Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 16

Ryan POV

I told Cass everything on Saturday morning.

Not just the alley and T7 and Miles and the broken wall, though we started there. All of it. The pack. The smell. The years of Aunt Joan's careful, deliberately incomplete answers. The files I had found after Joan visited us when I was seventeen and looked up the Blue River pack m******e in newspaper archives and found almost nothing, which had told me more than finding something would have.

Cass listened the way she always listened. Without interrupting. Without assembling her response while I was still speaking. Her tea went cold again and she did not notice.

When I finished she was quiet for a long moment.

Then she said, "We're going to Nat."

"Cass—"

"No. Ryan. Listen to me. You have a secret government organisation that has already sent people to our home, a facility you cannot locate, and a historical crime involving your family. Nat is a research scientist with a university laboratory and a very alarming number of academic contacts. We are going to Nat."

She stood up and started making a list.

I watched her for a moment. She was already three items in, writing with the particular focused speed of someone who processes emotion by converting it immediately into action. This was one of the things I loved most about her. Cass did not fall apart. She reorganised.

She had been given a great deal to reorganise this morning. The full weight of our past. The wolves that killed my family. The government programme that used them. T7, who had sat on our couch and told me the truth at two in the morning and then folded a blanket and disappeared into the dawn. All of it, laid out on the kitchen table over cold cups of tea while the Saturday morning light came in through the window.

She had sat with all of it without flinching. She had asked three precise questions. And then she had made her decision in the way Cass always made decisions — completely and without looking back.

"I love you," I said.

She looked up from the list. Her expression was complicated in the way it got when something had moved her and she had decided that now was not the time for it to show.

"I know. Pack a bag. And don't argue with me about coming. I am not staying here alone while you go be heroic."

"I wasn't going to argue."

She gave me a look.

"I was maybe going to gently suggest—"

"Pack a bag, Ryan."

I packed a bag.

…

Nat had been at her university research lab when we arrived, which she usually was on weekends because, as she put it, academic discoveries did not observe the weekend and neither did she. This was the same logic that had driven three postgraduate supervisors to mild exhaustion and produced two published papers before she was twenty-five.

She opened the lab door, looked at my face, looked at Cass's face, and stood back to let us in without asking a single question.

Nat had always been able to read me. It was the wolf thing, but it was also just the sister thing, the particular attunement that comes from being the only two people in the world who share a specific grief. She knew when something was wrong with me before I had finished deciding to say so.

She locked the door behind us.

"Tell me," she said.

I told her. Cass added the parts I glossed over too quickly, which Cass always did because she paid attention to different things than I did and between the two of us we usually managed to give a complete picture.

Nat sat on the edge of her desk and listened with her arms crossed and her expression getting progressively more still as I spoke. Nat getting still was the opposite of Nat getting calm. It was Nat getting focused. It was the look she got before she pulled apart a research problem with the particular controlled aggression of someone who finds incompleteness offensive.

When I finished she uncrossed her arms and turned to her main monitor.

"The chemical compound in the scent," she said. "Describe it to me again."

I described it. She typed. She pulled up three databases and cross-referenced something and typed more and pulled up a fourth database that required a login she produced from memory.

"A synthetic pheromone suppressor," she said after several minutes. "Combined with something else, something newer. I have seen a partial signature like this in a paper published two years ago about experimental immune system modulation in canines. The paper was authored by a research team at a private facility. The facility is not named. The corresponding author is listed as E. Mortem, PhD."

She turned around to face me.

"I have heard that name before," she said.

"Where?"

"A conference. Three years ago. A government-adjacent research presentation on enhanced human physical performance. The presenter cited Mortem as a source but the citation was to an unpublished internal document." She paused. "I thought it was strange at the time. Now I think it was something else."

"Can you find the facility?"

Nat turned back to her monitor.

"Give me until morning," she said.

Cass pulled two chairs up to the desk beside her.

"We're not going anywhere," Cass said.

Nat looked at my wife for a moment with the expression she had had since the early years of our marriage, the one that said she was extremely glad I had found her and also that if I had not, Nat would have found Cass herself and kept her.

"Good," Nat said, and got to work.