Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Will

After ten hours of scouring the area and rounding up all the feral werewolves, I finally came home with the rest of the pack members in the dead of night.

“That’s strange,” Vince said as he took his phone out of his pocket. “We were so caught up in defeating and killing those werewolves I didn’t even get a chance to see that Alexis has called me like a bunch of times.”

“She called you and not me?” I asked. Every bone and muscle in my body ached from the ten hours of constant exertion I’d been through. Tracking down all those feral werewolves and then fighting them until they died was not an easy task, even with all the reinforcements that I’d taken with me. I tried to fish my phone out of my pocket but realized that I’d left it at home.

I immediately raced to the house, dreading the worst. I had some idea that Alexis had been holding some information back, but I had no idea what it was. When I found that Alexis had left the house in the middle of the night, I immediately tried to find my phone. It was there in the bedroom, put on silent. I’d done that earlier today when Rogelio had arrived.

Fuck.

Sixteen missed calls and a voice message?

I played the voice message, hoping to hear some rationality coming from her. Maybe she’d gone out of town for the night to unwind or something like that. But when I heard what she had said, my blood boiled with rage, and my mind went numb with worry.

She had decided to go and confront Blair all by herself. This meant that she knew where he was hiding and had decided to keep that from me.

As my phone fell from my grip, I looked at my reflection in the bedroom mirror. It showed a gaunt man looking harrowingly back at the mirror. It was not the calm and contained Will I’d become in recent months. I looked every bit the werewolf who had just escaped from Edward’s manor—a haunted man.

It had taken me this long to recognize and register that I had been losing my grip on my anger. Perhaps that’s why she had kept this critical information from me. Regardless, if she had gone to face Blair all by herself, it only meant one thing.

Alexis’s life was in danger.

I immediately raced out of the house and came across Vincent, standing in the commune’s square, talking with the rest of the men as some drank beer and others smoked their cigarettes.

“Vince. Listen to me,” I said, holding him by the shoulders. “Alexis is in danger. I am going to save her. I need you to look after the commune for me while I’m gone. Can you do that?”

“Are you sure you don’t want us to come with you?” Vince asked, his face reciprocating the same worry that was on mine. “If she’s in danger, we all owe it to her to help her.”

“As many werewolves as we’ve killed, there might be more lurking around. Tonight, I need you to be the leader of the pack in my stead. And as for the rest of the pack, they should stay within the commune and defend it from any werewolf that tries to attack. Got it?”

“Got it. And good luck with rescuing Alexis,” Vince said.

“She’s a brave wolf. She doesn’t need any rescuing,” I said. It was more of a way to reassure myself than to reassure Vince.

I got in my Jeep and dialed Maliha’s number. This whole operation stank of her. She must have somehow found Blair’s location and shared it with Alexis.

“Will boy, it’s been such a long time since we’ve talked!” Maliha, ever so enthusiastic, said cheerfully.

“Did you ever tell Alexis Blair’s location?” I asked, trying to hold back the rage in my voice.

“Ummm…yes. But I thought she shared that intel with you. I mean, you guys share everything, don’t you?” Maliha asked.

“Not this. She did not tell me this. And I’m afraid she’s about to do something very rash. You have to tell me where she’s going,” I said.

“She’s in danger?”

“Yes!”

“Fine. Fine. Don’t scream at me. I’ll send you a message of the coordinates that I sent her,” Maliha said, hanging up the phone.

I waited a minute for her to send the coordinates, and then when I got them, I dialed them in my Jeep’s GPS. The location that the GPS showed was somewhere in the south of Fiddler’s Green. A half-hour long drive ought to take me there, or so my GPS said.

Turning on the engine, I looked back at the commune one last time, hoping I’d made the right decision in handing things over to Vince. After all, he was just as tired as I was, having fought all those feral werewolves and soldiers.

“One problem at a time, Will!” I said to myself, then drove out of the commune at breakneck speed. Alexis should not have done this. Even by her standards, this was extremely reckless. She should have waited for me. It wasn’t as if I’d ditched her. She had not given me any cause to be angry at her in such a long time that now when there was a legit cause, I did not know how to process the rage I was feeling. How could she be so reckless?

I swerved the car along the road and turned to the southward road, heading deeper into the forest. Could it be that Blair had been hiding here so close all this time? How had no one ever noticed this?

