Roth and Laird stood up. “We’ll work that out later,” the Alpha said, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek. “Meanwhile, thank you for this.” He held up the napkin and the two men began to make their way towards the nearest exit.
“Nuh-uh. I’m coming with you,” Bertie shouted, rising to her feet and taking charge with impressive authority. “I’ll take you where you need to go.”
Chapter 17
Emma lay shivering in the back of the van, darkness veiling her vision. She tried to make out the chatter in the front seat, but the partition separating her from her two captors was too thick. All she could hear was the grim rumbling of two deep male voices.
She hugged her arms around her shoulders, reassuring herself. The Dire Wolves had saved her before and they would do it again. There was nothing to fear from her kidnappers, whoever they were.
At least that was the lie that she repeated to her mind over and over again.
She was the mate to two powerful shifters, after all. It was her fate to spend her life with Roth and Laird. No one in this world was supposed to come between them.
Right?
The problem was, of course, that someone had come between them. Deliberately, maliciously, and far too easily. It was her own damned fault that she was now writhing around in a van in the dark. Alone, afraid, confused.
It was her fault that she might never see them again.
After about half an hour of frigid travel, the van stopped, throwing Emma forward so that she all but crashed into the corrugated metal wall behind the driver’s seat. A few moments later she heard footsteps on the asphalt outside, then the back doors cracked open, letting a ray of light flood in from a nearby street lamp.
“Right, up you come,” said one of the men, peering inside. But Emma huddled in the corner, hesitant to move. “Come on,” the man growled, “I don’t have all sodding night for theatrics. I know you can walk, woman.”
She pushed herself up slowly. Maybe the best course of action was to pretend to be disoriented and dizzy. A weak, helpless woman wasn’t a threat. Her only hope at this point might be to make them think she was too pathetic to flee on foot, then do it.
Slowly she crept towards the exit, her eyes trained on the buildings surrounding the van’s location, which seemed to be nothing more than a series of unremarkable low-rise office structures. Some lights were on, but no silhouettes moved about inside. Well, this was just superb. Apparently the men had brought her to some kind of deserted fucking ghost town at the edge of nowhere.
Emma felt suddenly very alone, isolated from London and the world. She wanted to scream with frustration.
“Don’t even think about yelling, love,” said the man with the wounded face, who’d apparently read her expression. “Ain’t no one around for miles but a few of our kind, and trust me, you don’t want to draw their attention.”
His friend chuckled. “I don’t think she needs to worry about that. We’re bringing her to the nastiest of us all. He’ll make quick work of her if she pisses him off.”
“What is your kind, exactly?” she asked, doing her best to sound ignorant. They’d never actually mentioned that they were shifters; maybe she could extract some information from the bastards.
One of the men grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the van, the bare soles of her feet hitting the ground hard. She winced as a sharp pebble threatened to slice into her right heel. “Oh, come now, darling, as if you don’t know perfectly well what we are. I can smell the Dire Wolf on you. Correction: Dire Wolves. I know you’ve been with them. That means you know very well what you’re in for here. You know our kind intimately.” When he said the last word, he leaned in and breathed it on her skin, drawing a hard shudder from her body.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Emma protested, trying in vain to maintain her mask of naiveté.
“No, of course you don’t, Little Miss Innocent,” scoffed Man Number Two, who’d begun to lead her towards a glass door. “Come, you’re going to meet the boss-man. Don’t worry, he’ll let you know exactly what he wants.”
Emma clammed up, quivering at the malevolent intonation of his voice. Okay, fine. Maybe there was no point in pretending to be naive. No point in doing much of anything, other than hoping she somehow came out of this night alive.
As they advanced, she tripped and fell forward, landing on the ground on her palms. Her right hand caught the sharp edge of a pebble, leaving a trace of her blood on the asphalt before she could push herself up again.
“Clumsy twat,” one of the men snarled. “Get up.” He yanked her to her feet and she kept walking slowly, miserably, towards her doom.
Her abductors guided her through the door and down a narrow hallway towards an elevator, shoving her inside. Emma watched as one of them hit the button for the sixth floor. She pushed herself into a corner, drawing her robe tight around her body, all too conscious of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra under her white pyjamas. These bastards didn’t deserve a look at her. They didn’t deserve much of anything, in fact, other than a swift kick in the bollocks.
When the doors opened again, they emerged into a dimly lit hallway. Ugly, depressing office dwelling, she thought. Even less inspiring than my lab.
Fluorescent lights lined the ceiling, casting an ugly green hue on the shifters’ skin. It was a stark contrast to the beautiful, glowing underground passages where Laird had brought her a few nights back.
The men guided her down the long corridor to a conference room, pushing her inside before slamming the door behind her. Nothing met her eyes but a few heavy, wheeled chairs and an enormous wooden table. It was hardly a locale suited for magnificent, magical beings to meet in secret; she felt like she was about to be interviewed for a sodding job at a bank.
Worst. Job interview. Ever.
Alone for the moment, she walked around the room, hoping to find something to use as a weapon. But the chairs were too solid and heavy, the table too large. Unless she could manage to pick one of the former up over her head and trounce someone with it, there was little hope for a successful outcome.
