Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

I wanted to blow Angie off, and I really wanted to blow him off, but I knew he wouldn’t leave until I agreed. Besides, breakfast sounded good.

“Fine. Just go away and I’ll get dressed.”

“I’ll wait for you outside.” He looked around the room. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“Cranky in the morning, aren’t you?”

I threw a pillow through him, and climbed out of bed to get showered and dressed.

When I joined Captain Bob outside, he led me away from the main building and said, “The dining room isn’t open yet, so the doc ordered breakfast in her cabin.” Angie’s cabin was the mirror image of mine, if you subtracted the vampire in the closet and added a boatload of food on the table.

“Good morning,” she said. “I hope this is enough to eat.”

“It’s a good start,” I said, my mouth watering from the tantalizing aroma of bacon and eggs.

“Then, help yourself. I’m not a big morning eater.” She wasn’t kidding. All she had on her plate was a piece of toast. “I hope you don’t mind me waking you so early, but I knew you’d be free. David has to sleep during the day, right?”

“He’s a real bear if he doesn’t get his full day’s rest.”

“Then he can get by on less sleep?” she asked eagerly, reaching for a notepad.

“Just a joke. When the sun comes up, he goes down, and doesn’t wake again until dark.”

“Fascinating. Another thing . . .”

I stifled a sigh, and dug into the food. At least it was fresh, even if the questions were stale. Angie asked me the exact same things as she had the day before, and I still didn’t have answers. Did she think I’d quizzed David the night before so as to be ready for her? It was so boring that I was yawning like crazy, and I could barely keep my eyes open wide enough to see the plate in front of me.

By the time I reached the obvious conclusion that I’d been drugged, it was too late to do anything about it except pass out.

I woke up in a cage. It wasn’t the first time that had happened, but this instance was considerably more frightening. I smelled death.

Superior sense of scent is part and parcel of being a werewolf, even when in human form, but it isn’t always a good thing. Somebody had died in that cage, maybe several somebodies. I smelled werewolf, and human, and beings I couldn’t identify. It was all I could do to keep from whimpering.

Okay, I lied. I whimpered.

The cage was enough to make any werewolf whimper. It was bare of furniture or comfort and the mesh of which it was built was woven so tightly that no dog on earth would be small enough to escape.

The room in which it stood was just as bleak. The walls and floor were bare concrete, and there were tables and shelves covered with medical and chemistry equipment, a computer, a bookshelf of serious-looking tomes, and a refrigerator. Add it all together and you got a low-rent animal research facility, but the only lab rat was me.

A few minutes later, in walked Angie.

“Oh good, you’re awake. I knew that drug would work on werewolves, of course, but I had to estimate your weight so I wasn’t sure how long you’d be out.”

“And you drugged me why?”

“To get you here, of course.” She got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator, put it into a contraption on the side of the cage, and pulled a lever that lifted a section of mesh just enough to allow the bottle to roll inside before slamming shut again.

“You’ve done this before,” I said, reaching for the water. The bottle was sealed, which was thoughtful. I wouldn’t have taken it from her otherwise.

“Many times. At first we had such a hard time getting people to talk to us, and an even harder time getting them to allow us to examine them. Then I designed the cage, and Carl said he didn’t think even he could get out of it. As it turned out, he was right.”

“You put your husband in here?”

“He was going to leave me! After I’d stuck with him through his Change! Do you know how much I cooked for that man? And how hard I worked to become a werewolf, too? I let him bite me over and over again! Then we started hunting witches, but none of the ones we found had any idea of what to do, no matter what we did to convince them.”

I really didn’t want to know what their persuasion techniques had been.

“The best we could do was to get one to make me the ghost amulet. That was our next idea, you see. Becoming a ghost sounded like a viable alternative.”

“I don’t think your definition of viable is the same as mine.”

“I know, I couldn’t very well sleep with my husband if he couldn’t touch me, but we didn’t know that most ghosts are insubstantial, or even the proper way to make one. We had half a dozen failures before we got it right.”

“Captain Bob?”

“That’s right. He wasn’t really killed by a vampire, of course, though Carl did try to make it look as if he had been. At first we thought it had been a waste of time, too, because the form has too many limits. Then I did a routine case study on him and realized that he had a witch in his family—that’s when we began to suspect the existence of the arcane gene.

“Next I traced Carl’s family tree and found a great-uncle who was a werewolf, but I had nothing. There was no way I could become a werewolf or a ghost or a witch.”

“Is that so awful?”

“To see all the possibilities and not want powers of my own? Not to mention the lengthened life span.”

“It’s not all wine and roses,” I said. “We have weaknesses, too. We have to hide what we are, and we lose more babies than we can carry to term, and—”

“I never wanted children. I just wanted Carl. But I got older while he stayed young. He started spending more time with the pack and less on our research. I hadn’t given up, but he didn’t care anymore. All he cared about was that bitch!”

It wasn’t even an insult, really, since she was talking about a werewolf.

“She was another bitten werewolf,” she said, “and he claimed he was just easing her into the life.” She snorted. “I didn’t need to be a werewolf to smell her on him. Soon he all but abandoned our work. All he cared about was rutting in the woods with his new mate.”

“So you killed him.”

“Thanks to our research, I knew exactly how to drug a werewolf. He didn’t taste a thing, any more than you did. Once I had him in the cage, it was easy.” She brushed off her hands as if she’d just wiped a dirty table. “If he’d been patient, we could have been together forever thanks to you.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to do. I’d be glad to bite you.” I couldn’t quite keep the growl out of my voice when I made the offer.

“That’s sweet, but no, it’s your boyfriend I want to bite me.”

“Excuse me?”

“David’s going to make me a vampire. Then I can continue my research forever. I wonder if a vampire can taste the arcane gene in a person’s blood. . . .” She actually pulled a pad out of her pocket to jot a note.

“You’re keeping me hostage to make David change you?”

“That’s right. As soon as I rise, I’ll tell him where you are.”

I saw a flaw in her plan, but unfortunately, she already had it covered.

She said, “I know he’ll try to use his vampire glamour on me, but it won’t work. The last witch I trapped claimed to know all about vampires, but what she really knew was how to protect herself from them. I was quite vexed. Still, the potion she made is coming in handy now, isn’t it?”

“It won’t work. David swore that he’d never offer anybody else the Choice.”

“I’m sure that was before he met you. I’ve seen the way he looks at you, just like Carl used to look at me. He’ll do anything to get you back.”