by Laura Taylor
“And while you were inside the lab, did you touch anything?”
“I don’t think so…” He played the layout of the room over in his mind. “There was the bench, and then the light thingy, there were the inks, and a tray of paper, and then boxes in the corner. I went to touch one of the boxes – the lid was half off – but then I thought better of it, so no. I might have touched the door handle, but that was it.”
Actually, he hadn’t, but there was nothing wrong with creating a little doubt in Logan’s mind. Once the results of the forensic tests came back, they would actually find not a single fingerprint on any of the equipment. The group who had set the room up were dedicated professionals, always wearing gloves, and the Den members who’d supervised the production had been careful not to lay a hand on a single thing. As far as the police were concerned, they might as well have all been ghosts.
“And was there anything else unusual you noticed about either the lab or the house itself?”
Alistair shook his head. “I was totally stunned to find it all. And then when I heard noises upstairs, I just hightailed it out of there. I didn’t stick around to admire the view.”
“You say there were people upstairs. Did you see them? Or hear voices?”
“No, I just heard the floor creak and then a small thump. Might have been a footstep or someone moving something.”
“Or, in a house that old, it may simply have been the building settling.”
Alistair shrugged. “I suppose so, yeah. I mean, I’d just discovered a counterfeiting crime scene going on, so I guess I jumped to the worst conclusion. But no, I didn’t actually see anyone.”
“Okay.” Logan consulted his notes, then set them down, gracing Alistair with a smile that was supposed to look sincere. “I think that’ll do us, then. Is it okay if we contact you again if we need to ask any more questions?”
“Yeah, no problem. Happy to help.” Alistair stood up, offering his hand for Logan to shake. It was an odd experience, shaking the hand of a Noturatii operative. Sheep’s clothing, Alistair reminded himself sharply, feeling a predatory instinct trying to rise. Valour, in this case, was far better served with discretion.
The sun was warm on John’s back as he lay with his limbs dangling, the rough bark of the pine tree biting into his skin. “So I had a knife stuck through my foot,” he continued, relating the story of one set of scars to Li Khuli, who was currently doing chin-ups on a nearby branch. “Two broken ribs. Serious gravel rash all down my left thigh and a mild concussion. And this meathead comes at me with a piece of rusty metal. I was on the ground and he was standing up, so I knee-capped him.” He shrugged, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “He hit the ground like a bathtub thrown out of a fifteenth storey window. If my ribs weren’t broken, I would have killed him, but the other two guards were quicker. They dragged me off him and threw me back in the truck.” He sighed. “Ah well. Can’t win ‘em all.”
Li Khuli moved hand-over-hand until she was near the trunk again, then dropped down onto a convenient branch. She sat in a crouch and surveyed the estate again – a habit John found rather funny. She never made any move to try and breach the wall or to do them any harm, but she persisted with the pretext of trying to spy on them all. The only thing she was going to learn, the way she was going about things, was who liked to go for a morning run and who preferred to sleep in.
“That was the worst?” she asked. “Somehow I had expected more.”
“Well, you’ve got to keep in mind, they wanted me alive,” John reminded her. “In your case the aim was to see if they could kill you. If you died too easy, you weren’t worth their time anyway. And more to the point, that was the worst as a human. As a wolf, they poured petrol on me and set me on fire. You ever been on fire?”
Li Khuli shook her head. “No. I’ve seen people who were, though. They punished one of the boys that way once. He was caught stealing food from the kitchen. We all thought he was a fool. If you wanted to steal food, everyone knew you stole from the local villagers, not from the Noturatii. You’d still be punished, but just with a flogging. This boy, they wanted to make an example of him, so they chained his arm to a post, then lit him on fire. I think they might have used oil, not petrol. It had an odd smell. I imagine burning fur doesn’t smell great, either.”
John laughed. “Can’t say I was paying attention at the time.”
“What about…” Li Khuli hesitated, then started again. “What about mentally?” she asked, her tone a touch more diffident, as if aware that she was venturing onto sacred ground. “You were alone for much of the time. I was with a group of children, all suffering the same things as me, all hating it just as much, but we were all enemies of each other. So in every way that mattered, I was alone. I’m not sure which would be worse – actually being alone, or having to pretend that you are.”
John sighed. It was a good question. “For me, it wasn’t so much being alone, as not knowing how long it was going to be that way. My mother… well, she said she was my mother, I don’t know if she actually was – but she told me stories about the shifters. She kept telling me I should escape when I got the chance. Stupid bitch. They let her see me maybe once a week for the first couple of years. Then at some point the visits stopped, and I guess I assumed she was dead. But she’d filled my head with all these crazy ideas about belonging to a pack, and the loyalty and comradery, and… fuck, it was like… It was awful. Thinking that there were these great people out there somewhere, and maybe one day I’d get to meet them, and being alone and trying to imagine what it would be like to sit down and share a meal with people you could really respect and trust… Fuck, it was like eating glass.” He grimaced. “Hope is a horrible thing.”
