Authors: Alianne Donnelly
I hear barbarians at the gate.
Let the games begin.
~
Aiden had managed to score pretty decent digs—a cell, five
feet long, six feet wide, ceiling almost high enough for him to stand upright,
with a solid metal door and half a piss bucket. Five-star amenities, as far as
he was concerned.
There was only one problem.
It was all wet.
The walls were wet. The floor was wet. There wasn’t a single
square inch of dry anything. He had water dripping down from minuscule
stalactites in the ceiling like an ancient torturous mindfuck.
Not to mention that weird, throbbing
whump-whump-whump
coming up from the floor. If he didn’t know better, he’d say Klaus had some
sort of generator stashed down there.
Well, at least his ass got a little vibrating massage action
while it was stuck to the floor. He might even enjoy it, if it weren’t for the
drip,
drip
, fucking
drip
. A nervous tic started to develop in his left
eye.
Screw starvation and torture, it was boredom that would
finally do him in. That, and the goddamned dripping.
So yeah, when the converts howled outside, Aiden perked
right up. Finally, something to take his mind off of things. Different was
good. A little drama never hurt anyone, and it wasn’t like he was opposed to
carnage. Bryce and Sinna were miles away by now, and he hoped to hell his
brother had hit the road north. The last thing he wanted was to play into
Klaus’ hands.
Bryce was loyal to a fault. Aiden hadn’t had a chance to
fully communicate his plan to him but hoped to hell Sinna at least had picked
up on it. They needed to go to Montana. People there were depending on their
alphas to return, and at least one of them had to. Aiden could kick his heels
up here for a while. Not like he couldn’t get out, if he really wanted to. He’d
stall for a few days, give his brother and Sinna a good head start, then bust
out of here, break some heads, and hightail it to Montana.
Good, solid plan.
And if converts wanted to thin the human ranks and make it
easier for him, Aiden wasn’t going to complain.
His keen hearing picked up on movement aboveground. If he
didn’t miss his guess, people were closing ranks, coming together to ride out
the assault. Whether it came tonight, tomorrow, or the day after, they’d be
vigilant from now on. But they’d be looking outside, not in.
Aiden was almost giddy with anticipation.
Then his ear twitched at the subtle
thunk
of wood
hitting stone. Aiden stood up, tilting his head this way and that, trying to
identify the uneven rhythm.
Thunk
, step.
Thunk
, step. Almost
like…
He smiled. The witch.
Aiden closed his eyes and savored the sound of her
approach—slow, measured, but hampered by a crutch or something. Her injury had
to be pretty significant to necessitate it. What could it be? A bad break,
maybe? A recently dislocated knee? No, something else. A mystery he itched to
get to the bottom of.
“Well, fee-fi-fo-fum.”
She stopped a few feet from his cell, too far away to
glimpse through the keyhole.
Aiden didn’t mind. He could work with skittish. “Making an
early run for it, are you?”
She swore under her breath, though she might as well have
shouted it into his ear.
Aiden grinned, licking a fang. “Well, go on. Don’t be shy. I
promise I’ll give you a generous head start before I break down the door and
chase you to the ground.”
“It’ll be a short chase,” she retorted, more to herself than
to him.
“Not the way I hunt,” he replied.
She huffed, and the next step she took was away from him.
“No, wait!” Skittish he could work with. Scared meant game
over. He needed someone to talk to him, otherwise he’d go apeshit in here.
“What’s going on out there?”
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” she said, as if
she’d tossed the words over her shoulder.
“Right, that’s why you’re hiding down here. Because it’s
nothing.”
“Who says I’m hiding?”
“Then you came to keep me company? Ah, Dee, I’m honored.”
An angry
thunk
. A step closer. “I have a name,” she
snapped. “And it’s not Dee.”
Interesting.
“Then what is it?”
Silence.
