CHAPTER 18

Josie white-knuckled it all the way back into town, and she wasn’t even the one driving. She sat beside Eli in the front of the Jeep and stared through the windshield at the eerie flashing red and blue of the emergency lights unaccompanied by the shrillness of the sirens; it was almost four in the morning, after all. The silence didn’t matter, though, because she still thought she could hear a high-pitched wailing noise without them. Too bad she knew that sound came from inside her own head, not out of it.

Behind the wheel, Eli’s features were set in a grim cast, the telltale muscle of his jaw twitching from the clenching of his teeth. He had said barely a word since the call, just switched into his super-efficient-sheriff mode, barked an order at Jim, hustled Josie into the car, and peeled out of the drive as if it weren’t already too late for speed to do Rosemary the slightest bit of good.

“Jim will be right behind us,” he said, breaking the silence with the gruff attempt at reassurance. “And he put out an all-hands call from my radio. I will have every man on the department working on this, Josie. I promise. We’ll find Bill.”

She said nothing, just clenched the hands on her lap together in one big fist and squeezed until she could feel her fingers growing cold from lack of circulation.

“I never should have stayed away last night,” she murmured. “None of the sedatives was working and Bill was getting more and more violent and aggressive by the hour. I should have stayed. I should have realized this was a possibility.”

“Don’t be stupid.” He shot her a hard look, softened a bit by the expression of compassionate concern in his green eyes. “No one saw this as a possibility, and there was no reason we should have. Bill and Rosemary were married for ten years. And more than that, they were mates. I’ve never even heard of one mated Lupine killing another, and I doubt Rick has, either. This kind of thing doesn’t happen, Josie, and you can’t beat yourself up for not predicting the unpredictable.”

“Don’t say it ‘doesn’t’ happen.” She meant to snap it out, but it sounded more like a plea. “You can’t say that. Because it just did.”

He made no response to that, just fixed his attention on the road and drove in tense silence.

When they pulled up in back of the clinic, one police cruiser had already beaten them to the scene. Eli parked beside it, but he’d barely finished applying the brake before Josie had the door flung wide and was sprinting for the entrance, past a very surprised Deputy Able.

Eli shouted at her to wait, but she ignored him. She heard him slam his door and curse, knew he would be following hot on her heels, but she didn’t slow down. Something inside compelled her to hurry—faster!—as if by getting to the scene a second or two sooner she could force the news not to be true. If she reached Rosemary before anyone else, maybe she could save her. Maybe she could make it all go away and both wolves would be locked inside the makeshift kennel, glaring and growling and pacing like ticking time bombs. She could live with time bombs, so long as she could turn back the clock and be here before one of them went off.

But of course, she couldn’t.

She bolted past Andrea, huddled on a stool in the triage area, looking white and shaken and miserable, and slammed into the wall of the hallway because she had taken the corner too fast. She blocked out the pain of the impact and kept running, reaching the isolation room breathless and desperate.

And it made not the slightest bit of difference.

She skidded to a halt just inside the doorway of the small windowless chamber and felt her stomach heave at the sight that greeted her. It looked as if some kind of monster had torn through the chain-link enclosure with the sheer force of his hate. And maybe that was exactly what had happened. A sharp and twisted mass of thick wire framed a hole the size of a hula hoop in the center of the gate. Blood and bits of fur clung to the ends of some of the wire, which looked not as if they had been cut neatly with a man-made tool, but as if they’d been simply snapped in some places and in others stretched until they gave out against an enormous force. The slightly bloody evidence of Bill’s passing, though, failed utterly at preparing her for the sight of what lay just beyond the fence.

Part of Josie wanted to laugh at the sheer amount of gore in the compact space, just because it seemed so impossible for something this horrendous to be real. It was logical to think that a Hollywood film crew had broken into her clinic and used the isolation room to stage an elaborate and ostentatious shot of the aftermath of a mad slasher’s latest murder spree. Surely that had to be it. Those couldn’t be pieces of Rosemary Evans lying like chunks of bloody meat on the perfectly polished linoleum floor.

They couldn’t be.

Eli threw himself into the room behind her, nearly knocking into her before he saw exactly where she was standing. He took one look at her chalk-white face and followed her gaze to the evidence of the Lupine massacre. He uttered a brief, filthy, Anglo-Saxon epithet and grabbed Josie, attempting too late to shield her from the sight. If only he could erase it from her memory.

