by Laura Taylor
Melissa had another go, and then another, sometimes managing to hit quite close to the centre of the target, sometimes going quite wide. But she liked the weight of the gun in her hand, the cool metal, the feeling of power it gave her, and after a time, she started getting used to the recoil, anticipating it, enjoying it, even. And instead of the blue silhouette of a human torso, she imagined she was shooting at a shifter’s heart instead, bullet after bullet sent hurtling down the range, each one a step closer to her dream of eradicating the shifters once and for all.
Jacob was on his way to the shooting range for a practice session when Abdul, the head of their small forensics department, stopped him in the hallway.
“I have the report on the car crash, sir. You said you wanted to know the moment it was complete.”
“Excellent.” Jacob took the report from the scientist, waving at him to walk with him as he continued towards the shooting range.
He skimmed through the information, planning on having a more thorough look later on, but he could at least get an overview now. “The vehicle was traveling at high speed. Skidded on the corner and hit the wall. Cause of the crash unknown, but it may have had to swerve to avoid an obstruction. The crash could be consistent with trying to avoid an oncoming car. Interesting…” He paused to open the door to the shooting range reception area, then turned the page. “No sign of the other vehicle, no tyre tracks on the road, no debris that didn’t come from our car.” He looked up at Abdul. “I’m sorry, I’m not quite following this. The report says the crash was consistent with avoiding another vehicle, yet there’s no evidence of any other vehicle being present.”
“Something must have caused the car to skid,” Abdul pointed out. “There was no mechanical fault that we could find. The basic cause of the crash was sudden braking, causing the tyres to lose traction, but why would they suddenly hit the brakes like that? There had to be a reason, and given the circumstances, the most likely cause-”
“Could equally have been a stray sheep in the middle of the road?” Jacob finished his sentence for him, and the scientist looked vaguely embarrassed.
“I suppose that’s a possibility, yes.”
They paused at the security desk, where Jacob picked up a pair of earmuffs and safety glasses. The door to the range opened, and Melissa came out, a gun and a pair of earmuffs in her hand. “Another practice session?” he asked, as she saw him.
“Yes, sir,” she replied crisply. “We’re waiting for the shifter to be prepped for the next round of tests in the lab, so I thought I’d make use of the time.”
“An excellent idea,” Jacob said, beaming at her. “You see, Abdul, this here is the sort of member we need. She thinks outside the square, she goes above and beyond the call of duty, and she’s always looking for methods to improve the way we do things. This young lady is going places, I guarantee it.” Dismissing Melissa with a smile and a nod, he turned back to his report. “The two bullet casings found inside the car were from a Glock 22. Which, coincidentally, is the same gun used by the majority of our security staff,” he said drily. “And also the type of bullet that killed Steve. There was no gun found on Steve’s body… so according to this report, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that someone took Steve’s own gun from him and shot him with it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Standing at the security desk, Melissa handed her gun back to the security officer at the window. Once she gained her full licence, she’d be allowed to carry one with her full time, but until then, she had to check it in and out each time she came for practice. As she initialled the sign-out form, her ears pricked up at the conversation happening behind her. The whole building had heard about the crash, and the rumours that Miller was now in the hands of the shifters. Jacob had made the firm point that until the official report came in, everything else was nothing more than gossip and hearsay, but from the sounds of it, that report had finally arrived. Melissa took her time with signing off. Any excuse to stay a few moments longer, and hear the results of the report.
“Daniel was killed in the crash,” Jacob was saying, “but what about any sign of Miller? Are you certain he was the one driving?”
“Yes sir,” the other man replied. “His fingerprints were on the steering wheel. He’d been injured – his blood was on the front seat and the door handle. There might have been more evidence, but unfortunately, the rain could have washed a lot of it away. But I can confirm that Miller was driving the car, he was bleeding when he left it, and his phone was left at the scene. There’s no other trace of him at all.”
Listening carefully, Melissa got her security pass out deliberately slowly to show it to the guard, fumbled with it and dropped it on the floor as she went to put it away. News of Miller was a topic of great interest to her. He had helped save her life after the attack on the lab, though disappointingly it had been at the expense of letting their prisoners escape, but even so, she held a certain professional respect for him as a result. Most of the guards weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, heavy-weight grunts who fought well, but didn’t do so well on the thinking side of things. Miller had seemed to straddle both sides of the coin, and Melissa was curious to know what had become of him.
Jacob was still peering at the report, and he flipped the page… then the next, then hurriedly turned back to the start. “Abdul,” he said suddenly, a warning tone in his voice. “There’s nothing in this report about any other bullet casings recovered from the scene. Is there more evidence still being processed?”
“No sir. That’s all of it. There were only the two casings found – both of them inside the car.”
“Okay, then for argument’s sake, let’s go out on a limb and assume that the captive herself managed to take Steve’s gun from him and shoot him with it. No sign of the second bullet, but that doesn’t mean anything in particular. Perhaps they were fighting over the gun, and a bullet was fired off into the fields. If it went any significant distance, we’d never find it. But according to the evidence, a grand total of two shots were fired. The prevailing theory on this case was that the shifters came after their captive, ran the car off the road and kidnapped Miller in the process. So could you explain to me how that could all have happened, with no confirmed evidence of a second vehicle, and without anyone else firing a single shot?”
