Wolfen (16 page)

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Aiden asked.

Klaus shrugged. “Perhaps in time. I am the closest thing to
a father you ever had.”

“I’m sure all you sick old bastards liked to think so,”
Aiden shot back.

One guard whaled a black baton across his back, dropping him
to his knees.

Klaus clucked his tongue, shaking his head. “There is no
need for that, Victor. We are all friends here.”

“Mother fu—”

“Ah-ah. There is a lady present.”

Bryce’s growl rumbled against Sinna’s back.

“Come forward, my dear.”

“I don’t think so.” Sinna stepped back instead, close enough
to feel Bryce’s body heat. He huffed, stirring the hairs that had gotten pulled
loose of her braid.

“Do you think I would hurt you? Never!”

“You must think I’m an idiot. I saw those women out there.”

Klaus impatiently waved that away. “They are nothing. They
are too weak to survive out there on their own, und too wild to live among us.
But you, my dear, you are a work of art. All of you. Beautiful specimens of
evolooshon.”

Sinna wanted to punch him in the throat. No one deserved to
be treated like that—
no one
—no matter what they were.

“So what now, Pops, you gonna put us in a cage again?”

“You would be no good to me in a cage,” Klaus replied. “Do
you believe in God, my friend?”

“I’m not your friend,” Aiden growled.

“But do you? Because, you see, I think God brought you to
me. You are the answer to my prayers.”

Bryce huffed, and Sinna glanced back to gauge his state of
mind. He looked just as wild as he had down in the catacombs, but now there was
a calculating gleam in his eyes, as if he was studying his opponent, choosing
the most effective form of attack. He wasn’t listening to anything Klaus said;
he was looking at the old man like a puzzle he would tear into to see how it
ticked.

To be the focus of all of that fury… “Your God must really
hate you.”

A smartass with too much time on his hands once said,
‘You can never outrun your past. No matter how fast you go, or how far you manage
to get, it always catches up to you.’

Yeah, buddy, I’m there.

And, sick fuck that I am, I’ve got Perry Como singing
It’s A Good Day
in my head.

~

“The answer’s no,” Aiden said, and damn, it felt good.

“You will not hear what it is I want from you?”

Aiden shrugged. “Don’t care. Answer’s still no.”
And it’s
a good day from morning ‘til night.

Klaus’ mouth twisted with displeasure. Oh yeah, Aiden
remembered him, all right. He’d worn that same expression whenever a test
result didn’t come out how he’d wanted it. A firm believer in second chances,
Klaus would repeat the test until the Wolfen child had healed in the prescribed
time frame. He’d called it
honing
. Or, in his accent,
hohning
. To
this day, Aiden had an insatiable urge to punch anyone who used that word in
any of its forms.

“Nevertheless, I will tell you anyway.”

“Knock yourself out. I’ve got time.”

It was easy for Aiden to cop an attitude. Bryce and Sinna
were a different story. He didn’t look at them—that would telegraph
weakness—but his senses picked up on things humans wouldn’t notice right away:
how Sinna was more afraid to turn her back on Klaus than on the rabid monster
ready to snap his leash, or how Bryce lapped up that trust and didn’t stray
farther than a half-inch from her. He was so close to losing it; a sharp sound
or a fast twitch of movement could easily set him off. But for the first time,
Aiden believed someone besides Bryce might survive the carnage. The way his
brother sniffed at Sinna, even in this state, he recognized her scent as
familiar. She had his blood, and that meant something, no matter how much Aiden
had downplayed it. But would it be enough?

“Have you noticed a difference in the converts of late?”
Klaus asked. A loaded question, if ever there was one.

Aiden cocked an eyebrow.

“But of course, you must have. They are everywhere, ya?”

It satisfied some petty little part of Aiden to withhold the
answer Klaus so clearly wanted to hear. Sinna, bless her heart, followed his
lead and stayed quiet.

“They are changing.” Klaus took off his glasses to polish
them with a square of pristinely white cotton. “Necessity is teaching them to
hohn
their minds und work together.”

Aiden’s teeth scraped together and a muscle in his cheek
twitched.

“They are becoming more and more like a truly demonic
vershon of the Wolfen. They learn our tricks und adapt strategies. Wolfen blood
used to bring them out of hiding in packs. But no longer. There are seven
groups of more than twenty converts around these forests, und when they smell
the blood, they spread out, hunting for humans instead.”

“That’s why you have those women chained up out there,”
Sinna said. “You bleed them so you can be safe? So converts won’t think to look
in here?”

Klaus made a face. “Ya, but you see, it is no longer
working. The creatures come out after dark, closer every night. I’m afraid very
soon they will be at our gate.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Aiden retorted. “Really. If my
hands were free, I’d even show you how much.”

