“What about Kreuger? Did she save him, too?”
Reggie nodded. “Yeah. But he was different from the others. He resented Vanessa. Was angry that someone with such a low AQ had been the one to get him out. That he was so dependent on her here.”
Outside there was a flash of lightning, and they all waited for the rumble of thunder to follow. When it came, low and angry, Cooper felt the vibrations in his throat.
“And Paul? How is he involved?”
“Oh, Paul,” Reggie said dismissively. “He knows everything and claims to support Vanessa no matter what. But he freaked when Llcaj disappeared. Was convinced Kreuger killed him, of all people. It’s his fault De Luca’s here. Dr. Joyce always said Paul’s not good enough for her and he was right. Now the De Lucas are trying to take our home away and they don’t give a shit about helping ex-rebels. Mutts.”
She looked boldly at Cooper and let the silence sit meaningfully for a moment. “No one does. No one except Vanessa.”
“And Dr. Joyce,” Cooper said, thinking out loud. “Or did he just care about Vanessa?”
Reggie looked at him, surprised. “It’s not like that between them. Dr. Joyce is just here for the work.”
“The couple’s counseling?”
“No, Dr. Nielsen’s work. Vanessa’s father. He was one of the developers of the AQ, you know. Joyce is sorting through all his old research to work on an updated, more accurate test.”
Cooper stood abruptly, and Reggie and Mutya both jumped a bit. “I need you to both go find Park. Tell him I need him right away while I go talk to Vanessa.”
“Are you sure?” Mutya asked worriedly. “Maybe I should—”
“I’ll be fine. Please, just hurry.”
“But you can’t turn Vanessa in!” Reggie cried. “I confessed. Please!”
“But you didn’t do it. And if I’m right, neither did she.”
* * *
Cooper burst into Vanessa’s office without knocking and found her slumped over her desk. For a millisecond he thought he was too late, but she jerked upright and stared at him, startled. Her eyes were red and swollen and she’d taken her false teeth out, giving her a slightly off, unfamiliar look. “What are you doing in here?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Cooper said. “But I wanted you to know, Reggie has confessed to killing your brother.”
Vanessa’s mouth dropped open in shock. “No. That’s not possible. She wouldn’t do that.”
“You all seem quite certain of what each other would and wouldn’t do,” Cooper noted. “Like Kreuger. I thought Reggie said he didn’t kill Llcaj because she liked Kreuger. Or didn’t care about him much, anyway. Turns out she hated him. Just thought a man like that—defeated and timid after losing his pack and his pride—wasn’t capable of that level of aggression.”
Vanessa frowned. “He wasn’t. You didn’t know him. You don’t know what he’s been through.”
“You mean his time in a rebel pack? How he was one of the escapees you took in and hid from retaliation?” She looked surprised. “I know you’re running a shelter here. What I don’t understand is why here. Why not sell the land like everyone wants and start somewhere new?”
“I—” Vanessa looked out at the window for a long moment. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked finally.
Cooper’s eyebrows shot up. “Um, no. Not really.”
“That’s okay. You don’t need to believe in ghosts to believe in hauntings. People can be haunted. That’s obvious. But places, too, I think. This land is haunted. Poisoned by my father and his sick obsession with AQs. He was a scientist, you know. Or he used to be once. I don’t know what you’d call the thing he became in the end. He was always trying to perfect the species. What makes a wolf? What makes an alpha? It wasn’t enough to just test us. He wanted to be able to change us, too. Oops, your kid’s a little too submissive? Take this treatment and they’ll be the alpha you always wanted them to be.”
“Oliver says low AQs aren’t bad, they’re just indicative of different strengths.”
Vanessa tilted her head thoughtfully. “Really? I wouldn’t expect that from someone in his position. Families like the Parks are precisely what my father wanted to be. Thought his treatments and serums and tests could make us. You can’t imagine what a disappointment we were to him. Me, special only in how low I test, and Ja-Jack, human like his mother.”