Melissa had wasted all the time she could without drawing unwanted attention to herself – getting pulled up for eavesdropping when Jacob had just given her a shining appraisal in front of her colleague would only make her look silly – so she gathered her things and headed out the door.
But as she climbed the stairs and walked back to her office, her mind was chewing over the information she had gleaned from Jacob’s conversation.
She didn’t have all the details, she knew, and besides which, solving the mystery of Miller’s disappearance wasn’t her job. But out of pure curiosity, she couldn’t help trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. What were the possible scenarios that could have led to the available evidence?
Well, option one was the most obvious. Miller had indeed been kidnapped by the shifters, and his fate was beyond their control. If the other car hadn’t skidded or hit anything, then there wouldn’t be any evidence of it left behind, and perhaps that second bullet had hit Miller, and he’d been injured and unable to defend himself as a result.
Option two was similar: the shifters had come after their captive, but in this version, Miller had survived the crash and hidden somewhere nearby, escaping before the shifters got a hold of him. If he’d been hurt, then he could be either trying to make his way back to the Noturatii somehow, or lying dead in a ditch somewhere, overcome by his injuries.
Option three: there had been no second car, in which case something else had caused Miller to crash the car. It had been a wet and stormy night, after all. Hazardous driving conditions. A stray sheep, or a dog running in the road? But that ultimately brought her back to option two – Miller was either injured or dead, somewhere lost i
n the countryside, the captive shifter having presumably run off sometime after the crash.
Option four… what was option four? What if the captive hadn’t run off, Melissa wondered idly. What if, by some freakish twist of fate, she’d managed to take Steve’s gun, shoot him, then she’d taken Miller captive? If he’d been injured, he might not have been able to fight back. So she’d captured him, taken him away – on foot, if there was no second car involved – and then either handed him over to the shifters, or killed him at a later time, somewhere in the middle of the countryside. That seemed less likely, as Miller was a seasoned fighter, and should have been able to take on one shifter relatively easily, whether they were armed or not. But it was a possibility.
And then a fifth idea occurred to her, one that she dismissed without even considering it… but then a moment later, she brought the idea back around in her mind. This one was even less likely than the last, going against everything she knew about Miller. But that was how real investigators had to think, she reminded herself, how the Noturatii had to think, when they were dealing with a species as malicious and devious as the shifters, and Melissa let her mind linger on the strange and unsettling idea.
Perhaps no one had kidnapped Miller at all. Perhaps, after the car had crashed, he’d… released the captive? she thought, running with the most outlandish scenario she could imagine. Perhaps the captive had bribed him, offered him a ridiculous amount of money for her own freedom… and then Miller had… decided to help her? Allowed her to go free? And disappeared off the radar, to begin a new life elsewhere? Traitors within the Noturatii were few and far between, but certainly not unheard of. They were all swiftly hunted down and killed, and Melissa would have found it easier to believe that aliens had finally landed on earth, than to believe that Miller had betrayed the Noturatii. But nonetheless, the idea was there, filling out her list of possibilities as to what could have become of the man.
The mystery would be solved one way or another, she knew, as she reached her office and put the idle thoughts aside. The Noturatii were nothing if not thorough, and one way or another, they’d track him down – either the man himself, or his remains. But until they did, the mystery remained a tantalising puzzle to be solved, and she was rather proud of her own deductive skills in coming up with a range of possible scenarios. She would wait eagerly to discover the truth, once the investigation was complete, and then she’d see how close to the target she’d managed to get.
Three days after his acceptance into the Den, Miller walked into the dining room, feeling a little more spirited than he had been lately. After he’d been released from his cage, he’d been told that he was to have formal lessons on shifter life; the rules around the estate, the mechanics of shifting, and the war with the Noturatii – from the shifters’ perspective this time, rather than the Noturatii’s. At first, he’d been looking forward to the lessons. Days of sitting in the cage with little entertainment and no purposeful work had left him feeling bored and restless, and though Skip had made the effort to teach him the basics, there was much more he still wanted to know.
But then had come another piece of news that had been rather startling: Tank was to be his tutor. Apparently it was a punishment of sorts, for the fight he’d started with Miller in the cages. But the idea made Miller a little nervous. Though they’d found some common ground while they were both locked up, and though Tank had voted for him to be allowed to stay, it was also clear that the man hadn’t got over everything about Miller’s past. Which was understandable, Miller reminded himself. Tank had suffered tremendous pain and lost numerous close friends as a direct result of Miller’s actions, and working through all the residual anger and grief was going to take time.
The other thing that was taking a significant amount of getting used to was the mannerisms of the shape shifters. The basics of the ‘merge’ had been explained to him, the need to accept the wolf’s desires and thoughts as his own, but seeing the result up close and personal in his tutor was more than a little unsettling. Tank had a tendency to watch Miller with a predatory stare, like a wolf stalking a deer. He possessed an almost preternatural stillness, a lithe gracefulness when he moved, an uncanny alertness to the things going on around him.
