Rivals and Retribution

  “I think it is time we discuss my terms. You want werewolves and need a good and proper cure to reverse engineer in order to make sure they are always werewolves. I want a good and proper cure for any member of my family—my pack—that desires it. But time is short.…” My mouth was about to outrun my brain. What did I want in order to get to the cure before losing Pietr to insanity or an absolute death? What did I need?

  “In order to make everything work, we require the following things,” Feldman announced, stepping forward awkwardly, one hand pressed to her slowly bleeding arm.

  Amazing.

  “You will continue to uphold your previous agreement. Every supply we ask for hand delivered immediately as top priority. Two adjoining rooms, or a suite with separate bedrooms and baths at one of the four-star hotels on Times Square with a view of Times Square.”

  I gawked at her.

  “You will find it simply inspiring,” she assured me. “I’d suggest the Marriott—absolutely lovely. We require all the imagined amenities, including meals and laundry service as well as transport to and from the hotel by private car.”

  I kept blinking at her. I would have never thought of any of those things, I realized.

  “We require a daily stipend of two thousand dollars each for—let’s call it incidentals. Oh, don’t look so pained,” she said to Wondermann in her most soothing tone. “It is a small price to pay knowing you will be able to deliver on your military contract. I’m certain the price the United States military is willing to pay for a new breed of nearly indestructible soldiers is a pretty penny. If there’s one thing the U.S. enjoys investing in, it’s the tools of war.”

  “Defense,” he whispered. “It is a defense contract.”

  “Tomayto, tahmahto,” Feldman declared. She turned, bringing her hand down to cup the other on the top of her cane, peering at me like some wrinkled and wizened little witch from a child’s fairy tale. “And you, Alexi, is there anything else you want?”

  “Da,” I whispered, realizing what it was. My entire life I had been trained to keep secrets, to trust no one with the family’s business or my grandfather’s knowledge. And listening to Feldman suggest things I would never have thought to ask for, seeing her push the envelope so many amazing ways, I knew it was time to make a break with old habits. If I was going to perfect the cure before losing my little brother, I needed as much help as I could get.

  If two heads were better than one, how fast might we succeed if there were five or six of us working together to solve the problem?

  “I want help. Your four finest scientists here by nine a.m. tomorrow. I do not care how they get here, but they simply must, for us to succeed.”

  Wondermann pursed his lips. “No.”

  “What?” Feldman and I asked in unison.

  “You heard me. No. I will not answer to your terms.”

  My vision grew hazy. We had been so close to getting everything we could possibly need and want.…

  “Then we have reached an impasse,” Feldman said.

  “Nyet,” I whispered. “There must be something…”

  “There is only one other thing I want, beyond the werewolves,” Wondermann said, turning his back to us.

  My head spun. Think, Sasha, think …

  What was a man like Wondermann still lacking? What had eluded him? I wanted to pace and give my brain a chance to determine the right course of action. But I did not dare. It would be too easy for him to see he had me up against a wall. So I stood still, regulated my breathing, and thought as fast as I could. What did he want that he couldn’t have just by writing a check? Who—besides my family—had cost him something? Who had betrayed him?

  “There was a woman in your employ. A woman who betrayed the company and allowed us to get inside the bunker with armed men and destroy all your precious research—all your files, computers … everything.”

  “Wanda McGregor. Yes. I know of her.” He tapped his fingers on his desk. “Is she not a family friend?”

  Feldman stood still as death, deliberating.

  “She betrayed my mother. There is no friendship there to be had.”

  “Interesting.”

  “What if I told you I could give you her? What would you be willing to do then if I handed over your traitor?”

  “I would not treat her kindly,” he clarified.

  “I would not expect you to. She has not treated others kindly, either. What mercy does she deserve in return for granting none?”

  He spun on his heel, the look on his face both criminal and angelic in its absolute joy. “I thought I might come to like you eventually. We have a deal then. Deliver me Wanda McGregor by the month’s end or you lose … everything.”

