Lycanthropy Files Box Set: Books 1-3 Plus Novella

by Cecilia Dominic

  “Selene, you have to let me in.”

  “No.” The word held calmness and despair.

  “I can break this door down.”

  “You wouldn’t.” She sounded certain. I backed up, but I recognized the futility in the action. She’d been traumatized twice over that evening, and she needed gentleness, not force. And I really needed her to attend to my wounds. It would be just my luck if an opportunistic microbe killed me, not a battle wound or something exciting.

  “Selene, I’m changing now, and I’m going to go into the next bedroom and get in the shower. I need help with my wounds or else I fear I’ll get an infection.”

  “Your lycanthropic immune system won’t handle it?” Now it was the gentle query of a scientist.

  “I don’t know. It depends on the maker of the bomb and what they put in it.”

  “Fine, but not here. I can’t stay here.” And the hysterical note was back.

  “Good idea. I’ll show you where your clothes are, and then you can take us back to my place.”

  I changed back to human—a miserable process—and when I stood, warm fluid dripped down my right butt cheek and leg. I called Garou to process the crime scene and told him what Selene and I had encountered outside of Laird Hall.

  “You need to stay there. Dammit, Investigator, I need your impressions.”

  “I’m injured.”

  “Fine, I will call Doctor Fortuna.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I told him. “Tell him to meet me at my place, and you and I can talk tomorrow. Don’t argue.”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t, and in half an hour, I lay face down on towels in front of the fireplace in my house. My entire back felt on fire, but I shivered as my nervous system tried to decide whether it would be better for my survival for me to change or stay human. I gritted my teeth and suppressed the urge, not sure I would make it if I did transform. One thing both sides of me agreed on: I needed fluids, and Selene gave me ice cubes to suck on while we waited for Max since sips of water made me gag.

  Finally the doorbell rang, and Selene went to answer it.

  “Thank god you’re—oh.”

  That was an “oh” of “oh, there’s another woman here,” and Reine’s soft voice drifted to me along with Max’s deep one. At that point, I seemed to float off the floor, and when I cracked my eyelids open to see if I did, indeed, levitate, the flames licked at the wolf-faced fireback in slow motion. Another shudder racked me, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the urge to change. A sensation of bugs running under my skin covered me, and I struggled to stay tethered to reality in human form.

  “Good gods, what happened?” Max asked.

  “As I said, he took the brunt of the explosion,” Selene said, and I wanted to wipe away the tears in her voice because I imagined them coming out of her eyes as well. I wanted to turn my head to say something comforting, but the wolf’s face behind the fire kept me anchored, and I feared I’d lose consciousness if I stopped looking at it.

  “How close were you?” asked Reine.

  “Too close,” Selene said. “We tried to run, but it was too late—they saw us and tried to kill us. He knew. He curled around me and protected me.”

  A cool finger ran over my back. No, through it. It was a dagger frozen in dry ice coated in ice, and I gasped.

  “You’re hurting him!” Selene cried.

  “Wait in the other room, child,” Reine told her. “I’m trying to save him. That was a hellfire grenade, and it will take more than human or lycanthrope magic to mitigate the effects. Then you both wandered through a residual blood magic aura. If he wasn’t as old and strong as he is, he would’ve already died.”

  A quick swallow and the sound of hair brushing over Selene’s shoulders told me she didn’t like it, but she nodded. There’s my girl.

  “What do you need me to do?” asked Max once Selene’s footsteps had faded. I wondered where she went, if she was fixing a drink for herself or just curled up somewhere. Curling up, that sounded good, but I couldn’t move. My limbs were leaden, and the fire continued its slow, sensuous dance.

  “Now it’s your turn to hold him, but first we must negotiate a price.”

  Aw, fuck.

  A curtain of sinewy curling white snakes got in the way of my flames, and the fairy’s face followed it. Her wide blue eyes held mine with a solemn expression.

  “You wolf-men get in more trouble,” she said, her lips curling up in a half-joker smile. I never understood the purpose of that card in the deck. It seemed extraneous unless you were playing something needlessly complicated. I never had the smarts or patience for—

  “Stay with me, Wolf-man,” she murmured, and I blinked, back from the land of floating, sneering face cards. “You know what I want as a price for my healing you.”

  “I can’t,” I said through dry lips.

  “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in offering a child? You can even make it your second if you like.”

  “No child,” I croaked.

  “Your name, then.”

  She held a hand over my temple, and a soft white glow suffused my vision. It soothed and cleared my head from the pain I’d been in. I understood what it would also do: capture my name as it left my lips and allow the fairy to use it however she saw fit. I would be at her beck and call, and she would have power over me.

  Max cleared his throat. “You don’t have to give it to her, Gabriel. Remember, it won’t just affect you if you do.”

  Right, Selene. If she does have a future with me… But the chances of us being together wouldn’t be high if we both ended up dead, and our opponents obviously meant business. A hellfire grenade meant it had been wielded by someone with powerful magic, and I knew I was dead if I didn’t accept Reine’s bargain.

  I took a deep breath and said through clenched teeth, “I am Gabriel Stuart McCord. I give you my name to use once. Employ it wisely.”

