Chapter 27: Alexis

Chapter 27: Alexis

It was three in the morning when I was woken up from my sleep by my phone. Usually, I made sure to keep it on silent whenever I was going to bed. If I didn’t, all the hundreds of notifications on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Instagram would drive me nuts. Tonight, though, after everything that had happened, I had completely forgotten about my phone and did not silence it.

I grabbed it and checked the time first. Then I checked the missed calls. Maliha had called me eight times in the past five minutes. What could be so urgent? I looked at Will and found him snoring deeply as he slept. The sex had tuckered us both out.

I didn’t have a chance to process everything that had happened. From the depression upon hearing Will’s presumably doomed fate from the doctor to the elation, I felt when Vince showed up with the potion, it was nothing short of an emotional rollercoaster. And to top it all off, we had passionate sex that culminated in us falling asleep before we could do anything else.

I was still naked when I got out of bed. As I dialed Maliha’s number, I hurriedly put on my pajamas and went into the living room. He might be asleep, but he was not going to stay that way if I were to start talking loudly in the room.

“Maliha, there better be a really good reason why you’re calling me at three in the fucking morning!” I whispered.

“There is; now shut up and listen to me,” Maliha said. “Remember that compression-based AI program that you used to search up terms on the Beckett Pharma server? Yeah, so apparently, neither of us actually shut it down, and it has been aggregating data ever since. I just checked while I was working on something in my room. It’s lighting up like fireworks. There’s been some sort of a phone call, and the people used one of the terms that you logged in to the program several times. I guess it was something called Wolf’s Bane? If you can get here within an hour before this program overtakes all of my computer’s processing power and fries up my circuits, that would be great. Otherwise, I’m going to have to pull the kill switch and end this task, or else my precious computers are gonna bite the dust!”

“Fuck!” I shot a look at the bedroom, then at the door. I’d have to do this alone. Will needed his rest. And according to Maliha, I had no time.

While still in my pajamas, I raced out of Will’s house and got into my pickup truck, my mind thinking in a dozen different directions as to what this latest development could mean. Had they perhaps made a breakthrough and somehow finished the production of Wolf’s Bane?

Fiddler’s Green turned into a veritable haunted town every winter. Now that we were on the brink of winter, the first of the foggy nights greeted the town at the most inopportune time. The entire town was covered in a dense layer of mist, making it extremely hard for me to get to Maliha’s place.

Half an hour and a few scraps on my pickup truck later, I reached Maliha’s apartment and knocked on her door.

I braced myself for the door to open and for her to yank me inside. It happened just as I had predicted. The door banged open, and Maliha grabbed me by the shoulders, pulling me inside.

“You’ve gotta stop doing that,” I said wearily. I yawned and stretched my arms as I walked behind Maliha.

“You look like you could have done with a few more hours of rest,” Maliha said.

“Couldn’t this have waited till the morning?”

“If it could have, I would not have disturbed you like that. But this whole program is overtaking my entire server, my computer power, and I barely have any RAM left to process my personal work,” she said. “I’ll make you some coffee while you go through the data. It’s all pulled up there; just point and click. Don’t worry; I haven’t seen any of it. Whatever it is, I don’t want to know. It’s against the principles of hacking. Let’s say you, and I end up in court. I’ll not know. Therefore, I won’t be convicted,” Maliha said.

“Yeah, but you hacked them for me,” I said. “You’re going to be complicit. These are your computers. This is your apartment.”

“Dammit,” Maliha said, slamming her fist on the computer table, rattling a bunch of keyboards. “I’m going to go make some coffee for you. Give me a second. I’ve got this new cappuccino that I want to try. It’s gonna take a while for me to get the machine going.

“Cool beans,” I said. Now that she was not in the room, I started combing through the data that her compression-based AI had aggregated.

The first thing that came up was a conference call with three attendees. Blair, Ralph, and Maurice. The call log was highlighted in red in five different places, and there was a search term next to it: Wolf’s Bane.

I clicked on it.

“Hello there, gents.” This was Ralph’s voice, undoubtedly. “You won’t believe what our furry friend did last night.”

“When you call him furry friend, it makes it sound like something in a porno for sick fucks,” Maurice said. “Let’s just call him by his name. At least give the fella that much courtesy. So what did Will do?”

“Will fucked up ten of my crew last night. I don’t know why he attacked yesterday of all days, but the few who survived told me that he was nothing short of rabid. It must be done now, Blair. He has to be eliminated. I can’t have any more casualties. Not after he killed two of my oldest men. It’s him and his fucking bitch that are running this town now, not us,” Ralph said. He sounded alarmed and afraid.

