I stood there and held my gun on her for another five seconds.
Then….
I lowered the pistol.
“God almighty,” I breathed.
She frowned at me, half a quizzical smile. “Who did you think I was?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Felicity Hope holstered her piece and came toward me. “You called me Grace.”
I said nothing.
“You thought I was Grace Courtland, didn’t you?”
“Grace is dead.”
“I know.” She stood there staring at me.
Up close, I could tell that it wasn’t her. This woman’s hair was paler, her eyes darker, her skin had fewer scars. But the height was the same, and the body. The same mix of dangerous athleticism and luscious curves. The movement was the same, a dancer’s grace. And the keen intelligence in the eyes.
Yeah, that was exactly the same.
Damn it.
When the universe wants to fuck with you it has no problem bending you over a barrel and giving it to you hard and ugly.
I cleared my throat. “Did you know her?”
She nodded.
“Was she…a friend?” I asked.
Felicity shrugged. “Actually, we weren’t. Most of the time I knew her I thought she was a stuck-up bitch.” She watched my face as she spoke, probably wondering what buttons she was pushing. Then she added, “But I don’t think I really knew her. Not really. Not until right before she died.”
“How?”
“What?”
“How could you know what she was like right before she died?”
“Oh…we spoke on the phone quite a lot. She was officially still with Barrier and had to make regular reports. I was the person she reported to.”
“You were her superior officer?”
She looked far too young. Grace had been young, too, but Grace was an exception to most rules. She’d been the first woman to officially train with the SAS. She’d been a senior field team operative in some of the most grueling cases on both sides of the Atlantic. There was nobody quite like Grace and everyone knew it.
Felicity shook her head. “Hardly. I was a desk jockey taking field reports. I know I’m not in Major Courtland’s league.”
“No,” I said ungraciously. “You’re not. Tell me why you’re here.”
She said, “Changeling.”
“Which means what exactly? The name keeps popping up in searches but no one seems to know exactly what it is.”
“What do you know about transformational genetics and self-directed theriomorphy?”
“Some,” I said, dodging it. “What do you know about it?”
“Too much.”
“Give me more than that.”
“They’re making monsters,” she said.
I shook my head. “Not in the mood for banter, honey, and I’m never in the mood for cryptic comments, especially not from total strangers I meet in dark places. This is American soil and a legally closed site. Spill everything right now or enjoy the flight home.”
She took a breath. “Okay, but I’ll have to condense it because there’s a lot.”
“So,” I said, “condense.”
“Can you take that flashlight out of my eyes?”
“No,” I said, and I didn’t. The light made her eyes look large and moist. If it was uncomfortable, then so what? I was deeply uncomfortable, so it was a running theme for the day.
She said, “Ever since the dawn of gene therapy and transgenic science it’s become clear that DNA is not locked. Evolution itself proves that DNA advances. Look at any DNA strand and you’ll see the genes for nonhuman elements like viruses hardwired into our genetic code.”
“Part of junk DNA,” I said. “What about it?”
“Transformational genetics is a relatively new branch of science that is searching for methods of changing specific DNA and essentially rebuilding it so that a new tailor-made code can be developed.”
“That’s not new,” I pointed out. “The Nazis tried that, and the whole Eugenics movement before that.”
“That’s selective breeding. That’s cumbersome and time-consuming because it requires eggs and host bodies and so forth. This is remodeling, and recent advances have opened developmental doors no one imagined would be possible in this century.”
I didn’t say anything. During the firefight at the Dragon Factory we’d encountered mercenaries who had undergone gene therapy with ape DNA. And there were other even more hideous monsters there.
“The word theriomorphy keeps showing up. What’s that?”
“Shapeshifting.”
“Shape…?”
“The ability to change at will from one form to another.” She smiled through the blinding flashlight glow. “From human form into something else.”
“At…will?”
“Oh yes.”
“Like from what to what? You’re making this sound like we’re hunting werewolves or something.”
Her smile flickered. “Who knows? Maybe we are.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I know.”
“Wait…hold on…are we really standing here having a conversation about werewolves? I mean…fucking werewolves?”
After a three count she said, “No.”
“Jesus jumped-up Christ in a sidecar, then why—”
“Werewolves would be easy,” she said, cutting right through my words. “Werewolves would be a silver bullet and we’d take the rest of the afternoon off for a drink. I wish it was only werewolves.”
I gaped at her.
Seriously…what do you say to that?
Chap. 7
“Okay,” I said, “before I pee my pants here, how do you know about this and what can we do about it? This facility is sealed.”
She flashed her first real smile, and it looked so much like the battlefield grin Grace used to give me that I almost turned away.
“When your task force shut down this place,” she said, “they made a thorough video inventory of everything. High-res footage from where every piece of paper was all the way down to the way pencils sat in a pot on each desk. Everything, with a second camera filming what the first camera was doing in order to firmly establish the integrity of the scene and contribute the first real link in the sacred chain of evidence. Am I right?”
Church had told me about that, but I hadn’t seen it. I nodded anyway.
“So we can take or touch anything recorded on that video.”
“That’s the size of it,” I agreed.
“The federal order sealing this place contains an authorized copy of that video.”
“Yup.”
“And the teams who were here agreed that absolutely everything has been documented — at least in terms of its existence and placement.”
“Sure.”
Her smile brightened. “Therefore, anything that isn’t on the video technically doesn’t exist in terms of that federal order.”
“Sure,” I said again, “but how does that put us back in a discussion about werewolves? ’Cause, quite frankly I’m having a hard timing shaking loose of that conversation.”
The smile dimmed but did not go out. “Not werewolves,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“They’re not werewolves. That’s not what they were doing here.”
Felicity turned and walked a few paces away, going along the hall in the direction I’d come. She stopped, looked through the shadows. “You were in the storage room?”
“Maybe.”
“You were in the storage room,” she repeated, not making it a question this time. “Did you look inside the bathroom?”
“Sure. Nothing there.”
She sighed audibly.
“I wish I could say you were right about that, Captain.”
Without another word she began walking down the hallway toward the storeroom. She didn’t have a flashlight, and my beam was currently pointed at the floor in front of me; however, she seemed quite at home in the dark.