Blood's Shadow: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 3 (25 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The sensation that had been simmering under my skin and centered in my solar plexus burst inward and outward simultaneously. I dropped to my knees and shook my head to clear the roaring from my ears. Then I recognized the roar for what it was and picked it apart into individual sounds—the heartbeats of the Council members, their chairs scraping across the stone floor under the rug, the rug fibers as they bent and straightened under the weight of chair legs and shoes, and underneath it all, the satisfied growl of Bartholomew Campbell.

“Do you know what he will be?” Tabitha’s frightened whisper floated to me on the stream of other sounds.

“I’m hoping he will be like his father, who was a phenomenal fighter,” Morena’s reply came next.

“Yes, Simon McCord was a fine specimen,” Keith agreed. “But shouldn’t we hold this in the arena?”

“It’s still closed due to flood damage,” Morena said. “They’ll just have to make do here.”

The sounds then faded in favor of the sense of touch, each nerve ending tingling. Now I felt all the little stitches in my clothing and the pressure of my belt and watch. All my senses went through that enhancement, then fading to let another one through, until they all fit together and concentrated on one thing: my heartbeat.

It beat, and I breathed, and it thudded, and I breathed, and with each throb, something expanded outward from it and transformed me physically. This wasn’t the painful transformation of most of my years. Nor was it the easy quick ones of the past few days. I felt the strength of boulders, the persistence of ice, the passion of flames, and the freedom of the wind. It made me into a creature of the elements, but especially of earth, with which I felt a bond like I never had before. When I opened my eyes, I saw not brown fur, but gray, and bigger paws than I’d ever transformed into previously.

“Magnificent,” someone breathed.

I stood and shook off the remnants of my clothes. Veronica’s fluorite hung on a chain around my thick neck, and it buzzed with power I’d not been able to sense before. When I looked around the room, I ticked off who people were: Keith—no threat, Tabitha—no threat, Morena—co-alpha, Cora—threat, but not too big of one, Dimitri—threat to keep an eye on, Bartholomew—

Bartholomew had also transformed into a large wolf, this one all black, and he watched me with shrewd eyes. Now with human niceties stripped away, we could regard each other as the enemies we’d always been.

“You clean up surprisingly well,”
he said.
“Not the ball of scruff I expected you to be.”

I wanted to respond, but I was too busy analyzing the combination of scents he was putting off. I smelled his surprise and a little fear. Perhaps it had always been there.

“I’m glad I can keep you on your toes,”
I finally replied.
“You’re about what I expected. Tell me, did you leave your little traitor back in the Hebrides?”

“Who? Jade?”
he asked.
“She was the one who insisted Cora and I return. She said she had a vision something had gone terribly wrong.”

“I’m sure she did.”
Now we circled each other, teeth bared, but the human part of my brain latched on to his revelation.
“You do know she’s a wizard, right?”

“No, she’s one of us. I smell it on her. I smell it with her.”
He licked his lips, and I gave him a disgusted look.

“You would say such things with your wife in the room? Can’t you see, Bartholomew? You were set up. We were set up.”

“What, are you afraid of a fight?”
He switched direction, and I almost ran into him. He nipped me on my rump.
“No matter how big you are, you’re still a pup,”
he growled.

“And you’re an idiot. You’ve been sleeping with a
vargamore
. She orchestrated all of this.”

His stride faltered.
“To what end?”

“To destroy us. To create dissent within the Council.
To gain control of the reversal process. She’s going to use it against us or is going to sell it to the Young Bloods.”

“I don’t have time for your conspiracy theories!”
He launched himself at me, and he knocked the wind out of me. I twisted away before his hind claws could find my abdomen and backed up to regroup. He gained his feet and came directly at me again.

“How did you meet Jade?”
I asked and dodged him.

“Is this a fight or an interrogation?”
he snarled.

“Why not both?”
This time I nipped his shoulder and leaped away, but I misjudged and knocked into a chair. I found myself needing time to become accustomed to my new, larger wolf body. What I lacked in maneuverability, I had gained in strength, but it was taking time to find my balance.