“Okay, I’ll start. Hi, I’m Aiden, and I’m a hostage. Now you
say, ‘Hi, Aiden.’ Go on.”
“You’re Alpha Seven.”
If not for the confused hesitation in her voice, Aiden might
have snapped at that. No one had called him Alpha anything since the last
Montana caretaker went down. “Does that subtle dehumanization make it easier
for you people to treat us like animals? I suppose I should have expected it,
you being the offspring of the great Klaus Koch the Savior and all.”
A pause, and then she sighed. “How did you know?”
Aiden snorted. “I can smell it all over you.”
A long, uncomfortable silence almost made Aiden regret his
words. He imagined her standing there, half-turned away as if waiting for the
starter pistol to chase her off. He kept his mouth shut, held his breath, and
waited for her to make up her mind. If she left, he’d have nothing to keep him
company but a leaky ceiling and that pulsing beat.
Aiden frowned and wriggled his ass. Had it gotten stronger?
There was another quiet
thunk
and Aiden ducked to the
keyhole. He spied the barest edge of her shadow off to the side. She wasn’t
leaving; she’d moved closer.
The crutch came to rest against the wall at the edge of his
field of vision; a small, pale hand disappeared before he could study it. She
slid down the wall by audible degrees until she was sitting on the floor and,
in a grave, unhappy tone, she said, “Klaus Koch has seventy-four biological
offspring. Most of them are either dead or out there between the walls. I’m
just the one he’d rather not own up to.”
Aiden’s tension slowly released, and he sat with his back to
the door, head resting against the cold metal. “So what’s your name?”
“Desiree.”
A particularly angry convert scream outside made her gasp.
“Are you scared?”
“I’m human,” she replied.
“And you all say that like it’s something to be proud of.
You know what humanity’s worth these days? Do you know what they’ve done?”
“They created
you
.”
“Yeah, that’s for damn sure. A whole pen full of tinker toys
to play with.”
Bitter now, are we?
“You know, there are people out there would give just about
anything to be strong like you. Not to mention the only creature safe from
converts.”
Aiden laughed. He couldn’t help it. “And you count yourself
among that number?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Right. “You know what? I’ll play. You let me out of here,
and I’ll give you a taste of what it’s like to be Wolfen. I’ll lock you in an
underground lab for a few years, pump you full of poisons and chemicals. I’ll
cut on you, and measure the time it takes for you to heal. I’ll burn and flay
the skin from your body, and record you regenerating. I’ll drown you, again and
again, to see if you can breathe under water yet. And when you feel like you
have nothing left to lose, I’ll rile you up with cow prods and pit you against
your best friend, so you can fight it out, Darwin-style. Only the strongest
will be allowed to survive. How does that sound?”
“Are you expecting me to be shocked?”
He was, actually.
“I’ve read the files,” she said. “I am intimately familiar
with the minutiae of the Delta-Omega den studies, and you know what? I. Don’t.
Care.”
Liar.
“Fact of the matter is, right now, you’ve made the top of
the food chain—”
“Yes, I have,” he drawled. “Best not go forgetting it.” End
justifies the means? He could play that, too.
“Trust me, I won’t.” A pause. “Actually, that’s why I’m
here.”
Aiden’s ear twitched at the subtle change in her voice. Not
quite an untruth. More like she’d just now decided something, switched tactics.
“You’re not like other Wolfen I’ve seen. You seem more…”
“Charming, witty, and handsome?”
“Capable of higher thought.”
Aiden snarled at that. “If you’re trying to flatter me,
insulting my kind is probably not the way to go.”
She huffed. “I’m not…
Augh!
Can we just agree that
intelligence varies across any species, and move on? I’m trying to make a point
here.”
Someone shouted outside. Several sets of heavily booted feet
stomped around the wide, metal perimeter. Aiden supposed the converts had made
an unwelcome move.
Desiree pushed to her feet and came up to his door. Her
voice was right next to the metal when she said, “This place won’t last much
longer.”