That, of course, was impossible. As was her fantasy of saving Rosemary. The wolf wasn’t just dead, but torn apart. Clumps of fur and flesh lay everywhere, and more blood than it seemed possible to contain in one body pooled and dripped and dotted every surface. Josie would never be able to look at this room again without seeing the thick, dark liquid and the gruesome evidence of her failure. She had wanted so badly to save these creatures, and she wondered if what she had done had been worse than if she’d never involved herself with them at all.

“You don’t need to look at this,” Eli rasped, his voice harsh and strained against her hair. Despite his words, his hands remained exquisitely gentle where he cradled her to him. “Come back out of here and sit with Andrea. She’s still shaking. You guys can be together and help each other through this. My men and I will deal with what happened in here.”

She shook her head and pulled carefully away from his comforting strength. She knew he was trying to help her, trying to make things easier for her by shielding her from the even more horrific task to come—that of sifting through what remained of the female Lupine in order to piece together what had actually gone on in this room. That would be the first step in figuring out where Bill had gone, and no matter how it turned her stomach, Josie intended to be there for every minute of it.

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and pulled carefully away from him. “I’m fine. I mean, I’m not fine, but I’m not going to fall to pieces. I can cope. And I want to be part of this. I have to be. I need to help sort this out, and I need to help make it right.”

For several long heartbeats, Eli said not a word. His bright eyes studied her face, noting the pallor of her skin, the bruised look beneath her eyes, and the determined set of her jaw. “You’re already tired. You haven’t gotten enough sleep tonight.”

“It’s already morning. And neither have you.” The steadiness of her voice surprised even Josie, and she drew strength from the sound of it.

But she still didn’t have it in her to argue. She didn’t want to argue; she’d had enough of fighting. More than enough. She just wanted to help.

“Please.”

He watched her a moment longer, his gaze searching. Then he nodded. “All right, but anytime you need to take a break, you do it. No heroics and no need to make a fuss about it. You leave and you take exactly as long as you need before you come back. Understood?”

“Understood.”

Josie did leave to talk to Andrea, but only long enough to ensure that the woman’s boyfriend had already been called and was on his way to pick her up. Since the clinic was closed on Sundays, there was no reason for the tech to linger after the police had finished taking her statement, but she shouldn’t be alone, either.

Once she had that taken care of, Josie dug a spare pair of scrubs out of a cabinet and went into the file room to change. When she stepped out again, she felt steadier in the familiar green uniform. The soft cotton cloth comforted her, and with her hair pulled up and back with a black clip, she felt almost ready to face the isolation room again. She grabbed a box of latex gloves and a pair of long tweezers on the way.

By now, the triage room was crowded with the entirety of the Stone Creek sheriff’s office, with the exception of only the secretary and part-time dispatcher, Cindy Lautenberg. Jim Cooper and the other full-time officer, Mike Driscoll, were carrying crime scene cases through to the isolation room, while part-timer Tim McGann quietly interviewed Andrea, her boyfriend Stu now standing with her, his hand on her trembling shoulder. Eli was near the door giving orders to Greg Able and Will Chkalov.

He turned when he saw her and immediately dismissed his men to start their search for the missing Lupine, covering the ground between them in four long strides. When he looked down at her, his expression held a wealth of concern and more than a hint of tenderness.

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

She nodded, once. “Positive.”

He waited only a second before he took her at her word. “Okay. Then let’s get started.”

The isolation room felt crowded with four adults packed inside, but somehow all the living bodies working side by side helped to minimize the devastating effect of seeing someone they all knew lying in pieces at their feet. Eli led her to the now fully opened gate of the kennel enclosure and stepped back so that she could get an unobstructed view of the carnage.

“If you really want to do this, you can help me most by telling me about Rosemary. If I know exactly what he did to her, it might help me figure out not just what happened here, but what could happen next.”

Josie took a breath—through her mouth so that she wouldn’t have to smell the sickly sweet odor of death—and tried to separate what lay in front of her from the living person she had treated throughout the last week. She wasn’t completely successful, but she did manage well enough to start.

Adopting an attitude of academic professionalism, she moved closer to Rosemary’s remains, being careful to step in the smallest amount of blood possible.

“Her lower body seems mainly intact,” she began, relieved at the sound of her doctor voice. She’d been afraid she would sound more like a terrified and devastated little girl. But she managed to keep that voice locked inside for now. “She had cuts and bite wounds on her flanks, including the left, where she sustained her previous injury, and on her legs, as well as blood on her paws, which indicates that although she was injured fairly seriously, she continued to struggle for at least a time before she was overcome.”

