* * * *
At first they kept me around for questioning.
“How many Werewolf Packs live in the San Francisco area?”
“Who are the Alphas?”
“How many people follow Gabriel Evans?”
“Can a werewolf be made?”
“How do you kill them?”
“What makes them weak?”
“How many of them have you met?”
“What are their names?”
“Where do they work?”
And on and on it went. I suspected that Marcus had already provided answers for the more intimate questions concerning the identity of his pack members. Which meant that they were probably tricks to see how much I knew, or if I could be counted on to tell the truth. But I wasn’t even inclined to lie. Instead I sat there, stone faced, until the round of questions was done for the day and the Agent left. Sometimes it lasted hours, sometimes it lasted only minutes.
But then they realized that I was better at acting as leverage than I was at playing twenty questions. The day started out like any other. I woke up in my cell, already mentally exhausted and shaking with nerves. Sleep was more of a fond memory in this place. There was too much violence soaked into the air and walls for anything but nightmares to exist. So I usually slept in fits and bursts, checking on Gabriel whenever consciousness returned, if only to reassure myself that he was alive and well.
That he was still there.
I always expected him to disappear now. To fade away when I wasn’t looking and damn the consequences of alerting the Sidhe. It made me even more terrified of his deep silences than I had been. They were reminders that he was only around because he chose to be, though why was still a mystery.
Rolling off the cot they called a bed, I went over to the sink basin in the corner of the room and tried to wash my face. The water coming out of the faucet was cold enough that rinsing my face with it was enough to erase any lingering dreams of sleep. I was shivering over the sink, and was thinking fondly of my abandoned apartment, when the door to my cell opened and Marcus and Agent Liam walked in. It still threw me, seeing those two standing together, but I suppose eventually I’d have to get used to the idea that I’d been tricked.
Agent Benson and Liam hadn’t been tailing me because they thought I was a domestic terrorist. Like the Huntsmen, they’d thought I’d been working for Gabriel ever since I’d thwarted the attempt on his life with the car bomb. The Huntsmen had planned on capturing him that day and the contents of that van had held everything they’d needed to do so.
The only reason someone hadn’t been inside of the van was because they’d needed backup when Gabriel had realized he was under attack and had faded out of sight. He’d been right beside them the entire time of course, but thanks to his abilities as a Hound it had been like he’d disappeared into thin air. The Huntsmen had panicked, sending the rest of their team out to try and locate him, and in that small window of time I’d wandered in and pushed their Mystery Machine to its death.
I would have killed to see a group of men in tactical gear and camouflage paint walking back to their bad guy headquarters in disgrace, but alas, I’d been busy explaining myself to the police at the time.
Apparently the FBI had been suspicious about the presence of Weres for years now. They’d developed an interest in Gabriel, and while they hadn’t been working directly with the Huntsmen, they hadn’t disapproved of their methods either. Now, thanks to me and my camera, both sides had the evidence they needed to reveal Weres to the world, though I suspected that their motives for doing so were very different from one another.
The Huntsmen wanted them eradicated. They wanted to be heroes in a world united in the fight against the Big Bad Wolves. They were fanatics, pure and simple, and Marcus was just using them.
I had yet to figure him out.
The Feds meanwhile, were easy enough to understand. Based on the questions they’d asked me and the experiments they’d put Gabriel through, it seemed pretty obvious that they wanted what the Weres could offer. Hunting instincts, long lives, increased stamina and intelligence, loyalty, super reflexes and strength. Sounded to me like the recipe for the perfect soldier. Not to mention what it could do for the public at large if they could learn to reproduce a Were’s healing capabilities in humans.
Now that the Weres had been outed, it would only be a matter of time before people began reporting sightings of them all over the world. The ones that the government couldn’t hunt down would probably volunteer to have their stories heard, just like those poor shmucks that had been featured on the news. By refusing to keep something like this a secret, the government could say that they were handling the problem. Keeping the public safe, while all the while using the Weres to further their own goals. And any Werewolf who cooperated would simply be lifted up as an example to draw in other wolves.
