle public housing in Montreal. She was in the hospital where the Alpha’s mate had first declared her an Omega. She was at home with her father, playing on the swings.
She was looking down on the werewolf sanctuary, where she neve
r belonged.
“Well?” Stark asked. He sounded impatient.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “The whole waterfall thing. It’s idyllic.”
“Waterfall? I’m asking if you feel your animal.”
She was on the grass with Rylie again, recuperating after their race through the sanctuary. They were next to the lumpy hill. The sun was rising.
“She keeps a memorial to someone who isn’t even dead,” Deirdre said. “She keeps it because it’s safe, because it’s magic. She enchanted it to be a bunker. Survive an atomic blast. And it’s not even memorializing someone who’s dead. What’s up with that? Why did Genesis bring back the people who mattered to Rylie and take mine away?”
Stark’s face swam through her vision. He looked angry.
“Do you know Rylie Gresham?”
The question should have alarmed her, but Deirdre was drifting, and she just didn’t care. “Gage grew up there. He grew up with waterfalls and a stupid enchanted memorial and an academy where nobody had ever beaten him. I wish I’d grown up in the sanctuary. I wish I’d had one home to live in this whole time. I don’t want to wander anymore.”
“If you knew what I know about Rylie Gresham, you would feel differently,” Stark said.
Rylie wasn’t the type to have secrets. She was so good, so effortlessly wonderful, and everything around her was beautiful.
Deirdre wasn’t sure if she said any of that aloud or not.
If she had, she was probably dead.
But Stark didn’t kill her. He went on to say, “The Alpha was involved in the outcome of Genesis. The blood of your father, and everyone else who died, is on her hands. That’s why she got the ones she loved back and we didn’t. Rylie Gresham doesn’t deserve to be in charge of the gaeans. She deserves nothing but pain.”
“Involved? Involved how?”
“She and her entire pack brought about Genesis,” Stark said. “I will get my revenge for that.” A hand touched Deirdre’s forehead, the gesture strangely gentle. “We’ll all get the revenge we’re owed.”
—XV—
Genesis was such a dark thing.
Deirdre was hiding underneath the blackberry bush again, knees hugged to her chest, surrounded by shivering leaves and vicious thorns. The approach of the fatal void roared like a rabid bear. There was pain in the cacophony, pain and fear and thunder, with millions of souls extinguished simultaneously.
She screamed back at the void as it consumed her. She screamed until her throat went raw and she couldn’t scream anymore.
Death had come for her, and she was so alone.
Her senses returned in a rush. Deirdre sat up, thrashing against the blackberry bush, arms flailing at the nothingness.
Then her eyes opened and she realized she wasn’t back home.
She was sitting in a bed in a very dark room, tangled in bed sheets.
Still at the asylum. Still with Stark.
Deirdre was drenched in her own sweat, and Stark himself was seated in the chair in the corner again, just as he had been when she first entered the room.
She licked her lips. “Stark?”
He didn’t respond.
She slid out of bed. The drugs were clearly still in her system. She felt hot all over, like she might be running a low-grade fever, and she still didn’t feel sure of her footing. But the visual hallucinations were gone. Her mood was good and her stomach felt satisfyingly full, like Niamh had always described. Deirdre felt she could do anything.
Maybe even take Stark.
But he wasn’t out for a fight. He wasn’t even conscious.
Stark was slumped in the chair, a syringe in one hand. His wrist was turned to expose the mesh square on the inside of his intake bracelet. Hints of the drug glimmered on the metal.
There was a watch on the table beside him. He must have taken it off earlier so he could wear the intake bracelet.
Deirdre picked up the watch, its links chiming softly as the wristband swayed in her grip. It was an expensive timepiece—at least in the four-figure range if he’d taken it to a pawnshop like Gutterman’s. And a pre-Genesis brand, too. So maybe low five figures.
Who had Stark been before Genesis? He clearly wasn’t the kind of person who could afford such watches anymore. He lived in an insane asylum with a ragtag band of terrorists. But he used to be someone else. Someone with money, someone who had military tattoos, someone who—maybe, just maybe—had lost someone on the same horrible day that Deirdre had.
She traced her fingertip over the inscription on the underside of the watch face.
“For Ever,” she said aloud. It was two words, just like that. It didn’t make sense to her. She set the watch down, careful not to make any noise, and backed away.
Deirdre was in Stark’s bedroom and he was unconscious.
It was a perfect time to explore.