  * * *

  Back in the lab I grabbed Feldman’s purse, understanding now why she had wanted it.

  “Thank you,” she muttered, unzipping it and pulling out an assortment of Band-Aids and gauze. “I’ll regret this momentarily, but do you have a little rubbing alcohol to swab it with?”

  I dug through the supplies and found some and carefully rolled up her sleeve to wipe the graze clean.

  She sucked her lips and said some truly uncomplimentary things about Wondermann’s heritage while I bandaged her wound and thought, all the time I did it, that she was actually quite remarkable for an old woman who had abandoned her only child.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jessie

  “So what are you going to do about them, Jessie?” Sophie asked me as I stood in Junction High’s hallway gawking at the milling members of Marlaena’s pack.

  Only the adults and Gabriel were notably absent from the school hallway.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I thought I should be prepared for whatever game plan you have in mind.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do. You always do. You’ll get involved somehow. No doubt about it.”

  Wide-eyed, I looked at Cat, Max, Pietr, and Amy for support.

  Max shrugged. “Sophia’s right.”

  “Thanks ever so much,” I snapped. But I turned back to face the gaggle of pups. Here they were without Marlaena’s steady influence. Here they might be influenced by someone else.…

  “So what’s the plan?” Max asked, unfurling his devilish grin.

  “How many specialists do we still have in the boiler room?” I asked Sophie.

  “It’s like they speak some freaky code,” Max grumbled to Amy. “Annoying.”

  “Except I speak it, too,” she said with a grin of her own.

  “We’re down to eleven since the food vendor changed and the additive disappeared.”

  “So if we added maybe eight pups…”

  “No. Absolutely not. Things are volatile as it is.…” Sophie crossed her arms and glared at me.

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  “Imagine how awesome it’d be if we could turn them—I mean, encourage them to be better than what Marlaena is forcing them into. It’d be like rescuing kittens.…”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Those kittens are way more fiercely fanged than any kittens I’ve ever dealt with.”

  “Aw, come on, Soph. You’ve made such a difference to the specialists already … why not add some other kids who need guidance into the mix?”

  “Jessie has an interesting point. Why not give the pups a little love and kindness and see where it leads? They’ve been on the run awhile—maybe all they need are some roots,” Max suggested, leaning in.

  Sophia looked flustered by being the focus of his attention. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this.”

  Frankly, I couldn’t either.

  Marlaena

  “Shhh,” Gareth whispered, running the damp cloth along my fevered forehead to sop up my sweat and cool me. “It’ll be all right.”

  Not long ago all I would have wanted from Gareth was his gentle touch and his focus and attention directed at me. But now? I grabbed his wrist and held his hand above my fa
ce. “Stop.” My eyes fluttered shut, and I tried to regain control of my breathing. “Just, stop…”

  He rocked back on his heels, pulling away from the bedside. “Whatever you say, Princess.”

  My eyes opened again, and I tried to focus on him—on the smoky-colored man with haunting eyes I’d wanted for so long.… But my brain took his every feature apart and lessened them by mathematical increments and threw Pietr’s design into the mix—showing just how short Gareth fell in comparison. I was going to be sick.

  Again.

  He had the trash can beside me before I even flopped over the bed’s edge, and as I emptied my guts into the can he stroked my hair and whispered kind and gentle things.

  And I hated myself. I had wanted Gareth forever. I loved Gareth, well, as much as I could love anyone, but the fascination—no, fixation—with Pietr overwhelmed all that.

  This strange chemical thing was crushing something beautiful.… maybe something I was simply not worthy of having. Did he know how his every touch only made me hungrier for Pietr’s imagined ministrations? Could he fathom how frequently my mind went from the real and beautiful existence of him to the fantasy of Pietr? A fantasy I was desperate to strike from my mind?

