Wolf: To Your Bones (Wolf series Book 2), page 24
His gaze flitted into the rearview mirror and then back to the street. “He’ll follow. Keep an eye out for more werewolves!”
For a split second, I wanted to yell at him. We couldn’t leave Hunter behind. However, not only Keith but also Liam remained calm. There was no indifference in their faces—just trust, as if they knew that Hunter would make short work of the new werewolf. They didn’t seem worried in the slightest.
I could only hope they weren’t wrong.
The next root almost catapulted me off the car, so I had to let go of Keith’s vest. The Dodge rushed into the clearing—a flat area of waist-high grass—and fought its way to a path that suited the size of the white van. I no longer dared to stand upright, crouching behind the driver’s cab with tensed shoulders and searching the surroundings. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t stop focusing on the memories of Josh’s and my accident. Through it all was Josh, kneeling before me with a bleeding forehead and a horrified face. The sight of it was so painful that I had to lower my eyelids and push it away with all my strength.
Where are you?
At the same time, Liam raised his arm. “There it is.”
My head popped up. About fifty meters away, a building appeared, disturbing the natural beauty of the area. It was a compact building with white walls and barred windows, and the front looked as if it had recently been repainted. The complex wasn’t particularly large. It would barely take up the space of the lower floor of my home.
It almost crushed my hopes. Could there even be anything here? I was on the verge of losing my nerve, until I remembered that Hunter was risking his life fighting a werewolf. There had to be something here.
I was so lost in thought that Keith’s sudden braking all but hurled me against the cab. He had parked the Dodge in the high grass and now kicked the door open. When his head appeared beside me, I got back to my feet and hurried out of the truck. Meanwhile, Liam had also stepped out to take a look around. The noise of the werewolves was no longer audible. It was dead quiet around us.
“We need to get closer.” Liam pulled the hood of his dark green sweater over his head. Keith and I did the same. Josh’s hood was a little too big for me and obstructed my view more than I was comfortable with.
“We’ll stay behind the trees,” Liam added. “They shouldn’t spot us right away.”
His gaze found my face.
“Better come with us,” he added. “There could be more werewolves around.”
I nodded and followed them with weak knees. My excitement had reached a level that stunned me. I stopped thinking about how we could be attacked by a werewolf at any time, and even the fear I had just felt was gone. The only thing I focused on was our mission.
I’ll find you.
We approached the old plant. It was almost on the edge of the clearing, so we stayed behind the trees a few meters away and peeked inside the building. There was only one window with thick bars blocking us. I couldn’t detect any guards.
“I’m getting closer.” Keith’s voice was a whisper but it still echoed through the thicket. I saw him trudge through the grass and cupped his hands around his eyes as he leaned against the window. My nervousness closed my throat. While the alpha remained silent, I prayed over and over again that Josh was in there, that Keith could see him. Whether that made sense or not.
“Hey.”
Hunter’s voice scared me to death. He emerged from the forest behind us, a few wounds on his face, and crookedly grinned at us. He must have gotten a new pair of jeans from the Dodge, because the rest of his clothes were missing. He joined us but couldn’t find a tree to sufficiently cover his silhouette. With his wide arms and flat belly, he looked like a bodybuilder. It was almost frightening how unharmed he was. As if nothing had happened.
“What did you do to it?” I whispered.
His answer was a quick glance, followed by a shrug of the shoulders. “I don’t think you want to know.”
His answer brought a terrible horror over me. I thought about Josh and how he had killed the werewolf that day. I knew that that werewolf had also been human. They all were. And yet, because we were here without permission, this new werewolf had attacked us and Hunter had probably killed him. I thought it was awful, but I pulled myself together. We couldn’t back out or change anything now.
Keith came back to us. “I say we go in. I don’t see much inside. It’s just too dark.”
He peered briefly into the sky. The morning sun was hiding behind dense rain clouds.
Liam nodded.
“We definitely found something,” he noted and came out from behind his tree. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have run into a werewolf.”
“Where do you think it came from?” I nervously asked. My ears were focused on the thicket the whole time. Just the thought of a second monster shooting out of the bushes made my neck hair stand on end and my palms sweat.
“At worst, it was pure coincidence,” Liam murmured. “This place isn’t in our territory.”
However, he didn’t seem overly convinced about this.
“If I’m right, though, he was a sentry. A guard dog.”
Hunter stared at him. “Are you telling me they trained him? How is that possible?”
Keith slapped his hand against a tree. His patience had run out. “We’ll figure that out inside. Let’s go.”
He turned around and hurried ahead to rattle the door. It had to be locked, because Keith didn’t bother with it for long. He took a step back and, with a single, powerful kick, propelled the thin sheet of metal off its hinges. The noise hurt my eardrums and echoed over the entire clearing.
“Great.” Liam sighed. “If there are any more werewolves here, you just called them all.”
“Good,” muttered Keith with his jaw clenched. “Let them come so that the damn sneaking stops.”
We remained silent in front of the old building until Keith pushed us inside to look around. He remained outside to keep watch.
