Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 11

Ryan POV

I called Cass that night and listened to her talk about the conference for forty minutes, and every word of it settled me a little more. She was presenting her cost-reduction model for neonatal monitoring equipment to a room of hospital administrators and she was furious with one of them who had spent the entire morning on his phone.

"He kept sighing," she said. "These long, theatrical sighs. Like my entire presentation was a personal inconvenience to him."

"Did you sigh back?" I asked.

A pause.

"I may have. Progressively louder ones. Until my colleague kicked me under the table."

I laughed out loud for the first time since the alley. Rhy, who had been sulking in the darkest corner of my consciousness since I'd come home, stirred slightly at the sound.

"I miss you," I said.

"I'll be home Friday. Go to sleep, peanut. You sound tired."

After we hung up I sat in the kitchen for a long time listening to the house. It was a skill I had developed as a child in the woods with Nat. Listening past the obvious sounds to what lay underneath them. The difference between wind and breath. Between rain and movement.

The street outside was quiet.

But not, Rhy noted, empty.

"I know," I told him.

"She's still out there."

"I know."

"Ryan—"

"I know," I said a third time, and went upstairs to bed.

I did not sleep well. I lay in the dark and thought about the chemical smell and the yellow eyes and the impossible pull, and I thought about my father's body in the grass and my mother turning to look at her children in the last second before impact. I thought about four weeks in the cold with Nat feeding me berries she had tasted first.

Whoever she was, whatever she was, she smelled like the thing that had taken everything from me.

I did not care about the bond. Bonds could be endured. I had endured harder things.

…

On the other side of the city, in a building that did not appear on any public map, Dr. Elias Mortem stood before a wall of screens and clasped his hands behind his back in the manner of a man who has trained himself to look calm when he is not.

He was a small man with very precise features and eyes the particular shade of grey that manages to look both colourless and intensely focused at the same time. He had come to the study of supernatural biology through what he called, in grant applications and the occasional carefully worded academic paper, an accidental discovery. In private he was more specific. He called it the best day of his life.

Twelve years ago a wounded wolf had been brought into an emergency veterinary clinic in which his sister-in-law worked as a night technician. Except it was not a wolf. Not entirely. The skeleton was wrong. The musculature was wrong. The healing rate, which she had recorded with the clinical attention of someone who did not yet understand what she was seeing, was so far outside normal parameters that she had called him instead of her supervisor.

He had driven through the night to get there.

The wolf was male. Young. He had survived injuries that should have killed him three times over and he lay on the examination table breathing steadily while Mortem stood over him and understood, with the particular clarity of a man who has just found the thing he did not know he was looking for, that nothing would ever be the same.

He did not release the wolf. He built a facility around him instead.

The female came two years later, sourced through channels that Mortem did not examine too closely and paid for with funds that appeared on no public record. She was older. Wilder. She did not survive the programme's attempts to domesticate her, but she survived long enough for what Mortem needed.

He had forced her body into readiness through chemical intervention — a process he described in his notes with the clinical detachment of a man who had decided that what he was doing was science and science had no obligation to be kind. The result, born in a sterile room on the facility's lowest level while the mother's body gave out around her, was a single pup. Female. Healthy.

He had designated her T7 in the programme records. The numbers before her had not survived infancy.

She was the first of his successes. She had grown up in the facility, knowing nothing else. She had been given language and training and directives and the particular emptiness of someone who has never been shown that anything beyond function is possible.

What followed had consumed twelve years of his life, three research facilities, and a budget that required the kind of friends in government that most scientists neither have nor want.

He had them.

The programme's next phase was simple: now that T7 had reached maturity, she would be bred with the original male. The bloodline would be strengthened. The next generation would be more controllable, more capable, more precisely engineered. Mortem had been patient. He was very good at patience.

T7 was among the finest things he had ever produced. Controlled. Capable. Reliable.

Or she had been.

"Three missed check-ins," said Captain Miles from somewhere behind him. Miles was a large man who had the bearing of military service and the pragmatism of someone who had long since made peace with the nature of the work. "That's not a technical fault. She's gone dark deliberately."

"I know what it means, Miles."

"She could be moving against us."

"T7 has no reason to move against us. She has no context for that kind of initiative." Mortem turned from the screens. "She has encountered something. A stimulus we have not accounted for. I want her located and returned before she compromises the operation or herself."

Miles nodded once.

"And the secondary target?" Miles asked. "The one in the residential area where she was last tracked."

Mortem looked back at the screen. At the residential address. At the name attached to the file he had been building for four months.

"Rogers," he said. "Ryan Rogers. Bring him in as well. Alive and unharmed. He is far too valuable to waste."

Miles left without another word.

Mortem turned back to his screens and thought, not for the first time, about the Blue River pack m******e twelve years ago. About the two children who had escaped. About the blood that ran in those children's veins. He did not know what made that blood extraordinary. He knew only that his instruments told him it was stronger than anything else he had catalogued, and that was enough. For now, that was more than enough.

He had been patient.

He was very good at patience. It was, he believed, the quality that separated serious scientists from merely clever ones. Clever people moved too fast. They saw the shape of a thing and reached for it before they had fully understood what they were reaching toward. Serious scientists waited. They mapped the terrain. They identified every variable. They moved only when the odds were so thoroughly in their favour that failure became a kind of achievement in its own right.

He had been patient with the male wolf for twelve years. Patient with the slow work of understanding what he was, what his body did, how the shift functioned at the cellular level, why the healing rate defied every model Mortem had built to explain it. Patient with the breeding programme and its early failures. Patient with T7, who had grown from a mewling thing in a sterile room into the most capable asset the Division had ever produced.

He could afford to be patient a little longer.

But patience, like everything else, had a limit.