“Nope.”
“I can get the keys to your cell and let you out before it
implodes.”
“Not good enough.”
Someone barked an order out on the wall, and a few seconds
later, an explosion shook the ground. Converts went mad, screaming in mindless
fury.
“I can show you the safe way out,” Desiree said quickly, “but
you have to take me with you.”
Aiden snorted. “Forget it.”
“But—”
“Even if I needed your help—which I don’t—you’re not
offering me any added benefit. Not only would I walk out of here unarmed and
unprovisioned, you expect me to take along a dependent who can’t fend for
herself? Sorry, sweetheart, you’re on your own. And good fucking luck.”
Gunfire outside. Wasting ammo, but hell, it might work for a
little while. Until the converts regrouped and attacked, en masse. Now that
they had confirmation and knew exactly where their prey was hiding, they’d be
back. Strategy might not be their strong suit, but they did learn, slowly.
Desiree was right. This place would go kablooey very soon.
But not tonight.
Already the screams were moving off; the converts were
retreating to lick their wounds—and if that stunning show of cognition and
self-preservation didn’t scare the shit out of the folks around here, Aiden
didn’t hold much hope for their survival.
“You know you’re not just a hostage here, right?” Desiree said,
reminding him she hadn’t slunk off yet. “You don’t honestly believe one of the
original scientists involved in the project would let an opportunity like this
pass him by, do you?”
“Yeah, I figured he’ll want to have his fun. There’s nothing
he could do that I can’t take.”
“The thing is, Alpha, an asset like you is worth a whole
hell of a lot to someone like Klaus. You think he’ll torture you for the fun of
it? Nah. He’ll find other ways to use you. It’s what he does. No asset around
here goes underutilized.”
“Bring it on.” He wasn’t scared. Anything Klaus might think
up, Aiden had already felt, many times over.
“I would urge you to reconsider.”
“I’m sure you would.”
“Not for yourself, mind you. It’s pretty clear you have the
strength, smarts, and stamina to take a lot of abuse; you’d have to, to have
survived this long out there.”
“My ego thanks you for that lovely stroke.”
“But there are over fifty Wolfen females in Haven. And you.”
She paused to let that sink in. “One, lone viable male.” Another pause. “Do you
see where I’m heading with this?”
Something dark and very dangerous gathered like cold shadows
in his chest. Whatever good mood Desiree had inspired earlier now wilted, as a
deadly, feral creature awakened inside him. It comprehended, but didn’t think.
It looked, but didn’t see. It heard, but didn’t listen. For all the potential
locked within the tight loops of his DNA, for all that he’d seen the same
potential unleashed time and again by others, Aiden himself had never wolfed
out like Bryce. Not once. Not in the entire span of his existence.
He felt it now, just beneath his skin, like claws itching to
be let loose.
“You may be at the top of the food chain,” the witch said,
“but trust me, you’re not invincible. Klaus has several ways to make difficult
subjects cooperate. It’s sort of been his life’s work after the fall.”
Aiden’s mouth pulled away from teeth that had grown into
fangs, and his fingernails dug into the stone beneath him until three popped
right off of his fingers. In their place, claws grew black and sharp.
Blissfully oblivious to the beast she’d just unleashed,
Desiree used her crutch to stand. “Think about it,” she said, offhand, as
cheering rose up outside. The converts had left, and the night was safe for
humans once again. She was free to leave.
Aiden hated how easily she could walk away from him.
“The next time someone comes down here, I can assure you the
conversation will be much less pleasant.”
I am back in San Francisco, staring down the pitch-black elevator
shaft with thirty converts sniffing around the main door. My heart is racing,
my palms are sweaty. I can’t catch my breath. It’s a week ago, all over again,
the people with whom I’ve spent the last three years are calling for me to
hurry up, to get down there.
But the face staring at me from the darkness isn’t the
stalwart, practical soldier, Nate. It’s Gerry. The only mother I ever knew.