I had wondered where Will had gone when he had disappeared into the woods in his frenzy. Well, there was the answer to that riddle. He’d killed a couple of vampires. No big loss there.

“Relax, gentlemen. Remember Wolf’s Bane? The serum that I was supposed to make?” Blair spoke for the first time.

“Yes, you kept promising that it would blow our pants off, but you’ve done nothing of the sort as of yet,” Maurice said.

“Mr. Mayor, now don’t you take that tone with me. If we’re to do this, we’re going to do this together. Operation Wolf’s Bane is a go. I finally cracked it. I’ve made the serum, and right now, it’s in my lab in its final stages. It’ll be done tomorrow, and as soon as it is finished, we’re going to go on a wolf hunt. Let’s slaughter those sons of bitches,” Blair sneered.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you figure it out?” Ralph asked. “From chemist to chemist. I’m interested in knowing the formula.”

“If you’re a chemist, Ralph, I’m the king of England,” Blair said and started laughing.

“Laugh it up,” Maurice said. “But do tell us what you did.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. Wolf’s Bane’s original formula was devised by my father. What he could not figure out, and what I was not able to figure out until recently, was how to make all the chemicals adhesive enough to create the concoction. I tried all the chemicals on the Periodic Table to see which one would be most effective. All of them failed. All except one,” Blair said.

“And which one is that?” Ralph snapped.

“Argentum,” Blair said.

“You mean silver?” Maurice asked.

“Silver indeed, gentlemen. Now you may laugh it up. All those old tales that we heard. It turns out they’re all true. Silver is going to be that werewolf’s undoing. Well, silver and a bunch of million-dollar of my proprietary chemical compounds,” Blair said.

“Fucking hell. Who would have thought?” Maurice asked. “So, I gotta ask. The Wolf’s Bane works with silver. But does silver alone do something to a wolf?”

“You know what, I never thought of it. Hey, Maurice. Why don’t you come around, and I’ll shoot you with a bunch of silver bullets, and we’ll see if you’ll live for the next midterms or not,” Blair said and then burst into snide cackles.

“Oh, please, you need me to run this town for you,” Maurice said.

“Tomorrow night, gentlemen. Mark it on your calendars. We’re going to hunt a wolf,” Blair stated.

“See you tomorrow,” Ralph said, then hung up. Maurice hung up after that.

The call may have ended, but my work was not. I immediately searched up other usages of the term Wolf’s Bane. The lab reports detailing the production of Wolf’s Bane version 19.1 came up, stating that the chemical was at 93% completion. The estimated time for completion was eighteen hours.

Will and I had an eighteen-hour window to stop the production of Wolf’s Bane.

My legs were shaking as I left the room. It had been one calamity after the other. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Out of the fire and into the lava pit.

“Hey, aren’t you going to drink this? I made it with love!” Maliha called after me from the kitchen.

“I don’t have time,” I said.

“I’m going to delete that program. Is that okay?” she asked.

“Delete it,” I said.

“If they catch us for this, plead the fifth!” Maliha called.

My heart was racing. How would we penetrate the security of that building and get to the lab where the serum was being finalized? Wouldn’t Blair, Maurice, and Ralph be there, waiting?

***

I did not wait to wake Will up in the morning. It was thirty minutes past four when I reached his home. I went to him immediately and shook him awake.

“Did I do something again?” he asked nervously.

“No. But something happened while we were asleep,” I said. I briefed him on everything I had learned and told him about the call between Ralph, Blair, and Maurice. When I shared the news that the Wolf’s Bane would be done in less than eighteen hours, Will sprang out of bed.

“I can’t have people playing dice with my life. This ends today,” he said. He put on his clothes in a hurry as I told him everything else that I had seen on Maliha’s computer.

“But Will, the lab,” I said. “The lab’s in the main building, and we can’t seriously just infiltrate it in the middle of the day. Since last time, they’re bound to have increased their security. They’re probably going to expect us.”

“Be that as it may, we have an absence of time on our hands. Had we a week to plan something, I would have engaged all the wolves of the pack, and we would have come up with an offensive strategy. But there’s no time. It’s just you and me,” he said.

“So what do we do?” I asked. “The three of them are going to meet tomorrow at the lab. That’s what they said.”

“You’re not seeing this for the opportunity that it is. We get to kill four birds with one stone. Blair, Maurice, Ralph, and the serum—all of them will be in the same location tomorrow. If we play our cards right, we can eliminate all our problems in one fell swoop.”

