* * * *
A few days later, there was a banging at my door.
I’d told Dawson and Sonya that I’d been in an accident and wouldn’t be able to help with the case for a while. It had given me a temporary reprieve while I searched for an excuse to call the investigation off. When I wasn’t racking my brain or eating in front of the television, I was sleeping and nursing my poor abused arm. None of the bones or ligaments had been broken or torn, thank god, so mostly I was just dealing with a lot of muscle pain. I’d had no idea how often I used the muscles in my left arm without ever thinking about it. Thank god for pain killers, otherwise I’d never be able to do the exercises the physical therapist had insisted on for a full recovery.
I was doing one of the said exercises, my muscles spasming as I worked to curl my hand into a fist around some dumb stress ball, when the banging started. I flinched, a lot jumpier these days, and dropped the ball.
I watched, irate, as it rolled beneath my sofa.
“Shit,” I said, to the remains of my television.
Then I got up and shuffled to the door. I don’t know who I expected to see on the other side of it. Sonya maybe, or even one of the ever so charming federal agents. I did not, however, expect to look up to see a pair of amber eyes and charmingly tousled blond hair.
I went to slam the door in his face, but he ducked through the opening before I could finish the move. I found him standing behind me and eyeing my living room in blatant distaste.
“You live here?”
“What do you want?”
I found myself taking a step back when he turned to look down at me and I saw the anger in him.
“I came to see for myself.”
“See what?” I asked, hesitant.
“If it was true.” He stepped closer and his head canted to one side as he examined me. A scientist with a bug beneath a lens. “If you really…” A muscle in his jaw worked and he turned away. Examined my apartment once more with unabashed criticism.
“Why haven’t you bought a new TV? Don’t I pay you enough?” He did, but that was neither here nor there.
“It’s ‘paid’ not ‘pay’. As in past tense. As in I don’t work for you anymore,” I told him. Then, “Gabriel,” I said, coming up behind him and clutching his arm before I could consider what I was doing. “What’s going on?” I asked softly, somehow unsurprised when he failed to brush off my touch as I’d half expected him to.
Instead he stood, back to me, for a long, breathless moment, and then sighed.
“Where’s your laptop?”
“I’ll get it,” I told him, feeling as if a storm was brewing and I was standing beneath a tree with a lightening rod and neon sign that read “Hit Me.”
I brought my laptop back into the room and set it on the kitchen counter. I watched, tense, as Gabriel sat down at one of my barstools and typed an address into the search engine, fingers flying over the keys. Then the webpage was opening, and I watched in growing horror as the newscast played out in high definition.
It was a video of what had happened the night I’d been bitten. From the angle I knew it had to be the necklace camera. First, it showed Gabriel hovering over the camera when he’d pulled me from beneath the conference table. Then it cut to my mad dash down the stairs only to run into the task force member and the wolf at his side. Any of the footage containing the shadow men had been cut out, so while the viewers could clearly see Gabriel Evans changing from wolf to man, they didn’t see him save my life beforehand. The last clip, was the most chilling. It showed the lobby as I’d seen it that night. Filled to bursting with ravenous wolves, eyes shining eerily in the dark.
When the footage was done, it switched to an anchorman who looked appropriately serious.
“Is this proof that werewolves exist or just a clever parlor trick? This video, shot by an unnamed source, has gone viral literally overnight. Experts have yet to be able to debunk the footage and in just a matter of days, millions of people from all over the world have begun to flood the area in hopes of either proving or disproving the presence of werewolves. While half of the city is stocking up on silver bullets and wolfsbane, the rest are crying foul.”
The scene shifted and suddenly I was watching Governor Harris shake his head in disgust at the camera. “Werewolves?” he snorted, “What next? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness monster? If I got worked up every time some kid with a camera said they’d found the missing link, my last two heart attacks would have killed me already.”
Back to the anchorman. “But others have a very…different take on things.”
The scene shifted again and now I was looking at the anchorman sitting beside a nervous looking young woman.
“You say you’re a werewolf? Is that correct?”
She nodded robotically, eyes flashing at the camera and wrung her hands together in her lap.
“What’s it like being a werewolf, Gina?”
She calmed visibly. “Safe.”
“How so?”
“It’s because, as a wolf, you have Pack. You don’t need family or friends when you have Pack. Pack is family. We keep each other safe. Keep each other human. Pack is all.”
And on it went, the scene changing as the anchorman interviewed one self-proclaimed werewolf after another:
“I didn’t always howl at the moon. I used to be a housewife.”
