“The mothers of the other boys will be happy to see their sons too,” he said. “That’s why we’re checking them here. We don’t want them to be away from their families for a minute longer than they have to be.”
Iain pushed his way into the cave. “Gentlemen, please do not dismantle any of the equipment. Try not to touch it. The FBI and FDA agents are going to examine it.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into my grandfather’s eyes. He had a weary smile on his face. “How’s the house?”
I patted his hand. “Still in one piece as far as I know.”
“Did you find the surprises I left you?”
“I think so.”
“And the cats?”
I pulled the silver chain out of my shirt. “Yep, here’s Mishka.” He put an arm around my shoulder and squeezed me tightly.
“I thought I wasn’t going to be able to do that ever again,” he said, his voice gruff. I looked away so I wouldn’t see him cry.
“Me too.”
Leo came over. “Are you okay? How’s the wrist?”
“Decent.”
“Sir, how are you?” Leo asked and gave my grandfather a hearty handshake. He cocked his head as if to ask how much he could give away.
“I’m doing much better now I know my granddaughter and all the children are safe. And you can say anything. She’s a smart girl—I’m sure she’s figured it all out.”
“Are you ready to assume the pack alpha role? We could use you on the hunt.”
“In time, Leo, in time. Where’s your cousin?”
Leo frowned, his handsome features distressed. “I can’t find him.”
My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder. “Then it’s a good thing we have a spirit-walker among us. She’ll be able to find him more quickly than anyone.”
“A spirit-walker?” asked Leo.
“It’s the term for a shape-changer who does so with spirit rather than physically, like you did. Not everyone has the talent. With a spirit form, you can move much more quickly and silently.”
I thought about my escape from Robert, and my stomach turned when I thought about how, for a moment, I had been tempted.
“The wolfsbane?” Leo asked. “How does that work?”
“It both helps and hinders the transformation. It prevents the transformation physically but facilitates the spiritual one.”
Leo shook his head. “That’s amazing.”
We walked out of the cave into the waning sunlight of another day. Iain continued to direct the federal agents, but one broke off from the crowd and followed us.
“Doctor Fisher? Doctor Landover? We have some questions for you.”
My grandfather’s brows drew together. “Can’t we go home, get hot showers and a good night’s sleep first? Have mercy on an old man.”
“It will just take a moment.”
“I’ve got to get Simon back to his family,” Leo said. “I’ll catch you later at the Manor. I can give Gabriel and Lonna a ride.”
The two of them hadn’t met each other’s eyes the entire time we were in the main cavern, and I wondered what, exactly, had transpired between them before they were kidnapped. But I didn’t have time for speculation now. The federal agent led us out of the ravine and away from the river to a clearing, where a lone black SUV with tinted windows sat.
I turned to the agent—a nondescript fellow with sandy brown hair and blue eyes—who I had nicknamed “Buddy” in my head, to ask what was going on, but got the answer even before the words came out of my mouth. He pointed a gun at us and gestured to the car.
“Someone wants to talk to you.”
“I’m guessing there are silver bullets in that thing, aren’t there?”
“Of course.”
The window rolled down to reveal Sheriff Knowles in the driver’s seat. “Come on in, Doctors. I’ve got someone here who’s been dying to meet you.”
The back door opened, and I saw Ron as well as a guy who looked like he’d been up all night waiting for us. His salt-and-pepper tufts were messy over his ears, and his greasy comb-over zigzagged in disheveled strands across his shiny head. Bags the color of green tea hung under his eyes, and his jowls wobbled as he introduced himself.
“I’m Agent Marius. I have a proposition for you.”
We climbed in, and Buddy closed the door behind us. The SUV started up with a purr, its hybrid engine making all the noise of a large golf cart. One more vehicle leaving the scene wouldn’t be noticed, especially one as quiet as this one. I didn’t know how long they’d been there, but I could guess from the collection of fast food bags on the floor and the empty drink cups it had been a few hours.
“That took longer than we thought,” Ron said. He faced the window and wouldn’t meet either my or my grandfather’s gaze.
“Not that you were any help,” I said. “And where is Kyra?”
“She’s around. She wanted to find Leo.”
I tried not to think of Kyra and Leo and how close they had looked that first evening. He had said there was nothing between them, but was it true?
“That was you last night, wasn’t it, coming out of the cave? How did you do that?”
I held up my hand. “All in good time. Now, can you guys please explain why we’re getting kidnapped—again?”
Agent Marius made a sound combining a cough, harrumph, and sneeze. “This isn’t a kidnapping, Doctor Fisher. We just want to have a little conversation.”
“About what? And what does Ron have to do with all of this?”
“All in good time.” His tone mocked me.
The vehicle went over a rough patch, and we were thrown from side to side. I hit my left wrist, and the pain made me hiss.
“Are you injured, Doctor Fisher?”
I glared at Ron. “As you well know.”
Knowles chuckled from the front seat. The road evened out. So, I guessed, this is what happens. Be disagreeable, get jostled. Be friendly, and things go smoothly. And keep in mind if things get too rough, Buddy’s gun might just “accidentally” go off.