  I spit out the last of the bile that burned in my mouth, and Gareth handed me a glass of water that I hadn’t even noticed him bring in.

  Jessie

  Pietr was quiet in school that morning, staying a few feet away from me most of the time. We attended classes together, spoke to each other at a distance, sat together at lunch, and that was where disaster once again struck.

  He was nibbling tentatively on a beef jerky strip when the cafeteria doors were opened from the small courtyard and a puff of cold wind blew across my back, picking up my hair and waving it out ahead of me in the space between Pietr and me. I swatted it down and pulled it back behind my neck, but Pietr’s pale skin tone greened slightly and he launched himself toward the hallway and the nearest bathroom.

  “I swear I deodorized,” I said, trying to make light of the strange way Pietr was acting. I grabbed my lit notebook and jotted that line down. I could use that in my novel assignment, too.

  Amy smiled weakly at me.

  “Max?” I said, closing my notebook, but he was already wiping his mouth and getting to his feet.

  “I’ll go check on him.”

  “Maybe you should just take him home,” I suggested. “He’s obviously too sick to be here. Maybe call Alexi…”

  He nodded. “See you at home,” he said to Amy, leaning down to kiss her.

  Stretching up in her seat she kissed a smile back onto his face and I was instantly jealous. Not of Amy kissing Max, but of the fact that any recent action like that on my part would have left Pietr puking up a lung.

  Considering I was dating one of the hottest guys at Junction, the current situation was far from good for my self-esteem.

  The rest of the lunch period was relatively uneventful, and I used my special all-purpose-Harnek-pass to skip out on science and head to the boiler room to check on the “specialists” as Sophie and I had taken to calling them.

  There were fewer now that Wondermann’s company was no longer providing the food that had been dosed with a triggering agent, and a few of the remaining ones had lost nearly all their powers—as well as their sense of what made them special.

  High school was weird that way. Most of the time you just wanted to fit in, but sometimes you were desperate to know how different you were from the rest of the crowd.

  Sophia looked up when she heard me on the stairs and then made a point of looking behind me. “I didn’t bring them,” I announced, realizing she expected the pups. “You haven’t said I can yet.”

  “Yet,” she said with a smile. “Still an optimist.” She closed the book she was flipping through and signaled me over. “Maybe you should. It’s all Island of Misfit Toys down here anyhow. How much more misfit can you get than a cult of teenage werewolves on the run?”

  I grinned. “That’s the spirit.”

  “Don’t say spirit,” she requested, and I laughed.

  “Next time then.”

  Marlaena

  They were only a few yards ahead when I found them, Pietr and Max, hunting. They ran as smoothly as water over the snowy path, focused intently on the deer that couldn’t be far beyond my sight since it smelled so strongly of musk and fear. I saw it a heartbeat before Max went for its belly and Pietr its throat, and in the space of the next three heartbeats the deer’s heart had beat its last.

  They tore into it, not even noticing me until I clicked my teeth together, and they turned, faces smeared with bright and beautiful blood, mouths dripping gore and drool. Beautiful beasts, they glared at me, their eyes as red as my own.

  But before they decided whether to invite me to dinner or chase me away, a branch broke on the other side of the thicket and we knew we were not alone.

  A bullet cut into my shoulder, and I yelped as I rolled to face the direction it’d come from.

  Not the direction of the broken branch.

  Another shot ruffled Max’s fur and he turned that way, snarling and backing up so his haunch hit mine. I whined, trying to see one of our opponents, and another gun fired, the bullet ripping through the leafless undergrowth. There was a clatter like a gun had hit the ground and someone cursed.

  Someone else exclaimed something in Russian, and suddenly the woods were alive with three angry voices. We lowered ourselves to our bellies and prepared to spring, my heart pounding through me as my shoulder throbbed. I nipped at it.

  Over our heads someone shouted at the others, “Drop your weapons and I will let you live.” Dmitri?

