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“So is Gregory now using science instead of magick?” Katana said.
“Yes. And he’s looking at easier methods of ‘delivery’,” Ashley said.
“Delivery?” Katana shook her head, deciding to ask about that later. “Surely then the real enemy here is Gregory. If he’s now using science in place of magick to turn people, that’s traceable right? Through DNA and stuff?”
“Bear in mind you burn all the werewolf bodies, where are they likely to get DNA from, sweetie?” Ashley said.
“The people they attack. Like the little girl who was killed up here.”
“Sure,” Ashley said, shrugging his shoulders. “But what do investigators know about DNA? They rely on their labs to give them results.”
“And?”
“And who do you think owns the labs?”
Katana widened her eyes. “No way. Are you being serious?”
“I’m sorry. What part of this isn’t serious?”
“Alright, quit the sarcasm.” Katana chewed on her lip for a moment. “I don’t think I really want to ask this, but I have to. How much of this do my parents know about?”
Ashley rolled his eyes and stared at Jacques. “Is this a normal level of intelligence for her?”
Jacques shot him a filthy glare. “No, but neither is finding out that your entire world is built on lies.”
“Hey, jackass,” Katana said, standing back up and glaring at Ashley. “I need to know exactly where I stand and what all the facts are, you know, since everything I’ve ever known is blatantly a bunch of crap.”
“Sweetie,” Ashley said, giving her a withering look. “Where do you think Gregory gets his orders from?”
“Quit calling me sweetie.” Katana stopped for a moment, allowing the penny to drop. “Why would Dad order someone to create a beast that he then has to go and hunt down, potentially risking his life? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Not ethically, no. But it’s good business sense. He needs to keep money coming in. To do that, he needs werewolves to be running rife. To keep your family on the top of their game, it needs to be an ever-changing field of expertise that the governments will never understand, because let’s face it—what’s more authentic than a family of werewolf hunters that date back over eight centuries?”
“Oh my God.” Katana sat back down and bent her knees up to her chest, resting her forehead against them. “I’m a crook. My entire family are nothing but a bunch of lying scam artists. Who else knows? Does my mum know? My brothers?”
Jacques shook his head. “Only the head of the organisation knows, but I suspect your mum knows more.”
“But there’s technically two heads of this organisation,” Katana said, remembering her dad’s twin, her uncle Arald.
“Exactly.”
“Are you telling me Arald knows?”
Jacques nodded and glanced at Ashley.
“He found out a good few years ago, like nearly a decade ago. He approached my mum for help.”
“Why did he do that? Who’s your mum?”
“Lenore is my mother,” Ashley said, his voice deadpan flat.
Katana gasped. “But her and Arald have been having an affair. That’s why Dad and Arald fell out.”
Ashley chuckled. “Arald hasn’t been having an affair with her. She’s his ancestor. That’s just icky.”
Katana’s head was whirling. “But, but Dad said...”
Jacques stepped forward, shooting Ashley a glare to silence his next sarcastic remark. “Your father twists whatever is necessary to suit himself.”
“But how is she still alive? That means she’s over eight hundred years old!”
Ashely shrugged his shoulders, then nodded. “Yes, give or take a few decades. She traded her magick for immortality.”
“Is that even possible?”
“Apparently so.”
“And she’s still fertile?” Katana motioned her hand towards him. “Because you can’t be much older than me, I know.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” he said, winking. “But yes, you’re right. I’m twenty-eight. She’s not actually my biological mother though. She adopted me after my birth parents abandoned me on her doorstep in the middle of the night.”
Katana ignored the questions she wanted to ask about his childhood, they were irrelevant to the situation. “What were you before Gregory got a hold of you?”
“Just a regular witch.”
“Now you’re a werewolf-phoenix hybrid that can’t die?”
He nodded.
The enormity of those words hit Katana square in the face. Gregory had created a hybrid species that couldn’t be killed. That was h-u-g-e. Even if only a handful ever existed at any one time, the fact they couldn’t die meant her family would be constantly in business.
“You can’t die?” she asked, trying to fish to see if he knew otherwise.
“I can’t really say I’ve attempted to take my own life too many times, but I’ve had my fair share of being trialled on by your mad scientist to say I’m ninety-nine percent certain we can’t die.”
“We?”
He nodded and frowned at her, like she wasn’t quite getting something. “You didn’t think I was the only test subject, did you?”
Katana widened her eyes. Her cheeks paled as the vastness of this conspiracy registered in her mind. “Do you know for certain there were others?”
Ashley grinned. “Of course I do. There were twelve of us phoenix hybrids, let alone all the others he’d been meddling with.”
“What?” she whispered. “He’d experimented with other hybrids?”
“Yes,” he said, chuckling. “My subject number H5A2 had a meaning—Human number five for animal experiment number two. The second animal he had been toying with was the phoenix. Hence, here I am.”
“What was the first?”
“Vampires.”