The asshole with the baton flexed for another go at him.
Aiden bent to duck the swing, using the guy’s momentum against him. One hard
knock, and the guard was on the ground. Aiden laid his size fifteen boot onto
Victor’s neck and leaned his weight on it, just short of crushing the guard’s
spine. “Fooled me once already. You don’t get a second chance.”

Someone yanked on Aiden’s chain, and spikes dug into his
neck. He maliciously pushed down harder, until good ol’ Victor moaned before
Aiden relented and allowed them to drag him off. The spikes had pierced skin,
but nothing else. He shook himself hard to dislodge them. They tore across his
neck, but the wounds were shallow and healed in seconds.

Klaus continued as if none of it had happened. “That is
precisely why you will help. You care nothing for humans, but you care for your
own. What if I told you I may have found a way for us both to be satisfied?”

“I’d call bullshit.”

Klaus laughed. “I knew you would say that.” The “you little
rascal, you” was implied. “I will show you something, und you will reconsider.”
He got up and left the creepy-ass Stepford front yard, and the rest of them
followed.

The large building Aiden had thought to be a supply store
was something much, much worse. Klaus waved off the guards, opened the door with
a flourish, and beckoned them inside.

Sinna looked at Aiden uncertainly. He merely shrugged. This
was all kind of freaking the shit out of him, too. He just hid it better,
because he had a badass reputation to uphold.

There were more guns on the inside, so those who’d leashed
them stayed out, keeping hold of the chains. Sinna wasn’t bound, but she wasn’t
a real threat. Compared to the males, females were at a severe physical
disadvantage, so nature had balanced the equation the only way she could by giving
them more defensive pheromone production. Shame it only worked on converts.

Sinna walked into the building first, followed closely by
Bryce. The sharp chemical smell put Aiden off until the last second, when one
of the gunmen made to shove him again. He stepped into the chamber and
seriously wondered if someone had slipped him some ‘shrooms.

The room was roughly twenty-by-thirty feet of low-ceilinged
open space filled with tables and candles strategically positioned in front of
mirrors to maximize illumination. Vials, beakers, and bottles of various
substances covered every available flat surface, and batches of nasty-looking
potions bubbled away over small fires. In short, an alchemist’s wet dream. The
only thing missing was the mad scientist squinting into a microscope,
scribbling “Double, double, toil and trouble” into a massive, leather-bound
tome.

Oh no, wait. There she was.

In the far back corner, surrounded by candlelight and
unstable chemicals, the apparent brain of the operation looked up from her work
to blink big owl eyes at the intrusion. She had a delicate round face, a small
nose, and a mischievously pointed chin; straight hair cut short, sticking out
like stray feathers from a nest. She was adorable. Which meant evil.

Klaus waved an arm to proudly encompass his achievement of
medieval proportions. “This, you see, is where my solooshon to the convert
problem will come from.” His accent had gotten thicker in his excitement,
making him almost unintelligible.

Aiden couldn’t help himself. “A problem
you
created.”

“A wrong turn on de path to greatness,” Klaus said
dismissively. “No discovery is wisout a price.” He snapped his fingers at the
female. “Dee, de formula.”

Even by the low light, Aiden saw her cheeks turn pink. She
said nothing, but her displeasure was clear, until she stood up, and Aiden
realized it wasn’t displeasure, but embarrassment. The girl, who couldn’t have
been a day older than Sinna, limped over to a set of wooden shelves and picked
a vial from the bunch. Her step was uneven, her right leg dragging as if her
knee didn’t work properly. Aiden’s keen eye picked out that it was shorter than
her left, damaged somehow, but her long, wide pants hid any evidence of what it
might have been.

Dee came within arm’s reach of Klaus, just close enough for
him to take the vial and shoo her back to work. As he held the glass container
up to the light, Aiden followed the girl’s slow retreat to her work station.

“You see this?” Klaus swirled the clear liquid inside the
vial. “It is the base for a deterrent. One small drop will take down whole
legions of converts. No Wolfen needed.”

That last bit was spoken so deliberately, it brought Aiden’s
attention back to the old man, as Klaus knew it would.

The old man smiled. “I see your interest is piqued.”

Understatement. Even Bryce had started coming back to
himself. They shared a speaking look, and Aiden knew Bryce thought exactly the
same thing he did.

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

A few hundred miles north, at the Wolfen stronghold in
Montana, a team of their best and smartest was working on the exact same thing,
with a hell of a lot more computing power and resources. They’d already
synthesized several variants, each one a dead end.