Looking out the window, she could see that there was no fire escape. No way to get down to the ground without breaking her body or her head. For a moment as she peered into the darkness, she wondered if Roth or Laird could have escaped such a place. Could their Wolves have leapt from such a height and survived?
Yes, they probably could have. They were strong, muscular. So damned powerful, and she was so damned weak.
A man’s voice cut through the air behind her as she stared out at the night.
“Ah, here’s our little geneticist now,” he said, a touch of humour in his tone.
Emma spun around, her eyes meeting those of a hulking man almost as large as the Dire Wolf shifters. His shoulders were thick and broad, his neck as wide as his skull. His eyes glowed a strange, menacing green-gold colour, and he sniffed the air as he made his way towards her.
“Who…I mean what…are you?” she asked as he drew near. She knew perfectly well, of course, that he was her worst nightmare. His eyes were so like those of the gruesome bear who’d stalked her a few nights earlier.
“My name’s Lothar. And I suspect that you know what I am, don’t you?”
Emma nodded, surrendering to honesty. After all, the bastard had called her a geneticist. He probably knew a good deal more than that, too.
Lothar threw himself into one of the chairs and spun around to face her, a smile on his face that sent a trail of goose flesh rising along her skin. “I apologize for the way we brought you here, but time was of the essence,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest as he looked her up and down. “We need your services, you see, and I don’t suppose those Dire Wolf friends of yours would have been too happy to let you cooperate of your own volition.”
“My services? What could you possibly want from me?” she asked. “Besides, you should know that my mates will be looking for me. They’ll be livid if you lay a hand on me…”
>
Lothar stared at her, his strange eyes softening for a moment as a thought seemed to occur to him. “Oh, silly girl. I’m not planning to injure you,” he said, his tone settling into something almost gentle. “I need you to do something for me, you see. For all my kind. Think of tonight as a mission of benevolence on your part.”
“Benevolence?” Emma spat the word out as if it was poison. The abducting bastard was really starting to piss her off now. If he thought he could charm her with some sort of fake niceness, he was insane. “If you wanted me to do something good, you should have bloody asked, instead of ripping me out of my home in my sodding night clothes.” Emma shocked herself with her own tone as the words poured out. She seldom yelled at anyone, let alone a man who could snap her in two like a toothpick. But he was pushing her damned buttons. The fucker had taken her away from her mates. He’d stolen her life from her.
A quasi-sheepish smile spread over Lothar’s lips. “I do apologize for my methods. But I need your expertise. I want you to help to enhance us, you see.”
“Enhance?” The word escaped her lips like shot from a rifle. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You work in genetics. You understand what we are, yes? You understand what it is to be a shifter?”
Emma stared blankly at him. It was a loaded question. Did anyone really understand how shifters worked? “Well, I know what you are. As for understanding, only barely. I suspect that shifters have undergone a mutation…”
Lothar slammed his fist on the table, and in spite of herself Emma leapt backwards in terror, hands searching for something to grab onto.
“The only mutation is in humans,” he snarled. “You are the ones who are lacking. We are perfection.” He pulled his eyes away. “At least we were once. We’ve devolved into something less than we once were, all because humans feared us. They forced us into hiding, forced us to conceal what we were. Our skills, our strength, have weakened with generations of neglect. Atrophy, that’s what it is. We as a species have lost our former might. All but the Dragons and those beloved Dire Wolves of yours.”
Emma found her courage and spoke again. “If you’re still so close to perfection, what could you possibly want from me? As you said, I’m just a human. I’m…lacking.”
Lothar stretched up to his full height and took a step towards her. Well, there was no denying that he was an impressively large man. “In a word,” he said, “I want you to gift us with gigantism.”
Emma backed against the wall again, her heart pounding. The Dire Wolves—they were massive in their animal form. Larger than horses, larger than Grizzlies. So, this man wanted what they had. He wanted his bear form to take on the characteristics of her mates, to grow larger than others of his kind. He wanted the strength and power of a Dire Wolf.
“I don’t think I can…I can’t just turn you into something you’re not. That’s not how these things work.”
Lothar let out a deep laugh. “You really don’t understand much about shifters, do you? You don’t seem to know that what occurred between you and your mates—the Ritual—it has changed you, all because of a simple exchange of bodily fluids, really. It’s very unromantic, I suppose, to put it that way, but it’s the truth. It has changed them, too. The Ritual has been known, even, to bring out the dormant déor in shifters who thought they were nothing more than feeble humans.” He locked his eyes on hers, those wild irises of his focused like lasers. “Ah, you probably think it’s deeper than all that, that it’s your invisible bond that’s brought you and your lovers so close together. But the truth is, it’s nothing but an exchange of DNA. They give you theirs; you, in turn, give them yours. Some call it the Wild Magic, the Old Ways. I call it a trade. So now, what I want is for you to give me what they gave you. A simple gift, that’s all.”
Emma swallowed hard. What exactly was he saying? Was he proposing that they have sex? Because if that was what he wanted, she really would be jumping out the window.
