I didn’t sleep, even with the pain medication and a few shots of whiskey to swallow them down, and lay awake as dawn broke and the birds started singing. I’d had all night to think about why Jamie didn’t want me to know he was alive, that he was…
My brain balked at thinking of him as a werewolf. There had to be another explanation.
I threw the silicone and plaster into the mudroom as the coffee brewed. I wouldn’t be making any masks for Dragomir until I knew a hell of a lot more about what he was hiding, about how he knew Jamie and what kind of history led to their animosity. Archer and his team thought they recognized Dragomir, and they called him Drago. He knew how to make werewolves and had done so before. It sounded like one of his calling cards. Why did he leave Chicago for Chilhowee?
I called the hospital to check on Archer but they wouldn’t tell me anything except when visiting hours started. I got there early, even with putting on makeup to cover up the duffel bags under my eyes. Didn’t want the other patients to think Death showed up to take them away ahead of schedule.
I found his room on the third floor before I lost my nerve. Giselle sat in the hall between two rooms, frowning at a laptop balanced on her knees. She didn’t look up as I paused outside the doors. “He’s in that one.”
She gestured to her right. I still hesitated. “How are Isidro and Lars?”
“Still alive,” Giselle said.
And that was it. I wanted to apologize, even if I didn’t know quite what I would be apologizing for. Instead, I slid through the half-open door to Archer’s room and swallowed hard when I caught sight of him.
Archer lifted his head when he saw me, though half his face was lumpy and bruised, and a small splint braced his broken nose. Bandages covered his shoulder and left knee, but he smiled with the mobile half of his face when he saw me.
I held up the bag of donuts I picked up. “I brought breakfast, but it looks like you might need a straw to eat them.”
He took the bag gingerly. “How are you?”
“Confused,” I said quietly. I pulled a chair up next to the bed but didn’t look directly at him. The bruises and cuts were all my fault. I couldn’t tell him the truth: I felt guilty, and angry because of the guilt. “Really confused and a little betrayed.”
Archer adjusted the bed so he sat up, then fished a bear claw out of the bag. “I can see how that would be true.”
“Can we start with who you actually are? Who you work for? Why you’re in Chilhowee?”
“We work for a private organization that works to keep humanity safe from any number of threats, some natural, some supernatural. My team specializes in hunting supernatural threats and gathering evidence so the brains can come up with more efficient ways to defeat them.” He said it in a neutral voice, the words rolling out without thought as if he’d said them so many times it became muscle memory.
A private organization. Maybe I could consider my collaboration with them a charitable donation to deduct on my taxes. I rubbed my temples. “Including werewolves.”
Like my brother. Like Jamie. Whatever he was, it wasn’t entirely human. Archer would look at him and see a threat even if he wasn’t a werewolf. Surely someone who could control animals with his mind met the qualifications for “supernatural.”
“Including werewolves,” Archer said. He grimaced as he bit into the pastry and one of the cuts on his face split, then settled for picking small pieces off.
“And you’re here because…?” I trailed off. He had to say it. He had to admit it, to lay it out there.
“We got reports of strange activity in the park and needed to evaluate the threat. When we heard about your disappearance and then reappearance, it sounded a great deal like other attacks we’ve seen that ended a lot differently. We wanted to understand how you survived the initial attack. We intended to stay until the full moon, when it would be clear whether you’d been affected or not.”
“And then?” My voice escaped as a thread of sound, small and afraid.
His gaze met mine, very little compassion in their deep cerulean depths. “Werewolves are dangerous, Ada. More dangerous than everything but vampires. We identify the problem and then deal with it, whatever it looks like. Then we leave, no one the wiser. Maybe there are some new rumors about strange creatures or ghosts in the trees, maybe some tracks or hair are left behind so our activities are attributed to cryptids or hunters.”
I closed my eyes. What if I’d inadvertently collected some of their misdirections? All my data was useless. My stomach sank. Would he admit it if I asked whether they’d planted false cryptid markings anywhere near me?
I steeled myself to go on. “And so you’re going to stay until you know whether I’m sick or not. Then you’ll move on whether you kill me or not. You never intended any of… any of what we talked about. What you promised.”
He hesitated, expression softening. I could almost see the man who’d kissed me and teased me about time machines. My sinuses burned and I looked away. “You don’t need to say it.”
“This is a complicated situation,” he said quietly. “I’d like to say it’ll all work out, but…”
When his words faded, I cleared my throat. “But?”
“But now it’s gotten more complicated.”
“Dragomir,” I said. I started the barrage of math noise in the back of my head to keep Dragomir from listening in, even if I had no idea whether it actually worked at a distance or over time.
“Yes.” Archer picked up another donut. “Drago. How do you know him?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, trying to echo Archer’s earlier hedging. He knew it. They all did. There was no use denying it, not when Dragomir didn’t hurt me out of all of them and went away when I told him to. My stomach churned with nausea. Maybe it was the vampire blood hangover, crashing the party early. Or maybe it was knowing I worked with the thing that almost killed him and his friends.
That would kill them if he caught them alone. Just like they would kill him if given the opportunity.