“Look how convincing we can be. How kind, how benevolent, how forgiving.” They could say, “Look how great our country is, that even a monster can call himself a Patriot.”
Then of course, the little issue of dealing with Werewolves would work wonders when it came to distracting the country from all of its other problems. Wars, dirty politicians, gun control and increased violence? Pshaw honey, don’t you know we have Werewolves running amuck? They’ll eat our children, rape our women, turn our boys. They’re probably prowling around in our backyard right now. Health care reform and a recession? Please. Spare me. There are worse things to worry about. Scarier things. Things with sharp teeth and fur coats.
Oh yeah.
I could see the big picture, and it was plastered on the front page of every major newspaper in bold and italicized font. Give the country an enemy, a common fear, and see how quickly they unite against it.
This was the kind of thing I thought about during my captivity.
Conspiracy theories.
It was probably unhealthy, but it sure as hell helped the time pass more quickly.
Wiping my hands down the sides of my jeans to dry them, I grinned a greeting at the two men and shook my head in wonder.
“Well, don’t this beat all?” I said, laying it on thick. “Company. I haven’t had company in lord knows how long.” I glanced around my cell and shrugged sadly, making a big show of trying to fix my hair. “Sorry I’m such a mess, but I wasn’t expecting anyone to stop by. I would offer you some coffee or something but,” I raised a brow in challenge, “I don’t have any. Or any cups for that matter. Or any shits to give, now that I think about it.”
“Cute,” Liam said, looking honestly amused as he came further into the room. Marcus stayed silent, instead stepping aside to lean against the frame of the now closed door.
“I try.”
I examined both men carefully, but there was no real way to tell why they’d come. They’d both perfected their own version of a poker face, and while one was smiling amiably and the other may as well have been carved from stone, both were unreadable. I didn’t like being in such close quarters with two men. Two dangerous men. At least when Jessica had come with Marcus there had been a female presence to mitigate his instinctive violence. Jessica was the devil I had grown to know; Liam was currently a mystery.
“What brings you boys here today?”
Marcus growled softly at being referred to as a “boy,” but Liam just kept on smiling.
I was beginning to not like that smile.
“Why, we came to see you of course,” he answered.
I shook my head, “But why?”
“The pleasure of your company,” Marcus deadpanned.
Shocked, I could only stare at him.
“Did you just make a joke?” I finally managed.
“I can be funny.”
“Uh, do you see anybody laughing? Making a joke and being funny are two entirely different things, sweet pea.”
Marcus was reduced to growling his displeasure once more.
“Actually,” Liam said, ignoring us both, “Marcus and I were h
oping you could help us solve a little problem we’ve been having.”
My eyes narrowed. “What sort of problem?”
Agent Liam shrugged as if it were no big deal, but I felt the hair on my nape rise in trepidation.
“It’s your friend, Mr. Evans,” he began, sounding contrite. “He hasn’t been nearly as….forthcoming as we’d hoped. He seemed like a reasonable man, so we don’t understand why he isn’t cooperating.”
“Might have something to do with being chained to a wall and cut up like a Thanksgiving Day turkey,” I confided, but Liam merely tsked.
“Now, Now. None of that. You see, I thought the same thing at first, then I realized that you, Miss Conners, have been treated with the utmost respect.” His brow furrowed, “And yet you haven’t been very cooperative either.”
“How can I cooperate when I don’t know anything?”
“Oh, I think you know plenty. Marcus here tells me that his Alpha, excuse me, former Alpha, has gone through a lot of trouble to keep you safe.”
“And you believe everything that Marcus tells you?”
He laughed outright at that. “I don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth. But the thing is that I’ve seen proof of it, Miss Conners. You forget, I’ve been tailing you for a while now, and ever since you started working at Lumière, Gabriel has been following you nearly as closely as my partner and I have. In fact, we nearly tripped over him a time or two. And if I remember correctly, wasn’t it Evans that picked you up from the station the night the Huntsmen took a shot at you?
