Awaken: Book One: London Page 3

  I looked around the room. It was destroyed. The expensive flat screen TV had been torn from the wall and was smashed on the floor. Most of the furniture was in pieces.

  I lost my footing when I saw a huge auburn-haired animal with glistening jaws and blood all over its muzzle. It was unconscious in the middle of the room. Another with a gash down its side was stood next to it. One of the suited women, also bleeding, limped over to them.

  ‘They will be fine,’ she said after briskly checking them over. I assumed she was a doctor.

  Wolfe grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet. ‘Do not trouble yourself. You did not kill anyone.’ Anyone? Those animals were people? Werewolves? They were terrifyingly big. More the size of a lion than a wolf. Wolfe looked me over as I leant on him. My legs were like jelly. ‘You are hurt?’

  I glanced down at myself. Though I was covered in blood and two of the buttons on my top were torn, I didn’t appear to have anything other than a few scratches. I shook my head. The realisation seemed to give me strength. I let go of him and straightened.

  ‘D-Did I do this?’ I already knew the answer.

  He looked at me thoughtfully, but he wasn’t angry. ‘Yes.’

  There were only a handful of people left in the room. The rest were in the corridor where presumably they had been ordered to stay. They were watching me carefully. I could sense something of their emotions: fear, anger, awe, relief.

  Vince was watching me carefully. ‘She took on wolves in human form, Wolfe.’ I frowned. ‘Who does that?’

  ‘What started her off?’ a man next to him asked. ‘Can she not control it?’

  Wolfe growled his response. ‘I will control it until she can.’ The others immediately lowered their heads as something powerful weighed down the room. I felt it push on my shoulders too, but I pushed back. Was that Wolfe? ‘Vincent, Patrick, come with me. The rest of you have your instructions.’ He took my hand and started tugging me forwards. Had I not felt so strange, I would have resisted but I just followed numbly. I stared at his back as he led me through another corridor and down a few flights of stairs.

  We moved into a sparse room with a bed, table and chair. There was another room attached with a bathroom in it. The walls were white and the floor concrete. A prison? I swallowed. My heart started to thud in my chest.

  As if sensing my nervousness, Wolfe put his hand on my shoulder. ‘This room should be able to contain you. I will have some things moved down to make it more comfortable.’

  I pushed him off and took a step back. I was feeling more like my old self. ‘You want to lock me up?’ I choked and moved over to Vince. ‘We have to go,’ I said to him.

  Vince glanced nervously at Wolfe then turned to me. ‘It isn’t safe otherwise.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘For us and for you, Ceri.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘You saw what you did upstairs. And what happened at the university. If Wolfe hadn’t been there... You’re dangerous.’ I felt a sudden feeling of dread. What if he was right? I still couldn’t believe I had attacked those animals. I hated violence. As much as I hated obedience.

  ‘When we discover what happened to you,’ Wolfe said, ‘and you are able to control yourself, you will be released.’

  I scowled at him. At both his choice of words – apparently deliberately selected to rile me – and his sentiment. ‘I was controlling myself fine before you showed up!’ In those four hundred years I could remember, not once had I blacked out. And I had been through more than enough to give me cause to.

  He quirked a brow and glanced at the other man, Patrick, who had so far remained silent by the door. He was watching me carefully. ‘What do you remember of what happened upstairs?’ he asked. He sounded like Wolfe. He had the same soft lilt to his ‘s’s.

  I shifted. I was debating what to tell him. I settled on the truth. ‘I remember being stood by the TV and then suddenly being by the fireplace.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘Do you remember what you were doing exactly before?’

  I thought back. ‘Nothing. I was just stood there being stared at.’

  ‘Do you remember anyone in particular?’ He was leading me to an answer he thought I didn’t want to give. I shrugged. I didn’t mind telling him something if it was true.

  ‘There was a woman with red hair and green eyes. She had been saying something.’

  Patrick looked at Wolfe before continuing. ‘Have you met her before?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did you recognise her at all?’

  I glanced at Vince but he seemed as confused as I was. What were they getting at? ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Ceri, do you remember anything before the Intervention? Do you remember Zosimos or any of the others upstairs?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. I don’t know anything about that. I only found out that I was supposed to be one of you last night.’

  ‘Zosimos is your mate.’ I glanced at Wolfe. He was concentrating very hard on my reaction so I made sure I gave none. It was easy to do; I didn’t know what a mate was. ‘All wolves must find a mate with whom they share a particular bond. It is not controlled by the human but by the animal. Zosimos and you were paired not long before the Intervention.’ I opened my mouth to ask a question but he continued. I was happy to let him. He was the only one offering explanations. ‘I believe that upstairs your wolf responded to a perceived challenge by one of the other wolves.’

  Wolfe stepped in at that. ‘No one challenged her.’

  ‘Leonor did not drop her eyes.’

  ‘Leonor?’

  I frowned also. ‘The woman with red hair and green eyes? Why would that matter?’

  Wolfe shifted as Patrick continued. ‘She has made it clear her intention to partner with Zosimos in the past. I believe your wolf picked up on that and responded to defend your claim.’

  ‘My wolf was jealous?’ There were so many parts of that sentence I was struggling with. I cocked a brow in disbelief. ‘So I went mental? That makes no sense. Even if this Ariane had picked up on whatever you said, Vince said I didn’t change into a werewolf and as a human I don’t know Wolfe at all.’ I wasn’t quite ready to deal with the idea that I was mated to the Zosimos Wolfe. Whatever that meant.