“What can we do for you, Agent Marius?” My grandfather’s tone held steel beneath his charming words. I had heard the same steel the last time I saw him and my mother together, and she had told him I wouldn’t be spending summers up there anymore. She got her way, but at the cost of losing her inheritance.
“Well, Doctor Landover, we’re interested in some of the experiments you’ve been doing.” He pulled a manila folder out of his black briefcase and handed it to my grandfather.
“How did you get these?”
I saw they were the documents Galbraith had given me and Iain, my grandfather’s notes on his aconite research.
“Your lawyer was more than happy to cooperate with us when we subpoenaed your records.”
“On what grounds was the subpoena served?”
“We were concerned about your research on the grounds of homeland security. A rogue scientist in a mountaintop laboratory might be making things we would rather not have fall into the hands of our enemies.”
“How did you find out in the first place?”
Ron’s guilty look told me all I needed to know. “They promised me a cure, Joanie,” he mumbled, his eyes still down. “They promised me if I cooperated, I would get my old life back.”
“Just couldn’t wait, could you?”
He flexed his fingers. “I need to be back in Little Rock, back at my fellowship.”
“And back within dating distance of your professor’s daughter.”
“What we’re interested in most is something Ron saw last night,” Marius, obviously ignoring us, continued. “He said he saw a shadowy wolf, something solid in its mouth, slip without a sound through the woods, fend off an attack from a material wolf, and then disappear when attacked again.” He raised one bushy eyebrow. “Would you know anything about that?”
I had been so intent on my goal I hadn’t noticed I was being followed. “I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
“Are you sure, spirit-walker?”
“You had bugs in the lab. You knew what was going on.” I clenched my fists, and the truck lurched over a pothole or rock of some sort.
“Sorry,” Sheriff Knowles called out. “That one snuck up on me.”
Marius ignored him. “We’ve been keeping an eye on Hippocrates-Cabal. We wouldn’t have let them contaminate the bird flu supply, of course.”
Wouldn’t they? I wondered. But I kept my breathing even and relaxed my hands with effort. “What do you want from us?”
“We want you to continue your research. We think it has intriguing possibilities.”
“We’re scientists, Agent Marius,” said my grandfather. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Fine, then.” Marius made the disagreeable sound again. “As you know, our military is stretched thin right now, and our enemies numerous.”
“Right.”
“We need better, stealthier, ways of quelling insurgency so we can get our soldiers out faster. Then we need the money to bankroll the operations.”
“You want to be the ones to make the ‘cure’ for CLS,” I said. “You let Hippocrates create the problem, and you’ll be the one to fix it. At premium cost.”
“And you want to turn your soldiers into werewolves,” my grandfather said, more steel in his tone. “You want to take all those young men and women and condemn them to a life I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Do you have a plan for what to do with them when they return?”
“We cure them.” Marius spread his hands as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“But there isn’t a cure.”
“That’s what we need you to find before we can put the program into effect. It’s a risk we’re willing to take. We’ll take care of them in the future if necessary.”
My grandfather leaned back. “You have my notes. You have my granddaughter’s documentation from her research so you can see who to experiment on. Why do you need us?”
“Because you’re the only ones who have made it this far, and for someone to try to replicate and fully understand your work, even for someone like Iain McPherson, would take far too long. This is an urgent situation, Doctors. We don’t have that kind of time.”
I heard gravel under the tires. We had reached the driveway to Wolfsbane Manor.
“You have a decision to make, Doctors. Will you help us with this?”
“What if we don’t?”
“Then you will be treated as rogue scientists, and we will not hesitate to lock you away for the rest of your life. Prison is hard on terrorists.”
My grandfather seemed to deflate in his seat. “It appears as though the decision has been made for us.”
They dropped us off at the front door and drove away.
“Why did you agree?” I asked as we walked inside. ”I would have gone to jail to keep them from hurting any more people. This is not how I remembered you.”
He shook his head. “Because they might just try the transformation anyway, without a cure. The dosing of aconite is such a delicate process they would likely kill many innocent people before they succeeded in their aims. At least this way, we’d have control.”
I looked at him in disbelief. He had always told me scientific integrity was the most important defense we had against the pressures of government. But he seemed too weary for me to argue.
We trudged up the stairs. The noises of the other inhabitants of the house were comforting, albeit sharper than they had been before my transformation. I heard Lonna in her room, packing. With the mystery of the disappearing children solved, I guessed she would be heading back to Little Rock, although I didn’t know how she would manage to live with her new CLS.
“Go talk to her,” my grandfather said. He had always managed to read my mind—or at least my face. “She told us in the cave things had been…tense…between you two since she arrived. Something about her not learning from your mistakes.”
“You could say that.”
“I think she learned her lesson. And you learned yours.”
“Mine?” But I knew what he meant.
Lonna’s suitcase lay open on the bed. She had already folded everything into it.