A musty room awaited us. The air felt like it hadn’t seen oxygen for years; it was dusty and somehow thick. I coughed while I groped along the wall searching for a light switch. There were none, so we had to make do with the semi-darkness. Hunter was still standing at the door to keep an eye on Keith, and he looked even larger in the small building, his head almost reaching the ceiling. Meanwhile, Liam had started to rummage through a pile of documents he found abandoned on a small desk. I peered into every corner and under every cloth with which some old equipment had been covered. I found buttons, switches, and indicators that didn’t mean anything to me—but no Josh. There was nothing I would’ve thought the kidnappers could need to study werewolves. No chemicals, no strange liquids, nothing.
My last hope died when I looked at Liam and he shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said. “They must’ve gone somewhere else.”
I was about to collapse under that realization when I noticed Keith. He was peering at the outside of the building with a strange, almost fascinated look on his face.
“Come on out,” he said. “This thing has a basement.”
What Keith had discovered was a kind of a storm cellar. Two large metal doors sitting at the back of the building. Under normal circumstances, we probably never would’ve found them. They had been hidden under a green tarp and some boxes that Keith had snatched away because he found it suspicious. Just like the rest of the complex, the doors looked almost new. There were no blemishes, not even rust stains—something the thin tarp could hardly have provided for. A lock hang from the bulky hatch.
Keith reached into the pocket of his vest and pulled something out. It was a pocketknife with a red handle that looked quite expensive.
“Step aside.” He picked the lock in a few seconds. He’d definitely done this kind of thing before.
After the lock had fallen into the grass, Keith grabbed the cellar doors with both hands and opened them. The hinges creaked and revealed a staircase that led steeply down. The corridor was only as wide as two people. None of us did anything, though, until Liam finally nodded. “We should check it out.”
“I’ll go first,” Keith said, turning to Hunter. “Close the doors behind us. No one needs to know we’re here.”
My nervousness had reached its peak. When Hunter urged me forward, I had to hold on to the wall so I wouldn’t fall thanks to my weak knees.
We had finally found what we were looking for.
We just had to.
It didn’t take long until the concrete steps turned into a clean, white tiled floor. They led along a corridor, down fifty or sixty steps, and into another corridor that had nothing to do with the building on the surface.
Inside the old storm cellar, we seemed to have entered a different world. My breath staggered. I could hear Liam gasp, too, when we left the steps behind us. Hunter was still busy closing the basement doors, but he followed us shortly thereafter and stared alongside the rest of us.
It looked almost more like an air-raid shelter than a mere storm cellar. The hallway was wide enough to move freely and had a ceiling height of at least three meters. However, it wasn’t its sheer size that caused our astonishment—it was its presentation. Tiled walls wherever the eye could see, an equally tiled floor, and horribly bright neon lights on the ceiling. Everything down here was so white and sterile. It looked like a hospital. Hygienic floors, cold light, and a white corridor from which countless doors branched off.
“Liam,” I said. “What . . .”
My whole body started to quiver. I just couldn’t believe that we had found something like this right underneath Shatterlake’s woods. It mocked all reality. I felt like I was in one of those movies where they didn’t take anything at face value.
The lab. Could it really be? Or was this just a dream?
Liam seemed to feel my tension as he pulled his hood up. “We’ve got to be damn careful,” he said. “Someone’s working here for sure. We can’t get caught.”
Keith’s expression was icy. He looked right through us. “You can count on that.”
Instead of making a plan with us, the alpha shot forward and for the first door. When he got it, he grabbed the handle and rushed in.
We chased after him. Hunter flanked me as I hurried into the interior of the room, and just two steps later I stopped in my tracks. The sheer amount of detail flooded me. We had found all the equipment we’d been expecting to find. My eyes flitted over electrical devices and machines whose purposes I didn’t understand, wandered across a desk full of documents, and froze at the doctor’s coats on the wall. They hung on small metal hooks, as if they were waiting to be slipped on at any time.
Then my gaze fell on a single person. It was a dark-haired man with deep wrinkles, who had probably only been made aware of us by the sound of the door. His brown eyes flew in our direction and stared at us, perplexed. It felt like an eternity that we just looked at each other. Then the stranger dashed across the room and reached for a switch on the wall.
He didn’t make it. In a split second, Keith stepped forward, ripped a gun from his pocket, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 21
The bang echoed unbearably loud on the walls. My brain hadn’t even registered seeing the gun before the bullet hit the man in the back. He stumbled forward and sank to his knees. I was too stunned to look away. Instead, I watched the strange man die. He fell face first onto the tiled floor and became terribly silent.
I just stood there and stared at the blood that was collecting into a puddle. It reminded me of the worst hours of my life. I saw the hybrid shot before my eyes and heard his whimpering, and finally stumbled over to Keith to slam my fists against his chest.
“What are you doing?” My voice was shrill as a siren. I didn’t care that Keith was holding a still-smoking gun. I was blinded by rage.