  “All right, then, you are a clever one.” She disappeared from my view. “Hold him, Maximilian.” Her tone was cold, and I guessed she was not pleased with his interference or my limiting her power over me. “I can sit on his legs, but you need to hold his arms.”

  “No sticks,” I coughed and moved my arms to the side and over my head so Max could easily restrain them. Her weight settled on my legs, and a burning electric jolt shot from my lower back to my neck.

  “Oh, darling Gabriel, you’re going to wish I was using a stick by the time I’m through.”

  My name dropped from her lips like a frozen pebble and landed on my sacrum. She murmured words even below my hearing, and each one fell onto my back, chips and daggers of rock and ice, a trail starting from my tailbone and rushing up my spine, sticking into each of those burning, throbbing places. I writhed to dislodge them—Death would feel better than this!—but my captors held true. The weight of the spell ground my front into the towels beneath me, and the needles of each little loop and fiber poked me. Searing cold poured through my nervous system, and if Max’s cleansing had been a torrent of glacial water, this one crushed me in an avalanche of ice, snow and misery. I thrashed with my head, the only part of me I could move freely.

  “Almost there,” Reine said through clenched teeth, and I imagined her, face slick with sweat and the effort of the spell.

  If the bitch can even sweat.

  The sensation turned from crystalline to gel, and it warmed gradually from the center outward until my entire body had been filled with it. I wondered where my bones went since I couldn’t feel them from my neck down, and then a cowl of the stuff grew over my head and face and into my eyes, nose and mouth. I struggled to breathe against its viscous web, but with every inhale attempt, I pulled it further in until it choked my throat.

  “Just another moment,” Reine murmured. “I have to get all the passages, even the little airways.”

  My chest worked to breathe, and on what I felt would be my last inhale before I suffocated, the stuff vanished. I drew air into my lungs in deep, desperat
e gasps.

  “Do you always have to make it so unpleasant?” I asked when I could speak.

  She laughed. “You boys are the ones who keep finding trouble that requires my kind of intervention.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Max released my arms, and I brought them down to my sides. “I am healed, then?”

  “Mostly. The rest is up to your body. The more life-affirming activities you can do, the faster you’ll heal the rest of the way,” Reine said. She stood, and I rolled to my side and then to my back. It felt sensitive, but closed and no longer raw. Max helped me to sit and then stand and hobble to the couch. Reine brought me a robe, which I put on before collapsing.

  “You need food,” she said. “And, as I said, life-affirming activities.”

  “That’s the good part of her prescriptions,” Max told me with a wink.

  She nodded. “But as with Max, you need to recover for a few days.”

  Max’s eyes met mine, and we both seemed to have the same thought: I didn’t have a few days to solve this mystery, and he certainly didn’t have the extra time. Neither did Selene or her brother. As for the fate of the Institute—my mind didn’t want to acknowledge the fact, but with David dead, I’d lost the majority support and possibly the ability to help those who needed it most, the ones who had been turned lycanthrope against their will.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said. “Where’s Selene?”

  “Selene! That reminds me…” Max stood. “I’ll fetch her. Believe me, I have my own questions for her.”

  I’d half expected her to disappear during Reine’s procedure on me, and I have to admit to some embarrassed surprise when she walked in after Max called her. She rushed to sit beside me.

  “Are you okay? You were making the most horrible noises.”

  “Fairy medicine isn’t pleasant,” I said. “But I’m much better.” I put an arm around her. “Max has some questions for you, and you need to finish telling me what you started earlier. I suspect it’s all about the same thing.”

  “Selene,” Max said, “we know that the sixth reversal subject Corey Richardson is really your brother Curtis Rial. I need to know what you were playing at and what you’ve been keeping from us.”

  She slumped back into the couch cushions. “Gabriel, when I came to you a few days ago and told you Otis’s death was my fault, I wasn’t lying,” she said. “And as much as I’ve lied, it’s because I had to protect my little brother.”

  “Start from the beginning,” I told her.

  She pulled away and looked into the fire.

  24

  Curtis always had problems,” Selene said. “Like, the kind that ends a kid up on medication by the time he hits first grade. Impulsivity, mostly, with a little bit of defiance. It later came out that my mother had an affair, and she never told my father, who left when we were little. Then I found the genetic tests when I was a teenager and pieced it together with information from her diary. She’d written about it in deliberately vague terms, but I knew she carried a lot of guilt with her. It was a relief to find out why my father left and her part in it.”

  “What did she write about the man who fathered Curtis?” I asked. “We have strict rules about that sort of conduct. Should a child be born with lycanthropy, or what you’re calling full-blown CLS, it’s the responsibility of the werewolf blood relative to make sure he or she is brought to one of our communities and trained so the child won’t accidentally hurt anyone.”

  “My mother only wrote that she’d made a new friend at the airport, where she worked in marketing. He was a corporate type who flew through often, and she’d caught his eye. Never any physical descriptions, and then a passage about how they never talked any more in spite of everything that had happened between them. If he offered to help with the baby he’d fathered, she must have refused him. Or maybe he didn’t know.”

  “Let’s get back to Curtis,” Max said. “Does he have CLS?”