That Klaus might have actually done it, or had come close to
it—or hell, that he even
thought
he had—pissed Aiden off. Not because
someone had come up with a solution before his own team, but because it would
come from a man who’d sell it to the highest bidder, rather than give it away
to benefit his own species, as Aiden’s pack would have done.

“The formula is almost complete,” Klaus said. “It is only
missing a single compound to be effective.”

“How can you be sure it’ll work?” Sinna asked.

“Because I designed it from the original genetic material of
the very first convert.”

Aiden believed him. A sneaky weasel like Klaus would have
been high enough in the food chain to have access, but still low enough not to
raise any red flags. Hell, Aiden wouldn’t have been surprised if the converts
hadn’t been an accident at all, but a careful orchestration of a disease Klaus
had hoped to profiteer from when he
miraculously
came up with the cure.

Sinna had no such suspicions. The possibility of a world
without converts got her so excited, she dropped her guard and let curiosity
get the better of her. “So where’s the last ingredient?”

Klaus held up a finger. “Ah, that is where you come in.”

“Careful,” Bryce growled in warning, earning a look of
surprise from Klaus.

“Be very, very careful what you say next,” Aiden added,
hands clenching into fists.

Klaus set down the vial and waved for them to go outside
again. Sinna couldn’t tear her eyes away from it, but Aiden had other concerns.
The girl with a bum leg was watching them from across the room. Aiden would
have given his left nut to know what she was thinking. Seeing she’d attracted
Aiden’s attention, she dropped her gaze back to her work, but as Aiden backed
out of the room, she glanced up one last time.

Challenge accepted.
He gave her a feral smile.

Out in the courtyard, Klaus paced back and forth, mumbling
to himself like he’d inhaled too many fumes. He shook his head. “No, no, that
won’t do…”

Aiden leaned over to Sinna. “Dementia setting in nicely, I
see.”

“Can it be true, what he said?” she whispered back.

Aiden twitched a shoulder in a noncommittal shrug.

Klaus suddenly stopped and faced them, as if he’d had an
epiphany. “You will join me for supper,” he said, with no small amount of
triumph.

“Sir,” a guard protested.

Klaus threw his hands in the air. “Bah! Very well. I will
tell you. I fos working on this formula, when the inerts converted und made a
mess of everything. We panicked. The soldiers destroyed the labs, burned our
research; everything fos obliterated. I only had a small portion of the active
compound, und I managed to hide it by injecting it into my daughter, Helena.”

“You used your own daughter to store chemicals?” Sinna said.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I had no choice,” Klaus replied, enunciating every
syllable. “It fos our only hope. The compound is harmless to humans und can be
sustained in a live host indefinitely. But the moment it touches air, it begins
to degrade. So you see, you cannot simply draw blood und transport it anywhere
in the world. It must be processed immediately, or it becomes useless.”

Aiden did not like where this was going. “Where’s your
daughter now?”

Klaus adjusted his glasses. “When we all evacuated the base,
the convoy hit on a convert horde und we got scattered. Most of the convoy went
north to Montana, but that avenue closed very quickly. The rest of us were
forced to turn west. The horde followed und split a few vehicles out to leave
formation. The last I saw of my family, they were diverted south. My daughter
is miles away now, somewhere in Gilroy, Califoania.”

“And you want us to go get her for you.”

“Pre-
cisely
.” Klaus smiled wide. “You will do this,
ya?”

“No.”

Klaus frowned. “Why not?”

“Why don’t you go get her yourself? You’ve got the men, and
the fire power.”

His face turned ruddy. “You do not sink I tried? There are
hundreds, thousands, of converts between here und there. Sixteen of de twenty
men I sent never came back. We may be well ahmed, but we are still human. Only
a Wolfen can make it sru dat gauntlet alive.”

Aiden shrugged. “Not my problem.”

Klaus sighed and smoothed his shirt in an effort to compose
himself. “This is a new world, my friend. Your choice is limited. You can do
this for me und I let you go—with the females—or you say to me no again, und
your female bleeds.”

A dozen weapons instantly snapped up, safety off. Aiden’s
and Bryce’s chains were yanked taut, and one enterprising fellow tried to force
Aiden to his knees. Yeah, like that would happen.

As they struggled, two gunmen grabbed Sinna and pulled her
away from Bryce before he could get mad. They didn’t use firearms, just knives
pressed to her skin where they’d shoved her down, ready to bleed her like a
satanic offering.

“She is first generashon, like you. Her blood is more potent
than all de rest of my females combined. If we are careful…”

At his prompt, one of the blades nicked along her throat,
and blood dripped onto the dry ground, pooling before it was absorbed.

“…we can keep her alive for a very long time to keep us
safe.”

Bryce hunched as if in pain. Only a matter of time now.