But it wasn’t just Tank. Everyone around the estate displayed the same unsettling blend of human and wolf traits, civilised people seamlessly merged with wild animals. And Miller was starting to wonder how long it would be before he began to develop the same traits.
Tensions had been running high over the past few days, and it had taken Miller a little while to discover that it wasn’t all due to the decision to let him out of the cage. Apparently, the vote had also caused a rift in the relationship between John and Baron. The news that they were in a relationship in the first place had been unexpected – not because they were both men, but because they seemed like such vastly different people. He wasn’t sure at this stage whether the split was a serious one, and would have liked to apologise for his part in it… but given Mark’s warning about staying away from John, he hadn’t dared.
Thankfully, though, other parts of his daily life seemed to be going a little better. One of the first things Tank had explained to him, once his lessons began, was the rules governing status within the Den. Status fights were largely ritualised, he’d explained, particularly at the lower end of the ranks. Once you got up near the top, the fights tended to be tougher, but there were still rules against doing anyone serious or permanent damage. Intrigued by the idea, and with Tank’s assurances that it was within acceptable behaviour standards, Miller had challenged George to a fight this afternoon. The elderly man was ranked one place above him, and by all reports, he held that low position through choice, rather than lack of fighting ability.
The fight had been short and simple, with Miller declared the winner, much to his own surprise, as he’d attempted the fight more from curiosity than from any expectation of winning, and he’d come down to dinner feeling pleased with himself. It was a small step up the pecking order, but a good start, given that he’d only been here a few days. He didn’t intend to try to rise too quickly through the ranks – firstly, he needed time to learn to fight as a wolf, which was a huge change from fighting as a human, but secondly, he didn’t want to antagonise anyone by being too pushy about things.
But when he stepped into the dining room, he stopped and looked at the seating arrangement in surprise. George was in his usual place, Mark at the bottom of the table and an empty seat between the two.
“Excuse me,” he said to George, while the man tried to avoid his gaze. “But I believe I won the fight this afternoon. My understanding was that I have your seat now.” It was said as politely as possible – perhaps Miller had misunderstood the rules?
But George meekly shook his head. “You’ll have to take it up with them,” he murmured, nodding to the far end of the table… and Miller was a little alarmed to see Tank and Silas standing up, both of them staring at him levelly.
“You won the fight,” Silas said calmly. “But the thing about that is, rank in a wolf pack isn’t just decided by who’s the stronger fighter. There’s also a whole pile of social wheeling and dealing to be done. And the long and the short of it is that if the pack doesn’t support your rank, you don’t get to keep it. No matter how good a fighter you are.”
Miller glanced around the room, wondering if what Silas had said was true. But no one else moved or said a word to contradict him.
“But you let me stay,” Miller protested, not quite understanding the sudden swing of opinion against him. “You voted to allow me to be a member of your pack.”
“The two things have nothing to do with each other,” Simon spoke up, from further down the table. “It’s like saying you deserve a promotion just because you work for the company. Doesn’t work that way. You have to earn it.”
The news was disappointing, but it also made an odd sort of sense. He’d only been here a few days, and it likely took a lot longer than that f
or newcomers to start earning a measure of social standing. Not wanting to make a fuss, Miller shrugged, and took his seat next to Mark. That in itself was an awkward situation, he’d been told. Under normal circumstances, as the newest member of the Den, Miller would hold the lowest rank. But due to the conditions of Mark’s punishment, he was relegated to the rank of omega until a full year had passed since his sentence was handed down, which wouldn’t be until the end of March next year.
Mark gave him a tight smile as the last of the Den drifted in the door and took their seats, a silent acknowledgement that life at the bottom of the pecking order could be trying. Then Baron stood up to announce the evening’s news, and the meal began.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Tucked under a fallen tree in the heart of the forest, a safe distance from the Grey Watch’s camp, Genna concentrated on the collection of rocks in front of her. Over the past weeks, she’d continued experimenting with her unusual talent, going on regular ‘hunting’ excursions, and once she’d made sure she’d caught something to take back to camp, a rabbit, perhaps, or a pheasant, she would spend fifteen or twenty minutes testing the limits of her abilities. She had to be careful, of course, conducting rigorous checks to see who else was around, as she didn’t want to risk getting caught. And if she took too long to catch something, her practice session would have to wait for another day. But all in all, she’d managed to practise at least twice a week, and was making slow but steady progress.
Today, she was testing out how far away an object could be before she couldn’t affect it any more. She’d already conducted tests on the size of object she could magic away, with the answer surprising her. She’d somehow assumed that the magic would be dependent on weight, but from her experiments so far, it seemed that size was a far more reliable indicator. She could manage anything up to about a foot long, but beyond that the strain was too much. She’d also discovered that once she’d made an object disappear, the very next time she shifted, the object would reappear. There seemed no way around that, and she’d been very careful since then not to leave anything ‘hidden’ for long periods of time, in case she suddenly needed to shift and the reappearing object gave her secret away.