The one I killed.
She smiles, holds her hand out for me to take. She is so
calm, steady as a rock, patiently waiting for me to make the move; to trust her
and step down into a pit worse than death, more terrifying than any hell nuns
used to teach about back in the day.
She waits for me, and I can’t move.
The damned door is open.
Close it! Run!
I can’t.
The converts group closer, chuffing in my direction,
weaving their heads as if they can’t see me, but they can smell me just fine. I
don’t look at them, but somehow I still know. One makes a face, sticks his
tongue out so far, its forked tip hangs well below the edge of his chin.
Another sucks in a sharp breath, not sniffing for prey, but savoring the aroma
of a waiting meal. A third, female, lowers down to all fours. She tries to
crawl between the males, but they won’t let her. So she takes to the walls,
climbing them with the ease of a demonic spider.
I am frozen, staring at Gerry’s smiling face.
Close the door! Run! Please, Gerry, live!
I want to scream, but I can’t even open my mouth. There’s
only one direction my body will allow me to go, and it’s not into that dark
shaft. Tears blur my vision. I blink them away, but more come, blinding me to
the danger.
They’re coming closer. Gerry must see them now—why isn’t
she moving? Why does she keep staring at me? I hate the calm acceptance in her
eyes. I want to slap that serenity off of her face. It makes me feel like it’s
my fault.
It is.
Was.
And it will be again.
Because there are monsters sniffing at my heels.
A run of slimy, disgusting saliva drops onto my shoulder and
burns like acid through my shirt. I slowly tilt my head up. There’s the female,
hanging upside down, her warped nose so close to mine, her rancid breath stings
my forehead. Her eyes are black holes in her skull—endless, bottomless pits of
ravening insanity—and they’re mesmerizing. I can’t look away.
In my head, I scream. I feel my body shaking on the
inside, but my skin is like granite, encasing me in a prison of my own making.
It’s a dream. Wake up!
“It’s time, Sinna,” Gerry says, and suddenly she’s standing
right in front of me. She smiles with infinite kindness, glowing from within
with a sort of angelic grace. Before my eyes, she begins to change. Always on
the shorter side, she now grows to my height, becoming transparent as she does
so. Her hand reaches out to cup my cheek as her hair stretches longer, curlier,
to mirror mine. I feel myself becoming lighter, losing substance as if she’s
drawing it out of me and into herself.
The female above me is twitching her head in confusion,
sniffing madly in a futile search. Those at my back are inches away now; a
solid wall of malevolence I can’t escape. We’re cornered, Gerry and I, but
she’s not Gerry anymore.
She’s becoming a reflection of me.
Her nose is already mine. Her eyebrows lift up into a
different shape, the eyes beneath shifting and growing in her face. Her
wrinkled skin smoothes out, lips plumping and reddening. And with each small
change, a little more of me disappears.
I become a ghost. And then, I am even less.
A clawed hand reaches through me, and I don’t even
notice. It falls heavily on Gerry’s shoulder, but I feel it on mine and I jerk
in surprise. Claws dig into her skin and I scream in pain, but my reflection
only smiles.
“Be good,” she tells me in my voice, “it’s time to wake
up.”
Powerful hands shake me so hard I fear they’ll tear me
apart.
Wake up! It’s only a dream!
“I love you,” Gerry whispers from my lips, as monsters
tear into her—into me! Her body jerks, bleeds, disintegrates, and I wail in agony,
but she merely smiles, holding my gaze as if it’s all an illusion. Nothing but
a dream.
“Wake up, Sinna.”
Wake up!
I see my heart get torn out of my chest.
Then I am gone.
~
Sinna woke screaming, fighting off the monster that had
latched onto her, but he was too strong. She flailed and bucked until his voice
bled through her panic and snapped her back to reality. “It’s me!” Bryce kept
saying. “Shhh, it’s just me.”
