When he paused, I sighed. “Just say it. Watching a video of dudes trapping and then murdering a man who turned into a wolf kind of gives away the surprise.”
“It was a werewolf,” he said. His gaze turned intense. “Even in human form, Ada, they never stop being werewolves. Whatever makes them, it drives them to find their own. They track down more or bite more to make a pack. We have reason to believe they sense others who have been attacked or bitten, and will return to finish the job.”
His right hand clenched and distracted me. My head tilted. I reached slowly to rest the tips of my fingers on his scars. “This wasn’t from a bear or cryptid.”
“No.” His expression hardened. The lines around his eyes deepened as he looked at his hands. “It was a werewolf.”
I ran back through everything he’d said, and another, terrible possibility floated to the surface. “Your sisters. They were…”
“Charlie died from her wounds at the lake.” Archer swallowed, his throat convulsing again and again, until he finally found the words. “Victoria woke up at the hospital… different. She attacked two nurses and almost killed one. I tried to restrain her but she turned on me. Bit me and growled and I knew… she was gone. My sister had already died. She never took a wolf form but she was a werewolf. So I did what had to be done.”
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t look away from his hand, those broad and capable hands. The hands that held my face as he kissed me, and held me steady in the middle of a panic attack. Those hands… “You killed your sister.”
“My sister was already dead,” he said, low and cold. “She died at the lake the same as Charlie. The beast that was left behind… was nothing but a rabid monster.”
I sat back, my hand dragging across the table until it fell into my lap. I didn’t know what to say, what to think. With something that big, that awful…
Archer cleared his throat. “So you see why we can’t allow any to survive. They’re monsters and will absolutely destroy humanity if left unchecked. I research cryptids in different parts of the country, and when we come across something dangerous, we… deal with it.”
“You kill them. You kill cryptids even if they haven’t attacked people?”
“All cryptids are dangerous, Ada.” Regret colored his words. “Some just haven’t had the opportunity to demonstrate it. They’re all predators that have survived in dark corners and neglected places. Their habitats are shrinking and we’re seeing more conflicts between humans and everything else.”
I pushed back from the table, shaking my head. My mind went immediately to Hopper, maybe still playing in my bathtub or barfing half-digested fish on my bed. What if Archer saw him? Would he even hesitate before killing the waterhound? “Wait a minute. You’re killing cryptids no matter what they are? What’s wrong with you? They’re not dangerous. And if they are, it’s because humans have moved into their territory and are being stupid. How many species have you driven to extinction without considering the consequences?”
“They’re all dangerous,” he said. Archer struggled with his patience, trying to be reasonable while I was apparently irrational, and reached for the tablet. “Ada, I can show you case after case where…”
“No.” I got up again to pace. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Come on, Archer. Nothing is purely good or bad. There’s context, there’s a system around it, things evolved the way they did for a reason. The world wouldn’t have coughed up sasquatches or werewolves or wat—whatever else unless they filled a gap in the ecosystem.”
“Vampires are pure evil,” he said. He wasn’t convinced on the other ones, I could tell, but his conviction with vampires shone through without hesitation. “They’re nothing but predatory instinct and blood-lust. They appear rational and convincing, even charming. They read your mind and find your heart’s desire, offer it up, and then use it to destroy you. They play games just to play games, to torment their prey. You saw the photos of that dead wild man. Torn to bits but almost complete exsanguination. What animal would do that? They’re an abomination and an evolutionary reject that must be eradicated.”
“You think there’s a vampire around here?” I forced incredulousness into my tone and hoped he bought it.
“We know there is. It could be hunting in the mountains, even without reported victims. It might be using the werewolves to cover its attacks as wildlife maulings. There’s one here. There is a pattern in accidents and kills, something that fits a model we’ve used before.”
A model to predict a vampire’s presence. Maybe one of those vampire math predation models. I looked at the window at the shadows moving around his truck. He spoke the truth, sure, and yet… What prey animal found their predator justified in being killed? Vampires were the apex predators, not humans, and humans would fight against that however they could. Including with people like Archer, apparently.
“Natura non constristatur,” I whispered. Or maybe Deus vult, like Dragomir said. Deus vult’ed all over them and set vampires up with almost no weaknesses, if I believed Dragomir. The results were the same either way. Humans were no longer on the top of the pyramid, and that was a damn uncomfortable place to be.
“What does that mean?” Archer asked.
I jerked my attention back to him. “What?”
“The mumbo jumbo. Natura something something.”
I cleared my throat and retrieved the tablet to figure out what kind of damage they’d already done to cryptids across the country. “It means nature doesn’t give a fuck about human plans.”
Were Archer and his team in the area because of Dragomir? Would they try to kill him?
His model was correct, and so was he. Completely, utterly correct about everything. And I could never admit it to him. The one guy in the world who wouldn’t view my life’s calling as completely unhinged... remained out of my reach, all because of that deal with Dragomir. I couldn’t jeopardize finding Jamie in the off chance Archer and his people hunted Dragomir and meant to kill him.
The vampire’s death would make finding Jamie impossible, or at least push it back into the realm of improbable.
My stomach twisted at the thought of protecting Dragomir from Archer. It should have been the other way around. And now I had to protect Hopper and the sasquatches from them both.
“You’ll have to convince me,” I said. I couldn’t quite look at him; maybe he would see in my eyes that I knew too much about vampires as it was. I didn’t really want to learn any more, all things considered, but sometimes we had to face even the ugliest, cruelest facts. “Because as much as I like believing in things, vampires are fairy tales. Hollywood magic. Myths.”
