Page 42 of Wolf Bane
His expression didn’t change except for a very slight widening of his eyes.I was right, it seemed.“I didn’t lie.Not about the working part,” he said after a beat.“Mal knew what I was doing.”
“Mal.Not Tyler?”I scooted carefully into a sitting position.“This fucking thing,” I hissed, reaching for the Tegaderm holding the canula in place in my arm.Waltrip and Benoit both looked away as I pulled it out, blood welling to the surface in a fat red bead before I could grab tissues from the bedside table to press over it.“Why did Mal know?Is he working with you now?”
“I was doing something for him,” Waltrip said sharply.“Not that it’s your business.”He paused, then deflated a tiny bit.“Well.It wasn’t your business until last night.”
He glanced at Benoit, who made an uncomfortable sound low in his throat and started pacing back and forth in the small trailer bedroom.
“There’s not an easy way to tell you this, Landry.And I don’t think now’s the right time, but I also realize there’s never gonna be a perfect time.”
“What?”I asked, hating the slight tremor in my voice.“Is someone… Did something happen to Ethan?To Mal or—” I froze.“Reba?Is she okay?”She’d been left alone by the weres and shifters in the community so far, but had someone decided to make their dislike of me clear by harmingher?“Waltrip?—”
“Garrow’s no longer in custody.”
I was pretty sure I stopped breathing for a second.Finally, I forced two words out on a wheeze.“Since when?”
Waltrip shifted his weight uneasily, glancing at Benoit again.Benoit was pacing so fast back and forth it was kind of a wonder that he didn’t just burst through the wall and keep on moving.“He was transferred almost immediately from human custody to a facility run by weres and shifters.It’s… discreet.”
“Let me guess.Council runs it?”I bit out.“That’s where they took Mal’s ex, isn’t it?”
“No.She’s in custody of the council, at a safe house.Under direct one-to-one supervision with mental health workers and guards.Garrow was… not.”
“Stop pussyfooting around,” Benoit snapped.“The prison’s a rat-maze of an old asylum, up ‘round the Canadian border in Minnesota.It’s in the middle of one of the oldest were territories in North America.Older than the Europeans comin’ over.The tribes who own the land allowed the prison to remain there after a lot of talkin’ and a lot of pleadin’.”
“Lund,” Waltrip supplied into the tense beat of quiet that fell between us.“Named the asylum after one of the first clans to come over.It’s on an island in one of the lakes.”
“Charming.”I breathed, the creeping awareness that Garrow was out, that Garrow was out, and I had been responsible for him getting caught, that a huge part of me, more than I wanted to admit, was a terrified little boy who had no idea what was wrong with him, and the man who twisted and turned me into what I am was out… It settled into my blood and marrow and froze me in a knot of rising paranoid panic.
“How?How… I thought he was under watch, too?I thought the council?—”
“Someone turned heel,” Waltrip said tightly.“Decided Garrow’s more useful out than in.”
“The virus.”I glanced up at Waltrip.“Tyler found a link already, but we thought it was just someone who worked with Garrow in the past.Wait, no,Ithought that.Tyler…” I frowned.“Did Tyler know?About Garrow?”
“So far just you, Benoit, and Mal.”Waltrip fidgeted, uncharacteristic for him.“Mal… he thought he was being watched a week or so back.Had a weird feeling, he said.So, I told him I’d check some things out and, well, one thing led to another, and I started finding some issues with the chain of custody.”
“Why did he think it was Garrow?”
Waltrip met my gaze with a bemused expression.“Because Garrow’s his boogeyman, too.”
A commotion outside the room had Benoit motioning for us to stay there while he went to find out who was fussing about what.I seized the moment to turn on Waltrip with a glare.“You’ve got until he gets back to talk, or I swear to whatever God you believe in that I will lose my shit, Waltrip.”
Waltrip, for just a moment, looked amused.Like someone looking at a kitten absolutely raining hell on a shoe.That didn’t help things a single bit, anger rippled through me in a hot, greasy wash that prickled along my skin and pulsed through my limbs.My thoughts, finally clear after the long and awful day, muddled into sensation, into something closer to instinct than logic.The shift in my vision was new—it had only happened once before—but I knew what it meant.
The shift was close to the surface.
Anger—I could break it down into physical components like cortisol and epinephrine, fight or flight, catecholamines getting riled up as my body tensed—tugged that part of me to the surface, stirred it loose past the point of whatever subconscious control I had.
Waltrip’s eyes widened not with fear or aggression but interest, sweeping over my half-reclined form as I breathed through it, tried to swallow it back down.“I didn’t get a chance to see this happen before,” he muttered.“Not really.Too much was going on.You… Can you fully shift?”
My body ached—the wound on my arm, the rattling my skull took earlier, even if I’d really wanted to, I didn’t think I could successfully shift.Instead, I hung in a halfway point.The change just below the surface, pulsing in my senses and making everything too much.My bones had changed just a little, my fingers curling towards paws, but past that… It was just theoretical.
“Not yet,” I panted, closing my eyes.“Waltrip.I’m tired.Tired of being jerked around, lied to, treated like a fucking mushroom, used up… I need to know.Please.”
When I opened my eyes, he was staring back at me with a troubled, soft expression I’d never seen on him before.
It was kind of unsettling.
“About two weeks ago, maybe a few days more, Mal started feelin’ like he was being watched.I tried to tell him it was probably some residual stress, some PTSD stuff, you know?”He shrugged restlessly.“But I was, ah, visiting him a bit and one night—” He darted a glance my way.I managed to keep my expression neutral but he and I both knew we’d be revisiting that tidbit later.“I was visiting him one night and someone was fucking around outside.In that easement between y’all’s houses.”