“I still don’t understand what it is that you expect me to do,” she said slowly, her voice rasping with fear. “Please, just let me go home…”
“I want you to isolate the genetic material that gives the Dire Wolves their massive size and power. I want it for our kind. I want to witness the rebirth of a species that has long been lost, Emma.”
She breathed a quick sigh of relief. Okay, so all he really wanted was her services as a scientist. “You do understand that even if I could isolate a gene, I probably couldn’t just inject it into you and make you grow,” she replied. “At least I don’t think I could.”
“You could, in fact, and you will. You can give us what we’ve lost, and I think you know it.” Lothar walked to the other side of the table to look out the window, possibly in an effort to make Emma feel temporarily safe. “There was once a type of bear known as the Béorn,” he said, his eyes looking out into the dark night. “Mighty, powerful, noble, they were. They lived and fought alongside the Dragons and the Dire Wolves centuries ago.”
“If they lived and fought beside them, what happened to them?”
“They died out when the Rituals ceased. We’ve tried in vain to resurrect their kind, but to no avail.” She detected a note of sadness in his voice for the first time. It almost made him sound human. For a second, she almost—almost—pitied him. “The Dragons’ and Wolves’ genes were stronger. Over time, when a Béorn and a Dire Wolf bonded with a woman, the Béorn’s genes failed to pass themselves along to their offspring. Their power faded over time, and their kind ceased to exist. They passed into darkness, while the Dire Wolves persevered.”
“Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, but do you really think that injecting Grizzlies with what basically amounts to a virus will bring the Béorn back?” Emma asked. “Besides, every Grizzly shifter I’ve heard of has been violent, aggressive, cruel. What makes you think I’d ever want to help you create a race of giant killing machines?”
“Well, let me ask you this: do you want to see your Dire Wolf lovers again?”
Emma bit her lip hard, anger bubbling up inside her at the question. So, this little meeting of theirs was going to culminate in extortion. “Of course I do,” she said.
“Ah, but it’s not only want, is it? It’s need. You need them, just as you need water and food. You have grown addicted to those two men. The Ritual has hooked you. Even now, it pains you not to know when—or if—you will be in their company again.”
Emma balled her fists, tempted to lunge across the table and punch the bastard in the smug face, to scream, to unleash her fury on his features. Chances were that she couldn’t do any damage, but it would be damned satisfying all the same. “Fine. Yes. What’s your sodding point?”
“Help me,” he said, “and I’ll set you free. Help me, and you can spend the rest of your long life with them. I will not touch you. I will not pursue you. You will have done more for my species than I can ever say, and for that, you will be protected.”
Emma released the tension in her hands, sadness taking over where rage had resided. “My mates won’t…they won’t want me, not if I help you. They’d see me as a traitor. Your kind has proven yourselves their enemy.”
“Won’t they? What harm could it do to create allies for them? Who’s to say that the Béorn would be an enemy? Perhaps we could renew our old alliance.”
Emma opened her mouth to protest again, but slammed it shut. Why was she wasting her time arguing with this man? The best thing would be to agree to his demands. If he wanted her help, he’d have to bring her to her lab. She knew the building; she might even be able to find a way to escape. It might also buy time for her mates to locate her. Three Grizzly shifters would be no match for Roth and Laird’s Dire Wolves.
For a moment, she shut her eyes and thought about her two lovers. Their faces, their voices, their bodies. She pictured them looking at her as they’d done so many times over the many hours they’d spent together. Pictured their hands, their fingers, their taste, their scent.
&n
bsp; Then all of a sudden, she began to feel them out there. Somewhere in the city of London were her two lovers, calling out to her silently.
They were mere vapour inside her mind, nothing more than apparitions. Like the elements of a dream unfolding in some deep corner of her imagination. Untouchable, abstract shapes that seemed to bend and move each time she’d focus on them.
But she could feel them, hunting, searching for her, as desperate to find her as she was to be found.
I need you, she whispered inside her mind. I need to see you again. I’ll do whatever it takes…
So I hope you can forgive me for what I’m about to do.
She opened her eyes and looked at Lothar. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 18
The trip to the university wasn’t quite as uncomfortable as the first ride had been; apparently the Grizzly shifters had become suddenly bent on treating Emma with some care. I suppose they need my brain. If I slam my head into the wall and get a concussion, I won’t be a lot of use to them, she muttered as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. For some reason she could see more now than she had earlier. She could make out the shapes of the wheel wells, the dents in the side of the van’s interior.
She even thought she could hear the men a little better as they spoke in the front seat. But she must have been imagining it.
Her wrists were bound behind her back with duct tape now, and she sat upright, her back pressed against the divider wall that separated her from the driver’s seat.
She thought once again of what Roth and Laird had said about the changes she would undergo after the Ritual. When would they take effect, she wondered, and how? Would she feel ill, strange? Would she go mad, like some superhero who’d been dropped into a vat of toxic waste?
No, of course not. Those were stories out of comic books. This was real life. Maybe nothing would happen at all; maybe whatever genetic forces had worked in ancient times had long since left the men’s bloodlines. Perhaps she was just to remain a very average, very normal human woman.
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