by Lauren Esker
No point in thinking about might-have-beens.
"You can stop playing dead," Evans said. There were small, suggestive clinking noises nearby, as of little tools being moved around, and that was what finally made him open his eyes. He didn't want her coming at him without being able to see it, even if he couldn't do anything about it.
The room was brightly lit, sending a spike of pain through his skull. He twisted his head to the side, so at least the banks of fluorescent lights overhead weren't shining directly into his eyes. White walls, sinks, workspaces with equipment arrayed on it—his stomach lurched, but not from the drugs this time. He was definitely in a lab.
I think I owe Chester an apology.
Evans, wearing blue plastic gloves, was sticking tiny labels onto a series of glass vials, scribbling notes on each one. When she got to the last one, she clicked it into a syringe and turned around. "Good morning, Avery. I need to draw some blood."
"No 'Agent Hollen' or 'Mr. Hollen' now, huh. Now that we're not playing nice." He scanned the rest of the lab. There were two other people present, both of whom were familiar to him from the break-in at the Hodgsons'. One was stationed by the door with a dart gun; the other, Mike, was now laying out some tools for Evans.
Evans shrugged. "We may as well be on a first-name basis. We're going to get to know each other quite well, I think."
She wrapped a rubber tube around his left arm and tied it tightly. Avery raised his head to watch her. "Those are some fascinating scars you have," she said, swabbing his inner elbow with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. "Am I correct to infer that werewolf healing is involved in your survival of those wounds?"
"Is there any point in answering any of your questions, since you think you know the answers already?"
Her smile was tight and perfunctory. She plunged the needle into his arm, and Avery schooled his face to stillness, refusing to give her the satisfaction of a wince. "You know," she said, "if you people were a little more cooperative, this kind of thing wouldn't be necessary."
"Cooperative, huh? Like Alan?"
Some emotion flickered across her face, something he couldn't identify. Avery watched her face rather than watching his blood splash around the inside of the vial, but she locked those feelings away before he could figure them out.
"Well, it's my hope that with your help, we can bring Alan back from whatever the hell he thinks he's doing out there." She popped another vial into the syringe, replacing the first in the little case of tubes. Avery nervously eyed the number of remaining vials, about a dozen of them.
"And what is he doing, exactly?" he asked, returning his gaze to her face.
"Interesting how you're turning it around on me now," she remarked. "Care to tell me if that woman in the cage down there is a werewolf or not?"
His heart clenched at the mention of Nicole. He wished to God they'd never let this woman realize the closeness of their relationship, with its attendant conclusion that they could be used against each other.
"I think she already answered that question herself."
Evans lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "Whether or not she's telling the truth remains to be determined. I suppose we can't determine it scientifically, since we haven't isolated the W factor yet."
"W for werewolf?" he asked, but the question was obvious enough not to need an answer. "Wait, is that what you're doing here? Figuring out what makes us ... us?" No wonder EGL had been trying to recruit the Leungs. If they didn't know about the general existence of non-werewolf shifters, they might not have even realized Tim and Erin were shifters; they were just interested in the Leungs' research.
"There are many questions about your kind that we're trying to answer here, Avery." She set aside another filled vial. "One thing we haven't yet determined, which you and Nicole might be quite useful for, is whether your species is cross-fertile with human women. We've created viable embryos from our stored stock, but I certainly wasn't about to become a test case, so we don't know if they can grow to term or not."
Avery listened to this with mounting horror. "You're going to breed us? Are you insane?"
"If you are cross-fertile, that would greatly reduce the need for breeding stock," Evans said in that same polite, sensible tone. She'd filled half the vials now. "All we would need is to collect and freeze semen from a handful of male specimens—you'll do nicely—and then use human women as surrogates. Having lost our other breeder, the simplicity of that plan is appealing. We'd only need to do it until we could isolate and replicate the W factor in the lab, of course."
"Holy shit," Avery said, staring at her. He definitely owed Chester an apology. "How does it feel to be evil, Dr. Mengele?"
Evans brushed this off. "Like I said before, with a little cooperation on your part, no coercion would be necessary. We tried being nice, and I have nothing but a handful of dead employees to show for it. That's when I realized that your species lacks the moral development for anything other than base self-interest. I'd appeal to your higher sense of purpose if I thought you had one."
"You keep saying 'species'," Avery said. "You realize we're not actually a different species, right? I'm as human as you are; I just have a few extras."
"Genetically, so are Neanderthals." She was down to her next-to-last vial now, and Avery was shivering, though paradoxically his temperature had gone up as his body worked to replace the blood it had lost. "Unlike Neanderthals, your kind have been living among us, undetected, for ... well, I suppose I would have to guess as long as the human race has existed, because we must have branched off from a common ancestor. Of course we were never entirely ignorant of you. We fought you once. Old myths and stories can attest to that, though as one might expect from folkloric sources, they have some of the details wrong. Silver bullets were one of the first things we tested."
At least he wouldn't have to be a test subject for that. He tried not to think about the obvious question: Tested on whom? Instead, he asked, "So, do you believe in vampires, Bigfoot, and dragons, too?"
