It was mid-afternoon, the sky a menacing grey as Genna stood on the wide lawn of the Scottish estate, her whole body trembling.
Tank stood beside her, his arm around her shoulder, and when Genna had told him that perhaps they shouldn’t be quite so open about their relationship, Tank had merely shrugged. “Everyone knows we’re together by now,” he said dismissively. “They’ll have been able to smell us on each other for days. I want to be by your side.” That had been the end of the discussion, as far as Tank was concerned, and, not knowing what else to say, Genna had decided to simply go with it.
Everyone on the estate was gathered here, Sempre and her pack standing in a tight huddle, Baron’s pack meandering about in a loose clump, and the Panel and the Council standing before them all in a long line. But there were three extra people standing near the Council, one woman and two men. They stood straight and still, grim expressions on their faces and a startling array of weapons scattered about their bodies. The assassins. Genna had seen them only briefly before the hearing had begun, and hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of them since then.
“May I have your attention please,” Eleanor called loudly, and the gathered shifters fell silent. “Before we begin, we would like to ask Sempre’s pack to line up in order of rank, to facilitate proceedings.”
A wave of muttering followed, but the pack did as asked, taking less than a minute to sort themselves out. Genna stayed where she was, not really sure whether or not she was still considered a member of Sempre’s pack, but since no one said anything, she figured she was being treated separately for the moment.
“Thank you,” Eleanor said politely, once they were done. “Next, I believe Kajus and Oana have something to say.”
Kajus stepped forward, a dark scowl on his face. “I would like to formally express my disagreement with the decision of this hearing,” he said bitterly, “and to have that disagreement noted on official documents. I believe this punishment is too extreme. I will, however,” he went on, “abide by the hearing’s decision and consider the breach of the Treaty to be rectified by the action they have chosen to take.” He stepped back, and then Oana and her translator stepped forward, stating that Oana, too, disagreed with the hearing’s conclusion.
It was no surprise to Genna that not all of the Panel would agree with each other. They came from vastly different backgrounds, after all, and held widely varying beliefs and values. But Kajus’s declaration that ‘the punishment was too extreme’ was cause for concern. It was Genna’s honest expectation that either she or Sempre – or possibly both – would be put down for their crimes. What punishment had the Panel come up with that was more extreme than death? She knew that Baron and his pack held firm views against the use of torture. If that was the case, then surely the Council would never condone such an act, regardless of how serious her crimes were?
But she didn’t have any more time to ponder the possible outcomes. Linnea stepped forward, ignoring the low growl that came from Kajus as she did so. “This is the declaration of the Grey Watch Panel,” she read from a document in her hand, her voice loud and clear, “and of the Council of Il Trosa, of the decision regarding the breach of the Treaty of Erim Kai Bahn, in the five hundred and seventy-ninth year of the Treaty. We hereby find Sempre-Ul guilty of conspiring with the Noturatii against Il Trosa, and we find Genna-Ul guilty as an accessory to conspiracy.” The words were no surprise, but Genna still felt a wave of nausea hit her hard. Tank pulled her closer, his arm like a steel band around her.
But Linnea went on. “It is, however, our considered opinion that Genna-Ul cannot be primarily held responsible for her actions. She was acting under the direction of higher ranking members of her pack and without proper training or instruction by which she might understand the consequences of her own actions. As such, she will be required to attend a period of training with the Grey Watch packs in both France and Germany, in order to ensure she has a proper understanding of the Treaty and for the purpose of teaching her to use her unique abilities in a constructive manner. She will also be demoted to the rank of omega, whether she decides to stay with a Grey Watch pack or defect to Il Trosa, and she will hold that rank for a full two years. She is also disqualified from ever holding the rank of alpha. Aside from that, is it evident that since joining Sempre’s pack, she has already suffered significant hardship, both physically and mentally, and on that basis, no further punitive action shall be taken against her.”
Linnea paused, and there was a moment of silence as everyone digested the news. After getting over the shock that she was to be allowed to live, the rest of the sentence wasn’t a great surprise. It was actually quite similar to what had happened to Mark after he’d been accused of treason, Tank having told her a little about that episode over the past few weeks. But...
“When Mark was sentenced, he got branded as well,” Genna muttered to Tank, confused, though she certainly wasn’t going to volunteer for the painful procedure.
“You’re still officially a member of the Grey Watch,” Tank pointed out softly. “Branding is something only Il Trosa does.”