“And you’re convinced sasquatches are real?”
“I have evidence of that! You can’t just trot out a legend from the middle of Romania and roll with it unexamined.”
“The blood in your fridge is evidence?” His head tilted and he gestured at the fridge. “Give me some samples and I’ll test it for you. Make sure it doesn’t come from a werewolf. They have some connection to their blood and pack and people who have been bitten, so if it came from a werewolf, they could use it to track you here. You’d need to get rid of it.”
“I have my own ways to test it,” I said. “I know exactly what it is, thank you.”
“Is that why you were at the university?” He held up another handful of articles and a journal on infectious diseases. “Getting help testing that blood? Or is that why someone sent you your own state-of-the-art lab?”
And we were back to suspicion and accusation. The edge to it had changed, though, now that I knew what he did. Monster hunter. What did monster hunters do with people they thought harbored monsters? Hopper would be bad enough, if Archer caught the waterhound in the cabin, but I couldn’t explain away being in league with a vampire when obviously Archer’s group saw no justification for letting one live.
“I met up with an old advisor,” I said. Half-truths again, but better than nothing. “I took advantage of the library while I was there to dig into a new topic of interest. It’s going to be a long winter and I need a lot of reading material. As for testing, I have my own processes and analysis, and no, I’m not going to share those.”
He made a thoughtful noise, though a small smile played across his lips. “We could achieve a great deal working together. We need someone with your knowledge and skillset. You’d be a game changer.”
I laughed, still searching the tablet for more data. I started sending everything to a cloud account so I could review it all later and compare my analysis of Dragomir’s blood when I finally fired up the lab. “You want me to join your team and help you go kill innocent cryptids? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“They’re not innocent, and I can prove that to you.” Archer caught my hand and squeezed it, his expression familiar once more. Kind and gentle, interested in what I had to say. Open. Wanting to connect. “Hunting down dangerous beasts takes the kind of unwavering belief and attention to detail that you possess. I’d hate to see you linger in the mountains when you could contribute to a real public service by helping us protect and defend humanity.”
“Don’t waste your time on that argument,” I said, rolling my eyes. I double-checked the tablet for anything else interesting, then handed it back. “I’ve heard that a thousand times before. I’m wasting my talent. I’m not living up to my potential. I’m selfish for not solving all those terrible problems that humanity creates for itself. I’m denying the world blah blah fucking blah. Well, fuck that and fuck everyone who thinks that. I have my own problems to solve first, and finding my brother is the top of the list. Everything else is a far second, including giving a shit about the rest of the country fending off cryptids who fight back when their habitat is destroyed. My own mother couldn’t convince me to leave Chilhowee and take a respectable job up in Boston, so why do you think anything has changed?”
“Because we believe what you believe,” he said. “I’m not asking you to give up your dreams, Ada, I’m offering you the chance to realize them. To find the cryptids you know exist, to study them. To travel anywhere and everywhere in pursuit of the knowledge you’ve been searching for your whole life. Anywhere in the world, Ada.”
There he went promising the world. Literally.
Maybe cryptids weren’t entirely innocent, but no one claimed a lion was innocent after it ate a gazelle. If they truly wanted to be left alone, who the hell were we to force them into the light? My heart sank. Of course, all of my research had attempted to do exactly that. He hunted them to kill them, but I hunted to reveal them to the world. Which was worse?
I shook my head. “I don’t have the horsepower for this right now.”
“Sure.” Archer got up and stood in front of me, holding loosely to my shoulders. “Ada, I wanted you to know all of this before either of us considers whether anything else happens. My life can be dangerous and it takes me a lot of different places. It’s amazing and adventurous, but it can be hard to maintain relationships outside just a few people.”
“Right.” I studied his chin, hoping to see his dimple when he smiled, and didn’t dare meet his gaze lest he see some of the truth in mine.
He drew me in for a hug and I closed my eyes, leaning into him and reveling in the way his arms flexed around me and he bumped his chin across the top of my head. “Tomorrow we’re going to that access road where the werewolf attacked. You should come with us.”
I leaned my head back but kept the rest of me plastered to his body. “Why the hell would you do that? And why the hell would I?”
He laughed, squeezed me, and kissed my cheek as we untangled. “It’s injured but not dead, so we have to finish the job. We can’t find its den and the only way to find it is to set out some bait. Sometimes we’re the bait.”
“See, that’s not the way to convince me to go back there. Especially since you said they like to hang out in packs. Are you guys ready to deal with more than one? Because I can tell you now I’m useless in a fight.”
Archer raked a hand through his hair and stretched, looking around the cabin as if searching for something. “We are. Giselle and Lars set snares and cameras in the area before we left, so we should be able to drive them toward the traps.”
My stomach turned over. Hardly a fair fight. “I don’t know if I have the guts to try being werewolf bait.”
“Think on it,” he said. He winked. “I’ll let you take blood from it. Maybe other samples if you’re good.”
“Weirdo,” I said.
Archer laughed and strode out to his truck, unmindful of the darkness that closed in around him when he left the warm light on the porch. Imagine being confident enough to walk into the night, knowing what hunted in the dark, without protection or defense. I couldn’t have faked it, much less meant it.
Bait. Freaking insane. Being indentured to a vampire was bad enough. Werewolf bait sounded infinitely worse.