Her voice cracked and she looked down at her desk. “He was such a sweet baby. He loved these woods. Always running and laughing. I should have taken him with me. But when I ran away he was only four years old and I—I was terrified.”
“That’s understandable,” Cooper said. “You were just a kid yourself.”
She shook her head. “My father changed him. Broke him. I should have listened when he wanted to sell. I just thought we could finally do something good here. Wash away the poison. I tore down my father’s labs, sold our old house, that whole section of the property, and built this place instead. I thought I could make just enough money on the retreat to create a haven for runaways.”
“And all the stuff in your father’s labs? All his research, what happened to that?”
“I couldn’t bear reading his journals, his notes.” Vanessa shuddered. “But Joyce was my mentor. My friend. He already knew about my past, my father. I asked him down here to sort through it all for me. I wanted him to see if he could make the research into something good.”
“Why? If your father’s work was so evil, why not just destroy it?” Cooper asked.
“You know how little information there is on wolves?” Vanessa whispered. “How little we even know about ourselves? We don’t have the resources, the collected history, the population, the liberty to run mass studies, publish textbooks, study the full range of our experiences. We have no idea why some wolves’ bodies fight the shift while for others, like your mate, it’s as easy as an exhale. Why do some of us choose to live our whole lives in fur? Why does submission in a fight have such a profound, lasting effect on our minds? I couldn’t justify throwing out sixty years of data. It wasn’t the science that was bad. It was the way he used it. The reasons he used it. But in the hands of someone like Joyce? He can take that data and fine-tune the AQ test. Make it better, more equitable. He can help us all learn about ourselves. If we know why we’re so drawn toward alpha-types, maybe we can stop that draw. Prevent wolves from joining rebel packs in the first place.”
“Change them, you mean? Like your father wanted?”
“No,” Vanessa protested. “Joyce is nothing like that. It was his idea to stay and help wolves escape from rebel packs.”
“Because he cares? Or because he needed a supply of subjects to study, and transient, vulnerable wolves indebted to you and this place, with no connections of their own are the perfect population to take advantage of?”
Vanessa shook her head slowly, expression horrified. “No, he—no.”
Cooper pointed at the bookshelf. “The secret door, does it lead to his office?”
She looked surprised but nodded and stood, pulling the shelf back with ease. Cooper walked through. It was empty and the desk drawers were open as if someone had been in a hurry. He shuffled through them, finding nothing of interest. He then reached under the couch and found a key in the same place as Vanessa’s office and fitted it into the locked dresser.
Behind him Vanessa protested weakly, “Those are full of confidential files.”
But he ignored her. Inside were eight leather-bound diaries. “Your father’s notes?” he asked, holding one up and she nodded.
“Some of them, anyway. I know Joyce said there were missing volumes.”
The journals the mysterious wolf that had been harassing Monty was trying so hard to collect. Cooper flipped through them, and it wasn’t long before he found new annotations. Scribbles in a different hand commenting on the original tex
t. Then, toward the back of the book, full pages in that same second hand making notes of its own. Dosages. Acronyms. Test results. Hormones—only some of which he recognized. Drugs—none of which he recognized.
Cooper continued looking through the other drawers and found dozens of files with names, including Thomas Kreuger. Cooper flipped through it. So this was where his test results and personal information had ended up. Park had been right about his AQ: a middle-of-the-road sixty-seven. He skimmed the rest until he reached the last page.
...rage-induced blackouts. Subject has been warned to cease usage but is resistant and may be self-administering. Whether this is due to an unforeseen addictive quality or the subject’s reluctance to lose the marginal increase in AQ on this treatment is not yet clear.
That was the last entry for Kreuger.
Heart pounding now, Cooper shuffled through the rest of the files. His own undercover name jumped out at him, Kyle Davis, and he pulled it out. Joyce had lied about his first AQ being inconclusive. Both his tests were present and accounted for. Both his tests were the same number.