Josie moved her gaze along the mangled body and had to work to suppress a shudder. “Her abdomen and chest appear to have sustained the worst damage. She’s been eviscerated, and her large and small intestine, liver, stomach, and one kidney are clearly visible outside the abdominal cavity. The organs also look as if they’ve sustained severe trauma, and I suspect that pieces of one or more of them have been removed and possibly lie scattered in another part of the room.”

She could feel Eli watching her closely, but she intended to give him nothing more than the mildest sign of the turmoil inside her. She refused to be taken away from her scene, her patient, her clinic. She’d stick this out if it killed her, until Bill was caught and the source of his violent rage was found.

“Two of her lower left ribs have been displaced and broken, and these look like teeth marks here.” She pointed to the stark surface of a bone exposed beneath a missing chunk of muscle tissue. “Whether they got here because of an attempt to feed or merely an attempt to inflict further damage, I’m not sure. I’m suspecting, though, that it’s the latter. While there are pieces of... the victim... not attached to the carcass, there appears to be sufficient matter in the room to account for what isn’t right here. Plus, I’d expect to see more exposed and displaced bone if an attempt to feed had been made, and it would be likely that the liver and at least part of the stomach would be completely gone. The liver being the most prized piece of meat in a wolf’s kill.”

Eli nodded. “Anything else?”

“Well, I see plenty of defensive wounds, so she clearly didn’t go down without a fight. There’s blood and fur in her mouth, so she bit her attacker, and the fur on the nails of her front feet indicates more than just walking in shed fur and blood. She put up a pretty fierce struggle. For all the good it did her.”

He nodded grimly. “She didn’t stand much of a chance. He outweighed her by a good fifty pounds, for all their overall size was similar. Plus, she stayed unconscious longer and took longer to recover from that than he did. Chances are, she still had some lingering weakness that made her an easy target.”

“That’s the point I don’t get,” Josie admitted. “Why in the world would he target her? They were mates, and wolf pairs are notoriously loyal to each other. A male wolf is a hell of a lot more likely to kill for his mate than to kill her. What could have motivated him?”

“Is insanity a motive?”

She looked surprised. “You think Bill was insane? I didn’t notice anything odd in his behavior until after he shifted and all this other stuff started.”

“I don’t think Bill was insane, but I think there’s a chance that whatever he’s been turning into since his failure to shift back to human form could be. I imagine that sort of situation, being trapped and not really understanding why or what’s going on... that’s the kind of thing that could play games with a person’s mind. Don’t you think?”

“But this isn’t just, ‘Oh, woe is me! I’m so confused!’ This is Jack the Ripper, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Freddy Krueger’s got nothing on me violence for the sake of sadistic pleasure and the release of rage. Could just a few days have pushed him that far?”

“I don’t know, but I think it’s possible.”

“Then why did Rosemary not do this yesterday? She shifted first, a whole day before Bill. If it’s about the length of being stuck in the wolf form, why didn’t she snap first? Why is Bill not the one lying here in pieces?”

“Maybe it also has to do with the person’s state of mind before they become trapped. Maybe Bill had some underlying psychiatric issues we’re not familiar with. Who knows?” He raked a hand impatiently through his hair and looked harried and angry and frustrated. As frustrated as she was. “Or maybe since we’ve been working on the assumption that he caught an infection from Rosemary that prevented his change, the virus has mutated somehow. It could be anything, but I’m not a scientist so how much my opinion matters here, I can’t tell you.”

“I am a scientist, and I don’t know that I can explain what’s been happening, either,” she admitted, feeling frustration boiling up inside her. She hated feeling helpless. Hated it. “But I know that I want it stopped, and I want it as soon as possible.”

“We’re on the same page there.” He reached for his cell phone, glanced grimly at the time, and flipped it open. “I’m calling Steve, though. There’s a difference between not pressuring someone who’s trying to do you a favor and standing back while people start to die.”

Josie refrained for breaking into a chorus of hallelujahs, but just barely. She watched him dial, then step out into the hallway and pace while he waited for an answer. She didn’t feel even the least bit bad about following him and openly preparing to eavesdrop. She needed this information as badly as he did.

It seemed as if they waited forever, but in reality only a few seconds passed before she saw Eli’s body tense and his expression sharpen.