“Hope kept me alive,” Li Khuli said softly, sitting down properly on the branch and dangling her legs over the side. “I knew that if I survived until I was sixteen, I would be sent on missions alone, and I’d be away from all the other children and away from my trainers, and life could only improve. I just kept telling myself I have five more years to wait, and then four, then three. If I could just survive one more day, then I’d be one step closer to getting out of there. My first assassination was glorious. For the first time, it was all about me killing someone else, and not having to worry about them trying to kill me. They never even saw me coming. I felt delirious for days afterwards.”
“Okay, my turn,” John said. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to do?” Perhaps he should have been finding this bizarre conversation gruesome, but it was turning out to be rather cathartic. Though Baron knew more than the general gist of what he’d been through, and both he and Heron had heard a few of the gory details, John had never been quite able to tell them everything. For one thing, they simply didn’t understand, Heron pouring too much sympathy his way and Baron coming up with unhelpful analogies. For another, he’d learned quite quickly that though they’d both given him an open invitation to listen to what he had to say, normal people found the tales far too traumatic to really be able to process them. When Baron had started waking up in the night from vivid nightmares, John had quickly realised he needed to tone down the stories or he was going to send the man mad. As both his anchor to sanity and his alpha in this new and confusing world, his sense of self-preservation had dictated that he remain silent on the more explicit details of his childhood.
Li Khuli, then, was a natural and convenient sounding board, and though he didn’t enjoy listening to her tales in return, they had an educational quality and he thought it only fair that he let her speak her mind as he had done.
Li Khuli thought about his question for a while. “Difficult to answer,” she said finally. “Do you mean objectively the worst, like killing children, or subjectively? The mission I least wanted to do?”
John looked at her thoughtfully. “Never mind,” he said a moment later. “I already know the answer.”
Li Khuli scowled at him. “Don’t make so many assumptions. You don’t know me
so well.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said coolly. “I am you; your reflection in a mirror. We’re two sides of the same coin.”
“Why do you hate Miller so much?” she asked suddenly. “You said right at the start that you’d thought about killing him. You criticise me for not having done so, but you haven’t done it either.”
It was the first time today she’d actually managed to get under his skin. “It’s not that simple,” he said with a scowl. Why hadn’t he killed him? The fact that he didn’t know the answer bothered him.
“Are you too afraid that your precious pack would kick you out? Now that you’ve found all that loyalty and comradery you were looking for? Or is it that you know deep down that he’s no worse than you are? I know Miller has killed and tortured, but I also know the darkness in your mind,” she told him with a bleak certainty. “I know the horrors you’ve imagined. Is a person’s worth calculated by the things they’ve done, or by the things they’re capable of?”
They stared at each other in silence for a long moment, birds chirping incongruously in the tree above their heads, until the moment was finally broken by John’s phone vibrating in his pocket. He fished it out, seeing the call was from Andre. “What’s up?” he asked as he answered it.
“I’ve got some free time,” Andre told him. “Wondered if you wanted to do some training?”
“Yeah, cool. I’ll be right there.” John hung up and tucked the phone away. “I’ve got to go,” he said to Li Khuli. “How much longer are you going to be around?” He was genuinely enjoying these talks, but knew they couldn’t go on forever.
“I don’t know,” Li Khuli said, looking away morosely, and John almost felt sorry for her.
“Well, you’ll have to make a decision soon,” he said, not caring that he was tempting fate. “After all, the clock is ticking. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.” He dropped gracefully out of the tree, still chanting the sound, waved at her over his shoulder, then shifted on the fly, jumping the gate back into the estate grounds.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Leon hit send on his email, forwarding the report on shifter sightings to Melissa. He’d no sooner done so than three new messages appeared in his inbox, two of them flagged ‘High Importance’. “Flaming hell,” he muttered to himself as he checked the time. He had exactly three minutes before the weekly strategy meeting with Melissa and their group of field agents, and while he was loath to be late, he also knew he needed to be fully prepared for whatever questions Melissa threw at him. She was a demanding boss with no patience for excuses, but her methods were also showing results where decades of more tolerant leadership had failed. Leon was always careful to stay a step or two ahead of her, since he was the sort of person who hated being forced to play a card he might otherwise have held back for another time. Unfortunately for him, the sheer volume of information being thrown at them of late was making that a difficult strategy to maintain.
In response to her current fervour for finding the elusive shifter estate, reports had been coming in thick and fast, research from their field agents, call-ins from the public, descriptions from their satellite surveillance team of likely properties that could house a shifter pack. Leon had spent the past two hours consolidating the information into a few simple emails, but these most recent arrivals had thrown his carefully prepared schedule out. It was less than ideal, but if he could at least skim through them, he wouldn’t look stupid if someone happened to mention the contents in the meeting.
