Dr. Talbot sighed. “I can see that you’ve changed since we knew one another last. Appealing to your sense of responsibility is obviously not going to work outright. Very well.” He opened up the folder and paged through the papers inside. “Here.” He pulled out a glossy photo and held it up so that she could see it.
She refused to lean forward, or squint, or show any interest. But she couldn’t help but register the grisly scene that he’d offered. Rocky, sandy soil; a distant mountain range; the corner of a modest brown house. And people. A half dozen laid out across the ground like stepping stones; outstretched legs, reaching arms, necks snapped back. And they looked like they’d been…chewed. Pulpy, messy wounds. Clumps of gore strewn across the hard-packed dirt.
“Afghanistan,” Dr. Talbot explained. “Up in the mountains. One man wiped out an entire village. He feasted on them. And he wasn’t a man at all anymore; he was a corrupted thing.” He took a breath, and afterward, he looked tired. Old. “Five hundred years ago, a very brave prince marched, in secret, deep into the heart of the retreating Ottoman Empire, across deserts and through villages where the locals had never seen an outsider, and didn’t care whose empire they were a part of. He found a secret, safe underground place, and he buried his uncle there – along with all of his uncle’s germ warfare.
“There are so many idiot, spiteful little terror cells that have cropped up in the wake of Usama bin Laden’s death, and one of those groups, searching for religious relics to sell, found something very, very different. A pre-biblical plague has been loosed upon the world; it’s what did this.” He rattled the picture. “It’s a threat we’ve known could come, that we’ve been preparing for for a very long time. It’s why you and the others like you were created.
“There hasn’t been a full-scale outbreak yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Eventually, someone will wake the uncle, and then. Well.” He shrugged. “No one wants to see that happen.”
Red kicked her chin up. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
But she’d seen the photo. Oh, God, she’d seen it.
“Of course not,” he said with a sigh. “But maybe you’ll believe the prince.” He turned toward the door. “Vlad?”
A slight pause, and then the door opened, and Red wished for the cuffs to be gone all over again.
The man who entered reminded her, in a vague sense, of Fulk. Long dark hair and sharp features…but this man was broader, more heavily muscled. And the wide plane of his forehead, the slant of his cheekbones spoke of a culture farther east than Fulk’s crisp Britishness. And there was such overt threat coiled within this man’s body, a sense of other, a hard edge.
He eased the door carefully shut and moved to stand beside Dr. Talbot’s chair, gaze trained on Red.
“This is the one?” he said. Heavy accent, something she didn’t recognize.
“Yes,” Dr. Talbot said. “This is…Ruby.” He stumbled over the name; she’d only ever been “dear” before, when she’d been a serial number and not a human.
The man – Vlad – stared at her without expression. “She’s young. And small.”
“Yes, well, you know as well as I do that a mage’s power isn’t rooted in the physical. She’s quite strong, I can tell you.”
Red curled her hands into fists; her knuckles went white.
Vlad squatted down in front of her, so they were on eye level. His gaze moved across her face like a physical touch; she felt it against each freckle. “You look like your mother.”
“I don’t have a mother.”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “You are angry. That’s good. I can use that.”
She pressed her lips together to keep from baring her teeth at him.
He seemed to know it. He smiled, and his canines were long and sharp. He stood and turned to Dr. Talbot. “I want to see how she gets on with the boy. Sasha.”
“Very good. We’ll set up a supervised meeting between them.”
Vlad cast a look back at her over his shoulder. “You should have told her what she was, doctor,” he said, tone gently scolding. “From the beginning. What we all are. And what we’re up against.”
A note of unease in Dr. Talbot’s voice: “Of course.”
*
Annabel thought Fulk was intended to be Vlad’s wolf Familiar.
Annabel was wrong.
Sasha realized that the moment his escort led him into a white, brightly-lit room and he saw the redheaded girl standing in the far corner, wrists cuffed together with a short piece of chain the same way his were.
She stank of fire. The mage girl.
He growled before he could stop himself, a gentle rumble that prompted the guard behind him to nudge him with the end of his baton. “Hey, none of that.”
Fulk entered, his presence like a soothing hand down the back of Sasha’s ruffled neck. “Let’s all be civil,” he said, cool gaze directed toward the guard. “That will be all, private. I have them firmly in hand.”
The guard muttered “creepy fucker” under his breath and quit the room. The door closed behind him with a resounding thump.
Fulk held both hands clasped loosely behind his back; against the clean white backdrop of the room, his black-clad legs looked especially long. He’d left off his red jacket and wore a sleeveless Def Leppard shirt. He could have looked like a degenerate; he looked instead like the baron he was. It was all in the carriage, the lofty angle of his head.
He looked first at the girl, and then at Sasha. Cameras, he mouthed, and Sasha darted a glance up into the corner and spotted one, wrapped in black shatterproof glass.
Sasha nodded.
Fulk turned back to the girl. “I have to apologize on Sasha’s behalf. He doesn’t care for mages. Had a rather bad experience with one, so, it’s understandable. But he’s actually quite pathetically friendly when you get to know him.”
Sasha growled, but it wasn’t especially threatening. A token protest.
The girl’s head lifted; she leaned to the side a fraction to see around Fulk, to send her startled gaze Sasha’s way. She had very green eyes. Save the smell, she reminded him nothing of Philippe, so that was at least one point in her favor.
“Well, you are,” Fulk said mildly. To the girl, softer, almost kind: “I trust someone’s explained to you about Familiars?”
Her gaze moved back to him, inscrutable, and she finally said, “Yes.”
“Good, then we can skip that part.” He began a slow, dignified pace, back and forth across the room. “The two of you have the honor of having been chosen by Vlad to be his left and right hands,” he said, as if reading from an official announcement. Words he’d been told to say, Sasha knew; he could scent the other wolf’s disgust with the whole business. “As such, it’s important that the two of you learn how to work together.” He paused, glancing between the two of them. “And that you not kill one another.”
Then he just stood there.
Sasha shifted forward a cautious step, the chain between his cuffs chiming against itself. “It’s true, I don’t like mages,” he said, stiff and formal.
The girl watched him, outwardly calm. But Sasha could smell her fear; sense the fluttering of her pulse, rabbit-fast.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” he asked.
No hesitation: “Yes.”
“Have you ever killed one of your friends?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s something,” Fulk said.
Sasha took a deep breath…and it got caught halfway to his lungs. He’d been able to shore up his panic and push himself through the days here. The conversations with the doctors, all the blood samples, and the tests. Earlier, they’d put him on a treadmill with a dozen monitors taped to his chest and had him run until his legs gave out. It had been uncomfortable, yes…but suddenly it was all unbearable. Pressing down on him. Annabel had said the others were coming, but were they? And here he’d been cooperating. And was about to be made Vlad the Impaler’s Familiar, and he couldn’t…
“Sasha.” Fulk stood over him.
Oh. He’d sat down on the floor, somehow. Or maybe his knees had buckled. Sasha tipped his head back and looked up at the other wolf.
Fulk snapped his fingers. “Sasha, get up.”
His breath sawed in and out of his lungs as if he’d just staggered off the treadmill. “I can’t – I just…but Nik…”