by Laura Taylor
But nonetheless, she was at something of an impasse at the moment. That irksome assassin was still lurking around the estate, more often than not a shadow in the footsteps of the pack’s alpha. The alpha also happened to be the second target Li Khuli had been given, alongside Jack Miller, and it was a matter of serious professional pride that she did not fail to kill both marks. Killing Miller would have been easy by itself. A simple ambush while he was out in the forest by himself and her job would be done. And then she would be free to play with the others, a macabre game her master well approved of, or to simply walk away, job done. But killing Miller would reveal her presence to the rest of the pack, and then she’d never get close enough to take out the alpha as well.
Therefore she had lingered, planning strategy, wondering how to create opportunities for violence, and somewhere along the way, how had turned into... something else. Not quite a question about why she should kill them, but questions about the shifters themselves. What did it feel like to become a wolf? Did it hurt? Why did they sleep outside some nights and indoors other nights? And why was everyone so obsessed with the stand of aspen on the lower side of the lawn? Every five minutes, it seemed someone was over there pissing on the tree trunks.
How they had developed such a watertight security system was also on the list of questions Li Khuli pondered during her long hours stuck up in the tree. How did they make sure the system wasn’t constantly being set off by birds and squirrels? Why was the eastern gate padlocked and wired to an alarm? Did no one ever just walk through it like a normal person?
Not for the first time in her life, Li Khuli felt a sharp irritation at all the things she didn’t understand about the world. Before, though, there had been training at the Noturatii’s compound to keep her distracted from such thoughts, missions that were to be carried out swiftly, with little opportunity to stand around and admire the view, and a persistent disdain for those not strong enough to match her in battle.
But here, there was no training, no overseer to crack the whip at her every minute of the day. The mission gave her ample opportunity to sit and think for hours, as she assessed this new territory and created battle plans. And the assassin who lurked in the shadows of this estate was very much her equal in battle. The entire situation was rather unsettling, if she was honest about it.
Pulling herself out of her reverie, Li Khuli realised it was getting dark. While two or three wolves were often outside at night, most of them retired indoors for the evening, and there would be little opportunity for anything else to be gained until tomorrow. Knowing that even a predator such as herself needed food and sleep, Li Khuli checked her surrounding area, and once she was sure the coast was clear, she dropped lightly to the ground and made her way down towards the road. She had acquired a motorbike to use while in this country, and she retrieved it from its hiding place in a ditch, under a collection of dead branches, wheeling it back onto the road before starting the motor. She’d rented a room in a hotel in Penrith, a small, out of the way place that provided food, water for bathing and a door with a lock for her to sleep behind. It also had a bed, and Li Khuli had pondered actually sleeping on it, but until now, the floor had sufficed.
Perhaps she should try the bed after all, she mused, as she gunned the motor and took off back to her makeshift base. It had been years, decades even, since she’d slept in one, and at least if she tried it out, it would put her curiosity to rest. What harm could there be in one night’s minor extravagance, after all?
Dr Gianna Evans pulled into the parking garage of her apartment block, letting out a sigh as she waited for the electronic gate to allow her access. She shut off the car’s radio just as the reception cut out, avoiding the need to listen to a minute or two of broken static while she parked her car.
As the head scientist of the Noturatii’s British division, she was well aware that her employer had attracted significant enemies, and for years, being scrupulous about security had been a firm habit. She double-checked that she’d locked her front door each morning. Kept an eye out in the parking garage in case of suspicious characters lurking about. Closed all her windows at night and made sure every curtain was drawn. But lately, she’d been deliberately lax about that sort of thing, and in what was slowly becoming a new, but equally firm habit, she avoided looking into any of the shadows as she eased her car down the ramp and into the building’s belly.
It was nearly three months since that mysterious man had stolen their shifter captive from them and had issued her with a simple promise at her desperate request that he take her with him: you will not be forgotten. She’d walked around on eggshells for a week afterwards, convinced he was going to come back at any moment, snatch her out of her nightmarish job and give her the second chance she’d been craving for longer than she cared to think about. But a week had turned into two, then a month, and still nothing out of the ordinary had happened. No strange phone calls in the middle of the night. No shady characters lurking near her car. No cryptic notes in her mailbox. And now, three months on, she had all but given up.
He hadn’t promised her anything in particular, after all, Gianna tried to console herself as she parked her car and shut off the motor. Perhaps he simply meant for her to continue working for the Noturatii in the hope that she could obfuscate their experiments and delay their progress. Not that there had been much progress of late anyway. Without a captive shifter, there was very little for her to do, aside from planning wave after wave of research projects that might be done, if they ever got their hands on a shifter again.
Gianna shuddered at the thought. The poor creature they’d kept in the cages for months had been a mere shell of a human by the end of it, and even worse off as a wolf. In the meantime, she was reviewing papers written by her peers in other divisions of the Noturatii and generally trying to keep her head down.
Getting out of the car, she slung her bag over her shoulder and locked the door, telling herself to stop being foolish. A masked man who worked for her employer’s arch enemy was not going to come on any rescue mission to save a scientist who had tortured one of his brethren.