"If someone put a dragon on my lab table, of course I'd believe in it. Did you really think you could hide forever in an era of cell phone cameras, video surveillance, and Internet sites?"
Despite the desperation of his situation, his lips twisted in a wry smile. "That's what I keep trying to tell my friends, but no one ever listens."
"They don't have to believe, in order to reap the benefits." Having finished filling the vials, she withdrew the needle—but not in the way that Avery, who'd had his fair share of blood drawn over the years, had come to expect. Rather than pressing down with her thumb to stop the bleeding, she simply pulled it out and watched, with a fascinated expression, as blood welled to the surface and then congealed while his skin healed underneath. There was something almost orgasmic in her expression.
"Thank you for making this situation even creepier than it already was. What are you going to do with my blood? Or do I want to know?"
"Would you care?" she countered. "Your people are not scientists or engineers. You live like animals. The work I do here is all well above your ability to understand."
There she goes with that 'your people' nonsense again. "So what do you know about us, anyway?" he asked in as conversational a tone as he could manage while naked and strapped down on his back. It was infinitely easier to stay calm when he wasn't in the cage.
"The obvious, of course." She moved about the room briskly, consigning most of the vials to a refrigerator before taking one of them to a machine in the corner. "The transformation is the most obvious—I've barely begun to collect data on it. But even more importantly, there's your ability to heal yourselves, and your correspondingly greater endurance and strength. That is what our most important work deals with. You could benefit humanity so much, if you didn't selfishly keep those abilities to yourself."
"They are our abilities, though," he couldn't help pointing out, although he felt vaguely guilty because, Dr. Mengele though she was, she did kind of have a point. Shifter
healing could benefit a lot of people. The Leungs had also mentioned research in applying it to regrowing tissues in the lab. But that still didn't make it all right to tie him down and experiment on him. "Have you heard of bodily autonomy? How about informed consent? Or medical ethics at all, for that matter?"
Evans ignored the question, working with her machine. Over her shoulder she said, "Mike, get the camera, please. Don't worry, I don't think he's going anywhere."
Mike stepped out for a minute and came back with an expensive-looking digital camera on a tripod. Having started the machine running, Evans took over the job of setting up the camera next to the lab table. Avery watched the process with some trepidation. The camera couldn't hurt him, but having its black eye aimed at him made him want to curl around himself protectively.
All the while, worry for Nicole beat at the back of his mind. She was all right, he told himself. She had to be. Especially if Evans planned to breed a bunch of so-called werewolf-human hybrids—horrifying thought, but at least it meant they should be treating Nicole decently and feeding her, if she was intended to be the mother of ...
... mother of what, was the question. An army of werewolves, maybe? Strong, fast soldiers, who could hunt by smell and outrun any human foe.
Good thing they don't know about bear shifters.
That made him think of Jack, and the rest of the SCB. Not to mention Nicole's family. Between the lack of windows and the drugs, he had no idea how long they'd been held prisoner, but surely their family and friends would have noticed they were missing by now, even if it had only been a few hours. And Cho had last seen them at EGL, so how long could it take for the SCB to mount a rescue?
However long it takes to get a warrant, he thought gloomily.
"Are you right- or left-handed?" Evans asked, breaking into his thoughts.
He stared at her, worried. "I don't think you could possibly have any good reason for asking that question."
"Uncooperative again. Well, ten percent of the population is left-handed, so I suppose we'll play the odds."
She moved the camera to point at Avery's left arm, which made him even more nervous. He yanked on the restraints, but they held.
"Recording," Evans said brightly. "Subject W008, day 1, continued."
"Recording what?" Avery demanded. "Continued from what?"
"As noted in earlier examination, subject is male, height 5'8", weight 153.2 pounds prior to blood draw," she reported, ignoring him. A chill ran through Avery: they'd been recording him while he was unconscious. And weighing him too, apparently.
"So, do I get a say in this at any point?" he asked. His voice rasped in a throat that was dry from more than just his drugged sleep. Terror had him firmly in its grip now, and he struggled not to show it.
Evans went on as if he hadn't spoken. "Blood was drawn just a few minutes ago." She tilted the camera to pointed at the crook of his elbow. "This was not recorded, but it can be clearly seen that the skin is unmarked."
Her thumb pressed against the inside of his elbow, wiping away the half-dried blood. Avery flinched away from her touch. Just having that much contact with her gloved fingers made his skin crawl.
"Whoever is watching this recording, I'm being held against my will," he said loudly. "I do not consent to any of this."
"The subject will shut up now," Evans said with a bright, brittle smile, "or the subject will be gagged."
"My name is Avery Hollen," he went on, almost shouting now, his words tumbling over each other. "I'm an agent with the SCB—"
A fist cracked across his jaw. He'd been so focused on Evans and the camera that hadn't even noticed Mike moving in from the side. Avery reeled, tasting blood. So much for any help coming from that quarter.
"Thank you," Evans said. "Please gag him." She tapped the camera's button with a gloved fingertip, pausing the recording.