  “You drop your weapon and we’ll let you live,” someone shouted back—a woman, by the pitch of her voice.

  “Do it!” another man shouted.

  Dmitri snarled something in Russian again and opened fire on them both.

  For a few moments the air above us was alive with bullets and the fur along my back buzzed with shots that came too close.

  And then there was only ragged breathing, from me and … from the bushes surrounding us.

  And then it was only mine.

  Cautiously we rose to our full canine heights and prowled the underbrush, our ears our first line of defense. There were no more words from the shooters, no more sounds of breathing, and when I found the first one, a young man in hunting gear, I realized there was no more life to them, either. I stalked to the other bodies, Dmitri’s and the woman’s, and I paused and tilted my head, recognizing her.

  I had seen her before at the motel. I had even made a face at her while I finished my breakfast. I pressed my nose to her throat, taking in a deep breath of her scent, and I hopped back. Like bad luck, her scent had been nearby ever since Chicago.

  I raced back to the young man and took a long sniff of him as well. Also familiar! The hunters who had chased us—the ones who had taken Harmony and dogged our steps all the way to Junction—lay dead around the Rusakovas’ fresh venison. Forgetting the pain in my shoulder I sat back and I howled out my joy.

  Suddenly I was human and shivering, and Pietr, naked and bloodstained from the deer, his fingers trembling, dug the bullet out of my shoulder as the wound began to close. In that moment, between the stars and the snow, was the closest I’d come to perfection. I grabbed him and kissed him hard.

  And he kissed me back.

  Jessie

  Pietr came to my bedroom window that night, spattered and smeared with blood. I pulled him inside and watched him tumble to my bedroom floor, his feet tangling and his body shaking like he had the worst case of the flu ever. “What’s wrong, Pietr?” I whispered, pulling him close.

  He was cold—so cold, and that was definitely not in his nature. “Dmitri is dead. And hunters. They shot each other fighting over who got the glory of killing the three of us.”

  “Are Max and Cat okay?” I asked, scrambling up to look out the window onto the lawn.

 
“Da,” he whispered. Max and … Cat are fine. But I…”

  “You’re a wreck. I need to get you home.”

  “Nyet, nyet,” he moaned. “Not home…” He rubbed at his eyes so hard I pulled his hand away. “There is something I must tell you,” he said, his voice hoarse and breaking. He sucked down a deep breath. “Since I broke through the cure, something is different.… Something is wrong with me. Something in me has broken,” he whispered. “Puhzhalsta, please … you must help me.”

  I wrapped my arms around him, and he shuddered in my grasp. “I will, I’ll do whatever I can to make this better,” I promised.

  “Say it again,” he begged. “Promise me that whatever it takes, you’ll help me make this better.” He grabbed my head, holding my face in his hands and staring at me with desperate eyes.

  “Of course…”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise I’ll do whatever it takes to make this better.”

  “Thank you, thank you, Jess,” he whispered, right before he grabbed my trash can and heaved his guts into it.

  I called Max. “He’s acting really weird.”

  Silence.

  “Max?”

  “Da, I know this, Jessie. I just don’t know why. What is he doing now?”

  “Sleeping—well, shivering in his sleep. He feels cold. That’s not normal, is it?”

  “Nyet. I’ll come get him.”

  “Come get us both. I’ll leave a note for Annabelle Lee. She’ll cover for me.” I hoped.

  He did not fight us when we loaded him into the car to take him home, and alone in his room, he finally told me what he needed me to do. “Cure me again, Jess.”

  “It didn’t hold—it’s not permanent.”

  “But it helped. I need that help now,” he said, his eyes roaming the room.

  “Fine. I’ll cure you in the morning.”

  “No,” he whispered, grabbing my arm. “You must do it now.”

  Seeing him so scared, I could not deny him. So I gathered the necessary items, cut myself, and mixed the cure for Pietr.

  And, for the sake of my own remaining sanity, I stepped out of his room while he went through his final change.