Gianna pressed the call button for the lift, closing her eyes briefly and shaking her head. The sooner she gave up this fantasy, the sooner she could get on with figuring out how she was going to pass the rest of her years on this planet in the quiet hell of -
She felt a sudden, sharp pain in her arm, catching a split-second glimpse of a needle being withdrawn before a brutally powerful hand clamped down over her mouth, holding her still and preventing her from letting out more than a muffled whimper.
“All is well,” a soft voice said into her ear. “Just relax.”
Feeling a profound rush of relief, Gianna did just that, and then the world tilted, spun, and went black.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sitting at a table at the side of the pub, her back to the wall, Li Khuli watched as a waitress wandered over to clear away her dinner plate. The room she’d rented was on the first floor at the back, and it was only a short trip down the stairs and along the hallway to get a meal for the evening.
After coming back to the room earlier, she’d showered quickly, in cold water, as she had done every day since she’d been ‘chosen’, then she’d stared at the bed for a long moment. Khuli children didn’t have beds; they slept on woven mats on an otherwise bare wooden floor. When she’d been young, it had been a regular occurrence that some child or other would be beaten for trying to make the bed softer with a stolen blanket or extra layer of clothing hidden beneath the mat. As they’d got older, the acts of defiance had become less frequent, partly from the fear of punishment, and partly as a mark of pride. If one of them was found to be cheating, they were considered weak by their peers, and scorn and derision follow the cheater around for weeks.
Then, once they turned sixteen and began missions for the Noturatii, the Satva Khuli learned to sleep anywhere, always with one eye open, able to take advantage of any five-minute interval in which to get so
me rest. Their work went on at all hours of the day and night, and since sleep was unfortunately still a biological necessity, they learned to take it where they could.
And so, the bed in Li Khuli’s rented room presented a forbidden temptation. She was not supposed to sleep on it. And yet she failed to see what harm it would do. She was perfectly capable of sleeping curled up in the fork of a tree, or underneath a car, or in the middle of a swamp that was inches deep in dank water. Sleeping on a mattress for one night wasn’t going to rob her of that ability.
In the end, she’d laid down for all of thirty seconds, somewhat unsettled to realise the bed was every bit as comfortable as it looked, before she’d leapt up again, guilt and fear gnawing at her. There were few in the world who could match her skills now, and she knew for a fact that she was far superior in her fighting abilities to the instructors who had made her life hell as a child. But the memory of too many beatings made old habits hard to break.
But now that she’d answered one of the wayward questions in her mind, a dozen others had popped up to take its place. Now, in the pub, the waitress picked up her plate with a smile and said, in a thick Yorkshire accent, “Would you like something to drink?”
“Yes, please,” Li Khuli said, before her brain caught up with her mouth.
“What would you like?” the woman asked, and that made Li Khuli realise exactly what she was doing. The newness of this place, the long hours of contemplation, the questions in her mind were all conspiring against her to make her lose track of where she was, and more importantly, who she was. Li Khuli did not order drinks at bars, did not allow alcohol to cloud her judgement, and most certainly did not speak without thinking! But now that she’d said yes, she felt obligated to order something. One of the governing rules of the Satva Khuli’s missions was to blend in.
“I’ll have one of those, please,” Li Khuli said, pointing to the glass of amber liquid that the man at the next table over was drinking. It was some sort of beer, that much was obvious, but she had no idea what it was.
“Coming right up,” the waitress said, before disappearing over to the other side of the bar.
Had her master sent her here deliberately to test her, Li Khuli wondered? This mission was unlike any she had ever been given before. Blending in was all well and good when one knew the rules, of course. She knew how to vanish into a forest, leaving naught but the faintest trail of her scent. She knew how to stalk a politician through dark streets and then slip a drop of poison into his cup through an open window. She even knew how to put on a cocktail dress, order a glass of expensive champagne (which she never actually drank), seduce a high-powered business man and then stab him to death with the heel of her stiletto. But this place, this quiet town in the middle of the country, this England, as far as she’d seen it, was such an ordinary place. How was she supposed to blend in in a country where she was quite clearly a foreigner, in a town full of working class nobodies, in a pub where she didn’t know the difference between a lager, an ale, and a bitter?
A minute or two later, the drink was being placed on a dull cardboard mat in front of her, and she smiled and thanked the waitress. That had been a hard lesson to learn as a child, how to smile and be polite to people in a way that seemed authentic. Sarcasm came far easier, a sneer that mocked, rather than a smile that approved. The idea that she should thank people who were already paid good money to do these trifling tasks for her had taken years to sink in, but when she’d finally got her mind around the concept, it had become surprisingly easy. Just as it was her job to convince the businessman that she thought him attractive, it was also her job to convince the waitress she was grateful. Neither task required anything from her in terms of actual emotional investment.
