Luis and I growled at the screen in unison. I wanted nothing more than to have that woman’s slender, pale neck in my hands. She was experimenting on shifters, trying to create a drug that would eradicate us. The door behind us suddenly swung open. I jerked my head around to see Maddy walking in.
“How’s it going in…” Her eyes took in the video playing, and her face went pale. I leaped up and put an arm around her waist. Maddy shook me off and took a hesitant step toward the monitor. “That… that’s Gabriella’s wolf.”
I moved behind her again and helped her sit in a chair as her legs began to give way. She wasn’t fainting, but her entire body had gone soft, almost like the bones had been removed. She basically melted into the chair but kept her eyes focused on the screen.
“Something’s happening,” Luis said, nodding toward the footage.
I looked up and saw the wolf had raised its head and was now growling at the glass, taking a step toward Viola. Then, in a flash, the wolf leaped at the glass, slamming its body into the barrier over and over again. Her teeth snapped and screeched across the glass. The snarls and yelps came through the speakers but didn’t do it justice. I’d never seen a shifter in such a rage before. Then, as suddenly as the attack started, Gabriella’s wolf stopped and collapsed. My heart lurched. Was she dead? I tried turning Maddy away from the screen, but she wouldn’t budge. Before any of us could say anything, Gabriella, still unconscious, shifted back to her human form.
Viola turned and glared at the security camera, her face bright pink with anger. “What the hell was that?!” I wasn’t sure who was supposed to have been monitoring the video feed when it was live, but whoever it was, she was pissed at them. She pointed a finger at Gabriella’s motionless form. “They aren’t supposed to be able to shift back. Did you fuck up the formula?”
Viola gave Gabriella one last look, then shook her head in disgust before stomping away. “I swear to God, if those fuckers don’t figure it out soon, I’m feeding them all to a bear shifter. I swear to God I will.”
The last thing we saw before the video feed cut was Gabriella’s chest rising and falling gently, blood dripping from a cut on her forehead. Then the screen cut to black.
98
MADDY
Tears of anger blurred my vision. Nico had his arm around my shoulder to comfort me, but nothing helped. They still had Gabriella. That fucking bitch Viola. I’d walked in on Luis and Nico watching that security footage, and my wolf snarled at the sight of Viola. Everything else I witnessed only made my hatred burn hotter.
“Luis, turn it off,” Nico said after the video went black. “We can check more later.”
“No,” I hissed. “Keep going. We need to see what these sick assholes are up to.”
Nico looked like he wanted to argue, but he must have seen something in my eyes. He gestured to Luis to go to the next video. For the next two hours, we watched videos of other shifters being experimented on. Every species I’d ever heard of and some I didn’t even know existed. One man shifted into what looked like a horse, but he had some kind of allergic reaction to the poison and died.
“It keeps going,” Luis whispered. I could hear the fear and anguish in his voice. What we were watching was nothing short of torture. Illegal medical testing on shifters. It was disgusting.
We found another set of video clips of the cells they kept the shifters in. After flipping through nearly a dozen clips, we found the one showing my mother’s quarters. She’d fully reverted back to her human form, and the timestamp on the video showed it was more than a day later than the experimental injection. She seemed normal and was sitting on a cot, hugging her knees to her chest. They had her under some form of elevated observation. Multiple cameras were in the room, and she had electrodes on her body running to a machine in the corner. None of the others had anything similar.
“They don’t know why it didn’t work,” Nico said, watching the video. “They’re watching her to see if they can figure it out.”
“Is that a guess? Or do you know something we don’t?” Luis asked.
“A guess, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happening here. Why else are they recording her body diagnostics like that?”
“What’s the newest video?” I asked. “The last one that was recorded?”
“Hang on,” Luis said. “I think I saw it earlier.”
A few clicks later and a new video began playing. Luis turned the volume up for us to hear what was happening. A man in a white coat was pacing back and forth across a lab, a phone to his ear, talking animatedly.
“I’m telling you,” the man said. “There’s not enough. It’s a simple supply issue. What Viola is proposing works on paper, yes, but if I don’t have enough blood, then it’s pointless to bother. The little she brought back from Europe is almost totally gone. It’s already getting diluted. If we make any more of the formula, it’ll be like that first one—you know, the wolf lady? They’ll shift but change back again. What the fuck do you want me to do? Viola’s coming back tomorrow for another test, and I have nothing new to show her. We’ve got to source more of that blood, or this entire goddamned plan is going to fall apart.”
The man’s voice was verging on panic. It made me wonder how much terror Viola instilled in her own people. This guy was actuallypartof the royal organization, and even he sounded afraid of what Viola might do. It said a lot about her leadership style. Not surprising.
Nico ran a hand through his hair and recommended we go down for a break. “There’s nothing more we can see anyway. Maybe that software will get us deeper into their network, but we have to let it work,” he said, standing and stretching.
Luis and I agreed and followed him downstairs. We found Tiago sitting at the table, watching the news and sipping on a cup of coffee. “How did it go?” he asked.
“Which part?”
He set down the cup and cocked an eyebrow. “Well, I was talking about the whole witch teleportation to Australia thing. If something else has trumped that in the last day, then I’d love to hear about it.”
We sat with him and went over everything that had happened, filling him in on where we were. At the end, we told him about the videos and what the scientist had said in the final clip. Tiago sat in silence for several seconds before nodding toward the tv. “There hasn’t been another attack since before you all left. I think she’s out of this drug or poison or whatever. That big giant wave of them a few days ago was probably her Hail Mary to get governments around the world to institute that state of emergency. It was almost enough to tip the scales, but now she’s back to square one.”
“I think he’s right,” I said. “The attacks were happening left and right, and the whole world was ready to lock us down, thenboom.Nothing. Why would that happen unless they’d run out of whatever she’d created from my blood? We all know there isn’t a real disease.”