“Fine,”
he growled.
“I’m happy to point out how stupid you’ve been.”

“As long as I get the information I need, I’ll take whatever you can give me in whatever form.”
He lunged at me, and I leapt over him, grazing his back with my claws.
“First blood.”

“You’re not fighting fair,”
he said.
“Sit still.”

My hackles rose at his command.
“I think not. Now my question—how did you meet Jade?”

He huffed and circled me again.
“She came to the office with resume in hand looking for a job. Nothing interesting.”

“Who hired her?”

“Probably one of the HR people.”
He dodged my feint.

“And how did she become your personal secretary?”

“The girl who was my secretary had an”—
he stopped and blinked
—“accident. No one could prove it was foul play, but there was talk. It happened about a year ago.”

“When we were first talking about the Institute.”
This time I took advantage of his mental confusion and made a full direct assault. We rolled in a mass of fur and teeth and fangs, and I finally had him by the neck. A whimper came from the other side of the room—Cora.

“Do you give in?”
I asked and bit harder such that a little trickle of his blood came into my mouth.

He tried to wriggle free, but with each movement, he sank my teeth farther into his throat. Finally, he said,
“I surrender.”

I let him go and backed away. He lay on the ground panting, blood on his ruff. I sat back and looked at Morena, who nodded, but then her eyes widened.

“Gabriel!” she said and gestured to the floor in front of me.

A mass of black fur toppled me, and I snapped at the face that tried to maneuver to grab hold of my throat. I heard jaws clamp around something and waited for the suffocating sensation of Bartholomew cutting off my air, but he backed up, shaking his head and wheezing. Finally he coughed up the fluorite sphere Veronica had given me. It rolled across the carpet to land at my feet.

“Just like a sissy boy to wear a necklace to a fight,”
he sneered.

“That was a dirty play, Bartholomew,” said Morena. “You surrendered. We have no room for that sort of thing on our Council. You are hereby banished from Lycan Castle and Lycan Village as well as a ten kilometer radius from the Castle itself.”

He flattened his ears but nodded.

“What about me?” asked Cora. “What if I don’t feel safe being here without him?”

“You can always abdicate your seat on the Council,” Morena told her. “I’ve half a mind to banish you as well.”

Cora’s eyes widened. “You can’t do that! This is a hereditary position.”

“And we have just learned of two people who are related to Dimitri.”

Cora stood. “You have no idea what you’re doing, Morena,” she said in a low voice, all traces of her helpless female act gone. “The Lycanthrope Council is a relic of the past, and new forces are coming into play.”

Morena tapped her pen against the table. “Are you threatening me, Cora? Threatening us?”

“I’m just making a promise of what’s to come.” Cora smiled. “Very well, then. I abdicate my position on the Council. I see no reason to continue to support this hidebound organization, particularly if you’re going to allow a half-blood to become a full member. That’s not what my father would’ve wanted, and it’s surely not what I want.”

She stalked from the room followed by Bartholomew, still in wolf form. All eyes then turned to me.

“Welcome to full Council membership, Mister McCord,” Morena said. “I suggest you change back to human form. We have a lot of work to do.”

“What if I want to challenge him?” Dimitri asked. “Without jewelry, of course. I am still not convinced he is right for full Council membership.”

“One does not refuse gifts from a witch,”
I told him.
“As for your challenge, ready when you are.”

“No,” Morena told him and me. “Mister McCord will be keeping his position. He has already proven his ability to maintain focus on the important aspects of a situation in spite of his animal instincts. Now we need to concentrate on our most pressing problem: another
vargamore
in our midst.”

Keith grabbed the remnants of my clothing, and I followed him into my tower office, where I changed back into a human and attended to the scratches I’d gotten from my fight with Bartholomew. Thankfully I had more clothing there, and I slipped the fluorite into my pocket. When I returned to the Council Chamber, I found it empty except for Morena.