The waitress walked away, and Li Khuli looked down at the drink. At first, once she’d realised her mistake, she’d thought to just sit here for ten minutes or so after the waitress brought it over, and then go back to her room, leaving the glass of beer untouched. But now that she had it, she found it was very much like the bed upstairs; something that piqued her curiosity and aroused her emotions in unfamiliar ways. What would it taste like? Was it sweet, or bitter, or fruity? Surely this was something she might actually need to know one day? Normal people drank beer, and wine, and watched television, and complained about the weather. She could simply chalk this up as a new learning opportunity.
But the froth on top was something of a concern, so she discreetly watched the man at the next table drinking his. He didn’t seem bothered by it at all, just sucked it down with the liquid, then wiped the excess off his moustache with his napkin, so Li Khuli decided to do the same.
Her first mouthful was mostly froth, bland and unremarkable, so she had another try, managing to get some of the liquid this time. While not unpleasant, it had a distinctly bitter flavour, as well as an odd smell, and she regarded the glass with a perplexed frown, not entirely sure what the appeal was. Perhaps it was an acquired taste? She raised the glass to take another sip -
“You don’t seem to be enjoying that very much,” a voice said, and Li Khuli looked up in surprise. A man stood over her table, a glass of clear, sparkling liquid in his hand and a look of faint amusement on his face. She had known he was there, of course; she was acutely aware of the location of every single person in the room and had seen him walking past her table. But she hadn’t expected him to stop and speak to her.
She glanced down at the beer in front of her self-consciously. “It’s my first time in England,” she said, now also aware of her own accent, feeling a bizarre and inexplicable embarrassment over it. “I’ve never had a beer before.”
The man looked surprised at that. “Really? You’ve never had beer?”
Li Khuli shook her head. “My… father does not approve of it.” She stumbled only slightly on the word ‘father’. The man who was the head of the vast international juggernaut known as the Noturatii was the least father-like person in the world; cold, authoritative, and dictatorial, but he also held the leash of every Khuli in the organisation, and the Khuli, in turn, were trained to obey him without question. He was the only one they truly respected, even as they hated him, and the only person in the entire world who could call a Khuli to heel.
But telling this man that her ‘controller’ didn’t like to see his pets inebriated would hardly do when she was trying to blend in, so ‘father’ had been the first word to come to mind that seemed even remotely appropriate.
But the man merely smiled. “So, while the cat’s away?” he asked, but his meaning was lost on Li Khuli.
“Excuse me?”
“I said ‘while the cat’s away’. I take it your father’s not around at the moment? I’m sorry, may I?” he asked, gesturing to the empty seat opposite her, and Li Khuli was startled for a moment. He wanted to sit with her?
“Okay,” she agreed, feeling a strange little lurch inside her chest. This was oddly disconcerting. Usually it was her trying to attract the attention of a pompous middle-aged bore, using charm and seduction to her advantage. Never before had she been on the receiving end of that sort of behaviour. It was an entirely unique experience, sitting in a pub, drinking beer and talking to a handsome young man. And he was handsome, she admitted to herself, though she didn’t usually bother to appreciate such details. Maybe in his mid-thirties, ginger hair, freckles across his nose, a contagious smile and the most startling blue eyes she’d ever seen.
“No, my father’s not here. I’m from China,” she explained, a detail which was, in fact, true. She’d been born there and raised in a training camp in the mountains, learning to become a ruthless weapon along with the other Khuli children. Mandarin was her first language, though she now spoke five in total. “But what does that have to do with a cat?”
“It’s a saying. While the cat’s away, the mice will play. You’ve never heard of that one?”
Li Khuli shook her head, feeling foolish. “I’m sorry -”
“No, no, I’m sorry,” the man apol
ogised. “English clearly isn’t your first language. I didn’t mean to confuse you. It just means that while no one’s watching, you take the time to have some fun.”
“Ah.” Li Khuli said. “Yes, I suppose I thought I would try some new things.” Should she be feeling embarrassed, or guilty, or angry? Less than five minutes of breaking the rules and someone had already caught her at it. The fact that he was a complete stranger was no comfort, given how closely her behaviour had been scrutinised in the past.
“So, what brings you to England?”
“Business,” she replied smoothly. Lying had never been a problem for her, and now that they were on slightly more familiar territory, she easily recalled the details of her last mission, one in which she had played the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Prime bait for a budding young politician who had pissed the Noturatii off in one way or another. Fabricating stories was a familiar ritual; it was only the unfamiliarity of the situation that had her off balance, the feeling of not quite knowing which role she was supposed to be playing.
But rather than pushing harder for details, as the arrogant politician had, this man backed off at her one-word answer. “I’m sorry, am I being nosy?” he asked, with a charming sort of chagrin.
She was failing at blending in, Li Khuli reminded herself, and deliberately lowered her guard a little. “I’m sorry, I’m being rude,” she said, putting on a timid sort of smile. After the disastrous beginning to the conversation, she could hardly just switch to all-out seductress, but she was oddly uncertain about how to play a more middle ground. “My father sent me to England to attend a number of business meetings for him. He’s not often able to travel himself, so he sends me and my brothers and sisters instead.”
“And how many of each do you have?” the man asked, then interrupted himself before she could answer. “I’m sorry, I should at least tell you my name. I’m Drew,” he said, with an incorrigible grin.
