nevermore

by Nell Stark

  “He is a fascinating man,” Delacourte said after a moment, choosing his words carefully. “And dangerous. I will tell you what I know of him over our meal, if you wish.”

  I nodded, and while Delacourte went to the pantry, I lit the candles on the mantel and around the room. He returned carrying a large platter laden with fruit, bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine. The Weres of Telassar, I had quickly learned, rarely ate meat while in human form. While I understood the rationale—when nearly every day involved a hunt, there was no point in further depleting the wildlife resources around Toubkal—my very human self hungered for a juicy ribeye. I smiled as I thought of how eager Val would be to take me out for a celebratory steak dinner upon my return to New York. She would probably insist on Smith and Wollensky.

  Delacourte set the tray down in the center of the rug and we sat across from each other. I poured the wine while he broke the bread, and when our glasses were full, we raised them in a silent toast.

  “I would start from the beginning,” he said, deftly slicing an apple with precision learned on the battlefield, “if I knew it. But Brenner’s origins—his family and childhood—are remembered only by him. He is reputed to have served as a member of the Habsburg forces during the Thirty Years’ War, but his meteoric rise to power happened a few decades later, as an officer in the Holy Roman Emperor’s offensive against the Ottoman Turks. He funneled the personal wealth he gained in battle into seeking out and gathering together Weres living throughout Europe. He established a sanctuary deep in the Basque mountains and mustered them there.”

  I could only imagine what it must have been like to be a Were before the advent of modern medicine—before the mechanism of infection was known and most of its effects understood. To be alone during that transitional period, confused and overwhelmed by powerful and conflicting impulses, must have spelled death for so very many shifters. Without Karma’s Web site and Darren’s example, not to mention Val’s unflagging faith and love, I would have been lost. The Consortium, despite its many faults, had saved many lives.

  “All of this was before the founding of the Consortium?” I asked.

  “The vampires built their own network much earlier,” said Delacourte. “But there was no collaboration between the species, and often open hostility. No one had ever succeeded—perhaps had never even tried—to gather more than a small pack of Weres together at a time. Brenner’s charisma was the force that brought and held them together, even when they might have turned on one another.”

  I nodded. Sebastian had inherited that kind of charisma, and it was reflected by his success as a businessman. “So if Brenner formed an enclave in the Basques, what led him to found Telassar?” At Delacourte’s shrug, I considered what I knew of the Basque Country, a small area in the Pyrenees that straddled the border between modern-day France and Spain. “Maybe he wanted more space?”

  “Perhaps. In any case, Brenner led his band of Weres here, drove out the local tribes, and founded Telassar. He ruled the city for nearly a hundred years before the newly formed Consortium ousted him.”

  Startled, I leaned forward, the food forgotten. “Why? And how did they do it? I thought this place was impregnable.”

  Delacourte’s smile was bemused. “You have been…what is the American expression? Drinking the…”

  I felt myself blush. “The Kool-Aid. You’re saying I’m naïve.”

  “How could you not be? It was not an accusation, merely an observation.” He refilled my wine. “But Telassar inspires legends, and most are half true at best. This city has been invaded many times. The Consortium used the vampire stronghold of Sybaris, only two days’ journey from here by horseback, as a staging ground for their assault against Brenner. They besieged the keep for months before finally breaking through its defenses. Many of his followers were killed. A few surrendered. A small, elite group escaped with him.”

  It was difficult for me to imagine the thick walls being overrun by any host, even an army of blood-drunk vampires. “He must hate the Consortium.”

  Delacourte murmured his agreement. “He has tried to retake the city several times over the past two centuries. But he has never succeeded.”

  I twirled the stem of my goblet between my fingers and gazed into the deep red liquid. Delacourte’s knowledge was formidable. I had been focusing my attention inward, in an effort to understand and embrace the panther’s needs and desires. But maybe it was time I paid closer attention to the external world as well—to the history of my people. The political tensions had to run deep in a community with such a long living memory, and if Val and I were going to thrive within the Consortium, we would need to know the big picture.

