Page 76 of Shifter's Homecoming

“They’ve been here,” Troy said. “There is no doubt in my mind. They are watching us, probably planning something.”

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Trent told him. He headed across the room and started up the stairs. When he was on the second one, he turned around and addressed Rowan. “Sorry, she-wolf,” he said, “but I’ve got to do it.” He disappeared up the steps.

She didn’t know what he meant at first, until she heard him upstairs, pulling her papers off the wall.Ohhhh.She got it now. She thought of the sweet faces of those two babies in the pictures, and she thought of all the names and facts she’d laid out, and she understood completely.

He came back down. “Do you have a shredder, or should I burn it?”

Rowan got him a shredder. He was quiet as he fed each paper into the grinding teeth.

“I hope it wasn’t them who read my notes,” Rowan said quietly.

Troy headed straight for her notebooks in the wire rack. He picked one up. “These notes? They read them.”

“Oh no,” Rowan breathed, her heart in her throat. She ran for the counter, her eyes on her countertop potentiator. She couldn’t tell if the poison was in there.Please be there, please be there, she chanted inside her head.

She pressed the button and the machine hissed open. Empty. She looked all around, almost frantically, opening up the other equipment on the counter, lifting things up and looking underneath it, knowing it was completely hopeless, knowing that the worst had happened. She looked out at the old reservoir and the forest beyond, gathered her courage, then faced Trent.

“This is bad,” she said.

Trent nodded, his face set in hard lines. “Tell us.”

Rowan tried to think where to start, what they knew and didn’t already know. She summarized everything they should already know. That she was out there working to find a neutralizer, that the company she worked for had been hired by the local government, that they’d been working on this for decades now and she was only the latest in a long line of chemists, scientists, and veterinarians who had taken the job. That the poison fell once a day, but only a drop, not enough to hurt anyone as long as it was mixed with enough water. Every twenty-one days the pool of water was completely emptied, and they only let it sit for that long so there would be samples to work with.

“Like I’ve said, this kind of thing is my specialty,” she said. “That’s why I was hired. The company gave me full autonomy, and well, I decided to potentiate reagent 13, the unknown substance in the poison. That means I concentrated it, I made it stronger because the processes I use to discern neutralizers requires concentrated substances to work on. We know what most of the ingredients in the poison are, we know how to filter and neutralize them in and out of water, what we don’t know is what exactly reagent 13 is, what its properties are, and how to neutralize it. That’s what I was trying to find out. That’s why I chose to concentrate it. I never ever dreamed that someone would come and take it and purposely try to hurt people with it.”

Trent nodded once, his expression still tight. “I know, Rowan. It’s ok, we’re not going to let that happen. Tell me, right now, exactly how concentrated is it? What’s the danger if it manages to find its way into a water supply?”

Rowan paled as she thought about it. “If it gets into Blue River, it will probably kill any animals who come to drink it or swim in it the first four or five hours. I don’t know what it will do to the fish, we haven’t tested that, but the more it is diffused by the water, the less dangerous it will be. However—” She grabbed a calculator, checked the time, and did some calculations.

She looked up at all of them, panic spreading through her. “We do know that reagent 13 is dangerous to humans by itself if concentrated enough. We’ve never tested it on humans, but enough of our scientists have used themselves as guinea pigs that we know it can be dangerous, possibly even deadly when isolated and concentrated. If someone manages to get that vial into Serenity’s water supply, it’s enough to contaminate it for 8 to 12 hours. Most people would probably be safe, but certain susceptible ones would probably come through it feeling like a case of food poisoning. All the pets who drank it in that time would almost certainly die, all of the livestock, too, maybe a good deal of our elderly population, and maybe even—” Her voice broke but she gathered herself and forced herself to keep talking.

“—Maybe even some babies and young children would die if they drank the contaminated water.”

50 - Grey’s Field Briefing

Grey stared at his hand, idly making it into a grasping shape and imagining he was plunging it down, into the angel. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck Rex had scrounged up from somewhere, waiting for Rex and Soren to return from surveillance. They’d been gone for hours. Grey desperately wanted to stand up and stab again—do what he had done before that made the pendant appear in his hand—but he didn’t want to be caught doing it. Rex was a sneaky fucker.

He was parked on a rural route turnout on a bluff that gave him a view of the old Harlem Pumping Station and the defunct reservoir behind it and the forest all around. He picked up his binoculars and trained them on the building and then behind it. Nothing. No people, nobody moving, nothing was going on down there.

There was one sedan and one truck parked out front. By the looks of the truck, the wolves had already found Rowan Atenboro. He wondered whose mate she was.

The air next to him shimmered for a second, the fiery smell of the Pravus reached him, and then Rex and Soren were both there, Soren looking lovesick, Rex looking slightly frustrated. Rex opened his hand, showing Soren a little test tube with a stopper closed tight.

“I got it,” he said. “You stay here, I’ll talk to the big guy and be right back.”

Grey sat up straighter, interested all of a sudden. Rex disappeared. Soren wandered to the front of the truck and leaned on it, looking very much like an out of work poet dreaming of his true love.

Grey got out and leaned next to him. “Rowan was down there?” he said, fishing for information.

“I like her. She seems smart.”

Grey tried not to make anookkkkkaaayyyface. Soren had issues.

“What did Rex have?”

“Poison.”

“Poison? What kind of poison.”

---