“Men don’t do that unless they’re trying to get something, or they’ve already got it.” He pointed a finger at me and then swung it over to where Gabriel was watching the proceedings on the other side of the wall, and then back again. Like a pendulum. “I’m guessing you two are somewhere in between. Some heavy petting and soulful glances, but no slide into home plate. Not yet anyway.”
“We’re not like that,” I said, stiff-lipped and angry. “He’s not like that.”
“Maybe he isn’t. But you are, aren’t you Miss Conners? You understand how this game is played don’t you? When a man wants something from you, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep you around until he gets it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a ring on your finger or his dick in your mouth. Or both. Sure, Gabriel’s part wolf, but on the inside, at the core where it counts, he’s a man.” All congeniality melted from his face. “And for better or worse, you seem to be the one he’s set his sights on.”
“Even if that were true,” I began, keeping my words slow and careful, “why would it matter to you?”
“Here’s the thing. Some of my colleagues believe that Gabriel is a lost cause. That we should cut our losses and hand him over to our lab technicians for research. Others, myself included, think differently. We believe that with the right motivation, Gabriel can still prove to be an invaluable asset to the U.S. Government.” The look he leveled on me made me feel very small, very fragile, and I shivered. “We just need to find out what makes him tick. What gets his hackles up.”
A low rumble filled the air and my heart sunk. It was Gabriel, and I didn’t have to turn my head to know his eyes had begun to burn like amber fire. Liam grinned at me.
“That’s where you come in, Miss Conners.”
Then, before I could so much as flinch, Marcus was on me. Hand wrapped around my throat, he swung me out and away from the wall so quickly that my feet barely touched the ground. Then, lifting me up, he slammed me down into the unforgiving concrete and pressed his knee into my chest to hold me still.
Not like I was going anywhere, slamming me into the floor had pretty much knocked loose all my sass, as well as a large portion of my consciousness. I lay beneath Marcus, brain throbbing and blackness edging my vision while my lungs struggled to keep me breathing.
“Are you all right, Miss Conners?”
I couldn’t see Gabriel, but something told me that if I could just play it off, maybe we’d be all right.
“Never better,” I gasped, enjoying the way anger darkened both of their faces. “I always imagined that this is what summer in the Hamptons would be like.”
Ok, so maybe I had a little sass left.
Snarling, Marcus pressed his knee deeper into my chest, bones ground against one another and the pressure built to something excruciating and panic inducing. I felt like the walls were closing in, like I was going to be crushed, and it killed a small part of me not to allow the instinct to panic like an animal free reign.
Instead, I bit my lip until I tasted blood and waited for unconsciousness to take me. When he saw what I was doing, Liam waved for Marcus to let up. The Were hesitated for a fraction of a second before complying, long enough for me to know that he wasn’t as obedient as Liam would try and have me believe.
“Let me try,” Liam said, just as calm as ever. Marcus placed his hand around my throat, a collar that trapped me as effectively as steel, while Liam straddled my waist. My breathing hitched, and my eyes flew to the ceiling. Unwilling to watch what he was about to do once I saw him pull the knife from a sheath at his side.
“I used to deal with prisoners like you all the time,” I found myself focusing more on the sound the blade made as he slid it across the floor at my side than what he was actually saying.
“They thought they were special. Individuals. But they weren’t. When they’re fighting for something they truly believe in, you’d be surprised just how many people can withstand torture.” Using his free hand, he began to inch my shirt up a little bit at a time. “They weren’t particularly strong-minded, or strong-willed for that matter,” he confided, his fingertips like ice against my adrenaline fueled skin. “They weren’t martyrs or heroes, and they hadn’t gone through any training designed to resist what we threw at them. What made them so hard to break, was the stubborn belief that they were right. That what they did, what they suffered for, was right.”
He seemed confused by the very idea, even now. From the corner of my eye the knife glinted beneath the overhead light, and on the inside I started to cry.
“In the end, they all learned the same lesson.” He leaned over me, and whispered against the shell of my ear. “Pain, Miss Conners, is pain. And if you aren’t careful, it becomes all you are and all you will ever be.”
Then he cut me.
He sliced into the meaty part of my stomach, and then pressed his fingers deep into the open, dripping wound he left behind.