Genna felt a trickle of relief at the news. Being omega for two years was going to be unpleasant, but all things considered, it was still better than the best possible outcome she could have imagined. But what had Kajus meant about the punishment being too extreme, then?
“With regards to Sempre-Ul,” Linnea went on a moment later, “as alpha of the pack, she can be given no such excuse. We hereby sentence Sempre-UI to death by gunshot. Il Trosa has provided trained assassins to ensure her death is fast and painless.”
“You brainless bloody mongrels,” Sempre snarled, and Genna supposed there was little need to adhere to protocol when you’d just been handed a death sentence. “I never had anything to do with that god-forsaken meeting, and if none of you can see that, I dread to think what the future of our species is going to look like with you idiots at the helm.”
The three assassins responded swiftly, hands on their weapons, each of them moving forward, prepared to either defend the Council, or apprehend Sempre, should she attempt to escape.
Not that she had anywhere to go.
But it seemed Linnea wasn’t done yet. “However,” she continued, once it was clear Sempre was not about to make any further disruptions, “an alpha does not act alone, but rather through the support and enablement of her pack. Peace and the restoration of the Treaty cannot be brought about only by punishing those responsible, but also by providing a sufficient deterrent that such a breach should not happen again.” She lifted her eyes to look sternly and seriously at Sempre’s pack. “The future of our entire species has been put at risk, in a time when we are already at a disadvantage against the Noturatii and struggling to hold our own against the encroachment of both humanity and technology. You have all spoken frankly about your objections to Sempre’s rule, and yet none of you have done anything to oppose her. Her rise to power and her actions in this matter have been enabled by your own inaction. Therefore, it is the decision of this hearing that the highest ranking third of your pack shall be put down, as bearing the responsibility for supporting Sempre in her position as alpha. The remainder of the pack shall be disbanded and reassigned to other packs of the Grey Watch.”
Stunned silence followed. “You can’t do that,” a solitary voice cried out, dismayed and uncertain. A wave of muttering rose, and from the comments around her, it seemed that even Baron’s pack were shocked by the decision.
“Can they really do that?” Genna asked Tank.
“They can,” he said grimly.
“That’s not fair!”
“Fairness and peace have little to do with each other at the moment.”
The assassins were already moving, and it was finally apparent why Sempre’s pack had been asked to line up in order of rank.
Luna’s heart was in her throat as she saw the assassin woman striding directly towards her. She glanced up and down the row, frantically trying to calculate where she stood. Was she in the top third? How were they counting the pack’s numbers? Were they still including the three males? What about Genna? Was she-?
“Over to your right,” the assassin ordered her, and Luna felt a stab of relief as she realised she was on the lower side of the split they had just created; she was going to be allowed to live. But the woman standing right next to her was directed to the left. How was it that she was somehow responsible for Sempre’s actions, when Luna wasn’t? How was that fair? How could they possibly do this?
Glancing up the line, Luna saw the horrified faces of long-time comrades shepherded away for the slaughter. Rift and Anya, Luna’s closest friends, both ranked lower than her, so they were safe, but then she saw Lucia, third in rank in the pack, standing so still she might have been a statue. Lucia closed her eyes, an expression of such abject failure on her face that Luna knew she couldn’t just stand there and let this travesty occur. She and Lucia had exchanged only a handful of words since last night, when Lucia had displayed such brazen support of Luna’s rebellion, but by Luna’s reckoning, she was honest and well-intentioned, and by virtue of her rank, she could well be argued to have come far closer to her goal of overthrowing Sempre than Luna had.
“Wait!” Luna shouted, rushing forward. “What if we had another solution?” She came to a sudden stop as one of the assassins forcibly got in her way, preventing her from getting any closer to the Panel. “You’re right, Sempre’s leadership has taken the pack down a dark path. But what if we installed a new alpha? New ideas, new morals, no more abusing the magic, respect for the males? A completely new way of doing things?”
“And you suddenly want to do this now, after twenty years of standing behind Sempre?” Eleanor asked. “It sounds far more like an attempt to save your own hide than a sound strategy for change.”
“I don’t need to save my own hide,” Luna shouted back, infuriated by the woman’s blindness. “My head isn’t on the chopping block in the first place! But you’re about to kill innocent people who had nothing to do with this!”
“But the point remains that you have made no effort to change your alpha until your lives were at stake,” Linnea pointed out, logic unfortunately on her side.
