I faced him and raised an eyebrow. "Come again?"
He leaned back and clasped his hands in his lap behind his crossed legs. "With more practice you may be able to control your werewolf abilities. When that happens there will be less need for the precautionary measures."
"But there'll still be need?" I asked him.
"There is that chance," he replied.
"So you promise I can get rid of the shock treatment if I learn to control myself?" I persisted.
"I'm afraid I can't make that promise. My life is important to me, and I would rather not make a promise that would endanger it," he returned.
I pursed my lips and turned my head away. Here was another empty promise from him. Everything had strings attached that he controlled like a puppeteer. Come ten o'clock tomorrow I'd cut my strings and try my luck without his benevolent tutelage.
"I bet you even lied about my being pretty, too. . ." I muttered.
"I never lie, I merely omit," he defended himself. "As for the compliments I gave to you, they were neither lies nor was there any omission. Believe me on this: I stand by what I said to you earlier."
I didn't grace his comment with reply. We arrived back at Indigo Towers and Fox escorted me back to the castle while Emery parked the car. The elevator doors opened and I stepped into the hall. Fox remained in the elevator.
"Miss Rogers," he called to me. I turned and glared at him. "Contrary to what you may believe, I truly do have your best interests in mind."
"You've got some funny ways of showing it," I quipped.
"I admit my methods are primitive, but they are effective," he argued. "That aside, I would prefer you remain in the castle all of tomorrow."
I frowned. "Why?"
"For precautions sake," he insisted. "But I can see you're tired from our outing, and I'll bid you goodnight." He pressed a button on the elevator panel and the doors shut, shutting down our conversation with them.
I spun on my heels and marched up the stairs.
"Who does he think he is playing God with my life?" I grumbled as I slammed my bedroom door open. The door hit the wall and bounced back to peg me in the nose. "Damn it!" I yelped. I clutched my wounded nose and shut the door behind me, but with greater care than the opening. "Great way to prove him right. . ." I scolded myself as I walked over and plopped myself on my bed back-first. I stared up at the top of the four-poster bed and sighed. "She'd better have a werewolf training ground, or I'm in trouble."
The brief foray into the real world allowed me a deep sleep. I awoke some hours later with my hand still on my nose and a dread in my heart. The sun radiated into the room and showed I'd slept through some of the morning. I shot up and looked at the clock on the nightstand. Nine-fifty.
I sprang from the bed and rushed out into the hall. My feet pounded against the stone as I flung myself down the stairs and into the hall. Fox and Emery stood at the bottom of the steps. A moment's hesitation would have meant forsaking a chance at freedom and a lifetime with them. I bowled through them and they jumped back to avoid becoming spare pins.
"Miss Roger!" I heard Fox call to me.
That only made me run faster.
I sped through the doors and out into the bright late-morning sun. My uncovered eyes blinked against the harsh light. I took a hard left and sprinted across the narrow part of the roof.
"Miss Rogers! Stop!" Fox shouted behind me.
His voice was drowned out by the whirring of helicopter blades. A helicopter appeared on the horizon and headed towards the far end of the Towers. The side door swung open and a man in a helmet leaned out. The helicopter hovered a foot off the ground at the edge of the roof and the man held out his hand to me. I pumped my arms, sprinted through the repaired park, and climbed aboard.
The helicopter rose and pulled away from the roof. I glanced over my shoulder at the Towers and saw Fox and Emery reach the edge of the roof a few seconds after the helicopter left. Fox's narrowed eyes looked into mine, and his thin, pressed lips told me he wasn't happy.
The man in the helmet buckled me into a bucket seat at the rear and took his position as the co-pilot. We flew away from the Towers and and towards the north where the helicopter dipped between the tall commercial buildings. I glanced back and saw the Towers disappear behind a half dozen office buildings. We couldn't see them, and they couldn't track us.
The pilot guided the copter for a few miles until we took a gradual turn towards the western and across the river. That part of the city, the western edge of Cam River, was heavily industrialized. Tall smoke stacks replaced the towering office buildings. The smell of steel was replaced by smelted steel. The helicopter flew low to the ground and swerved between tall power plants and paper mills. I grimaced and pinched my nose. Nothing like the smell of sulfur to keep me awake in these harsh daylight hours.
After an hour's flight the helicopter landed in a vacant, weed-infested lot surrounded by a tired chain-link fence. The lot adjoined a twenty-story building with rows of square windows along all its floors. Many of them were broken, and graffiti graced the walls. A steel door sat in the center of the building.
Morgan stood a few yards from the impromptu landing pad. She wore a trim white blouse and long blue skirt, and her long hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. The pilots didn't stop the swirling blades as she ducked down and came to the door. The co-pilot unbuckled me and helped me out. Morgan grasped my shoulders and led me towards the door.
"I hope your flight was uneventful!" she called over the sound of blades.
"Yeah!" I replied.
We reached the door and turned to watch the helicopter take off. It disappeared into the distance.
Morgan adjusted her long hair and smoothed her suit. "I hope my brother didn't protest too much."
"He didn't say a word," I told her.
She smiled. "Good. Now let me show you to your new home."