Sinna quieted long enough to remember where she was.
Hyperventilating, moments away from passing out, she fought to calm herself so
she could think. San Francisco was hundreds of miles away. She was on a
deserted road in the middle of nowhere. Stars twinkled above, and a crescent
moon was shining bright. Despite the lack of sunlight, her vision was near
perfect.
Breathe,
she commanded herself, as if she could open
her airways through sheer force of will.
“It was a dream,” Bryce said, softer, now that she’d stopped
screaming. He kept petting her face, and it took Sinna a minute to realize he
was brushing away her tears. Her dizziness wasn’t from panic; it was because he
was rocking her. “You’re safe.”
She blinked rapidly, unclenched her fingers from Bryce’s arm
to wipe her nose. Shaking like a leaf, she tried to disentangle herself from
him. At some point, he’d put on that old plaid shirt he’d found in the mule. It
was a shade too small, with stitches straining across his shoulders and arms.
He’d rolled up the sleeves and looked like a lumberjack, covered in dust and
dirt, but she was still uncomfortably aware of the blood it was meant to
conceal. He was still covered with it, and despite her attempts to scrub it
off, so was Sinna.
“You were having a bad dream,” Bryce said, as he watched her
with unblinking focus. Moonlight caught in his eyes and made them look
predatory and curious at the same time.
Sinna nodded. Her teeth chattered too hard for her to form a
coherent sentence.
He tilted his head, lifting his scarred side up to the light
almost subconsciously, then jerked his chin down in a gruff nod and helped her
into the mule. The passenger seat adjusted to fit into the bench behind it to
make a sort of pallet. With her head positioned toward the front, on account of
the grossness all over the rear, Sinna was just small enough to curl up
comfortably. But the more she calmed, the more worried she became that someone,
or something, had heard her scream. She scanned the area, eyes wide so she
wouldn’t miss anything, but not a creature stirred, and she gradually made
herself relax a little.
Rather than return to his own spot, Bryce sat on the ground,
his back against the side of the passenger seat. He was whittling some kind of
stick; a stack of them already sat next to him.
“Aren’t you going to sleep?” she asked. Her voice came out
reedy, raw, and she winced. She could use a drink of water, but they didn’t
have any.
Bryce shook his head.
“Okay.”
It was much too open out here; she couldn’t close her eyes
while they were this exposed. “Those Grays back there,” she said into the
silent night, “they were different than the ones in the city.”
Bryce grunted a reply.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Could be they got used to Wolfen pheromones.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
Bryce leveled her with a steady gaze. In the darkness, his
eyes looked more gold than brown, burnished with a glowing sheen. “No.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged again, and went back to his whittling. “Worry
solves nothing.”
Sinna worried her dry lips with her teeth, until she nipped
too hard and tasted blood.
Bryce tensed. “Stop that.”
“You may be okay with those things getting smarter, but I’m
not, okay?” The biggest advantage of turning Wolfen was supposed to be that
converts wouldn’t want to touch her. If she couldn’t rely on that anymore, then
what the hell did it matter what she called herself? Human or Wolfen, it didn’t
make a damned bit of difference. “I’m scared,” she admitted.
“Well stop.”
He said it so plainly, it surprised a chuckle out of her.
“You can’t order something like that.”
Once again he looked over his shoulder, and raised an
eyebrow at her.
Sinna laughed, and Bryce’s mouth twitched with the promise
of a smile before he faced forward again.
They were silent for a while and Sinna’s eyelids began to
droop in weariness. But every time her eyes closed, Gerry smiled at her in the
darkness, and Sinna startled awake again. Finally, she huffed and turned onto
her side, facing the back of Bryce’s head. “I can’t sleep.”
“Then stay awake.”
“That’s not any better.”
Bryce shrugged.
Sinna rolled her eyes. She missed Aiden’s easy ramblings.