“Hey,” I said. She looked up, her liquid topaz eyes full of emotion.
“Joanie, I should’ve listened to you,” she started, but I held up my hand.
“It’s all in the past.”
She bit her lip and took a deep breath. “I need to tell you what happened. With me and Peter. You need to know.”
The conversation about the spell he had put on her came back to me. “Okay.” I sat on the bed. “I’m listening.”
She told me how she’d gone to interview him at his request, and he’d made her agree to have lunch with him as the price of his silence as to who she really was.
“He was really nice, you know. He told me how impressed he’d been with my work. But then things got weird.”
He had leaned across the desk and taken her hand, turning it palm up. “You have an interesting story on your palm, Ms. Marconi,” he said. “It says you’re in for some big changes.” Then he brought it to his lips and kissed it.
“God, Joanie, I felt it all the way down to my toes. It was the most sensual kiss I’d had in my life—on my hand.” So sensual, in fact, she experienced an orgasm right there in his office. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and when she’d washed her hands, she noticed the hand he kissed had a small cut on it as though it had been grazed by one of his teeth.
“And then we went to lunch, and then back to his office, and then…” She put her hands to her face.
“It’s not your fault. You were seduced,” I assured her. “He saw you were attracted to him.”
But my mind raced. Peter wasn’t a werewolf, of that I was sure. I would have been able to tell in my spirit-walker form. So how could his bite have triggered the effect? But what if it wasn’t just the bite? What if it had been the bite and the spell reinforced by all the sexual energy between them? What if he had been telling me the truth, and he had some attenuated form that looked more like a traditional impulse-control disorder? His son, who had inherited his genes, had been able to see me.
My mind had been slammed by the possibility of werewolves, but now it seemed there might be some sort of rogue wizard or shaman, with enough of the genetic predisposition toward lycanthropy to inflict it on others.
“But all that is neither here nor there,” she said. “Now we both have this problem.”
“We’ll get through it. And my grandfather and I will find a cure.”
“God, Joanie. I wish I had never come up here.”
I went to touch her arm, but she flinched away from me.
“I should never have come up here,” she said again. “Now I have some weird disease that’s going to make me turn into some awful creature once a month.”
“Maybe the aconite will work for you, too. We can always try it.”
“Even so, it’s going to mean a day off from work out of every twenty-eight to handle not having slept. It’s going to mean strange stories I’ll have to tell my lovers. Can you imagine?” She raised her tear-stained face to me. “‘No, honey, I can’t go out tonight. No, I can’t tell you why. Oh, and don’t call me tomorrow, either, I’ll be asleep all day.’ This is going to ruin my career and my love life.”
“You’ll handle it. I’ll handle it. You can have some of my money to make up what you won’t earn.”
“It’s not your money. Your grandfather is still alive, remember? That leaves you with nothing again.”
My heart plummeted to my stomach, and I swallowed around the acid in my throat. She’s right, and I don't even feel like I know my grandfather anymore. “I’ve lost my career and contracted CLS, too.”
“But you won’t be alone in it. I will.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Thanks, but I’m just still so pissed, and Peter’s gone, and
it’s just too much for me to deal with.”
“I’ll leave you alone, then, if it’s what you want.”
“Yes.” For the first time in our long friendship, her eyes grew cold, and she turned her back on me. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“Okay, then.” I walked out of the room as slowly as I could, but she made no indication she wanted me to stop. I closed the door behind me, and when it clicked shut, I heard her sob. With a heavy heart, I went downstairs.
I found Grandfather and Gabriel poring over the blueprints as well as the electrical and gas-line schematics of the house, which they had laid out on the long dining room table.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked. My grandfather put a hand to his lips and made a crawling motion with his hand. I understood—they didn’t know if, while the house was empty, Knowles and his goons had come in and bugged the place. That explained his comments by the front door.
They wrote notes to each other, but all my grandfather would say to me was, “Shouldn’t you find the car you rented in Memphis and return it? You should bring Lonna with you. It sounds like she’s ready to go home. You can take my car, and she can drive the rental.”
“I’ll ask her if she wants to go. I think her car is still down at her apartment anyway from when Gabriel drove it.”
Lonna agreed to follow me down to Little Rock in the rental car. I found a place I could return it there. After a quick shower and change, I was ready as well.
“Bye, honey,” my grandfather said as he kissed me on the cheek. “We’ll see you when you get back.” In my ear, he whispered, “Spend the night with Lonna at her apartment. She may need you.” He pressed a small packet into my hand—two homemade capsules. “You may need each other. And remember, I’m so very proud of you.”
I bit my lip to keep from crying. “She’s so upset right now she wants nothing to do with me.” I pointed to the packet. “And how do you know these will work on her?”
“I don’t know. But it’s worth a try. Give her time, honey, she’ll come around. Emotions are always unstable soon after the first change. And she was given the formula that made them scream in agony and forced them to change.”
I shook my head, angry at myself for not realizing they’d been there long enough to be experimented on. I wondered how Gabriel was recovering, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella Page 26