CHAPTER 5
Morgan opened the door and guided me in first. We stepped into a long, shadowed hallway littered with trash and leaves. The wall opposite the door was filled with branching hallways and doors. Morgan led me down the passage with its fragmented lights.
"I think the maid missed a spot," I quipped.
Morgan chuckled. "We like to keep things simple for appearances' sake. The real fun takes place somewhere else."
We reached a metal door that looked like all the rest, but Morgan steered us inside. The room was a blank square filled with graffiti and broken office furniture. A desk sat in one of the far corners. Its broken leg was propped up by a cinder brick. Morgan walked over and kicked the brick. The stone moved an inch, and the back wall of the room slid to the left to reveal a new, clean room. Tiles graced the floor and the walls were a sparkling white. A pair of doors stood against the opposite wall of the clean room, and the space was illuminated by bright fluorescent tube lights.
Morgan turned to me and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. "You might need these," she warned me as she handed them to me.
I put them on and reluctantly stepped into the new room. Morgan joined me and pressed a button on a panel situated on the side wall. The wall shut behind us and Morgan turned to me.
"I can't tell you how glad I am that you trusted me enough to come to me," she told me.
I shrugged. "I already knew what your brother was going to do to me, so it wasn't that hard of a decision."
She shook her head. "No, it must have been difficult to jump into the abyss of uncertainty, and that's why I want to show you my appreciation by giving you two gifts. Please follow me."
Morgan guided me through the pair of doors and into a completely different building than the rickety exterior. The walls were white, and the halls clean and bright. Office doors graced the walls at neat intervals and bright lights lit up every corner. The first view through the doors was of one of those hallways that seemed to stretch forever and was intersected by others of like makeup. The only thing missing was people to hurry up and down the passages.
The place was eerily quiet, particularly to my sensitive ears. I heard only a few mumblings of voices ahead of us.
"Where are all the workers?" I asked her.
"The facility isn't staffed yet," she told me.
Morgan led the way down the hall to a large common room situated on the left side. A sunken seating area held couches, chairs and tables. In two of the chairs sat two very familiar people, Dakota and Lance. They noticed our coming and jumped to their feet.
"Gwenny!" Dakota yelled as she rushed to me. She wrapped me in a hug that nearly broke my bones.
I squeezed out of her grasp and pulled her to arm's length. My heart beat loudly in my chest as I looked between them. "What are you guys doing here?"
Lance came up behind Dakota and his wide smile told me how much he'd missed me. "Miss Morgan here told us everything and invited us here to see you."
"Can I see your claws?" Dakota pleaded.
I frowned and turned to Morgan. "How much did you tell them exactly?"
"Everything. I thought it better that the truth be known than lies be told," she replied. She grabbed Lance's arm and one of mine, and pulled our chests against each other. "I thought your first taste of freedom in a few days should be enjoyed with friends. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do and I'm sure you have some catching up to do." She disappeared down a hall on the left and left me alone with my friends.
Dakota took a step back and inspected me. A frown slid onto her lips. "You went partying without me!" she scolded me.
I looked down at myself and blushed. In all the excitement I'd completely forgotten about changing my clothes. I still wore the dress from last night.
"Believe me, it wasn't exactly your kind of party," I told her.
She wrinkled her nose. "They served wine and small snacks, didn't they?"
"Worse. No food and we had to look at a bunch of old stuff," I revealed.
Dakota cringed. "You really have been through torture."
My eyes flickered between my two friends. "What exactly did she tell you?"
"Your kidnapping, your change, and how you've been kept a captive by Fox," Lance explained.
"So do you howl at the moon?" Dakota asked me.
I rolled my eyes. "No." My face fell and I looked down at my gloved hands. "I don't really know how to become a werewolf unless I'm mad."
"So what do they look like?" she persisted. "Your hands?" I sighed and pulled off one of the gloves. "Wow. . ." she murmured. "That must be murder to file."
I snorted and replaced the glove back on my hand. "I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I missed your really stupid comments."
She grinned and wrapped me in another hug. "I missed you, too."
"What about me? Don't I get a hug some time?" Lance teased.
I broke off from Dakota and hugged him. He wrapped his arms around me. "I guess I missed you, too," I quipped. I pulled us apart and smiled at them. "And thanks for putting that notice in the paper."
Dakota shrugged. "It was the only thing we could think of. I'm just glad that lady saw it and you, and got a hold of us. So what are you going to do with your super powers?"
I shook my head. "I don't really know." I held up my bare hand with its clawed fingers. "I can't really figure out how to work anything yet."
"You could become a superhero," she suggested. She slid up to me and stretched her hand out in front of us. "Just think of it. Office girl by day, crime-fighting werewolf by night. Well, office girl when you get your job back."
I frowned. "What happened to my job?"
"They kind of laid you off when you didn't come back," she informed me.
My mouth dropped open. "But I was kidnapped!"
"Not according to your landlord, and your bills," Lance spoke up. "Your landlord says you sent him your notice to move, and your phone and cable companies received notices for termination."
"What? I didn't send any of that!" I argued.
"That's what we thought, but the police didn't think any of it was suspicious," Dakota told me. "We had to beg on our hands and knees just to get your picture in the paper."