  “You’ve made me curious,” I said. “Are there some books in the library that you might recomm—”

  Delacourte’s head snapped up a split second before Constantine himself burst through the door. His ebony skin gleamed as dark as the panther that lurked on the other side of his moon, and he moved with the athletic grace of a world-class sprinter. But his eyes were wild and his expression grim. My panther made a bid for control as she sensed the distress of her sire and alpha, and I was hard-pressed to rein her in. Wine sloshed over the rim of my goblet, and breathing deeply through my teeth, I set it onto the tray with a trembling hand. I caught Constantine watching me closely.

  “Should I leave?” I asked as calmly as I could manage.

  “No. I’m glad you’re here, and you must stay close to either Delacourte or me from now on.” He paused for a moment, and only then did I realize that he, too, was fighting for control. “We have spies among us.”

  Chapter Ten

  We had him cornered and outnumbered but he wasn’t going down without a fight. The dusky brown wolf before us was snarling and snapping whenever one of us got close. We had sent for help in the form of a tranquilizer gun but it hadn’t yet arrived. In the meantime, Constantine and I were holding heavy wooden chairs in front of us like lion tamers at a circus, but this beast refused to yield. Blood streamed down my forearm from a bite I had sustained while pulling the wolf off Constantine when he had first attacked. It had taken all of my control not to shift in response to the pain. Ordinarily, an animal loose in the castle was a commonplace occurrence easily remedied by flushing the beast outside and into the woodlands beyond the city walls. But Telassar had been under siege for the past week by a rival army of shifters and none of the Weres who left the city, for scouting or escape, had managed to make it back.

  The wolf snapped viciously at Constantine, slicing through one of the rungs on his chair. If he had taken that kind of bite out of me, I never would have been able to hold back my panther. Her growl reverberated through my head, and part of me wanted to let her loose—to meet the traitor wolf head-on in battle. We had caught Anders while he was in human form, rifling through files in Constantine’s study. His capture had been a stroke of pure luck; Constantine had been in the midst of an emergency briefing when he remembered he had left an important map in his desk. I had been in the middle of expressing my opinion that we needed to shift our defensive strategy to one of escape when he abruptly stood and left the conference. I followed him back to his study, all the while arguing my case. We had stumbled right into Anders as he was tucking folders into a bag. The ensuing struggle had spilled into the vestibule outside Constantine’s study and triggered Anders’s defensive shift into wolf form. Once transformed, Anders abandoned all thought of escape and instead turned on us instinctively as easy prey.

  The sound of footsteps slapping against flagstone echoed through the chamber. I glanced over my shoulder to see reinforcements pouring into the room. Katya, the head of Telassar’s security detail, raised the trank gun, a long-muzzled pistol with a Day-Glo orange grip, and fired two silent darts into the charging wolf, felling him before he could hurl himself at us again.

  “Take him to the pens.” Constantine threw his chair disgustedly against the far wall where it shattered into splinters. He rounded on me. “When you
go to the infirmary to take care of that scratch, inform Delacourte that his services are needed. I want Anders back in human form as soon as possible.” He turned back to the small security detail. “And I want to be alerted as soon as he gains consciousness. He’s not to be touched. If I hear that he has come to harm, I’ll assume the transgressor is an accomplice trying to shut him up.”

  Katya snapped her fingers and two muscular guards stepped forth. The men carefully lifted the body and carried it out of the room with Katya close behind them.

  “Katya.” Constantine’s command stopped the woman mid-stride. She pivoted crisply. “Where there is one traitor, there are likely others. I want you to assign an extra security detail to patrol all tactical nodes.”

