Page 19 of Act of Brotherhood
That wasn’t the case. Thankfully, he wasn’t the only above-average tall supernatural male in PSI. There was a fair number. He couldn’t think of any who were under six foot.
One would assume that the PSI building headquarters would have had accommodations for the men from day one.
One would be wrong.
Garth had been assigned to more than one division in his long career with PSI. To date, Division B in the United States was his favorite. Probably because he didn’t give himself a concussion every time he walked through the front door.
Always a plus.
Division B was also surrounded by woods that stretched out for miles. The woods were stocked with game. It tended to cut down on issues with attacks on humans if the supernaturals had something else to hunt when they needed to release whatever darkness they carried.
Jannick had once eaten a man who had wandered into the facility’s private woods, and the paperwork Garth had been stuck filling out was a nightmare. It did help some that the man turned out to be a human wanted for various murders, but still, they didn’t have a checkbox on the forms for “human is a dick, so he had it coming.” Though, they should.
As he looked at Gram, who was lying in a medically induced coma, he couldn’t help but think about his brother, Grid. His brother was part of the reason Garth sat at the bedside of a close friend, silently willing the man to live.
Garth hung his head, his elbows going to his lap. His long blond hair fell forward. A few varying braids were secured with small silver beads. He pushed his hair back and wrapped it in a self-contained knot of sorts at the base of his neck. He put his head in his hands and sighed, feeling as if the weight of the world was upon his shoulders.
In many ways, it was.
So much had happened in such a short period of time that it was nearly impossible to avoid feeling overwhelmed. No amount of preparation would have helped. Besides, how exactly did one prepare for their close friend nearly being killed, mad scientists doing gods only knew what, evil Fae who were named after trees, and finding out one’s twin brother had decided to go to the dark side?
Yeah.
There was no fucking preparedness and readiness courses for any of that offered through PSI. Though, with all the crap that was hitting the fan at work as of late, there really should be. But if a course had been offered, he’d have seriously second-guessed his career choice.
Who was he kidding?
He’d been a card-carrying member of PSI for so long that he’d actually lost count of the years. The organization had held a variety of names over the course of the centuries he’d been affiliated with them. No matter what it was called, it all boiled down to policing supernaturals and keeping both humans and supernaturals safe. Often from each other.
There was no end to the number of assholes out there, so his job was secure. Anymore, it felt as if he could throw a rock and hit some criminal mastermind hell-bent on world domination.
They were a dime a dozen.
At least that was how it was starting to feel. It made Garth miss the days of old when the biggest thing he had to do was keep warring supernatural lines from killing one another. Now, even the supernatural lines had blurred with the advent of crossbreeding and genetic engineering.
His thoughts drifted back to twenty years ago. When his team and a number of the Fang Gang had found the secret labs in the lower level of an organized crime boss’s home. That day stuck with him still. So did seeing the children who had been neglected and tested upon.
The tiny girl who Auberi had given his blood to still haunted Garth’s dreams. In them, she didn’t make it. In reality, all he’d been able to glean as far as details upon returning to human form was that she had lived. Landros had worked closely with the director of PSI, General Newman, to see to it that all the children had received the necessary medical care, and then had been placed quickly into good homes.
Homes that the heads of PSI weren’t big on sharing the locations of.
Hell, Garth had even attempted to have paid hackers dig through PSI computers for information regarding the children from that experiment, but nothing had been found.
As he thought harder on it all, he realized that if the child had indeed survived, as Landros assured him she had, she would be in her early twenties by now.
An adult.
That, in itself, was difficult to wrap his mind around.
So was the fact that he’d totally and completely lost his shit that night in the lab. His wolf had overtaken him in a way that it never had before. He’d been stuck in wolf form for nearly three full weeks. Upon returning to human form, Garth had found himself held captive by his own fucking teammates.
Of course, being held by his teammates might have had something to do with the fact Garth’s first order of business back then had been to seek out Auberi and try to drive a stake through his heart.
PSI frowned upon that.
Apparently, some idiot who made decisions thought the vampire was worth protecting.
Garth didn’t agree.