A box sat underneath the card table. Its lid was ajar, allowing Deirdre to see the pages that Niamh had printed at the benefits office inside. She watched Stark as she nudged the lid off and lifted one of the folders out.
Deirdre flipped through the pages. It was exactly as Niamh had said: records of families who received benefits that included a mother and two daughters. There was too much information for Deirdre to sift through it while Stark was sleeping. He couldn’t remain unconscious for that long.
She returned the first folder and searched through the others for any sign of what Stark might have been looking for.
One of the folders had several bookmarks in it to indicate specific records. Deirdre couldn’t tell what had made those records stand out to Stark. The people weren’t related. Their home addresses weren’t geographically close. Many of them weren’t even on the East Coast.
Stark stirred in his chair, head rolling to the opposite shoulder.
She froze.
After a moment, when he didn’t move again, Deirdre took one of the bookmarked pages and returned the rest to the box. She tried to put the lid exactly the way it had been before she interfered.
Deirdre stuck the page in her pocket and made a short search of Stark’s room.
She didn’t have to look far to locate a gun. He had several in his armoire, where most people hung up their shirts.
There weren’t silver bullets in any of the magazines that she checked. It made sense. Stark could control shifters, so he didn’t need any other defense against them. And it also meant that he didn’t have any ammunition around that could kill him, either.
She weighed one of the machine guns in her hand. It was fully automatic. He had enough ammo in his sock drawer that she could have sawed him in half with the gunfire. That would have been enough to take down most shifters—maybe even Stark.
It would also alert everyone in the house to his murder. Even if she managed to kill him, which was no guarantee, Gage was locked in the basement. He wouldn’t make it out alive. Deirdre probably wouldn’t either.
She returned the gun to its position and shut the armoire.
Stark looked uncomfortable in the chair, which was fine with her, really, because he was an asshole. He’d beaten her up, screwed with Gage, and killed people just because he could. He deserved to wake up with a terrible neck cramp. Heck, he deserved much worse than that. Like an electric chair.
But he’d also carried her out of the line of fire—which he’d put her into in the first place—and he’d been pretty nice about Deirdre suffering from a bad trip—which he’d also forced on her by injecting the lethe in the first place.
No. He deserved the worst.
“Should I really worry about this guy’s comfort?” Deirdre muttered to herself.
The sane answer was no.
But she wasn’t feeling very sane that night.
She took a pillow off the bed and stuffed it under his head so that he looked a little more comfortable. She unlaced his boots and tossed them aside, too. Then she threw a sheet over him—not a particularly warm sheet, which was the pettiest form of revenge she could imagi
ne—and headed out, the bookmarked page folded in her back pocket.
Gage wasn’t released that day. Night came and Deirdre slept in their cold bed, alone and fitful, the paper clutched in her fist.
She swam in and out of dreams that were only slightly less vivid than her earlier hallucinations. She couldn’t remember what she was dreaming whenever she woke up—which was frequently—but she felt like she had spent her sleeping hours somewhere with rolling green hills and a warm, shining sun.
But she woke up in the same musty asylum she’d gone to sleep in.
Deirdre stashed the page she’d stolen from Stark in the dresser. It was sweaty and crumpled from being in her hand all night.
Whatever conversation they might have had that afternoon, and whatever small mercy the two of them had shown each other, Deirdre didn’t have any illusions about what would happen if Stark realized she’d taken that page.
He would kill her.
And he would make it hurt.
She filled the magazine of her Ruger with silver bullets and shoved it in her boot before going downstairs for breakfast.
Though the dining room was filled with more people than usual—more than the fifty Stark had claimed lived in the house—it felt empty without Gage’s presence. The food looked unusually inedible, the morning light extra gloomy, the hostile looks from Jacek’s friends even more hostile.
Niamh sat alone at a table.
“Any news?” Deirdre asked, taking the seat beside her. She’d gotten a scoop of rice for breakfast and nothing more. She still had no appetite.
“We’re out of here this afternoon,” Niamh said. “Apparently we’ll be getting van assignments soon. I hope you and I get stuck together.”
“Me too,” she lied. Leaving the asylum would be the perfect opportunity to contact Rylie, but it would be harder to shake someone like Niamh, who actively sought out her company. If Deirdre was lucky, she’d get stuck with someone like Jacek—someone she didn’t mind hurting to escape.
“Have you heard about Geoff?” Niamh asked.
Deirdre grimaced. “What’s there to hear?”
“The healer says he’ll survive, but…” Niamh trailed off. She was giving Deirdre a weird look.