  Katya saluted and then hurried after her men, leaving Constantine and I alone once more. I gave his tall, lean frame a once-over, checking for injury. He appeared to be favoring his left arm, and a diagonal gash ran red with blood and sweat along his forehead and halfway across the mahogany dome of his clean-shaven scalp. Our wounds were relatively minor, superficial, easily healed by shifting into our animal forms. Though the panther inside me howled with every beat of pain that thrummed through my body, I held fast, preventing the change that needed and wanted to come. Constantine, as a Weremaster, had fully integrated his feline and human psyches. I was still a long way from that kind of control; if I were to relinquish my body to the panther in this moment, I would be little more than a backseat driver—sometimes able to influence her actions, but not always.

  Constantine picked up Anders’s bag and rifled through the files, cataloguing what had been taken. Stopping at one page, he frowned as he studied the information, then cursed under his breath.

  “What was he after?” I wanted to cross the room and examine the documents with him, but the stiff set of his stance and the sharp relief of the tendons straining in his neck as he clenched his jaw in anger cautioned me to keep my distance.

  “The hydraulic and sewage plans for the city. They’re either trying to break their way in, or they plan on poisoning us.”

  Poison. My mind reeled. In a way, we were lucky—there were fewer than two hundred Weres living in Telassar at the moment. The numbers swelled to over a thousand in the winters when prey was sparse and Weres preferred the seclusion of the surrounding woods where they could hunt at their leisure. Thankfully, the summer season meant fewer bodies to organize and evacuate.

  “That’s good news.” Constantine’s head jerked unconsciously in my direction at the apparent non sequitur. “If they’re trying to sneak in or poison us, that means they don’t have enough resources to take the city by force. We can still get away.”

  Constantine remained silent, but his outrage at my suggestion was palpable. It fueled my beast, waves of anger pummeling and suffocating me in this cramped room, stirring up an alien, claustrophobic anxiety. He was alpha, I reminded myself. Running away, abandoning his territory, was anathema. I took an unconscious step toward the exit and drew his attention.

  “I thought I told you to go to the infirmary.” His obsidian eyes dropped to my bleeding forearm. “Our medical supplies are running low. You can’t afford to get an infection.”

  “I’ll walk with you,” I said. “You should get that cut stitched up.”

  Constantine spun away from me and strode toward the stairwell, in the opposite direction from the infirmary. Four parallel gouges perforated the white linen across his blood-soaked back.

  “Your back—” The rest of the sentence died on my tongue as he disappeared around a bend in the stairs. I swallowed the growl that crawled up from my belly, uncertain whether it came from the panther or from my own frustrations. Constantine, I was learning, could be even more stubborn than Valentine. I made my way gingerly down the stairs and out into the street. A lone squirrel darted for cover as I cut diagonally across the northern corner of the park toward the monolithic granite building that served as the infirmary and quartermaster suite. Gamesmen typically kept the park well stocked with small animals that were easy to hunt for Weres who needed to blow off steam quickly and didn’t feel like venturing into the woods beyond the city walls. In the ten days of the siege so far, the critter population had dwindled to near extinction. I made a note to check with the quartermaster on how human provisions were doing. At some point, necessity was going to force our hand into fight or flight.

  The infirmary took up two-thirds of the stone structure we referred to as the Union. It was made from large blocks of hand-hewn sandstone in a vibrant shade of ochre. Decorative turrets framed each corner and massive windows plated with thick safety glass reinforced with wire webbing punctuated each wall at even intervals. It was the most modern facility in the city, which wasn’t saying much. Because the purpose of Telassar was to exist under the radar of humanity, literally and figuratively, all technological implements were banned. There was no electricity, fuel-powered machinery, cellular or satellite phones of any kind. The restrictions served two purposes. First, it guaranteed that satellites orbiting the earth would not be able to detect the existence of the city. Second, shifters who came here for sanctuary were forced to live in a natural, wild environment conducive to bonding with their animal halves.