At the bottom of the first test’s page, right next to the results, was that same loopy purple scrawl.
Impossible.
There was a knock and Mutya walked into Joyce’s office, closely followed by De Luca and Terradas. She was soaked and her hair was puffing up into a wild frizz. “He’s gone,” she gasped. “We looked everywhere. Your cabin, the lodge, staff quarters, barn, Lisa and Jimmy’s. They said he left with the gun lockbox thirty minutes ago to get dressed and no one’s seen him since. But...”
She hesitated, then held up a small piece of orange plastic. An autoinjector cap. “I found this on the floor of your cabin. I’m assuming it’s not yours.”
Long silence.
“Are you listening to me? The Shepherd is missing.”
Cooper had heard every word she said, but from a distance after He’s gone. He looked down at his test, shaking slightly in his hand, numbers swimming. He quickly ripped it up and tossed it in the garbage. “What about Joyce? Is he out there?”
“I haven’t seen him since the fight in the dressing room,” Mutya said, frowning, and looked to De Luca and Terradas, who shook their heads.
“We saw him heading down to the cabins to collect the rest of the guests, but not since,” Terradas said.
Cooper’s throat was so dry it clicked when he tried to speak. “Where would he go?”
“Who?” Vanessa asked. “The Shep—”
“No, Joyce. Where would he go?”
She shook her head, wide-eyed. “He can’t get out of the mountains in this. There’s nowhere to go.”
“You said you cleared out your father’s old lab. Where was that?” Cooper asked even as he pulled his phone out and pulled up the picture of the map they’d found in Kreuger’s desk.
“Where the mill is now. But I told you, it’s all torn down.”
“This?” He pointed to the building that had Mill written on it.
Vanessa frowned. “No. That’s the old gristmill. It’s a watermill on the river. It was rickety even when I was a kid, but...it’s two hundred years old, I couldn’t bear to raze it. Monty bought it along with the property.”
“Okay,” Cooper said, brain moving at hyperspeed. “I’m going to need exact directions there.”
“You’re not going in this,” De Luca said with disbelief. “It’s torrential out and you don’t even know this old mill is where he is.”
“I don’t have time to wait,” Cooper snapped. “And I don’t see any other options. Joyce has injected Oliver with something. He needs me.”
“You won’t be able to fight Joyce and win.”
“Then help me,” Cooper said spontaneously. “Come with me. If we all go together maybe—” Even as he said it, he could see the no in De Luca’s eyes.
“Don’t be a fool He has your gun and apparently some kind of poison,” he said bluntly. “We’d be fish in a barrel to him. And that’s if we’re not struck by lightning on the way. Absolutely no one here is leaving this lodge.” De Luca looked around pointedly as if the order wasn’t clear enough. “Anyone who follows you will be considered an enemy of the De Luca pack. Besides, if your mate’s been dosed as you say, he’s probably already dead.”
Cooper was too wired with adrenaline to feel the pain of those words, that thought, that concept. “You want him to die,” he breathed with realization. “That would solve your problems very neatly.”
De Luca gave him a sharp, considering look. “I would never wish that fate on any of my fellow wolves. But I’d rather risk the Shepherd’s death weakening the Park pack’s hold on the north than risk my own life for someone who intends to take my family’s territory and turn our pack against us.”
“And if he lives? And you did nothing to save him? What will you do then?”
“He won’t.” The others looked away, apparently unable to face whatever Cooper’s expression was at that moment. De Luca shrugged, and considered Cooper thoughtfully. “But there’s no reason for you to die as well. Don’t go.” That was an order, too.
Cooper couldn’t help laughing bitterly. “You have no power over me.”
“I could physically stop you.”
Cooper held De Luca’s gaze and leaned closer, voice barely above a whisper. “Look at me. If you even try to stop me, and something happens to Oliver, there is no place, no territory in the whole world where you’ll ever be safe again.”