The pack had never said a word about their intention to kill anyone. I realized that Keith had probably kept his gun in his pocket the whole time—in the factory, at the tent, at the supermarket. It made me sick. I could’ve taken him for anything, but not a cold-blooded killer. I had the feeling of losing the ground under my feet.
Keith’s answer was a shove that made me bump against Hunter, who held my shoulders while I regained my balance. Then I stepped back up to Keith and clenched my fists, though I didn’t hit him this time. I was so upset, I felt tears in my eyes.
“You murderer! This wasn’t part of the deal!”
I had the somewhat irrational thought that we had swapped roles. Just a year ago, Keith had accused Josh of killing his friend. Today we were arguing about the death of a man whose name we didn’t even know. I couldn’t believe it had come to this.
Keith looked at me like I was crazy. We glared at each other like enemies who could turn on each other at any moment.
“What were you going to do?” he snarled. “Ask them nicely?”
He pointed at the corridor with an energetic gesture.
“The guy was going for help, you damn hypocrite!”
“Hey.” Hunter stepped out from behind me and approached Keith with a reassuring expression on his face. He seemed to want to take the gun from him—just in case.
“Calm down, man,” he murmured softly.
Liam stood on the other side of Hunter, his eyes fixed on the dead man, and remained silent. He looked like he was in deep contemplation.
“Give me that thing.” Hunter took the gun. He tried to mediate between us. I didn’t let Keith out of my sight.
“What do you mean?” My voice had become calmer, and Keith knew exactly what I was talking about. He had called me a hypocrite, and he was so angry that I could see the veins pulsing at his temple.
Keith snorted. “How can you take sides for these people? After what they did to Josh? After they almost killed you?”
I almost gasped, realizing that this was the very first time Keith used Josh’s name. He hadn’t called him half-wolf.
“They don’t care about our lives,” Keith added. “So why should I care about theirs?”
He turned his gaze away, as if I wasn’t worth looking at.
“Your noble intentions of rescue obviously end when you have to get your hands dirty.”
“But . . .” It took me far too long to find my words again. “They’re people too, Keith.”
He was blind to my objection, only shaking his head gruffly. Before he could reply, however, Liam interrupted.
“I can’t believe it.”
The three of us spun around simultaneously. Liam was standing right behind the alpha and seemed to be reading something. I only realized at second glance that he was holding a stack of documents. He must’ve found it on the desk.
“What is it?” The sight of the white paper tied up my throat. I even forgot the dead man on the ground.
Liam didn’t answer. His eyes remained focused on the documents for an eternity until he gave them to me. His pale face made my knees go weak.
“You should see this,” he said almost soundlessly.
In one brief impulse, I tried to resist. I wanted to refuse to know what could upset Liam so much.
Josh.
I rifled through the documents. I scanned charts, weight data, and the names of drugs that didn’t mean anything to me. Liam helped me find the right place. He pointed his finger at a group of numbers which were listed neatly under each other.
001 - burnt out
002 - burnt out
003 - burnt out
004 - suffocated
005 - burnt out
006 - burnt out
007 - starved
008 - eliminated
009 - poisoned
I stared at Liam.
“What is it?” I whispered, feeling dread shoot up my spine.
Hunter and Keith peered over our shoulders and read along. None of them said a word. The gunshot, our fight, it was all forgotten. All around us time seemed to have stopped. We didn’t even notice that the noise of Keith’s gun had put us in danger. We just stood there, looked at the paper in my hand, and didn’t dare to believe what our intuition was telling us.
Only Liam was convinced, and he nodded. I’d never seen his face so expressionless. “They’re werewolves.” In the tense silence his voice sounded unnaturally loud. “On the other side you’ll find the dates when they were captured.”
I didn’t move. The sense of his explanation didn’t want to get through to me, because I knew Liam was right. These men not only caught werewolves and studied them—they also killed them.
All the blood had to have disappeared from my face.
“How?” Keith was no longer irritated, but he sounded no less stunned than I felt. “What does that mean, burnt out?”
Liam’s lips pressed into a thin line.
“That was explained on one of the pages,” he replied. “They test how much werewolves can take.”
His eyes flitted across my features.
“They call burnout an effect that occurs when werewolves are forced to transform for too long. The werewolves die.”
My heart was throbbing. There were too many questions in my head. How could someone force a werewolf to transform, and what was the point of then killing them? With this thought, I looked at the paper once again and searched the list. It was an incredible amount of numbers—and almost every one had already been put out of action. I discovered werewolves that had been killed with acid, with the injection of a wrong blood group, and even with silver.
“They burn or drown them, or let them starve, among other things.” Liam’s voice hummed in the background like a terrible singsong.
“Holy shit,” Hunter murmured.
The more Liam spoke, the more frantically my eyes flew over the list. I read number by number, holding the stack so tightly that I felt the paper tearing under my fingers.
Josh, I thought. No. Josh. No.
It was just one word. If I could find him on that list, one word could mean that he had been taken from me. One word and Josh would never return to Shatterlake. He would never look at me again, never kiss me, and never laugh again.