It hadn’t struck me before he said it out loud. Now that he mentioned it, how could I have overlooked something so glaringly obvious?

***

The plan was not simple by any means. But as far as foolproof plans went, it was as ironclad as the two of us could come up with on such short notice.

We used Will’s dining table to hatch our scheme. At this moment, twelve hours before the serum would complete, the dining table was cluttered with charts, markers, and notes.

Although Will’s initial suggestion was to eliminate all three people and destroy the serum, the more we thought about it, the more obvious it became that none of them could do anything without the serum itself. Our first priority was to get our hands on the serum before they could. Provided that the serum was in their home territory, it would be a challenge. It would be even more of a challenge to break in there in the daytime.

“The elevator shaft goes all the way down to the second basement. That’s our way in,” Will said, looking at the schematics of the building on the dining table. Getting my hands on the blueprints of the building was as simple as giving Maliha a call and asking her to do it for me. She sent me the PDF, which I printed from the printer in my home.

“So we’re going to sneak into the second basement where all the cars are parked and break into the elevator shaft,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then we shift and use our wolf forms’ litheness to our advantage. Then, we can simply climb to the twentieth floor,” Will said, pointing to the blueprints, “where the main lab is.”

“After that, we’re going to pry open the elevator doors on that floor and prepare for the worst,” I added.

We agreed that we’d take action against any guards or goons they would have implanted around the lab and then brute-force our way past their defenses until we got to the serum.

“We destroy the serum,” Will said.

“And then?”

“And then we escape the same way we came. The elevator shaft,” he finished.

“But what about Blair, Ralph, and Maurice? Aren’t we going to do something about them?”

“If we encounter them, we’re going to take them on. You must realize that they work with deception. Ralph once tricked me into thinking that he had snipers pointing at me. Blair once tried to rattle you by pretending that he had already attacked me. And the most dangerous of them all, Maurice. He has been working with vampires from the beginning. They’re going to play dirty. We need to be prepared for that,” he said.

“They’re also going to have their reinforcements. Ralph will have his vampires in the building. Blair will have his security team prowling through the corridors,” I added.

“Even if we cannot attack them at all, we destroy the serum and escape. We live to fight another day,” Will said.

“It’s not good enough,” I said, shaking my head. “Blair already has the working recipe for the serum. He’s going to make it again, and we can’t just keep expecting him to show up at the lab and destroy the serum the next time he makes it. Something has to be done. Something final.”

Then, almost at the same time, we both spoke:

“Dibs on Maurice,” I said.

“I’ll take Ralph and Blair,” Will said. “It’s personal. Blair and I will finish the business his father and I started. Once Ralph is dead, his vampires will be leaderless. It’s going to be easy to eliminate the rest of them. You can handle Maurice.”

We went over the plan another time, memorizing the layout of the building and discussing the minutia with each other. It wasn’t until another hour later that we finalized everything.

“So we’re doing this,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It all happens today.”

“For better or worse,” Will nodded.

“And are you certain that you’re strong enough to fight?” It was not meant to be a patronizing question. It was sincere. He had been through a lot in the past few days.

“I’ve never felt stronger,” Will said. “Obviously, we’re going to leave Vincent in charge of the pack.”

“Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, all our troubles in Fiddler’s Green will come to an end,” I said. “I know I should be scared, but I’m excited.”

“For once, we’re going to take the first step in taking back what’s rightfully ours. I could never have imagined being able to pull something like this off without you. I mean it. You have been a constant source of courage for me all this time,” Will said, hugging me.

“I love you, Will,” I whispered, taking in his musk as his body wrapped around mine. He smelled amazing.

“I love you too, Alexis,” he said.

***

We patiently waited for the sun to set. This reduced our window, but it allowed us to work under the cover of darkness. It was going to be easier to break into the building when all the workers had left.

As Will said, there would be less collateral damage this way.

We waited on the rooftop across Beckett Pharma, watching as a thick layer of fog rolled over the sea and crept into the town. Tonight, it would all come to an end.

“I am glad to have you with me,” Will said, holding my hand.

“Stronger together,” I said, squeezing his hand as we watched the last of the workers leave the building.

Now, only the security guards patrolling the outside and the lobby remained.

“Shall we?” I asked, looking at Will.

“After you,” Will said.

I put my phone to my ear and said, “Maliha. Cut the power.”

“Going dark in 3…2…1,” Maliha said. She had truly outdone herself. She had hacked into the grid and had isolated the section providing power to this town. The moment she finished her countdown, all the lights on the building turned off.

Werewolves saw better in the dark anyway.