His voice, so laid back and confident, always put her at ease. But thinking of
him only reminded Sinna he was shackled in an underground cell in Haven, with
that horrible collar around his neck like an animal. Another nightmare.
Sinna shook her head hard. She needed something to distract
her. “Talk to me.”
“What?”
“Talk. I need to hear your voice.”
Bryce’s answering expression of baffled terror was almost
comical, but Sinna had momentarily lost her sense of humor.
“Please,” she said.
Some of her desperate anxiety must have carried through.
After a tense moment of silence, Bryce started talking. “Once upon a time,
there was a little girl who always wore a red riding hood.” He paused after
that gruff introduction as if he expected her to cut in.
She didn’t.
Bryce cleared his throat, shifted into a more comfortable
position, and continued. “She was loved in the village and had many friends,
including a young boy who always followed her around.”
Sinna smiled at that, but kept quiet.
“One day, the girl’s mother packed her a basket and asked
her to take it to her grandmother. The old woman was a strange one; she lived
deep in the woods and never came to the village. People were afraid of her, and
whispered rumors that she was a witch. Usually, the girl and her mother did
this together, but that day, the mother had to sell her wares at market and
couldn’t go along.
“The little girl was worried about making the long trip all
alone, but she knew she wouldn’t be. The boy who always followed her around
would…follow her.” He huffed with annoyance at that, then shook his head. “So
she set out and kept her head high, so no one would know she was scared. But
the boy could tell anyway, and he took her hand so they could walk together.”
This was a version she’d never heard before. Sinna touched
Bryce’s shoulder and turned her hand palm up for him to take. When he did, she
shifted closer, putting her head almost onto his shoulder.
“But the villagers were right,” he said, softer now. “The
old grandmother truly was a witch, and she was very possessive of her little
granddaughter; she didn’t take kindly to strangers sniffing around her. When
the little girl and her friend arrived at the grandmother’s cottage, the old
woman took one look at them and knew things would change. She could look into
the future, and what she saw was her granddaughter falling in love with this
boy and leaving her to make a life with him.
“The old witch became enraged. She wrenched them apart, and
cursed the boy into a wolf so he could never get near her granddaughter again.
If he did, the villagers would shoot him dead.”
“That’s terrible.”
Bryce brushed his head against hers in an odd caress. “Yes,”
he said.
“So what happened?”
“What always happens. The little girl grew up, as did her wolf
boy. He kept watching over her all those years, waiting for the chance to set
himself free. One day, when the girl went out to visit her grandmother again,
he stopped her in the woods, tried to tell her the truth, but she didn’t
believe him. Her grandmother’s spell had stolen all of her memories of him. And
the old woman had warned her not to talk to wolves, that they were evil
tricksters out to devour innocent maidens.
“So the wolf had no choice; he had to kill the grandmother
to break her awful spell. But even after she was dead, the spell remained. Only
love can break a curse that strong. When the girl saw her dead grandmother, she
became scared and called on the woodsman to hunt the wolf down.”
Sinna frowned. “That’s even worse!”
He squeezed her fingers. “Fairy tales aren’t meant to end
with ‘happily ever after.’”
“Only you would come up with a love story that depressing.”
Bryce chuckled. “Can’t take any credit for this one. Tiny
Bree-bee told it to me. Aiden read her
Little Red Riding Hood
when she
was growing up, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why the wolf
would hate the grandmother so much he had to eat her. So she wrote her own
version. In verse. She made a ballad out of it, like those ancient Norse bards
used to sing:
The Wolf’s Lament
.”
Sinna smiled. “Is she one of your pack?”
Bryce nodded. “Twelve years old, and already telling the
boys her age what to do.”
She chuckled. “I’ll bet she is.”
Some of his good humor faded. “She didn’t always have it so
easy. When she was born, our den was still under human control. Bree’s mother
was sick and died shortly after the takeover, and we didn’t have any milk to
feed her.”