The True One

Chapter 39

Verity

Days before being led into the trap that left me locked in a basement, drugged, and emotionally raw, Alek made a confession.

"Norvin told me you're a ticking timebomb."

"Oh?" It was late into the night, and my feelings were already in disarray after seeing him for the first time in weeks. Add to that, I'd just learned Norvin set up a stupid treasure hunt we had to solve to get any answers from him. And now this. "That sounds bad."

We were sitting in my living room by this point, and despite my anger with Alek, my response to him was said in a shamelessly flirtatious manner. Facing him, I draped an arm over the back of the couch, my hand landing so very close to his bare skin. I imagined walking my fingers over to his neck, his throat, down the front of his shirt until he stopped talking about Norvin's bullshit ideas.

"It is bad," he said, eyeing my hand like he'd been having the same thoughts as I had. "You have no idea."

What sort of self-destructive streak did this man have if he was willing to sit so close to an explosive device? Either he didn't care what harm I'd cause him, or he didn't believe I'd do it. A third option popped into my head: maybe he thought he could disarm me, tame the wild beast before it could inflict damage. "Why don't you tell me then."

Clearing his throat, Alek began a lengthy, entirely unerotic monolog about what he called Next Gen werewolves. I wasn't alone in my abilities, he claimed, but instead was one of only a tiny handful of these Next Gens ever to be produced.

"Are you serious? This sounded amazing!" I finally had an answer about what I was—and there were people out there who understood my experience because they shared it with me.

Alek frowned and gave me the bad news: one of the members of our exclusive group had committed a rather appalling mass murder.

"So, that's it then," I said. "You think I'm a serial killer waiting to commit my first of many atrocities—a manufactured weapon Aurum Venari will kill if they can't control."

"Verity." My name was a song on his tongue. A lament. A funeral dirge.

He ran his arm along the back of my couch until it lay side by side with my own. My stomached clenched. "Why are you telling me this, Alek? Have I let you into my home so you can make Norvin's job easy? Kill me before I kill?"

He grinned and I melted a little.

The dimples. That's how he would kill me. I would succumb to his adorability.

"Would I come here alone if I thought you were a killer?"

"You took a job as my bodyguard because you thought that."

"That was different."

I shook my head. "It's exactly the same. What makes you think I won't snap right now, send out my wolf to make you the first in a string of victims?"

"I doubt you'd want your expensive hand-woven rug stained with my blood."

Despite the gravity of the moment, a booming laugh erupted from me. When it ended, I leaned my head against his arm. "Where do we go from here?" I asked him.

He kissed the top of my head. "Wherever Norvin's treasure hunt leads us. He thinks I've come around, that I'll deliver you to him. Instead, I say we get to wherever he's hiding Flora's mom, and then we use the opportunity to take him down."

Now, as I sat with my mom, numb to my wolf, I had the realization that "taking him down" had not gone entirely to plan. We'd expected an ambush at some point, and that Alek's loyalty would be tested. What I didn't expect was to be severed from my wolf self. As for my mom's appearance—while still a shock, the breadcrumbs leading us here had included clues that she was alive.

The moon doesn't care if the dog barks. She must have convinced Norvin to include that for a reason.

I had no time to ask her about that now—not while Alek was relating to me everything Val had revealed to him and Flora.

The gist of it, as it turned out, was that Norvin was a big liar. No surprise there.

Out of the handful of other Next Gens, one was named Edward. His father, a natural werewolf like my mom, had been hunted and killed by Aurum Venari when he was seven. He'd undergone the same treatments I'd had, and like me, there'd been no indication that they worked until his early twenties.

Edward had gone on to kill a bunch of people, just as Alek had previously related, and he'd done it by astral projecting a wolf into the world. The wolf was his instrument of death, and something to be greatly feared, but scapegoating his psychic werewolf abilities didn't paint the complete picture.

Val says he killed two people a year before the mass murder, Alek told me. The Aurum Venari spies watching him at the time knew of his guilt but reported back that he'd used entirely human hands to strangle both victims. In fact, he'd not yet shown any signs of werewolfism, psychic or otherwise.

What you're saying is, he was a psychopath before he was a psychic werewolf? I asked.

Exactly. Being able to use a wolf to enact his murder fantasies may have made him an efficient serial killer, but that ability isn't what drove him to do it. He was evil from the start.

A peace settled over me. My mother was alive, and I was not an inevitable monster. Now as long as we could break out of this place, take down Norvin, and destroy as much of Aurum Venari as possible, life would be sweet.

An itching in the bottom of my front right paw snapped my attention away from these thoughts.

Alek, I can feel my wolf again!

The room came into focus. It seemed a similar holding cell to the one my human self was in. I rose from the floor, stretched. The air smelled like mold and industrial cleaners. Pacing to one corner of the room, I listened at the wall. Nothing.

Crossing the room, I could tell even before I reached it that my mother was on the opposite side of that wall, her smell a blend of cheap soap and the stale, processed foods these assholes fed her.

And from outside the door, approaching footsteps.

I stood to the side, ready to pounce, but they were ready as well. A few yards from the door, a screech echoed like an owl had made a kill, and then the two footsteps became four. I waited, but nothing happened, until finally more human steps and a voice broke out.

"How did you think you were going to open the door without opposable thumbs? Duh!" Chip's human voice broke into laughter.

So, that's who I'd be dealing with: one of the Chip's moronic underlings. The door clicked open, and after Chip's footsteps faded away, a massive brown speckled wolf pushed himself inside.

I went straight for the jugular.

The werewolf yelped and I dug in.

Stay alive, Alek said as I ripped at flesh and fur, swallowing warm metallic blood in large gulps.

We're coming for you, he said. We'll be there soon.

____

Author's Note: Is Alek loyal to Verity after all? Can Verity live her life, assuming she doesn't die in the next chapter, without fear that she'll go on a murderous rampage? Will they succeed in taking down Norvin? Will Chip become a decent person if he's cut off from his Werewolf-making drugs?

Two more chapters to go, which makes the next installment *hopefully* a dramatic one. Stay tuned!