“Steve. I’ve been hoping to hear from you for a few days now.”

He listened for a second, then made an impatient noise. “Save it. I didn’t call to lay on a guilt trip, but things have changed since I sent you that package, and it’s just become a lot more important that we get those results yesterday.”

Another pause.

“Man, hold on. I can’t understand a damn word you’re saying. Except for the occasional but, and, or the. You’d better talk to the girl who speaks your language.”

He thrust the phone at Josie, and she didn’t hesitate for a second before snatching it up and pressing it to her ear.

“Let me hear what you have.”

She heard a surprised silence. After several tense seconds, a voice spoke. “I’m afraid that I don’t quite know who I’m speaking to.”

“My name is Josie, but at the moment that’s about the least important thing about me. I’m a veterinarian. I went to UC Davis, took microbiology from Stanley Kulcharsky, and I know my way around a damn serum scan, so tell me what the hell you’ve found.”

The voice responded in a tone noticeably harder than the last. “There’s a slight problem with me doing that, Josie. You see, some of what we’ve found is a matter of concern to more than a small-town veterinarian from North Podunk, and I’m not at liberty to divulge all of it to random strangers.”

“Don’t jerk me around,” she snapped and saw Eli wince. When he reached out to snatch back the phone, she danced out of his reach and stomped out to the now almost deserted triage area with the device still pressed to her ear. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, or even who the hell you really are, but I’ve been willing to trust you because Eli said you could help. Well, I’ve yet to see proof of that. But if you want talk about being at liberty, how about you chew on the fact that right now, what’s at liberty is the second Lupine we suspect has contracted this infection you will neither confirm nor deny the existence of.”

“Where’s patient zero?” the stranger demanded in a near bellow.

The use of that term made the hair on the back of Josie’s neck stand up. Used mainly in medical circles and specifically in the field of infectious disease, patient zero referred to the patient suspected of being the source of a specific disease outbreak.

In other words, the cause of an epidemic.

That term sealed the deal for Josie. Not only did she now know that they were dealing with an infection, she now knew several very important and frankly terrifying facts about it: (1) It appeared to be of great concern to a microbiologist connected with the US military; (2) Said microbiologist appeared to be acting under either an assumption or a direct order that information about this disease ought to be kept extremely confidential, if not outright classified as top secret; (3) the scientist and/or the military suspected that this disease was highly contagious, potentially capable of launching a full-scale epidemic; and (4) an infected patient with symptoms more severe than those of patient zero had escaped from quarantine and was now roaming the Oregon woods with a bad attitude and a potential for extreme violence.

All of that added up to make the alarm on Josie’s bullshit-o-meter squeal like a baby pig.

“You want to know where patient zero is, Doctor? Why don’t I let you see for yourself. Talk to Eli for a minute while I scrape enough of her off the floor to mail to you.”

Disgusted, she moved to hand the phone back, but a shout from the other end of the line stopped her. “Wait! Wait! Dr. Barrett.”

Against her will, she found her hand returning the receiver to his ear, but she didn’t speak.

“Dr. Josephine Barrett. That’s you, right? You’re the one Eli told me about. You’ve had both Lupines at your clinic for the past week, right?”

“I did. Up until sometime last night.”

“Tell me what happened.” Steve paused. “Please.”

“While we waited to hear from you,” she began pointedly, “we noticed that the subjects began to display different symptoms than we originally saw. The sedatives we had been giving them seemed to lose their efficacy, and when they regained consciousness, they displayed markedly more wolf-like and more aggressive behaviors. We kept them isolated from the town and from visitors and patients, but we left them together as it seemed to keep both of them slightly calmer. Then this.” She briefly outlined what they knew of the night before, which mostly consisted of Rosemary’s condition and Bill’s disappearance. “So now we’d very much appreciate knowing what we’re dealing with and how the heck we’re supposed to stop it.”

She heard a sound somewhere between a horrified chuckle and a moan of fear.

“First, you need to find that second Lupine. The only chance we have to contain this thing is to keep him from infecting any more Lupines.”

She felt a tingle of triumph sneak up on her anger and irritation. “So the danger is confined to Lupines?”

“It is,” Steve acknowledged. “Only Lupine shifters can be infected, either by bodily fluid contact or by direct exposure.”

Josie thought of Bill tenderly licking his mate’s wounds and winced. He must have ingested her blood, but the amount had been so minute, she never would have expected transmission of a disease. She’d really thought the mode of spread would be airborne. “Exposure to what?”