"I do not consent!" Avery screamed. There were other cameras in here, he was sure of it, just as in the room with the cages and Nicole. "I do not give my consent to any of this. I'm being held against my—" That was as far as he got before the henchman's big hand slapped a piece of duct tape across his mouth. He stopped screaming, aware that it would do no good, and lay breathing heavily through his nose. His breath was wet and hot on the inside of the gag, the stink of the glue almost powerful enough to make him sick.
"Take two," Evans murmured, and turned the camera on again. She went through the same litany as before, height and weight and so on. Avery thrashed desperately, not sure what he could possibly accomplish except to make it clear to any non-complicit observer that nothing about this situation was consensual. He tried to wrench his arm out of the way when she reached down to point out the healed needle mark, but didn't manage to do anything other than twist his shoulder unpleasantly.
Evans ignored his struggling as she might have ignored the squirming of a lab rat. She aimed the camera at his left hand, and Mike placed an object in her blue-gloved palm. Something small and sharp and bright.
A scalpel.
Oh, you have to be fucking kidding me, Avery thought. His heart was hammering now; he panted through his nose as best he was able. This is like B-movie villainy here.
"Previous experiments have demonstrated that subjects show variable healing abilities and tolerance for pain," Evans said as she bent over his hand with the scalpel in one hand and, bizarrely, a black marker in the other. "As this subject is unrelated to the others, it will be interesting to see if healing speed is within established parameters or if it turns out the variance is even wider than already suspected."
Unrelated to the others? he tried to say, but only managed a muffled, incomprehensible noise that Evans ignored, focused as she was on marking out neat, even delineations on his skin, while her assistant used a pair of calipers to measure the distances for her. Part of him was trying to crawl out of his skin with fear. But another part—a distant, analytical part—seemed to be watching it all from a distance, and thinking without haste about what she'd said. Who were her other test subjects? The four kids? Chester's missing pack? Both?
The blade bit into the back of his hand with a sharp, silvery flash of pain. A bright red line opened up behind it, measuring out the span between two of the black marks, and began almost as quickly to close.
"Firm conclusions will have to wait for data analysis, of course," Evans said, a suppressed, breathless excitement in her voice. "But it seems healing speed is even faster in this specimen than in the others. Scars indicate an extensive history of injury. Is it possible that repeated use of the healing factor makes it more efficient?"
Yeah, any of us could have told you that, Avery thought, and he closed his eyes. Watching her cut into his skin was doing him no good. He tried to relax, tried to tell himself that whatever would happen, would happen. It didn't help; he was tense as a plank of wood, fear-sweat prickling his skin.
And yet still he felt detached, distant—ever more so as another sharp line of pain opened up across his hand. Like none of this was happening to him, not really.
Oh, Nicole, I hope you're having a better time than I am.
All they had to do, he told himself grimly, was hang on until the SCB came for them. And, despite his earlier misgivings, it might not necessarily involve waiting for warrants and proper chain of command. If Jack and Cho believed he was in danger, they'd come: through the vents, through the walls, whatever it took.
His conviction startled him.
They would come. For him.
At its base, it wasn't an unusual emotion for a werewolf to have. It was, in fact, a very ordinary emotion for them. Loyalty unto death was a werewolf hallmark. But it was something that was normally extended to one's own pack, and to few others. And it was something that one expected to receive only from one's pack, in return.
He flinched as another flash of pain shot up his arm. Evans was pressing in deeper now. He could only hope that she had some idea of how far his healing abilities could be stretched, and didn't plan to
actually maim him.
Yeah, and how do you think she plans to get that information, dumbass?
He shuddered, a sudden and uncontrollable fit of shaking. Evans broke off her narration—her voice had settled into a steady hum in his ears; the words no longer had meaning—to make a disgruntled noise. He felt her fingers close around his arm, holding his hand still as she resumed her gruesome work.
It is no part of me, he thought, but it wasn't a verbal thought; he was slipping into a very old place, the place in his head where he'd spent much of his early childhood. He had lived as wolves did, with no past or future, no thoughts beyond the immediate. In those days he'd had nothing, been nothing; he was only a child who was allowed to exist as a cog in the machine that was his pack, his family, until they abused him so badly that the authorities came and took him away. All the years since then, he'd tried to find his way out of that place, to convince himself that he was something, that he mattered, that he deserved a pack even if he didn't have one.
He had told himself that, and never believed himself, and only now, with his back against the wall, he realized that he had been both right and wrong.
He was right because he was not the animal Evans claimed he was. I am not going to let you make me be nothing, he thought, dragging himself back with his fingernails from the place he wanted to go in his head. Even if it hurt. Even if it was degrading, and awful; even if his mind was only trying to protect him, as it had protected him so long ago. And maybe it would come to that, in the end. But he was afraid if he let himself go there again, he'd go all-wolf, as he almost had as a child. He was afraid he'd never come back. And that scared him because of the thing he was wrong about.
He was wrong that he had no pack.
Nicole was his; he would fight for her. Jack and Casey and Cho were his; they would come for him.
He held onto that, as the pain lanced up his arm and Evans narrated her findings into the camera as if he was nothing more than an inanimate object on her lab table.
