“If anyone should feel bad, it’s demons. We could have forced the world to see them, but we didn’t. That’s not just because people don’t want to believe there are monsters in the dark, Petra. It’s because a lot of demons would have a very serious problem with what I’m trying to do.”
“Why?” She finally looked at him, and when their eyes met, he saw anger in the cornflower blue.
He shrugged. “Because I’m basically resurrecting the dead. That tends to upset people.”
“But they’re not dead,” she snapped, like he was arguing with her. “And it’s not like worse things haven’t been done before.”
Silas tipped his head in a nod. “Agreed. That’s why I sayfuck ’em.”
He’d hoped to see the lines between her brows relax, but they only seemed to get deeper. Petra pursed her lips and reached for the old leather book she’d left out on the armrest of the couch. It was the one he recognized from the trunk with the ridiculous gold bars in it.
Watching her crack open the book with quick, agitated movements, Silas pulled away from the door jamb. The fluttering sound of her flipping through pages filled the silence as he crossed the room to make them a couple of drinks.Gods know I need one.
He didn’t get far before instinct screamed at him to stop.
Silas froze mid-step, his head whipping toward Petra before the gasp had even left her lips.
“Ah!” She all but threw the book onto the floor as she reared back into the couch. In the span of a blink, she went sickly pale.
Silas lunged for her. “What? What’s wrong?”
Her cheeks were cold and clammy under his palms, and her lips trembled when she rasped, “We need to— I need to call Rasmus. Right now, Silas.”
What the fuck?
Before he could unleash the possessive beast that roared in his mind, Petra pointed one shaky finger at the book on the floor. “Weneedto call him. That’s— That’s…”
Confused and worried enough to give him a stomach ache, Silas released her just long enough to swoop the book off the floor. It’d fallen open, creasing the ancient spine and allowing him to turn it over to see what exactly had so rattled his mate.
His gaze fell to the yellowed page. There, scrawled in ink that had gone rusty brown over the years, was a familiar name.
Patient #43: Rasmus Jebediah Adams - wolf shifter, aged 17, infected.
Chapter Forty-Five
Silas’s face was pale,his knuckles bleached white with the force of his grip on the steering wheel. His eyelids were narrowed as he glared through the tinted windshield of his car and out into the tiny, deserted parking lot attached to the roadside diner.
All around them, sloping fields of verdant grass stretched into a sea of green. They were only about forty minutes from Silas’s home, but the change of scenery was stark.
Petra understood that this was costing him. Guilt crawled under her skin whenever she spied the sheen of sweat on the back of his neck or caught the cagey way he scanned his surroundings, like he expected someone to jump out from the drainage ditch on the side of the road and snatch her from the car.
She didn’t want to ask him to do this, but whenever she thought of that journal, it felt like a thousand tiny pins pricked her all at once.
Just about everyone knew the story of how weres came to be, but that was history. Normal people had been used as experiments in the darkest days of the Great War. They were intentionally infected with a previously deadly virus by anamoral scientist and, at least at first, sent to the battlefield to act as tireless, brutal soldiers. But weres couldn’t be controlled, and when the war eventually ended, they had nowhere to go in a world that ostracized them. Infections soared. Most of the weres she’d known, like Rasmus, ended up in the criminal underbelly of the UTA when there was nothing else for them.
While she’d known weres her whole life, it wasn’t a story she’d ever dreamed of having a connection to, let alone holding a critical piece of it in herhand.
And never in her wildest imaginings did she think that Rasmus might be one of those original experiments. Her stomach curdled at the thought.
Petra hadn’t known what she held at first. Her reaction to seeing his name on that yellowed page was visceral and immediate. Instinct screamed that it waswrong,and when she and Silas sat down to really figure out what they had, that feeling had only gotten worse.
There were conspiracy theories galore about who funded the infamous Dr. Wyeth’s research. Dozens of inquiries had been done over the years, some more politically motivated than others, but no one had ever been able to definitively say who’d done it. The name she’d heard from most weres was Queen Sigrid Seagrim, though evidence on that was, as far as Petra knew, scarce.
While she couldn’t say she was particularly well versed in were history, Petra knew for a fact that she’d never, ever heard anyone even suggest that the Temple might be involved.
That horrible pins and needles feeling rushed back, making her skin pebble. It was before her time, and she couldn’t say she was particularly good friends with Rasmus, and yet a sickly swell of guilt rose ever-higher in her stomach.
Was that what you found, Max?she couldn’t help but wonder.Did you know?