He sighed. “A genetically engineered virus. One that was still in the experimental stages and was about to be deemed too dangerous to proceed with when it disappeared. Twelve hours before it was slated to be destroyed completely.”

Christ, it was the kind of nightmare scenario that kept espionage thrillers in business. A military-engineered virus unintentionally set loose on an unsuspecting public. All they needed was for a wildfire to be headed straight for town and they could film a bloody movie of the week!

“Is there an anti-virus? A drug? A vaccine? Anything?”

“No, which was on the list of reasons for its destruction.”

Josie gave a muffled shriek. “You guys are morons, you know that?”

“To paraphrase great words of wisdom: In our own defense, we do know that. Believe me, Dr. Barrett, an investigation into how this happened is already under way. We don’t know yet how the virus got out of the lab, but we think we know how patient zero contracted the infection.”

“Tell me.”

“The drug vial that Eli included with the blood samples. It contained three doses of the virus when it was last seen at a facility in southwestern Idaho. When I received the package from you, it was empty, and Eli says that’s how he found it.”

“I never saw the vial,” she said. “I didn’t even know about it until last night, but if that’s what Eli says, that’s what happened.”

Her own words jiggled the back of Josie’s mind until something broke free and tumbled straight into her conscious thoughts. Her stomach clenched.

“Oh, shit. The syringe,” she whispered to herself.

Steve, though, apparently had a perfectly healthy set of ears. “What? What syringe?”

“Last night, this night, the night that’s just barely over. Before we found out about Rosemary, Eli and I were at his cabin and we were attacked by someone we thought was trying to kill us. But when the guy got away and Eli and one of his deputies started to search the room for the weapon, all they found was a filled syringe. We had no idea what was in it, and we forgot about it as soon as we got the call about the incident here at the clinic.”

The scientist cursed roundly. “I need to see that syringe, and I’m not waiting for the mail. I’ll get a chopper and fly up myself. I can be there in less than four hours.”

“Only if you bring me images of that virus. I want to see the evil little bastard that’s caused us so much trouble this last week.”

“I can’t do that, Dr. Barrett, but I’m afraid the images wouldn’t prove very illuminating in any case. You likely wouldn’t be able to distinguish the LV-7 virus from one with which you’re already quite familiar. The people who worked on this project chose the prototype for their creation very well—it was engineered from the common rabies virus.”

Well, fuck a duck.

Josie groaned and shook her head. “I changed my mind, Steve old buddy. You people aren’t morons, you’re frickin’ insane. All of science has been working for more than a century in a futile attempt to cure, contain, and control the rabies virus, and your people decide to see if they can make it an even bigger threat to the world? Nice going. Someone deserves a medal for that, you know?”

“I can assure you, Josie my dear, that these were not ‘my’ people. I wasn’t even aware of the project’s existence until I started looking at your samples, and the reason I never contacted you is that I’m still waiting for the clearance that will authorize me to find out what I’ve already told you. I could be court-martialed for this conversation, and to be frank, I likely will be at some point before this is over. But I think the safety of the Northwest—the entire United States—actually takes precedence over my own career concerns, so I want to see this stopped at least as much as you do.”

“Noble. But there’s one more thing I want to ask before you go commandeer yourself a helicopter.”

“What?”

“You said this LV-7 virus is only transmissible to Lupines.”

“Right.”

“Then I don’t think it can be the same as what was in the syringe our attacker had last night. What would be the point of injecting either me or Eli? I’m human, and Eli certainly isn’t Lupine. We should both be immune to the virus that left your lab.”

Steve swore again. “Three hours,” he barked.

The phone went dead in Josie’s ear. Flipping the headset closed, she handed it back to Eli.

“It looks like we’ll at least have some company while we try to get this all sorted out,” she informed him. “Your friend Steve is on his way here to lend us a hand.”

The sheriff blinked. “Steve? Is coming here?”

“You’re surprised?”

“I didn’t think the man knew how to find the door out of his lab. That, or that he wasn’t authorized to leave. I haven’t seen him in person in at least five years.”

“Okay, then you go ahead and think today’s your lucky day,” she offered. “At least until you hear the rest of the story.”

Then she proceeded to tell it to him. By the time she had finished, no one felt very lucky. Except maybe Bill. And everyone else involved in the whole mess intended to make sure that feeling didn’t last for very much longer at all.

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