The room was dead silent.
De Luca narrowed his eyes. Finally he shrugged. “It’s your life. Die how you wish.”
Chapter Thirteen
Driving in a vicious storm over flooding roads was not ideal, but Cooper couldn’t figure another, less dangerous and time-efficient way to get there. As it was, he was driving twenty miles an hour at top speed and still doing so much swerving and skidding around the road that it took him fifteen minutes to pull up to the lumber warehouse.
According to Vanessa, the old watermill was only a three-minute walk through the trees, and while semi-accessible by car, Cooper was trying to maintain some element of surprise. With him he’d brought a large kitchen knife and one of the heavy shovels from the boiler room, but those were no match against a gun, depending on if Joyce had made it past the lockbox. Park, of course, knew the passcode, and Cooper tried to think as dispassionately as possible reasons why he might have given the code to Joyce.
Cooper stuck the knife in his raincoat pocket and held the shovel with both hands on the rubber wrapped handle, running doggedly through the woods until he glimpsed a clearing and the outline of a building through the rain.
The old mill was smaller than he’d anticipated, and for a moment Cooper wondered if he’d gotten it all wrong. You can’t know Joyce brought him here. What if he was still on the main property and they just hadn’t looked hard enough? What if he was stowed away in one of the other cabins they’d forgotten to check? What if they had lied to Cooper?
He couldn’t think like that. He was here now, so that’s where he’d start.
Cooper crept closer, darting between trees for coverage. The building looked all two hundred of its years. Wooden siding had lost all its paint and several of the windowpanes were filthy and cracked. The waterwheel itself still seemed operational, though whether that had something to do with all the flooding or not was unclear. It was an overshot design, and a wooden trough spilled a heavy stream of water on top of the wheel, catching its remaining paddles and propelling it into motion.
Cooper surveyed the building for its best entry points. There were two regular doors on opposite sides of the building, and a latched panel door tucked behind the wheel itself that was possibly for some sort of means of maintenance and accessible only by a narrow stone wall that protected that bottom half of the building from the water. Cooper went for the latched panel.
&
nbsp; Clinging to the splintering wooden siding of the mill with one hand and his shovel in the other, he inched along the wall concentrating on not slipping on the wet stones. Being less than four feet from the wheel, the sound was absolutely deafening, and Cooper kept jerking his head around, convinced that Joyce had snuck up behind him. He continuously had to blink away rainwater and residual spray, which only half worked; more often than not he couldn’t see as well as not being able to hear.
When his hand brushed over the cold iron of the latch, Cooper had to bite down on his lip to stop himself from crying out in relief. Particularly when the latch worked and he was able to pry the panel open.
Inside was clearly where the grindstone had once been, though now there was some cheap, contemporary furniture. A desk, a couple of chairs, a cot with blankets and a flat pillow. Freestanding construction lights. Terrifyingly, the whole room, floors and walls, was covered in thick, clear plastic tarps. Seated in one of the chairs, facing him, was Dr. Joyce. In his hand was an uncapped autoinjector.
So much for sneaking up on him.
“You made it,” Joyce said in his usual pleasant voice. It didn’t seem right. By all rights, he should sound evil now, cackling and gleeful. But if anything, Joyce just sounded a bit sad.
Cooper held his shovel up, wishing he had a little less rainwater dripping into his eyes. “Where is he? What have you done to him?”
“He’s alive,” Joyce said. And again, the reassurance with a tinge of melancholy was odd, out of place. “I’ll even tell you where he is, but not if you try to attack me.”
Cooper lowered the shovel, just slightly, staying on guard. “I—”
“And the knife. Come on, if you don’t think kitchen knives stink, you don’t cook.”
Cooper took the knife out of his pocket and tossed it to the ground. Far enough to relax Joyce, but not too far. “Park. Is he...”
Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Big Bad Wolf) Page 26