“They’ve taken a break for lunch and scattered to their respective offices,” she said. “I suggest we do so as well.”

She led the way to her office, where the castle staff had laid out a lunch of chicken, salad, and bread. And steak and potatoes and haggis and an assortment of other things in pots and on platters, even chocolate-dipped shortbread. My stomach growled.

“Most of this is for you,” Morena said. “Your first alpha change tends to deplete your resources. You likely could have taken on Dimitri, and you may need to eventually as we sort out our new hierarchy, but you need to save yourself for the battle that is yet to come. I wanted to caution you to wait until you’ve achieved your full strength, but I have heard from the Wizard Tribunal—they’re taking Max tomorrow if we don’t solve this mystery.”

I nodded and chewed the bite I’d just taken. “I don’t think there’s another
vargamore
,” I said once I swallowed. “I think this is just one form of the one we’ve been dealing with for a while.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean Wolfsheim?”

“Yes. Tell me everything David found. He showed me some of his materials, but whoever killed him destroyed many of them.”
And I will avenge his death.

As I ate more than I’d ever dreamed of consuming, she related the highlights of David’s research and the investigation the Council had engaged in before he picked it up. As he’d mentioned to me, Wolfsheim had come to Scotland to eliminate the lycanthropes as some twisted way of denying and suppressing the werewolf side of himself. Consequently, he’d jumped in on the side of every war that did not include the endorsement from the Lycanthrope Council, typically losing, but doing much damage to our numbers in the meantime. David had gathered the evidence as part of a case to bring to the Wizard Tribunal in hopes that an alliance could be forged, and together we could bring him down. My father had gone to the Continent looking for him and for evidence of his involvement in the second Great War, for Wolfsheim had been rumored to be in Belgium.

“We suspect he somehow lured your father to meet him at the edge of the Moerbrugge battlefield,” she said, “and that’s where he used his blood magic to destroy him.”

“And how am I supposed to combat that?” I asked. “So far, no one has been able to stand up to his magic.”

“You will have to use your wits, not your brawn, I’m afraid.” Morena poured a cup of tea for each of us. “Unless you have some sort of protection you can bargain for with Reine.”

“I’ve already given her all the power over me I feel comfortable with.”

She raised her eyebrows. “How so?”

“Selene and I encountered Wolfsheim or one of his or her henchmen outside of David’s house last night. He hit us with a hellfire grenade. I shielded Selene and took the brunt of it. Reine saved my life in exchange for the one-time use of my name.”

“Risky,” said. “Even just once. No telling what she’ll make you do. There are other things you could offer her. Your first-born, for example.”

“Never. I wouldn’t do that to anyone, especially not a child.”

“Desperate times, Gabriel. Remember the legend of the Boar King.”

“Right.” I leaned forward. “Why is that legend so important?”

“It’s one of our oldest, mostly a cautionary tale to keep our pups out of the woods at night, but I always suspected it was a map of how to deal with a
vargamore
because another name for them in our old language was torc, or boar, which got confounded with the word for necklace, and of course Latin for twist.”

I thought about what I had seen. “I can understand that. It seems that having one of those around your neck will make your vessels twist and explode. Why did you not tell me of this before, particularly since my father was destroyed by him?”

She looked away, and pink came to her cheeks. A blush? “I wanted to, but the rest of the Council, particularly Dimitri and Cora, wanted to wait for you to reach your majority and find your inner alpha. That Wolfsheim lives is not common knowledge among our kind. The others think he died in the Napoleonic wars.”

“Right. And now he has Selene captive and the Council by the bollocks. He has issued an invitation for me to come plead my case for her this evening.”

“Nighttime is when he is most powerful,” Morena said. “Are you sure that is wise?”

“As you said, we have to finish this tonight. We can’t lose Max, and I can’t give up Selene.”

“And you’re positive she’s to be trusted in this? She’s lied to you before.”

I nodded. “I would be able to tell if she wasn’t, at least now.”