"And they only did that because Dakota refused to get off her hands and knees," Lance added with a smile.
Dakota put her hands on her hips and glared at him. "I was making a stand."
I smiled at my two friends as they bickered. The long days alone in my stone room had me forget how fun it was to be around people who didn't have wooden or sadistic personalities. My thoughts drifted back to that cold prison and my last look at Fox and Emery, and I wondered what sort of traps they'd lay for me if I ever did return to the free and open world.
"Hello? Earth to Gwen," Dakota called to me.
I started back. "What?"
Lance looked at me with pursed lips. "You okay?"
I waved off their concern. "I'm fine, just thinking about what's happened. Anyway, I really wish I did know where to go from here. Until I learn to control my transformation I'm kind of a danger to everyone around me."
"How did it happen, anyway?" Dakota asked me. "That Morgan lady didn't know that part. She just said you got turned and kidnapped by Fox."
Lance frowned and his eyes narrowed. "Fox is still going to be a problem for you, Gwen. He's a powerful man, and I doubt he likes losing."
"But Morgan told us she could stay here as long as she wanted," Dakota reminded him.
I looked around us. "Where is here, exactly?"
"I'm glad you asked that," Morgan spoke up as she rejoined us. She wore a form-fitting white lab coat over her clothes and protective goggles over her eyes. "There's something I wanted to show you. All of you. If you'll come this way."
Morgan led us down the corridor which she'd left and to an elevator. We piled inside and she pressed one of the lowest buttons on the panel. "This secret building is a prototype for the most secure, sophisticated research laboratories in the world."
"What do you research?" Dakota asked her.
Morgan's sly smile slipped onto her face and she looked to me. "Creatures of myths and legends."
I frowned. "That sounds like your brother."
"I have to admit we share the same interests, but we go about things the opposite ways," she assured me. "I wish to study the essence of the myths and legends, what created them and keeps them alive."
"Food?" Dakota suggested.
Morgan shook her head. "No, there's more than that. Creatures such as werewolves, leprechauns and-"
"Leprechauns are real?" Dakota gasped.
"Yes, and dragons and many other creatures people now think are nothing more than characters in stories," Morgan replied. "I want to know what keeps them here in our world. Is it food. The belief in them? Natural sources? That's why I built this facility, to observe and document their very beings."
"So you're going to put them into test tubes?" I guessed.
"On the contrary, they're much more useful to my research in their natural habitat," she argued.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal a large room. The ceiling rose twenty feet above our heads and the walls stretched a hundred feet square. The white walls were covered with panels, screens, and buttons. Tables were positioned at the corners, and on them were empty glass vials and beakers. In the center of the room was a row of glass tubes with tall, circular bottoms. The tops were attached to pipes that led from some of the machinery in the walls. We stepped from the elevators and Morgan led us over to the tubes.
Morgan stretched out her arms on either side of her. "This is my workstation where all the magic happens. My secret lair, if you will."
I turned in a circle to get a full take of the room. "I don't think this place will stay a secret for long. Your brother already knows about it. He stole the plans from your house last night," I warned her.
"Besides, how can you keep a space this big a secret?" Lance pointed out.
"William will never see it. No one will," she assured us. She turned away from us and pressed a few
buttons on the console in front of the tubes. Blueprints were projected on a screen above the console. They were the same from the hologram. "You see, Emery missed one very vital bit of information." She pressed a button that zoomed out away the image, and a new building appeared on top of the original office building. "The entire facility was built underground on top of an existing structure. That was the decrepit plant you all saw outside. The white room we entered was an elevator that led down to the lower levels." She leaned back and folded her arms across her chest. A sly smile graced her red lips. "My brother will be kept busy looking for new construction while I can continue my work down here in peace."
Dakota held up her hand. "Wait, so a lipstick manufacturer knows all this doohicky sciency stuff?"
Morgan smiled. "All those lipsticks didn't appear out of thin air. They took several years of testing to create, testing which I thoroughly studied."
"What will you do with the information you find?" I spoke up.
She draped one of her arms across my shoulders. "I'm glad you asked because some of it involves you."
I narrowed my eyes. "How?"
Morgan laughed and shook her head. "Nothing like my brother's tortures, I assure you. Quite the reverse. I want to cure you of your werewolf curse."
I started back. "That's possible?"
Lance stepped between Morgan and me. "The legends say there's only one way to end the curse, and that's to kill the werewolf with a silver bullet."
"But for every kernel of truth there's a cob of lies, and that, my dear young man, is a lie," Morgan argued. She pressed a few more buttons and the scene changed to show a helix of DNA. "I have been studying Gwen's DNA to see if the effects can't be reversed via genetic modification."
"Where'd you get the DNA sample?" Lance questioned her.
Morgan's eyes flickered to my torn glove. "Let's just say she owed me a little compensation from last night. Fortunately, I can use the sample for good, and I believe I've found some promising avenues to take."
"But you said creatures like me were more than that," I countered.
"Maybe, and maybe not. You were human once, after all. There might be more science than sorcery to your transformation," she pointed out.
"So if dragons are real does that mean sorcery is real?" Dakota spoke up.