I screamed, and Gabriel finally lost it.
It had been important to make it through this. To show that they couldn’t use me against him. I knew once I heard the sound of screaming metal from his cell after Liam hurt me that we had both failed this little test miserably.
He didn’t howl this time. In fact, he didn’t make any noise at all. The first indication any of us had that he’d broken free of his chains at all was the tap, tap, tap of his nails against the glass. Together, we looked towards the sound.
Gabriel stood in his cell, manacles still tight around his throat and wrists just as they should be. The only problem was that the chains were no longer connected to the wall, and Gabriel was flush against the glass, his eyes burning a deep, putrid, yellow-like sickness or poison, and his nails scraping along the surface of the glass as if he could cut his way through, but wanted to play with us all first.
He grinned at us, a maniacal, mad-looking smile that somehow revealed rows and rows of glistening fangs, and his head canted to one side. It was stupid, but my heart actually clenched at the familiar gesture, even as he blew gently against the glass and wrote three lines in the steaming cloud of condensation he left behind:
Little Pigs
Little Pigs
Let me—
“—come in,” Liam finished reading aloud and no sooner had he done so than the lights flickered in both cells. When we next looked, Gabriel had disappeared, leaving nothing but his sing-song request to echo mockingly in our minds.
Then I realized something.
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I was shivering like a leaf in the wind, as terrified as Marcus and Liam, when I should be remembering one very important fact:
I wasn’t dinner. I was his mate. The wolf wasn’t coming to get me; he was coming because of me. I was the only one in this little trio exempt from the ass whooping that was about to go down.
It was hard to do, but somehow I managed to relax.
“Where the hell did he go?” Liam whispered. Marcus didn’t bother answering, instead stepping back from me and eyeing the glass with a curled lip. I followed his gaze and felt something twist in my gut. The words written on the window seemed to be smoking, and for a moment I was confused by what I saw.
Then I realized why it was so strange. One by one, each letter Gabriel had written was disappearing into smoke. Smoke that drifted in the air on my side of the cell rather than his. Soon all three of us were surrounded by it, a thick vapor, a warm fog that seemed to breathe. I felt as if I was surrounded by something living, and I realized that the room was growing darker, lights straining to retain their brilliance beneath the weight of the fog that just seemed to grow thicker and thicker.
The lights flickered. Off and then on again, and I saw it. A hunched figure in the corner behind Marcus, eyes still shining a putrid yellow. He was barely discernible through the fog, but his focus was unwavering as he watched his foster brother. I couldn’t say that he was more animal than man in that moment. I’d never seen an animal whose bones stretched the confines of their skin, or whose limbs seemed disjointed, as if they were used to be bigger, used to being more.
No, I couldn’t say he was an animal. That would have been too tame a word for the thing that was carefully stalking the two men in the room with me. Getting closer and closer with every flicker of the lights, like some nightmare crawling freely through the world.
The last image I saw before closing my eyes was of Gabriel finally rising from his crouch. He rose up behind Liam, a huge black shadow that seemed to touch the ceiling, indistinct around the edges. His gaze was an empty abyss, and when he opened his jaws and breathed death against the back of Liam’s neck it was darkness that brushed against the unsuspecting man’s skin. Gabriel breathed the darkness in, it seeped from his skin, he was made of it, black smoke held together more by an idea than reality.
I think I whimpered before my eyes snapped shut. My entire body trembled as I lay there, waiting. Too hurt to rise to my feet and too frightened to push the issue. But the scream I’d been expecting never happened. Instead, when I opened one eye to update my brain on what was happening, I saw Gabriel looking over at me. He still stood behind Liam, but he no longer hovered over him as if he were about to unhinge his jaw and swallow him whole. The other men hadn’t noticed him yet, as if they were unable to see or feel the threat he represented.
But I saw him just fine.
I saw his eyes flicker with humanity, the Gabriel I knew shining through. Saw his body condense and reform into something sane and right. The whole time he was bringing himself back, he watched me, until finally he stood there, naked and tired, guilt written all over his face and amber eyes wary.
