“Your lawyer was more than happy to cooperate with us when we subpoenaed your records.”
“On what grounds was the subpoena served?”
“We were concerned about your research on the grounds of homeland security. A rogue scientist in a mountaintop laboratory might be making things we would rather not have fall into the hands of our enemies.”
“How did you find out in the first place?”
Ron’s guilty look told me all I needed to know. “They promised me a cure, Joanie,” he mumbled, his eyes still down. “They promised me if I cooperated, I would get my old life back.”
“Just couldn’t wait, could you?”
He flexed his fingers. “I need to be back in Little Rock, back at my fellowship.”
“And back within dating distance of your professor’s daughter.”
“What we’re interested in most is something Ron saw last night,” Marius, obviously ignoring us, continued. “He said he saw a shadowy wolf, something solid in its mouth, slip without a sound through the woods, fend off an attack from a material wolf, and then disappear when attacked again.” He raised one bushy eyebrow. “Would you know anything about that?”
I had been so intent on my goal I hadn’t noticed I was being followed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Are you sure, spirit-walker?”
“You had bugs in the lab. You knew what was going on.” I clenched my fists, and the truck lurched over a pothole or rock of some sort.
“Sorry,” Sheriff Knowles called out. “That one snuck up on me.”
Marius ignored him. “We’ve been keeping an eye on Hippocrates-Cabal. We wouldn’t have let them contaminate the bird flu supply, of course.”
“We want you to continue your research. We think it has intriguing possibilities.”
“We’re scientists, Agent Marius,” said my grandfather. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“Fine, then.” Marius made the disagreeable sound again. “As you know, our military is stretched thin right now, and our enemies numerous.”
“Right.”
“We need better, stealthier, ways of quelling insurgency so we can get our soldiers out faster. Then we need the money to bankroll the operations.”
“You want to be the ones to make the ‘cure’ for CLS,” I said. “You let Hippocrates create the problem, and you’ll be the one to fix it. At premium cost.”
“And you want to turn your soldiers into werewolves,” my grandfather said, more steel in his tone. “You want to take all those young men and women and condemn them to a life I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Do you have a plan for what to do with them when they return?”
“We cure them.” Marius spread his hands as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“But there isn’t a cure.”
“That’s what we need you to find before we can put the program into effect. It’s a risk we’re willing to take. We’ll take care of them in the future if necessary.”
My grandfather leaned back. “You have my notes. You have my granddaughter’s documentation from her research so you can see who to experiment on. Why do you need us?”
“Because you’re the only ones who have made it this far, and for someone to try to replicate and fully understand your work, even for someone like Iain McPherson, would take far too long. This is an urgent situation, Doctors. We don’t have that kind of time.”
I heard gravel under the tires. We had reached the driveway to Wolfsbane Manor.
“You have a decision to make, Doctors. Will you help us with this?”
“What if we don’t?”
“Then you will be treated as rogue scientists, and we will not hesitate to lock you away for the rest of your life. Prison is hard on terrorists.”
My grandfather seemed to deflate in his seat. “It appears as though the decision has been made for us.”
They dropped us off at the front door and drove away.
“Why did you agree?” I asked as we walked inside. ”I would have gone to jail to keep them from hurting any more people. This is not how I remembered you.”
He shook his head. “Because they might just try the transformation anyway, without a cure. The dosing of aconite is such a delicate process they would likely kill many innocent people before they succeeded in their aims. At least this way, we’d have control over the process.”
I looked at him in disbelief. He had always told me scientific integrity was the most important defense we had against the pressures of government. But he seemed too weary for me to argue.
We trudged up the stairs. The noises of the other inhabitants of the house were comforting, albeit sharper than they had been before my transformation. I heard Lonna in her room, packing. With the mystery of the disappearing children solved, I guessed she would be heading back to Little Rock, although I didn’t know how she would manage to live with her new CLS.
“Go talk to her,” my grandfather said. He had always managed to read my mind—or at least my face. “She told us in the cave things had been…tense…between you two since she arrived. Something about her not learning from your mistakes.”
“You could say that.”
“I think she learned her lesson. And you learned yours.”
“Mine?” But I knew what he meant.
Lonna’s suitcase lay open on the bed. She had already folded everything into it.
“Hey,” I said. She looked up, her liquid topaz eyes full of emotion.
“Joanie, I should’ve listened to you,” she started, but I held up my hand.
“It’s all in the past.”
She bit her lip and took a deep breath. “I need to tell you what happened. With me and Peter. You need to know.”
The conversation about the spell he had put on her came back to me. “Okay.” I sat on the bed. “I’m listening.”
She told me how she’d gone to interview him at his request, and he’d made her agree to have lunch with him as the price of his silence as to who she really was.
“He was really nice, you know. He told me how impressed he’d been with my work. But then things got weird.”
He had leaned across the desk and taken her hand, turning it palm up. “You have an interesting story on your palm, Ms. Marconi,” he said. “It says you’re in for some big changes.” Then he brought it to his lips and kissed it.
“God, Joanie, I felt it all the way down to my toes. It was the most sensual kiss I’d had in my life—on my hand.” So sensual, in fact, she experienced an orgasm right there in his office. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, and when she’d washed her hands, she noticed the hand he kissed had a small cut on it as though it had been grazed by one of his teeth.
“And then we went to lunch, and then back to his office, and then…” She put her hands to her face.
“It’s not your fault. You were seduced,” I assured her. “He saw you were attracted to him.”
But my mind raced. Peter wasn’t a werewolf, of that I was sure. I would have been able to tell in my spirit- walker form. So how could his bite have triggered the effect? But what if it wasn’t just the bite? What if it had been the bite and the spell reinforced by all the sexual energy between them? What if he had been telling me the truth, and he had some attenuated form that looked more like a traditional impulse-control disorder? His son, who had inherited his genes, had been able to see me.
My mind had been slammed by the possibility of werewolves, but now it seemed there might be some sort of rogue wizard or shaman, with enough of the genetic predisposition toward lycanthropy to inflict it on others.
“But all that is neither here nor there,” she said. “Now we both have this problem.”
“We’ll get through it. And my grandfather and I will find a cure.”
