There was only one location left along this path. Soon we’d reach the spot very few ever gained access to—the round Council chamber with its rotating platform and glaring spotlights. A strange place to cage children and an even stranger one from which to plan an attack. Because there was only one door leading in, not even a window to offer an escape route.
Strange also because it was the exact same destination Gabi had sent me and Celeste toward once before.
This time, Celeste stopped in front of the closed door. She had to—she and I both currently lacked fingers with which to manipulate doorknobs. For one long moment, we stood there, assessing what might be on the other side of the barrier. Could we hear breathing? It was hard to say with so many of us unable to maintain complete silence.
“Any alternative routes in?” Orion asked via the mate bond.
I shook my head. And I didn’t have clever ideas other than barging through the door either.
Orion didn’t make me say that. He tried the knob, and when nothing happened, he stood back to let Celeste do her part.
She’d already shifted upward to humanity, assuming that scanners would have been keyed to her retinas here like at the front gate. She was right. The light flashed. The lock clicked.
Orion was gentle yet adamant as he nudged her away from the door, for which I was grateful. It was one thing to let Celeste come with us. It was another to let her lead the way into certain danger.
So Orion was the one who turned the knob and pushed the door inward, staying in the dimly lit hallway for only a moment before growling and stepping through. I followed him and I suspect Celeste and Finnegan did also. But I only had eyes for the two little girls huddling close together on the now-still platform where I’d faced the Council on a few memorable occasions. The kids were no older than Celeste’s students and one seemed to be shielding the other with her bird-like body.
“We’re here to take you back to your families,” Orion said, his voice as gentle as I’d ever heard it.
The little girl who’d folded herself protectively over the other wasn’t gentle when she replied. “That’s impossible. We don’t have families. We were rescued.”
“From wolves.” This female voice was older and it came from the shadows I’d assumed were empty on my right side. The same side where Celeste now stood, naked and weaponless.
I pushed my way around my sister, intending to exchange places with her. But there was movement on both sides of us now. No matter where I stood, Celeste remained in danger.
The glare of lights in the center of the room made it hard to see, but I was pretty sure two people tall as adults only more slender stood on my left. Meanwhile, behind the young woman who’d spoken, were two shorter shadows.
It was hard to say which side presented a greater hazard. Well, hard until one of the girls on my left stepped out of the shadows with what looked like the broken leg of a wooden chair held like a club before her.
This was an ambush. But the aggressors appeared to be the exact children we’d hoped to save.
Chapter 29
We couldn’t fight children. But what was the alternative? Lock them back in and run to town to hunt down tranquilizer darts, hoping we could calibrate the dosage to their smaller bodies? Find some sort of knock-out gas like what Gabi used against us on the oil rig weeks ago?
No, I didn’t have the stomach for any of that and we didn’t have time for it either. Because Gabi had led us directly to this spot and she was bound to have a nefarious plot relating to our presence. I didn’t know why we hadn’t been attacked yet, but the other shoe was bound to drop before long.
So I didn’t body block Celeste the way I wanted to when she strode alone and unarmed toward the two little girls at the center of the dais. Instead, I drove my fingernails into my palm as my sister held her arms away from her naked body, her wide open hands proving to anyone who cared to look that she was defenseless.
Well, as defenseless as someone who’d trained under Gabi could possibly be. Still, the girls and young women who had been caged here didn’t know about Celeste’s education. So I wasn’t surprised when they let her pass, focusing instead on those of us with obvious fangs, guns, and knives.
“You’re a wolf,” said the littlest girl, who had been hiding behind the other but wasn’t any longer.
“I can be,” Celeste agreed. “Do you want to see?”
“Yes,” that girl answered at the same moment the other one shook her head in adamant refusal.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noted Ari following Celeste’s lead, albeit with a different destination. The teenager shifted from wolf to human then used that nakedness to prove he wasn’t dangerous as he worked his way toward the girls not much younger than him on our left side. The one holding a chair leg in front of her waggled it menacingly, but he said something I didn’t catch and she laughed before letting the makeshift weapon drop back toward the ground.
So that was all good. But while Celeste and Ari were wooing two of the three groups of children, I was adding up numbers and ages of them all. Most came in pairs and, if I didn’t miss my guess, each pair was about five years younger than the next. Meanwhile, the woman who wasn’t part of a matched set looked like she was about twenty, suggesting she’d once been planned as a sister for Hailey.
That sounded like the exact type of math Julius would go for when creating alternative offspring. Four paired experiments ready to bear the matebrand and half-glyph just in case his gamble on me and Celeste didn’t bear fruit.
Worse, Julius took the scientific method seriously, had told me multiple times how important it was to set up variations when testing hypotheses. What conditions might he have changed when raising these kids? My gut twisted as I imagined childhoods even more rocky than mine and Celeste’s.
Now wasn’t the time to tease out the girls’ traumas however. Because the scent of Celeste’s old sock was still strong in my lupine nostrils. And it didn’t emanate from the center of the room where my sister now crouched beside the youngest girls, murmuring words I couldn’t make out from this distance. The scent instead came from my right side, near where the woman Hailey’s age stood.
Still on four paws, I paced toward the scent, trying to look innocuous. It didn’t work.
“Don’t come any closer,” the woman demanded.
“Oh, let her pass.” This was a ten-year-old. From the tone of the girl’s voice, it sounded like she thought she was in charge.
No wonder the woman snapped back, “Why should I?”
“Because Gabi left a message.”
“She didn’t tell me about it,” whined the other ten-year-old, the one who’d been silent up until this point. Her eyes were wide and her lip quivered.
“That’s because she knew you were a tattle-tale.”
I gave the bickerers a wide berth while continuing to follow the sock’s scent around the backside of the tables earmarked for Council members. The young woman and the ten-year-olds let me pass, and soon both the source of the scent and something else became visible beneath the chair where Julius always sat.
The sock that had drawn me here was irrelevant, but what lay beneath it wasn’t. A black box with one small display screen. Glowing red lights counting down seconds. Attached wires leading in so many directions I could only imagine the devastation after the numbers hit zero.
I shifted so fast I banged my human head against the underside of the table. “We have to evacuate,” I said through the pain. “Now.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” That was the woman Hailey’s age.