  She nodded. “Once I learned about the disorder in graduate school, I knew that’s what he must have, but the genetic type. He did display the classic behaviors: sneaking off at night even as a preteen, hyperactivity and impulsivity around the full moon, and strong loyalty to friends to a dangerous degree. What is it that parents always ask their teens? If they’d all jumped off a bridge, he would have, too.”

  “So how did you get it?” I asked. “Or were you also a genetic case?”

  “No, just my luck, I had a flu vaccine from the tainted batch when I was on my predoctoral internship at the Central Arkansas VA.”

  “Maybe the same batch that infected Leo,” I said.

  “Maybe.” She rubbed her eyes. “But I adjusted to it better than Curtis ever did. He struggled in school, even with medications. He hates the changes, which started once he hit late puberty. He didn’t tell me about them until he caught me at one of mine. I just thought he’d disappear. It’s amazing—he would have been the one per generation that happens in the general population had it not been for the viral vectors. But he can’t even hold down a part-time job because the sensory experiences are too intense for him.” She blinked, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “He’s been my responsibility since our parents were killed. I had to do something, and this was going to help both of us. I am interested in the work, very interested. I understand just how difficult this condition can be for people.”

  “So you conspired to get a job with us, for him to change his name, and for the two of you to come here.” I looked at her silhouette with slumped shoulders against the fire. I wanted to be angry at her, but I remembered the Young Bloods and how they struggled with their lycanthropy. Curtis’s case sounded even direr than theirs. Was it fair to withhold something that could help the extreme genetic cases that couldn’t function in the real world? Was it any wonder our ancestors who couldn’t survive in society took to the woods to become hermits so they wouldn’t end up burned at the stake as witches?

  “What about Curtis’s friends?” asked Max. “The ones who are holding him hostage?”

  “As I said, he’s overly loyal to his friends. One of them was a Scottish exchange student named Jake. He convinced Curtis to come over early before he was going to be a study subject and hang out for a while. Jake brought him to Wolfsheim, who can look at a person’s blood and know things about them. He saw what Curtis had, and worse, who he’s related to.”

  Now her earlier statement that this went all the way up to the Council came back to me. Also the theft of the blood from the Institute’s vault. “Who would that be?”

  She looked at me over her shoulder. “Curtis is Bartholomew Campbell’s illegitimate son.”

  Reine clapped her hands. “Oh, that’s perfect! And does Bartholomew know?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect so.”

  “So why did they let you go?” I asked. “What do they want you to do?”

  Selene turned away. “Wolfsheim wants me to bring you to him, Gabriel. He wants you to be his spy inside the Council and the Institute. He said something about you not being fully developed, so you’re the one it will be most easy to influence.” She shivered. “And he is able to influence.”

  Her words brought back something David had told me, and my gut clenched with anger at what had been done to him. “That was before he killed my friend and tried to blow me up.”

  “He’s powerful, Gabriel,” Reine said, the syllables of my name dropping like two diamonds and a pearl from her lips.

  “As powerful as you?” asked Max.

  “No.” She shook her curls, and I thought I saw little white rabbits hopping through them. “But he is very old and has lost what little humanity he had. What motivates someone like that? Power, and then the choice becomes whether to save or to destroy because humans cannot do both. He has always wanted to eliminate your kind.”

  “He will not do so through me,” I vowed, “and I have to destroy him before he tries with someone else.”

  Selene gazed into the fire, and her silhouette reminded me
of an ancient pagan priestess, which made her words that much more frightening. “He has his fingers in all aspects of your life and organization. He will find a way, or one of you will die with his attempts.”

  “Is that what Otis’s death was?” Max asked, and his normally cool tone even icier with anger. He must have learned some tricks from Reine. “An attempt to influence us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But your friend was there,” I said. “The one with the scarred cheek.”

  “Rhys,” Selene and Reine said at the same time.

  I shook my head to clear the bell-like tone that echoed after their less than perfect harmony. “So when you said Otis had a question for you, it wasn’t to ask you out. It was about your brother.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’d found out somehow through his research that Curtis and Bartholomew were related. All the applicants had to submit initial blood samples to confirm their CLS diagnosis. He went digging.”

  “And the Institute also had blood samples and profiles on the Council members, their mates, and most of the Institute staff as a show of good faith in the blood magic process and to start a database,” Max told us. “But not Bartholomew Campbell. He abstained from the project.”

  “What if someone got a blood sample from him and slipped it to LeConte?” I asked. “Garou’s report said there was no sign of a struggle. What if Campbell’s secretary had been working with LeConte all along?”

  “Why?” asked Selene.

  “To gain access to the rest of the blood.”

  “Can you prove it?” asked Max. “LeConte was fanatically curious, so I’m not surprised. But that doesn’t tell us who killed him.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to go digging like he did, and he would never have betrayed us.” But Selene didn’t sound so sure. “I can tell you Rhys didn’t kill him. Rhys doesn’t have that kind of magic. As for who did…” She shrugged. “He won’t tell you. His secrecy is a price for working with Wolfsheim, and he’s not going to go up against his boss. He told me he doesn’t even know a name.”