“We’ve tried!” Lucia shouted, watching the argument from a short distance away. “Two high ranking wolves tried to kill Sempre, one five years ago, the other about two years before that. Both of them should have succeeded, but they both ended up dead. Their bodies were found abandoned in the forest to be food for wild animals. There are rumours that Sempre cannot be killed, and for as long as that witch, Lita, stood by her side, no one else was game to try.”
Eleanor snorted in derision. “You’re saying she’s somehow figured out how to make herself immortal?”
“No, you half-wit,” Lucia snapped, respect and protocol be damned. “I’m saying she knows things about the magic that make my skin crawl. We all saw what it did to Lita, so you’ll have to forgive me if I wasn’t quite brave enough to face a fate like hers.”
Even the Panel was growing restless now, muttered conversations breaking out among them, people milling about in agitation. “The hearing has made a decision,” Linnea insisted, over the chaos. “And that decision stands.”
Luna turned on Sempre then, who was standing back, watching the whole debacle with open amusement. “You have nothing to say?” she demanded. “You would rather let a third of your pack die than put your hand up and say you’ve made a mistake?”
Sempre had the audacity to laugh. “Like you’ve said, Luna, your head isn’t on the chopping block today. And after that display last night over dinner, it’s perfectly obvious that you’re one of the ones champing at the bit to overthrow me. But for all your high ideals, I don’t see you putting your own life on the line for the benefit of your pack.”
“Fine,” Luna said, making a split-second decision. She spun around to face Linnea. “I offer to trade my life for Lucia’s. She’s an honest wolf and a strong leader, and the pack would be better off with her alive.”
Lucia’s jaw dropped, shock written all over her face. Even Linnea seemed at a loss for words, Luna feeling a wave of triumph as it seemed she had finally managed to crack the woman’s heartless exterior.
“Um, I don’t…” She turned to look at the other Panel members around her. “Is that allowed?”
“What do I care?” Sempre announced, stepping forward and throwing her arms wide in a brazen display of carelessness. “Shoot me if you like,” she said to the nearest assassin. “Whether or not these squabbling pups ever make a decision, it seems I’m still destined for the next world.”
Melissa wandered into the science lab where Dr Evans was working, trying to look casual about it. She’d taken a gamble continuing to fund this project when the money was sorely needed elsewhere, but letting Evans know that her work had been favoured over other people’s would only make the woman more insufferable. Aside from the routine antagonism between the two of them, Melissa has also discovered that she felt a sharp jealously whenever she was around Evans. While she was deeply honoured to have been promoted to Chief of Operations, she was finding she missed the quiet, methodical days in the lab, the slow taking apart of the universe to see how it worked, and resented Evans for the role she still played in the Noturatii’s discoveries.
Of course, that implied she would eventually actually discover something.
But when Melissa stepped through the door, her casual air vanished. The experimentation table was in pieces, electrodes scattered, a faint, burning scent in the air. The main electrical cord was lying on the table, bare wires sticking out of its frayed end.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked, her voice just a fraction softer than what could truly be called a shriek.
Evans looked up, while two of her underlings simply ignored Melissa and continued fiddling with wires on various parts of the equipment. “A minor setback,” Evans reported, not looking at all upset. “We just ramped up the voltage a bit too high. Blew out half the electrodes. Nothing’s damaged permanently,” she added, looking a touch apprehensive as she watched Melissa’s reaction. “We just need to replace the damaged parts and we’ll be back to it.”
Melissa glanced around the room, startled to see that the shifter was currently curled up in the corner in human form; he’d taken a dislike to staying in his wolf form after they’d shaved his fur off. “What’s he doing here?” She inadvertently took a step back. Cowed and drugged or not, these beasts were dangerous.
“Don’t worry, he’s chained up,” Evans said, again with that disinterested calm. It made Melissa feel like a silly child who was overreacting to everything. “It was quicker to just stick him in the corner for a while rather than having security drag him all the way back and forth to the cages. He’s sedated for the moment.”
Melissa peered at the shifter, torn between fascination and fear. As a general rule, she didn’t like to get too close to them, vermin that they were, but there was also a niggling curiosity in her mind about them. Her own brother, the brother she had grown up with, the brother she had trusted more than anyone else and whom she had grieved for after his supposed ‘death’, had become one of these creatures. No one could really explain how the shifters changed their bodies so completely, science currently still giving way to mythology on that score, but she rather imagined it was like having an alien parasite living inside you. Disgusting, and untrustworthy, and the sort of thing that should only exist in science fiction movies. The shifter looked like an ordinary man, albeit a battered and bruised one, with nothing apparently remarkable about him when compared to the average human.