Katana almost choked. “Vampires? Are you kidding me? He took one blood-thirsty monster and merged it with another?”
Ashley just stared back at her, his face completely blank and impassive.
“Were there any other animals?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, nodding. “There were seven animals he tested.”
“SEVEN?”
He nodded.
“How many were there of each?”
“There were twelve test subjects for each.”
Katana balked and stumbled backwards as if an invisible force had slapped her in the face. “That’s over eighty experimental hybrids.” She pondered over this for a few seconds before a more disturbing reality struck her. “You said about easier delivery methods. Does that mean you...they can turn people?”
“Well, yeah. Obviously.”
At hearing his snarky tone, she turned on him in an instant. “Obviously? I’m sorry, what part of this is obvious exactly?”
He backed away from her holding his hands up in a surrender sign. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to patronise or anything.”
She gave him the evil eye before she started trying to make sense of all this. “So, let me break all of this down—just so I know I’ve got it all straight in my pretty little head.” She sneered at Ashley. “Henry Kempe did exist, and he did in fact kill a werewolf.”
Ashley nodded.
“The werewolf was created by a witch called Lenore and after the success of the first killing, she turned more men into werewolves in order to keep money coming in from the King.”
He nodded.
“The King obviously told of the arrangement to his court and then what? It’s passed from throne to throne until the government was eventually formed?”
“Pretty much.”
“To piece it all together, some sort of fantastical tale was woven and told down the line until we end up with me, here today. And at some point, Lenore faded into the background?”
Another nod.
“And then...what? Science came in where?”
“Well, if you think about it, science and magick are actually kind of very closely related. It’s just science is more to do with what you can physically see and handle in front of you, whereas magick is more about the invisible energy living around us.”
Katana gave him a cool, blank stare.
“Ok, sorry. Some of Lenore’s children carried on, keeping the werewolves alive and all, but things happened over the centuries—some of their own were attacked or murdered, so gradually the witches stopped wanting to help. With Mum immortal but dried up of magick, no witches were willing to turn people through magick, even if it meant keeping food on the table.”
“I’m still waiting for a timeline here.”
“Alright. Science replaced magick only very recently. Like in the last few months.”
“So it’s all been magick up to then?”
He nodded.
“So how has science now replaced magick?”
“Gregory created a virus. A physical illness if you like that can be passed from person to person. It’s now reality, with us hybrids, that werewolves can turn people from a bite.”
Katana frowned. “That’s always been the reality.”
Ashley shook his head. “No. I’m afraid it was all a lie. If you’re turned by magick, that doesn’t then give you the power to turn someone else. You still need a witch.”
Katana sat back down, her mind spinning. “So literally, every single werewolf until the last few months has been the result of magick? Not one of them has bitten someone and turned them?”
“Correct. When the witches started refusing to help at the beginning of the year, Gregory began turning people with injections. He had them abducted, brought to the lab, and then released after they’d been turned. But now he’s created a virus that will save all that leg work.”
“Oh my God. That’s crazy. Isn’t there someone we can talk to about Gregory? Like his parents or any siblings?”
Ashley looked at the floor. His cheeks flushed a deep shade of red. “He...Gregory is technically my brother.”
Katana froze. When she spoke, the high pitch of her voice could have shattered glass. “Say what now?”
“Well, Lenore is his mother, biologically, and I’m her son, legally, so...”
“So there’s no ‘technically’ really, is there? He’s your step-brother. Right, do I dare ask how old he is?”
Ashley mumbled something under his breath, still staring at the floor in shame.
“SPEAK UP, ASHLEY. I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”
“He’s one of the originals from Henry and Lenore. The youngest.”
Katana gasped. “So he’s immortal too?”
Ashley dared to look up at her. “No...more like living off borrowed time...”
Then the penny dropped. Really dropped. “The first werewolf, Lenore’s father, he went after a horse, not a person...when did werewolves start going after people?”
Silence.
“I’m guessing right around the time Gregory decided he wanted to live longer?”
Silence.
“Do werewolves really need the organs they take?”
More silence.
She looked at Jacques. He dared to meet her eye contact for a brief second before looking away.
“Wow. You really must have loved the lie of the life I thought I was living, Jacques, hmmm?”
He said nothing, still looking far away into the distance.
“And to think all you ever did was preach the moral high ground. You’re a hypocrite. A really bad fraud. You know that?”
He still ignored her.
Ashley attempted to step in and stood in front of Katana. “Lay off him a little. He’s got his own politics with your father that put him in a sticky situation.”
“Well, I guess you would know.”
Katana wandered off to Altair, needing a reprieve from the intensity of the situation now surrounding her. He stood on the edge of the treeline, nodding off under the full moon highlighting the scenic woodland around them.
With everything she’d ever known now suddenly in tatters around her, Katana had no clue where to turn or what to do. Everything she’d been trained on, trained for, was all just a lie—a big, money-making lie.