Archer’s left eye was swollen shut but his right tracked me, weighing and measuring. After the silence stretched, he reached for my hand. An IV and pulse monitor stretched with him, making me nervous about touching him. His hand, warm and rough with calluses, cradled mine. “Come on, Ada. You’ve got to help me out here.”
I licked my lips and bought a little time by eating one of his donuts. “I don’t know what to say. It’s between us and I swore not to talk about it with anyone. I stumbled into all of this and most of the time I don’t know what’s going on or who’s the bad guy.”
“Well, I’ve got one easy answer for you.” Archer squeezed my fingers, despite having an IV in his hand and his pinky splinted. His jaw clenched and a flush bloomed in his cheeks. “Dragomir is the bad guy. Full stop. He might be able to pretend for a short period of time, but he’s ruthless. He’s a murderer and cruel to a degree you can’t even fathom. He’s a serial killer of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, and a psychopath. He has no capacity for sympathy or empathy.”
“You know him?” Archer looked like a kettle ready to boil over, mouth twisted in pure disgust. His heart monitor clicked faster and faster, and something beeped in warning.
“I know of him, yes.” Archer glanced at the door before going on. He lowered his voice but lost none of his intensity. “He was the master vampire of Chicago for a couple of centuries. We looked up his file just to be sure after what happened yesterday. It’s him. Dragomir Viteazu, son of Constantin, Boyar of Hatszeg. Dragomir the Brave, ironically. He was so cruel, so awful, that his own nest staged a coup. They tried to kill him, and we thought he’d been dusted him, but… It does not surprise me that he’s been here licking his wounds for the last century. He’s plotting his vengeance, and if he’s started making werewolves, he must be ready to move on Chicago.”
I swallowed the taste of bile. A master vampire? What the fuck was that? He’d been planning for a century? That was plenty of time to have run through every possible attack option and settle on day-walking and werewolves as suitable vectors. Plenty of time to identify research monkeys like Jamie and me to exploit, to use to solve those problems.
Archer tilted his head back to stare at the ceiling, though he winced when something tweaked and he adjusted how he sat. “I should have known it was him when the werewolf reports started. Very, very few of his kind know how to make them. We closely watch any who can, and since all the others are accounted for, it had to be him. They can control the werewolves mentally and make them do their bidding. He’ll create an army of cruel, superhuman, fast-healing, perfectly controllable monsters.”
I leaned back in the chair so I could prop my feet up on the bed near his hip. I pondered what he’d said, since it sure as hell hadn’t looked like Dragomir controlled the wolves at the cabin. He tried, sure, and almost did when the wolves attacked me, but Jamie wrestled that control away. How could Jamie have controlled the werewolves?
Archer studied me. “You’re thinking about something awfully hard over there.”
Frowning down at my hands seemed like a better option than facing him directly; he was too observant by half, even with just the one eye. “Can I give you a hypothetical situation and ask your opinion?”
He took a deep breath, then nodded at the door. “Why don’t you swing that closed before we talk in hypotheticals?”
“Good idea.” I jumped up to close the door before returning to my chair, and I lowered my voice just in case Giselle had bionic hearing. “Hypothetically, could someone other than a vampire control werewolves? Like another werewolf?”
His eyebrows rose. But Archer didn’t immediately answer, instead frowning as he considered what to say. Eventually he took a deep breath. “Whoever created them would be the one to control them, as far as we’ve seen. In theory it might be possible. Werewolves can occasionally bite a human and make another werewolf, though they are closer to the animal, more dangerous, and less sentient. I would say it could be possible for a werewolf to control other werewolves in the absence of the original maker. The maker trumps everything else.”
I studied my hands so I wouldn’t think too hard about the “hypothetical” and how it could affect Jamie’s life and what I might be telling Archer in the process. “But in the presence of the vampire? Could the lead werewolf take control of the others when the vampire tried to direct them to do something he didn’t want?”
Archer’s head tilted at the very specific hypothetical. “We don’t have data for that. No one has theorized such a thing. On occasion, a particularly iron-willed vampire can take over werewolves whose master died, or defeat a weaker vampire to take their pack. For another werewolf to do it… First they would have to throw off the master’s influence, then disrupt the master’s hold on the pack, then take over the pack and keep the vampire from taking it back, then control other werewolves… It’s a long shot. The werewolf would have to have a hell of a motivation to even consider something like that, and they don’t have the mental capacity to be motivated like that. Maybe in the name of chasing and killing prey, but a deliberate effort to take the pack from the vampire… That’s a stretch.”
If there was any way to describe Jamie, it was “iron-willed.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. That sounded like Jamie — stubborn enough to break through an impossible mental hold. Or maybe he wanted to protect me from the vampire and there was no way to do that unless he took charge of the rest of the pack. Which made sense, from what I’d seen. The wolves didn’t immediately obey him, but when his eyes got all golden, they backed down. It looked practiced, as if he’d done it many times, and even though the other wolves resisted, they caved in eventually.