No, wait… that wasn’t entirely true. As she watched him, his brown eyes flared with a touch of gold, and Melissa made a mental note of that. Identifying the shifters out of the normal human population had always been difficult. Perhaps the eyes were the key? Could they scan wavelengths of light from the iris? Was there a structural difference that allowed them to change colour? It was a worthy question to be explored another day.
“Have you had any success with the tests?” she asked Evans, keeping her tone light. “Before you blew up the table, I mean.”
Evans chuckled, apparently taking Melissa’s irritation as wry humour. “Not yet,” she replied, her head bent down to peer into the guts of the table. “There’s an almost infinite number of possible variations; the voltages, the frequency of the pulses, the positions of the electrodes on the body. I have a theory on that, though,” she went on, not really paying attention to Melissa. “When he shifts, the transformation begins at the neck, then spreads both down the limbs and up over the head. So whatever initiates the electrical signal must reside somewhere in his neck. We’ve never been able to find any physical structures that are any different from humans, but maybe the nerves simply work differently…”
As she prattled on, Melissa glanced around the room, wondering just how much damage had been done here. Was this the result of carelessness, or of an inquiring mind pushing the boundaries? The frayed electrical cord was still sitting on the table, and she idly reached over to pick it up, wondering how badly it was-
“Don’t touch that!” Melissa jumped back, too startled to even object to the sharp tone Evans had taken with her. “It’s live,” Evans said quickly, breathing a sigh of relief as she saw Melissa was out of harm’s way. “When we blew the electrodes, some of the wires burned out. Collins was testing them to see which ones needed patching.” She nodded to one of the technicians, who lent her a weak smile from where he was now soldering something on a nearby bench. “Sorry, we weren’t expecting anyone else to come in here.”
Melissa recovered from the shock smoothly – she was getting rather good at that, she thought, having survived not one, but two attacks by the shifters. A near-electrocution was a trifling thing to worry about in comparison. “How long will it be until you’re up and running again?”
Evans shrugged. “An hour. That’s before we can use the table again, but if we want to try out some of the higher settings, we’ll need to redesign the full array, or it’s just going to fry the wiring again. That could take anything up to a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks!” Melissa shrieked, abandoning her efforts to play it cool and calm. “Weeks more until we have anything like a solid result from this colossal mess?” She flung her arm out to encompass the entire lab. “You’ve been studying this one simple problem for months, and you have nothing to show for it!”
In a fit of pique, Melissa snatched up the live wire from the table. Damned scientists! Damned experiments! And the god-forsaken damned shifters! She hated the lot of them! Without a second thought, she spun around and jammed the live end of the wires into the back of the shifter’s neck. Evans thought the neck was the key to the shift? Well, why not see if they could prove it, then? An instant later, Melissa realised there was a good chance she could actually kill him, but in all honesty, she didn’t care. The world would be a better place with a few more of these vermin dead!
The man’s body convulsed as the electricity shot through him, then, with a rough jolt, the human huddled at her feet disappeared, to be replaced with a naked and ridiculous looking canine, who screamed and darted away from her, as far as the chain around his neck would allow.
It took a moment to sink in, Melissa’s eyes dropping to stare at the bundle of wires in her hand in astonishment, and then her jaw dropped as she realised what she’d just done.
“What the hell was that?” Evans’ rough exclamation dragged Melissa’s attention away from the wolf, and she looked as shocked as Melissa felt. “How did you…? I don’t…. What did…? How did that happen?” And then Evans brightened. “And more to the point, can we do it again?” She lifted a hand, reaching for the computer-
“Don’t touch that!” Melissa screeched, stopping Evans in her tracks, her hand hovering only an inch above the keyboard.
“What?”
“Don’t touch a thing,” Melissa snapped again, dropping the cable and dashing over to the desk. “Is this thing switched on?” The screen showed its usual array of readouts.
“Yes, of course,” Evans said, looking confused. “What-?”
“Record everything,” Melissa snapped at her. “The voltage, the number of wires that were active, where on his body I zapped him. Right down to the ambient temperature of the fucking room. Everything.”
Evans looked around dumbly. She glanced at the other scientists, then at the computer, and then eventually reached for a simple notepad and pen. “Um… right. On it. Guys? Let’s get this all written down.”