As I drove past the forest, an abandoned research site came into my view. I’d never seen this facility before in my entire life. In truth, none of the werewolves ever ventured south of Fiddler’s Green. Strictly speaking, this area was not Maine, nor was it the state of New York. This was Connecticut. Fiddler’s Green had the odd luck of being nestled between so many different states that the lines between them were all blurred.

We never had any business in Connecticut. Until now, it seemed.

The coordinates in the GPS showed that the series of abandoned buildings ahead of me were the location where I had to go. It was where Blair was hiding. I got out of my car after parking it along the road. If Blair was in there, I had to be very careful and sneakily make my way in there instead of raising the alarm.

It was so quiet everywhere. There was not a single person out and about. All the windows of the buildings in that research facility were boarded up, with not a single source of light in there. But I could spot shadows moving in the dark behind those windows.

Whatever this place was, it was not abandoned.

I tapped into my bond with Alexis, hoping to see where she was or what she was doing, but I could only sense darkness all around her, as if she was either knocked out or walking about in a lightless place.

There was a road snaking through the forest. On one side of this road, there was a big billboard that looked like it had seen better days. On top of it was written “Morales Virology Research Institute, Connecticut.”

Hmm. A virology research facility that had been closed for some time. It made sense that Blair would set up shop here. If there was lab equipment in there, he could have used it. Besides, all those big buildings surely had to have an underground component to them—a perfect place to hide all the experiments he was doing and all the soldiers that he was housing.

I had to give it to him; this was very ingenious of him, hiding in plain sight like that.

Alexis, are you out there? I had barely sent out that message when something spontaneous happened.

The utter darkness of the road was gone in a second. Now, dozens of lights shone on me as I stood there at the entrance of the research facility. In the next moment, ranks upon ranks of soldiers started coming from every direction, wielding big rifles that were aimed at me, all of them circling me.

“Halt! You shall move no further!” Their Captain barked at me, holding his hand up.

“I’m not here to fight,” I said, raising my hands. My declaration did not deter them from aiming their guns at me. Dozens of red laser dots were on my body, moving around. I knew that there was no chance I was going to fight so many soldiers by myself.

I was not counting on what happened next.

First, the Captain fell to his knees, his rifle falling from his hands. As he tried to get up, he suddenly shifted into a feral wolf. He had barely finished transforming when all the other dozens of soldiers also succumbed to the same fate. Now, instead of being surrounded by soldiers, I was surrounded by feral werewolves, all of whom were closing their ranks around me, their mouths snarling, their claws gnarled.

I shifted just in time to swerve and avoid the sudden onslaught of wolves that had broken upon me like a levee.

Even I knew that it was not possible to fight all of them. But I did not have to fight them in order to defeat them. If my earlier experience with these feral werewolves had any credibility, all these wolves would die within the next few minutes. I just had to run long enough to outrun them and wait for them to die.

But that was easier said than done. Even as I raced at the top of my speed, the feral werewolf horde caught up with me, slashing away at my body from behind, injuring me in several spots at once.

I was bleeding out, and my body was weakening quickly with the loss of blood and the infliction of all these wounds. The feral werewolves were relentless, and they showed no signs of stopping or slowing down.

Until five minutes later, when I was covered in bruises and my blood, all the werewolves stopped chasing me, and I turned around to see that ghastly sight of dozens upon dozens of werewolves writhing there on the floor, turning back into their human forms, their mouths foaming, their eyes and ears bleeding.

Such a terrible fate to fall upon so many. Could Blair see the insanity that he had wrought?

I waited till the last of the wolves was dead and then shifted back into my human form. As I crossed the corpse-riddled path, I noticed that my injuries were not healing as quickly as they used to. The gashes in my legs and the slashes on my back were stinging, blood continuing to pour out of them.

I inched slowly back to the winding road and stood back where I’d started, only this time with piles of corpses all around me.

While waiting to catch my breath and for my injuries to heal, I noticed that the lights were shutting off one by one, and the door in front of me was sliding open. Could it be that Blair had finally conceded?

But Blair was not standing on the other side of that door. For that matter, neither was Alexis. As the last of my wounds got covered with healing scabs, I walked into the abandoned research facility, hoping to make Blair see some sense.