I’d been silent for too long; Archer took my hand again. “If you’ve got a question, Ada, just ask me. Let me help you. You got in over your head and you did the best you could. It’s overwhelming, I know it is. Just tell me what happened and I’ll fix it. I can take care of this for you. I just need to know what we’re dealing with.”
He’d help right up until I turned into a werewolf or he discovered that Jamie was one.
I got the sneaking suspicion that Archer’s help, no matter the problem, came with weapons and a few hastily dug graves in the forest. I cleared my throat. “Say I knew someone who was a werewolf. Might be a werewolf. But he’s not dangerous. He’s trying to protect us. Wouldn’t that be — wouldn’t that be okay? He would stay hidden and you wouldn’t have to… arrest him.”
“He can’t fight nature forever,” Archer said. He squeezed my fingers and regret turned his mouth down at the corners. “Ada, I’m so sorry. It’s just a matter of time until the werewolf virus takes over and he turns into the beast. Most of them never go back to their human form after they’ve turned under the full moon. They’re just instinct and bloodlust.”
Except Jamie had been in human form when he ordered the wolves away. And from what he said to Dragomir, my brother had been a werewolf a hell of a lot longer than a month. I sank lower in the chair and my fingers slipped from his.
Archer turned to face me, his bruised legs dangling over the side of the bed and the sheet slipping to reveal more of the scars on his right side. It was hard to take him as seriously when he wore a hospital gown and showed more leg than a pin-up girl. “Like the old man who attacked you. There’s no telling when he was turned, but he’d lost all control. As they age, senility can take hold. It steals whatever control the vampire might have, and makes them exponentially more dangerous. Even if they manage to sound normal, we can’t leave them out there to propagate and create even more feral werewolves.”
“Do they ever look like full wolves, just bigger?”
He stilled. “What do you mean?”
“The werewolves we saw are all hybrid – a gross mash up of human and wolf forms. Monstrous. Is it possible they could take one or the other form completely, or do they always look so creepy?”
“That’s an interesting question,” he said after taking a deep breath. “I don’t have an answer for it.”
Except he sure looked like he did, or at least an opinion on it. I set that aside as I studied the plastic shell of the hospital bed. My vision blurred. Archer would never let Jamie exist, whether Jamie could control himself and others or not. Jamie would kill Dragomir the moment he had a chance, and Dragomir returned the favor. Archer absolutely wanted to destroy Dragomir, and I’d boarded that train, too, after learning what happened to Jamie. And yet… Dragomir knew how to make werewolves. Understanding how they were made was the first step to unmaking them. If Dragomir died, that all remained unknown. I pinched the bridge of my nose and struggled to breathe without sounding like I started to cry.
His hand brushed over my head and settled on my shoulder. “Help me understand, Ada. What else is worrying you?”
What wasn’t worrying me? I should have gotten up, gone home, and started researching how to cure werewolves so I could save my brother. I could slow-roll Dragomir until I had what I needed, then I could turn Archer and his pals on him. Jamie and I would be together, I could date Archer, and we’d all travel the world. A perfectly perfect solution. Elegant, one might even say.
But the truth slipped out in a small, broken voice. “I just never expected... this.”
“What do you mean?”
The tears surfaced and escaped, burning my cheeks before I wiped them away. Nothing turned out like I wanted and needed. None of it. For ten years, nothing went right. “I thought when I found cryptids it would be positive. A huge discovery opening up a new field of study, a whole new chapter in evolutionary biology. More knowledge for the world. I thought people would come here and bring money and jobs to Chilhowee. I would find my brother and he’d be fine, not… not different. I thought it would all help. Make things better. And instead…” I covered my face and slumped. “It’s all ruined. Everything is ruined.”
Archer made a rusty sound and tugged my hand until I got up and sat on the bed next to him on his non-IV side. His arm looped around me and his chin rested on my head. Archer brushed my hair back. “It’s not ruined. It’s just different than you hoped.”
I rested my head on his shoulder even with the guilt of aggravating his injuries. Archer absently squeezed my shoulder. “Here’s the thing, Ada. I felt the same way when I first learned about this stuff. I didn’t know what the fuck happened when I was attacked, I didn’t know what happened to my sister, I didn’t understand anything. It was my good luck that a team nearby managed to save me before the wounds got infected and the virus spread.”
I shook my head and stared at the blank, taupe wall. Even though I knew he lived, I still had to save Jamie. I had to restore the supernatural balance in the park so they didn’t kill each other in a bloodbath. “I can’t turn my back on him. I won’t.”
“On Dragomir?” Disbelief dragged his tone higher. “Ada, he’s a vampire. He’s using you to help himself and punish everyone he can. I don’t know how the hell he did it, but he attacked us in low light. It isn’t possible, but he managed it. We’ve alerted headquarters and they’re sending more teams to help us deal with him. You should forget him.”
“I didn’t mean him,” I said. I couldn’t tell him everything. But something else slipped out in a whisper, Dad’s favorite saying. “Dum spiro, spero.”
While I breathe, I hope.
We sat in silence for a long time as I rested my head on his shoulder. I wished things were different with every cell in my body.
But some things would never change.