But as he opened the first message, he suddenly forgot all about Melissa waiting impatiently in the conference room. A detailed image of the grounds of a large property appeared on the screen in front of him, accompanied by a brief analysis of the layout of the buildings, the sightings of people on the property, a couple of irregularities in the landscape picked up by their satellite feed. That was... wow...
The property featured a large house and a number of smaller cottages that would have historically been used as living quarters for the staff. Based on estimates from similar properties, it could house at least twenty people without a problem. The property itself was large, over three hundred acres with a stretch of thick woodland on the western side. The house was shielded by trees and creepers, and according to council records, the estate had belonged to the same family for the last two hundred years.
It was, in a word, perfect. The perfect hideout for a group of reclusive shape shifters, far enough from civilisation to afford a nice level of privacy, large enough to house the entire pack.
The agent sending in the report had done his homework, and Leon read through the information carefully, his excitement growing with each sentence. The neighbours reported that the owners of the property were not particularly welcoming, making a point of maintaining their privacy. They had dogs on the property; several people reported hearing them barking, particularly at night. And one neighbour had seen a large white van parked in the driveway several days in a row.
Leon felt his hands tremble ever so slightly. It couldn’t be, he told himself sharply. It was all too convenient. He read on.
One of the neighbours, an elderly man who had lived on the adjoining farm his whole life, had told their agent that he’d met the owner a couple of times over the years. He was a rough sort of fellow with a short beard -
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Leon muttered, running a hand through his hair. It couldn’t be. Had they really found it after all this time?
- a short beard, he continued to read, who claimed that his name was Henry Galston. The trouble with that, the agent had written, was that according to public records, there was no such person; not living in the Lakes District, not who owned a large estate in the region, and not who was anything like the correct age to be the man this neighbour had met.
The phone on Leon’s desk rang abruptly, and he jumped halfway out of his seat. The meeting!
“Sorry, I got a bit distracted,” he said as he picked up the phone, not waiting for Melissa to berate him before launching into an apology. “One of our agents has found something you’re going to want to see.”
There was a momentary pause. “Then I suppose you’d better come and show it to me,” Melissa said, and Leon could see in his mind’s eye the sour pout she would be wearing, an expression that showed up when she was thoroughly annoyed and trying to pretend she wasn’t. It had become a point for Leon to try and get her to make that face at least once each day, and though he hadn’t seen it in person today, he decided this would still count.
“I’m on my way,” he said, closing his laptop with a thud. From the lack of excitement in Melissa’s voice, he reached the easy conclusion that she hadn’t heard the news yet. Which meant he was still one step ahead.
Twenty seconds later, Leon strode into the meeting room, laptop tucked neatly under his arm. “Sorry I’m late,” he addressed the room -
“Where’s Kathy, the lab assistant?” Melissa asked immediately, interrupting him. “This is the second day in a row she hasn’t shown up for work.”
“I’ve sent a man over to her flat to check things out,” Leon replied without missing a beat. Melissa could easily have asked him the question in private, but she’d chosen to call him out in front of the entire team instead. Kathy’s disappearance was just one more thing on a long list of urgent tasks that he’d been battling to get on top of, and while he would have preferred to have a definitive answer for Melissa by now, at least he could say he’d begun investigating.
“I’ll give you an update as soon as I hear any news, but in the meantime,” Leon said, sliding into his usual seat beside Melissa and swiftly taking control of the meeting, “I believe Connor has come up with a rather intriguing discovery.” He turned to the man who had sent him the email. “Connor? Perhaps you could give us a rundown on what you’ve been up to this week?”
Thando stared at the sheet of paper on the table in front of him. Twenty-two names were listed in neat handwriting, along with each person’s role within the
Noturatii and the base they were currently working in. He glanced over at Liam, standing with his hip resting casually against the kitchen counter.
“Isn’t this the bit where you tell me it’s not our call and we’ll have to abide by the Council’s decision?”
Liam raised an apathetic eyebrow. “I realise I have a reputation for enjoying following the rules,” he said drily, “but that doesn’t mean I’ve handed over my free will entirely. You’re absolutely right, by the way: ultimately, we’ll have to follow the Council’s ruling. But we’re the ones here, listening to those two explaining everything.” He gestured at the dining room door, where Analisa was currently watching the two scientists while they ate lunch. “We’ve seen how easy or difficult it might be to liberate members of different rank. And you know as well as I do that if we keep gathering more and more people, having an ever-growing horde of assassins babysitting them all is not a workable solution.”
The absence of their third member for this discussion wasn’t a problem. The covert nature of their work meant they were all used to having disjointed conversations, half of which would be repeated later with another party, and which could, at times, continue to progress over several weeks, or even several months. As part of their training, all assassins were taught to put aside pride and self-interest in order to keep in mind the opinions of multiple parties and considerations from both past and present discussions.
