Page 26 of Red Dragon’s Heart

She sounded sincere. Shit, maybe he hadn’t told her. He’d been in a pretty bad way.

His voice tight with suppressed emotion, he said, “Your purple dragon friend shot me up with one of the cute little serums you invented, back when we broke the white wolves out of Grenadier a year ago. You know, the wolves you were torturing and using as lab rats?”

“He shot you with something that made you into that… creature?” She sounded incredulous. “But… I didn’t make anything like that. I mean, I figured out the chemical process that makes them change, and was mapping the DNA…”

“Yeah. What were you trying to make, anyway? Hellhounds? Supersoldiers?” He saw her flinch at the word ‘supersoldiers’, and knew he’d hit a nerve. “Fuck. Me,” he said. “You’re all just picking up where Ragnor and Gen-X and the other shifter torturers left off, a dozen years ago, aren’t you? Why the hell can’t you leave us alone?”

She was shaking her head, looking confused. “It wasn’t like that.”

“It was exactly like that. Those wolves in the lab—some of them had been in captivity for decades. Some of their kids had never even been outside, for fuck’s sake. How the hell can you justify doing that to people?”

“But I only worked with the chemicals! Not the animals…” She broke off immediately, which was good because the rage was taking him over and he was holding a gun.

“The animals?” It came out a snarl, and she flinched. He didn’t care. “We’re all just monsters anyway, right? Not people. So what does it matter what you do to us?”

“No, no, you don’t understand. I was trying to fix it. Whatever turns you into animals—it’s a like a retrovirus, something that causes mutations in your DNA. I was trying to find a cure—”

“You think being a shifter is a disease?” Fuck.

She frowned at him, perplexed. “Isn’t it? But… Eric said…” She stopped, and then shook her head. “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered. “That lying bastard…”

She seemed genuinely confused. Zak stared at her. Could it possibly be he had this wrong, somehow? He asked, “What did he tell you?”

She sighed. “He said that shifters were created by being infected with this retrovirus, usually by another shifter, through a bite. They had to be kept in isolation, or they might infect other people.”

He stared at her. “You seriously believed that this was like some kind of Walking Dead scenario, where foaming-at-the-mouth shifters are out stalking people and trying to Turn them?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Well, yes,” she admitted. “I would have said, ‘without all the TV drama’, but considering what’s happened during the last twenty-four hours…”

He just shook his head, rolling his eyes.

She said defensively, “Eric was the head of a well-respected research group. I had no reason not to believe him.” She added, “At least, not at first.”

“And then?”

Madeleine gazed earnestly into his face. “All I ever wanted to do was help people. Heal them. That’s what we were supposed to be doing—what Eric told me we were doing. Helping the infected shapeshifters, and maybe finding out how to adapt some of their healing abilities to cure disease in regular people. But then I found out what he and his men really were… what they were really going to do—”

“Which was what?”

Her eyes grew dark and angry. “He took my research on how shapeshifting works, and altered it so that infected people could be made into—what did you call them? Supersoldiers. And he was going to sell it to some foreign warlord.”

“He was? Not you?”

She bit her lip and looked away. “I don’t expect you to believe me. No one does.”

But he was starting to, he realized. He remembered their conversation in the warehouse last night, where she’d accused Chisholm of exactly that.

And he’d responded by calling her delusional, for the cameras, and pretending there was no such thing as shifters. So who was really the liar?

She added, “That’s why I had to get the proof.”

He shook his head. “That’s what I don’t understand. What proof? All you got was video of a bunch of shifters losing their shit because you forced them to Change against their will.”

“But that’s the point,” she said. “Don’t you get it? All anyone ever sees is Eric Chisholm—company CEO, multi-millionaire, pillar of society. So when he told the police and the FBI that I stole proprietary data that could be used as a bioweapon, and I was going to sell it to a foreign government, they believed him. Just like they believed him when he said that his security team caught me, and I deliberately blew up the lab with them in it.”

“You did steal the data.”

She stared at him. “Of course I did! I couldn’t let him sell it. And I didn’t kill anyone on purpose.” She bit her lip. “I blew a hole in the lab wall to get out. I could have sworn no one was close enough to get hurt.”