“And why do you believe this to be different from the experience of others?” He seemed utterly fascinated. I don’t think Jane Goodall would have been this thrilled if her gorillas walked up and started talking to her one day.
“I was born with active lycanthropy.” I wasn’t going to get into the finer details of how werewolves turned one another. He didn’t need to know about the Awakening ceremony, or the hierarchy of the werewolf pack. But any idiot who had seen a creature feature would know it’s not normal to be born a werewolf.
“Born?”
“Yes.”
“Is such a thing even possible?”
I held my hands up in front of myself as if to say, Well?
“Remarkable.”
“It’s rare but not unheard of. It…” I stopped, not sure I wanted to tell him any more details. If I told him babies were only born with active lycanthropy when the mothers experienced physical trauma, what would he do with that information? To me it was just a known fact, but in this man’s hands I could picture a dozen pregnant werewolf mothers being abused in God knows how many ways, trying to turn their babies into wolves. “It’s rare,” I concluded.
Now that my mind had gone down this new track I didn’t want to tell him anything. If he knew how I’d been created, what was to stop him from bringing in those pregnant werewolf mothers and force-feeding them vampire blood?
I was suddenly dizzy.
What if that was his ultimate goal? Not research or scientific understanding, but reproduction? Did he want to study me so he could learn how to make more of me? I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea of a mass-produced army of vampire/werewolf hybrids.
For one thing, they’d be a pretty ridiculous army. Couldn’t go out in sunlight, couldn’t shift without the presence of a pack, basically…strong but not stronger than vampires. All of the weaknesses, only half of the perks. Story of my life.
Why would anyone want more of me?
Maybe if I could make him understand the negatives outweighed the positives, he wouldn’t want to do it. But if he hadn’t yet conceived of the idea, would I be giving it to him?
Or worse yet—for me anyway—would I be handing him a list of all the best ways to hurt me?
My plate became the most fascinating thing in the room again.
“I can’t give you more blood today, I hope you can understand why.” Why did he have to sound like Mr. Nice Guy all the time? It made it difficult for me to think of him as a villain. And he was a villain.
There weren’t a lot of heroes in my life, but I’d met more than enough bad guys to recognize one when I saw them.
“Where did you study?” I asked.
“University of Vienna for my undergraduate. Stalingrad for my Master’s.” Stalingrad. He’d been in Russia when it was still the Soviet Union. That made me feel very, very young. “My PhD was received in Berlin.” So he really was a doctor.
“What was your specialty?”
“I started with research on the mutations caused by nuclear fallout, spent a great deal of time investigating the Chernobyl meltdown. People said the children born from radiation poisoning were monsters, but they were not. Just…different.”
My wine was teasing me, coaxing me to drink it. I needed something to keep me from going stark raving mad in here, but I knew alcohol would only hinder me. I had to stay sharp.
“How did you make the leap from deformed babies to vampires and werewolves?”
“Is it not a natural progression to look at what humanity deems monstrous and wonder what is a real monster? I wondered what it was about ugliness or cruelty that would make someone call another human a monster. So I began to search for the real monsters. It wasn’t difficult, not when you really look. Especially in cities like Moscow or Berlin. Big cities always have what you need, as long as you know which rocks to turn over.”
“What about Paris?”
He went still, his smile shriveling up faster than a deflated balloon. “I didn’t mention Paris.”
“No, but you lived there, didn’t you?”
His silence was all the answer I needed.
“You had someone there to help you find your monsters. Didn’t you?” I’d been thinking a lot about Peyton while I’d been locked up, playing out the ways he’d have known The Doctor and how he would have been able to convince a man like this to take me. My capture had been a risky one, not just picking up a single wolf or vampire in the night. I’d had protection.
“That’s enough.”
“I know. You’re not the only one who can see other people’s secrets, Doctor.”
He got to his feet slowly and came around the table so he was standing behind me. I knew I’d made a mistake the moment his hands rested on my shoulders. I shouldn’t have played the Peyton card, shouldn’t have let him know what I knew.
His fingers grazed the sharp points of my collarbones, pressing into the skin, making me aware of how little protection there was between the surface and the bone.
“Put your hands on the table, please.”
I didn’t want to. I held them in my lap, fingers trembling, wondering if an apology would work.
“Put your hands on the table,” he repeated, and this time he didn’t say please, stripping away any illusion it had been a request rather than a command.
I did as I was told, putting my hands palm down on the smooth linen tablecloth.
“Let me tell you some things I have learned over the thirty years I have been studying. Would you like that?”
No. “Okay.”
“I have learned a werewolf confined to a small space during the full moon will not survive a shift. I kept one in a very tiny box once, and she became irreversibly deformed. Perhaps she and her wolf fought for supremacy over her body. Neither of them won.”
He kneaded my shoulders, his deft fingers avoiding interaction with the collar yet somehow reminding me it was there.
“I’ve learned what happens to a vampire if you lace their blood supply with silver. They quite literally melt from in the inside out. It’s quite grotesque.”
Sliding his hands lower on my arm, he stooped closer, pressing his lips against my ear. His breath was warm, but the words chilled me when he whispered, “Do you know what I’ve done with your vampires?”
“You said you’d take me to Holden.”
“All in good time.”
He stood straight again, his chest solid against the back of my head. “I want to tell you one other thing I’ve learned first. For the average vampire, it takes about forty minutes to an hour. The typical werewolf…a little over a day.”
“What?”
He lifted my right arm off the table with such delicacy for a moment I thought he was going to kiss my hand. Then he squeezed my wrist and braced his other hand against my shoulder. When he bent my arm backwards at the elbow, I still didn’t believe what he was doing.
The bone snapped, and I screamed, falling out of my chair, trying to wrench my arm free of his grasp, but he held firm, giving my elbow an extra twist to drive home the pain.
I saw nothing but white spots, my hearing went hollow, just buzzing noise to blot out the sound of my own screaming, but through the haze I heard him say, “I wonder how long it will take for you to heal a broken bone.”