  The only exception to the technology blackout was the armory. Access to the armory was restricted to Constantine, Katya, and her lieutenants. Today’s incident with Anders was the only time in my sojourn here where the armory had been accessed, and I wondered if there were enough weapons for us to shoot our way out against the invading host.

  The main room of the infirmary was a large vaulted chamber divided into a dozen curtained treatment pods. On the east and west ends of the room, natural sunlight streamed in through long windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. On the wall opposite the doorway where I stood, half a dozen heavy wooden doors marked the individual treatment rooms. I found Delacourte adjusting the intravenous drip on an unconscious teenager strapped down in one of the curtained cots. Since Weres could heal themselves by shifting into animal form, the infirmary was usually a deserted place. The types of cases that made it here tended to be new Weres who were having a hard time adjusting to the change and those who had injured themselves so severely while in animal form that they couldn’t hunt to shift back. A wash of sympathy suffused me as I regarded the patient in Delacourte’s care. Barely six months had passed since my own difficult transition, and the sight of the young man, sedated and restrained, brought back terrifying memories of wrestling with my panther every time Valentine tried to feed. Delacourte turned, finally satisfied with his adjustments.

  “Alexa!” His smile of welcome melted into concern as he caught sight of my injury. He hurried over and examined my arm, turning it and probing gently. “This is a bite. Wolf, from the looks of it.”

  “Anders.” I winced as his fingers skated over the broken skin. The panther flared briefly in response to the pain and then retreated into the silence of my subconscious. “He’s a spy. We caught him searching through Constantine’s files. Katya is holding him in the pens now.”

  “Does he require treatment as well?” Delacourte led me to an empty cot and retrieved his medic bag. He doused a gauze pad with antiseptic and carefully cleaned my wound.

  “Constantine wants him back in human form. He seemed to indicate that you have some way of getting him to make the change?”

  Delacourte didn’t answer right away. He palpated the skin around my wound, shaking his head. “Weres fighting Weres. It’s not natural.”

  “But animals fight all the time in nature…”

  “Not over philosophy. Not over imperialism. This dispute, this siege, is very human.” He covered my forearm with more gauze pads and wrapped it with first aid tape.

  “But you yourself told me that Weres battle over Telassar all the time. This is a turf war just like any other, isn’t it?”

  Delacourte shook his head again but didn’t continue the debate. Instead, he walked to the far side of the room and unlo
cked a cabinet. He pulled out two clear plastic bags filled with some kind of fluid and brought them back to me, then opened one of his desk drawers and withdrew a syringe. When he began to fill it from a vial of pastel blue liquid, I grew curious.

  “What’s that?”

  “Diluted wolfsbane.” He capped off the syringe and handed it to me carefully. “Have someone inject this into his scruff after you’ve hooked him up to the IV. Combined with the glucose in the bag, this will force him to change back. Having this in his system will make it much harder than normal for him to return to wolf form, even if his metabolism could handle it.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “This blocks the change to animal form? Why has no one told me about it before?”

  “Nothing blocks the change,” Delacourte corrected me. “This herb simply delays it. But it is quite toxic, and dangerous if used frequently.” He washed his hands and returned to the bedside of his unconscious patient.

  “Make sure Constantine and Katya check with me before they raid my IV supplies again. We’re going to have to watch our resources if they plan on waiting out this…turf war.”

  Clearly dismissed, I headed back toward the barracks in search of the imprisoned Anders. While the Union stood out in size and architecture from its surrounding buildings, to the casual observer, the barracks compound appeared unremarkable. The compound comprised two squat brick buildings covered so thickly in ivy, they gave the impression of being swallowed by nature. The larger structure housed the administrative offices of the security detail and the prison pens. The smaller building served as the armory. I walked into the former and headed for the conference room in the back. These days, it served as a defense headquarters. There was a guard stationed in front of the door and I held up the supplies to show my purpose. For a second it looked like he was going to harass me anyway, but angry voices from the conference room gave him pause. Instead, he flashed me a feral grin that said “better you than me” and waved me in.