Then and only then did he lift whatever power had been shielding him from the others. Liam and Marcus “discovered” him at the same time, and it was all the Agent could do to keep Marcus from attacking his former Alpha with claws and teeth.
“We had a deal,” Liam hissed, shoving Marcus away and resting his hand on the butt of the gun that rested in his shoulder holster. “You hand over Evans, and we help you gain control over your little pack. Well, congrats. You’re Alpha now, but that means that Evans is ours. You lay a paw on him and we wipe you all out.”
“What about your research?” Marcus snarled, eyes still trained on Gabriel as he brushed past the two arguing men to come to me. “What about your werewolf army?”
Liam shrugged. “Turns out we don’t need that many of you alive after all. Amazing how frugal budget cuts can encourage you to be.”
By this time Gabriel was at my side and I sighed as he knelt at my hip. His head lowered, and for a crazed moment I thought he was going to go all Hannibal Lector on me.
But no.
Not exactly anyway.
Instead of teeth I felt his tongue against the wound Liam had made. As I lay there, he began to lick the blood away and beneath the rough glide of his tongue I felt the skin begin to knit back together.
This whole Mate thing?
Best health plan ever.
All too soon the feel of his mouth, the feel of his tongue, and the burning promise of his breath against the sensitive skin of my stomach had my mind wandering to other things. It was only when I felt Liam and Marcus turn their attention to us that I was able to snap out of it.
Knowing the type of abuse that both of us would be in for if anyone found out that Gabriel could heal me, I pulled him up and against me. Wrapping my body around his, I clung to his neck and fake sobbed. Catching on, he wrapped his arms around my waist, sliding my shirt down over my now smooth skin as he did so. Even though it was meant to be artifice, I really liked having him there, wrapped around me. Holding me like he cared.
It would have been all sorts of romantic if Liam hadn’t walked over to us and kicked Gabriel in the side.
“Get up, mutt. Nice trick with the glass, but it’s time to go back to your cell.”
Gabriel growled without releasing me or raising his face from where he’d buried it against the side of my neck. I clutched him a little tighter and my “sobbing” got a little louder.
“Just leave them.” Support from an unexpected source. Marcus sounded more exasperated than understanding, however. “We have other things to do today.”
Liam was quiet for what felt like forever, before I finally heard him sigh in agreement.
My muscles relaxed.
“Fine,” he said, “I learned what I came here to learn.”
He crouched down beside us and his voice lowered. I don’t know why he bothered whispering, everyone in the room could hear him just fine.
“I’ll be back for you though,” he told Gabriel. I felt him tense against me and my nails dug into his back as if I could pull him even closer than he already was. “Now that I know what it takes to make you talk, you, me, and Miss Conners are going to be the best of friends.”
He stood and stepped over us on his way to the door. Marcus followed. Before he left, Marcus turned to look back at us, offering a final bit of advice.
“I wouldn’t try your little disappearing act again. The Huntsmen have a new toy they’ve been dying to test out. We may not be able to see you, but we don’t need to see you to hurt you.”
Then they were both gone.
I listened for the sound of the door locking, and when it reached my ears, I sighed shakily into Gabriel’s mop of curls. Even his hair looked beaten, and something fierce and snarling came to life in me.
I couldn’t let them hurt him again. He’d managed to reach me and the least I could do was protect him now that we were together. Even though our audience was gone, neither Gabriel nor I thought to move away from one another. Within minutes I heard the soft, even sound of his breathing. Using his gift must take a lot out of him. Not to mention that I could count the number of times I’d seen him doze off on one hand.
I would have preferred it if we’d done this on the bed, but I wasn’t heartless enough to wake him just to make him move to that pitiful excuse of a cot. So instead, I lay there, hands soothing down the muscled expanse of Gabriel’s back. I didn’t sleep. I just stared at the wall and let my mind work.
By the time morning rolled around, I had a plan.
I just hoped it would work.
“Don’t complicate things. Life is simple. When the world hands you lemons…you eat them.”
—Lettie Arnold
Chapter Fourteen