Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71314 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
I pick out some bills. They’re a little bloody, but they’re still good currency.
“Here,” I say, leaving a generous tip. “Treat yourself.”
She tucks the money into her apron and nods at me. Oh, I really wish I could stay in this town. There aren’t many places in the world where you can find women who don’t ask questions when handed a wad of bloody cash. I suppose most of New York is probably that way outside my social circle of people who basically never handle cash.
I never used to handle cash. I never used to eat in diners. I never used to… well, there’s a lot of things I’ve done today I haven’t done before. There’s a lot of firsts happening. It could be overwhelming. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at self-care.
CHAPTER 10
Gray
“She did this?”
This is the second time I’ve asked this question, and this time I am even more shocked than I was the first. I made my way to the facility as fast as possible, hoping I’d be able to uncover some clues. I never imagined it would be this messy.
There are a lot of bodies. A lot.
The scene at the laboratory is grim. Aftermaths of massacres tend to come across that way. The staff are already starting to clean up, I mean cover up, but there’s certainly enough left to demonstrate that whatever happened was nasty and violent.
I am being escorted by a tall, thin man in what used to be a white lab coat. His name tag reads Doctor Moon. He’s balding on top, but he is keeping the hair at the sides of his head. He’s probably mid to late thirties, if I had to guess. He has an air of detachment that might be coolness under pressure, or might just be necessary dissociation.
“She underwent the first phases of treatment,” he says. “She was injected with a series of isolated and engineered DNA fragments that we believe are connected to the were-process. It’s believed the human body will naturally integrate them over time, and start to replicate and produce their own variants. It’s very exciting.”
It is a little exciting when he says it that way, and when I turn my gaze away from the pools of blood. Scientists have a way of making their horrors seem reasonable. That is why I resist the urge to admire their cleverness in anything other than the shallowest of ways.
“The rats did become quite violent during the testing phase,” he admits. “We should perhaps have been more careful, but she was a small, blonde female. We really didn’t think she’d do that much damage.”
“Nobody ever does,” I murmur under my breath. “Did she turn into a wolf?”
“No. We don’t expect a transformation to take place until the therapy has had thirty days to take effect. A full moon might bring the shift on sooner.”
Therapy. They have the absolute fucking nerve to call what they are doing therapy. What they are doing is chemical torture. They are trying to create something entirely unnatural. Not supernatural, just something that should not exist.
And they used my mate to do it.
Dr. Moon keeps explaining, probably more out of nerves than anything else.
“Sometimes the process can cause a little in the way of excess aggression. We’re still fine-tuning doses, but when you’re trying to replicate a natural process, there’s always an element of guess and test.”
They guessed and tested on my mate.
The slaughter makes up for that, in some respect, but not entirely. She should never have had to do this. She didn’t deserve to have to do this. She was a sweet girl when I met her. She’d never done anything wrong. All she’d done was try to understand what happened to her, what gave her the bite that scarred her. And then I started liking her, and now look what she’s done.
She’s a wild creature with wolf instincts, a human who doesn’t know what the fuck just happened to her. And now she’s somewhere out in the world, trying to survive and not knowing if I led her into the trap or not. She’ll probably hate me, if she even has the mind to know who I am.
I stalked my mate for months. I infiltrated her life. I became part of her world. This is less like stalking though, and more like hunting.
“How did she leave?”
“Took a car, I believe,” the scientist says.
He avoids saying stole, because stealing cars is something that people do, and Callie is just an escaped subject to them. They’re not angry at her in the sense someone would be angry at a murderous person. They’re treating her like a zoo might treat an escaped beast.
“Alright. I need the details of the car. And an antidote to what you did to her.”
“There’s no antidote, sir. There’s never been a cure for lycanthropy.”