Dagrun walked over. “Axlam?” She touched her friend’s arm and looked at the screen. “Can it be?”
“What did you find?” Ed also looked over Axlam’s shoulder. “That’s him, alright.”
They must have found a photo.
“Bastien-Laurent St. Martin,” Ed said. “He’s the CEO?”
We had a pharmaceutical CEO menacing Alfheim like some second-tier trickster spirit?
“He’s dead, Axlam,” Dagrun said.
Ed pointed at the screen. “Wait. This guy’s dead? Great.” He stepped away and paced next to the women.
Was St. Martin like me? “I’m confused.” I seemed to be confused a lot this week. Was someone else re-building people? He did own a pharmaceutical company. “Did you find something that will help us contain whatever magic he’s using?” Was this all coming back, yet again, to my father?
Axlam shook her head. “Standing up to him just now was the dumbest thing I have ever done in my entire life.”
Ed stopped pacing. “No. You did the right thing.”
“I didn’t have a choice.” Fear crept into her shimmer, and her face. “He was going to hurt you, Ed.”
Ed looked at me as if annoyed he’d needed to be saved by a werewolf.
She looked up at the sky. “St. Martin is bad, bad magic.”
“Axlam?” I took my phone from her hand. And there he was, our interloper, grinning up at me like the entitled idiot he was.
I minimized the page and put his name into Wikipedia.
“He’s not going to back off,” Axlam said. Terror flashed across her face. Real, undeniable, traumatic terror as if that one phrase pulled up the absolute worst moment of her life.
I knew what that terror meant. I’d seen the exact same fear flash across Mark Ellis’s face, and across the faces of other members of the pack.
This wasn’t about rage. Bastien-Laurent St. Martin had somehow been involved in Axlam’s turning. And that’s also why St. Martin had felt “familiar.”
“Dagrun,” Ed said. He wanted answers as much as I did.
Our Queen shook her head as if to tell Ed to wait.
I scanned down through St. Martin’s bio. He was born in the late eighties into a wealthy family of French doctors, and started Mednidyne less than a decade ago after coming up with some miraculous drug for a disease I’d never heard of. There’d been a story a few years back about a proprietary major medical breakthrough. I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention at the time, but I did remember the hoopla about the discovery, and their young genius of a founder. His past was mostly unremarkable, except…
“His father was murdered in a refugee camp in Kenya?” I said. The same year Axlam had come to us.
She hugged herself. “He was attacking kids,” she said. “He’d already killed at least twenty-seven when he went after my sister.”
Ed’s mouth rounded.
“I couldn’t let him take her. I couldn’t.” Axlam looked up at the sky. “He still managed to turn me before I stopped him forever.”
Chapter 18
Bastien-Laurent St. Martin was the mundane son of the werewolf who had turned Axlam Geroux—a pathetic son who had found himself some sort of revenge magic.
In my two hundred years in Alfheim, I’d learned the stories of only a handful of wolves, and mostly in the vague, scene-setting terms given by Gerard and Remy when they left to pick up a new wolf. Things like “ambushed in Texas,” or “the plane went down and a rogue wolf found the survivors,” or with Axlam, “there was a werewolf operating in the refugee camp.” That’s all I knew, all anyone other than the people who went to gather her knew, and that was fine.
I would never ask. I would never pry. I had the pain of my own creation and I knew damned well that some things cannot be tossed around like a tale told at a party.
Axlam said nothing else, only stared at Dag’s hand on her own. We all stayed silent. We all understood that such things were too personal—and traumatic—for most wolves to discuss.
She’d been young at the time—a teenager—and with her younger sister, who now lived in Minneapolis. She’d taken down an older, presumably stronger, werewolf in a Kenyan refugee camp before the Alfheim alphas and their accompanying elves showed up to help.
We were dealing with a vengeful mundane who might or might not understand that he was being used—and who, it appeared, was fixated on Axlam.
St. Martin probably didn’t care if he understood what he wielded—or what wielded him.
“He thinks he’s doing the right thing,” Axlam said. “He thinks…” She inhaled and looked up at the sky, then closed her eyes and shook her head.
I knew what she was thinking. I’d met many mundane men like St. Martin. We all had. He even reminded me of my younger self—angry at my father, unable to regulate my emotions, targeting others who were easy to target because learning how to deal with those in power took effort and the last thing an angry young man who thinks he’s entitled to revenge wants to do is to think things through.
Except I’d never hurt anyone. My father did that for me, then laid the blame at my feet.
From the look on Ed’s face, he was thinking the exact same thing I was. “He’ll get reckless,” he said. “They always do when they get mad.”
“That concealed camera,” Axlam said, “it was along our run route.” She motioned to the Admin Building. “He’s going to come at us while we run.” She sniffed. “While we’re under a Samhain moon, when our wolves are strongest. When we are most likely to allow the rage of the wolf to surface.”
“The pack will be safe,” Dag said, in a way that suggested she found the whole idea of the elves not doing their job under the Samhain moon to be a great personal affront.
Ed ignored her tone and peered into the Tesla. “He said he was going to make us pay.” He shined a flashlight into the interior. “That’s a terroristic threat from an