“This is a great opportunity to raise awareness of the relationship between man and beast. I hate being considered a villain, but society needs one. No one ever sheds a tear for the wolf. Not anymore. In a world filled with sheep, of course you’d see me as a monster.”
“Do I believe humans and my kind can coexist? No. If you live among wolves you can’t just act like a wolf. You must be one. If you’re not another predator, then you’re just prey.”
“How have I changed since becoming a Were? Well my priorities are different. My beliefs. The moon is my god now. I dance for it, I pine for it, and if it asked, I would kill for it.”
And on and on it went.
My breath escaped in an explosive sigh of disbelief.
“Sweet, buttery baby Jesus,” I said, “don’t you guys have like a public service announcement you can release or something? Where’s your publicist? Your agent? Anyone who can juggle the shitstorm this is turning out to be.”
Werewolves giving interviews. It would have been brilliant if any one of them had been coached on how not to make their race come across as mindless, cannibalistic monsters. And former housewives.
“I can only do so much,” Gabriel told me, staring unblinking at the computer screen. “The wolves you saw were not from my pack. I don’t know them. If I’d been able to stop them before they went on air, I would have. Though,” and here his voice grew cold, “if I hadn’t been betrayed, this would never have been an issue.”
Holding up my hands, I backtracked in a very literal sense.
“Hold on there, Fido. Before you start pushing Timmy down any wells, how about you let me explain?”
He looked like he didn’t know whether to laugh at me or strangle me.
“You have five minutes,” he decided finally, and I blew out the breath I’d been holding.
“It’s true that I went there to snoop,” I admitted and winced when he huffed angrily.
“But,” I continued loudly, “I never got anything good enough to build a story off of. That’s why I went back to the office that night, to see what sort of dirt I could dig up.”
“I suppose I ought to offer congratulations then. Once you admit to shooting the video, they’ll be tripping over themselves to hear your story. This is front page stuff, Miss Conners. I bet the rights for the movie will be worth millions.”
I disliked hearing him call me “Miss Conners” about as much as I disliked the undercurrent of hurt I heard beneath the heavy sarcasm. Knowing that he thought I’d betrayed him, and that the thought caused him pain did awful things to my blood pressure and I found myself scowling at him for no good reason.
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“I didn’t release that tape.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you lying?” he asked doubtfully.
Snorting, I came to sit beside him at the counter. “If I were, I would have started a hell of a lot sooner.”
He seemed to accept this, if the way he relaxed in his seat was any indication.
“Look,” I continued, “one of your guys took the camera off of me that night. I wouldn’t have been able to leak the footage, because I didn’t even have it.”
I was about to say that I wouldn’t have done something like that anyway, but since I wasn’t so sure, I didn’t bother. If anything, Gabriel seemed to buy the idea that I would have, but couldn’t more than if I’d said I could have, but didn’t. Go figure. I guess he knew me better than I’d thought.
Closing the laptop, he moved it away and put his elbows on the counter, face resting in his hands as if his head were aching. I sympathized.
“Who would have done something like this?” he asked, quietly broken at the thought of one of his own turning traitor. “Who would have revealed us to the humans? Why? What would they have gained from it?”
I almost said it. Almost put his name out there. But Gabriel raised a good point. It was one thing for Marcus to work for the Huntsmen. It was a completely different thing to reveal the presence of werewolves to the unsuspecting public. What could he possibly gain from revealing the fact that werewolves existed when he was, in fact, a werewolf?
Or was he?
It had been a man who’d snatched my necklace that night. A man. I hadn’t been attacked by a wolf. At the time I’d assumed that he hadn’t shifted into a wolf because he hadn’t wanted to. But what if it had been because he couldn’t?
“The task force,” I began carefully, “Are all of them Weres? Are all of them a part of your Pack?”
“Yes and no,” Gabriel answered. “They’re members of the pack, but not all pack members can shift. Some have lost the ability. Why?”
Partial truth couldn’t hurt. “I was just thinking. The man who took my hidden camera wasn’t in wolf form. I was wondering if that had been done by choice.”
Slowly, Gabriel lifted his head and turned to me. He looked flushed, almost happy, and I realized it was because I’d given him something he hadn’t had before. A lead.
“No. The full moon forces the change. Only the Alpha can fight the pull of something like that. If the man who did this could change, he would have.” His grin was very wolfy. “Which will make him considerably easier to find.”
“When the Alpha calls…you come. It’s that simple, and that complicated.”
—Geoffrey Giggs
Chapter Eleven