  ‘Nevertheless, your human form incapacitated her.’

  ‘Which is impossible,’ Vince chimed in.

  ‘She was the animal on the floor?’ I let out a long breath. ‘Will she be alright?’

  Wolfe didn’t share my concern. ‘We heal fast.’ I remembered then the scratches I had left on his neck and Vince’s brow earlier that morning. I looked but they were gone.

  ‘I don’t heal fast.’

  He showed no surprise. ‘The Intervention has controlled you.’

  ‘Apparently, not.’

  ‘I controlled you.’

  I scowled at him. I did not like authority on the best of days. And I was having a terrible day. ‘You seem to have brought this thing out!’ I turned to Patrick. ‘Is that because he’s my mate? Is he still my mate after four hundred years? I thought the Intervention had broken bonds and things.’ Wasn’t that what Wolfe had said?

  Wolfe took a step towards me and growled angrily. ‘You are mine until one of us dies.’ Possession? Fat chance. I was not about to be owned.

  ‘You thought I was already dead!’ A low defensive growl appeared in my throat and curled its way up my neck. A glint of something orange appeared in his eyes, but he said nothing. ‘I’m going back to my flat.’

  ‘Out of the question.’

  ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do.’ I could feel myself heating up. I wondered if I’d lose it again. I hoped Vince would stay clear this time.

  ‘You are my mate. This is my pack. This is my territory.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ I shot back. I didn’t know what I had stumbled into but I was hardly about to handover years of hard-fought independence to be locked up in some crazy guy’s cellar.

  He must have noticed something then because h
e became immediately distracted. ‘What is this in her eyes?’

  Patrick moved to see. ‘Blue light and smoke. Her wolf is battling magic inside her.’

  ‘How?’

  He shook his head thoughtfully. ‘Marcus always said he had arranged the magic to contain rather than kill her. And she did need containing, Zosimos.’ If Patrick was trying to make him feel guilty, Wolfe didn’t react. ‘If Ariane is starting to come back and Ceri cannot control her, something will need to be done. Ariane was disruptive back then, but now...’

  My eyes flicked between them but both were still. Whatever reaction the argument had stoked in me had calmed. I mostly felt like me. Maybe a little more tired and confused.

  ‘We will need to prepare.’ The two men were staring at each other. ‘To find another way to help calm her wolf.’ He flinched a little as though suddenly threatened. I glanced at Wolfe to see if he was the cause, but I couldn’t tell. ‘Only to help calm her wolf.’ With a nod from Wolfe, he left.

  Chapter 4

  Not long after, Vince and I were left alone with orders to make the cell more comfortable. We had a pen and paper to list what I wanted and an hour to fill the page. Almost every part of me hated the idea of being in there. But having seen the damage of what I had done upstairs, perhaps they were right. What if I blacked out on the tube or in a café? I needed to learn more about what was happening to me. Until I reached a conclusion about what I wanted to do, I decided to play along.

  Once the door was shut, Vince let out a long breath and sent me a look before flopping back onto the bed. ‘Bloody hell, Ceri!’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said stony-faced. I pulled out the chair from the desk and sat. ‘Twenty-four hours ago I had a cold, a duvet, and two seasons of The X Files left to watch.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’ve been with you pretty much every day for the last three years and not had a clue who you were.’

  ‘Yeah, well, apparently neither did I.’ I rubbed my brow.

  ‘But you’re famous. You’re a legend among all wolves. You’re who made this house great.’ House? Was that like a faction? He rolled onto his side so that he was facing me. ‘You’re mental.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said dryly. I sent him a look. ‘Werewolves?’

  He cocked a brow. ‘What? You thought you were just randomly immortal?’ The thought had crossed my mind once or twice. ‘No human lives forever.’

  ‘And werewolves do?’ I thought I might as well ask. I knew nothing about them – about what I was.

  ‘No, not forever,’ he said. ‘But for a long time. No wolf has ever died of old age.’

  ‘Just murder?’ He scratched his jaw which I took to be a “yes”. I hadn’t wanted to know that. It essentially meant that it was luck I was still alive. ‘So, how old are you?’

  ‘Not as old as you.’ He grinned. ‘Technically, I was born in 1812, but I was turned when I was well into my sixties.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  He shrugged. ‘If the stories are correct, you were turned when you were a child, and you’re not frozen in that form.’

  I wasn’t ready to talk about me just yet. ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘One of the main side effects of being turned: your body finds its predator peak and sticks to it. It’s different for everyone. We’re animals designed to hunt and survive.’ He could tell the change in my mood and so sat up. ‘It’s more difficult if you’re turned young. Your body grows to shape at different rates. Your skin bursts slowly and your bones splinter through your flesh. The chances of surviving are low and the pain is supposed to be torture. There’s a rule against it now.’ I shivered a little. I was glad I couldn’t remember that.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘The opposite. Every part of you repairs. Don’t get me wrong – it hurts like hell, but it’s relatively quick.’ He leant forwards onto his knees. ‘What do you remember?’

  Once again I opted for the truth. There seemed to be no point in lying to him. After all, if I really was a werewolf and he was part of my pack, what harm could it do? I shrugged. ‘Nothing. It’s a blackout like what happened today. A fifty year blackout starting with my going to sleep at my mother’s side one night and waking up bloody and alone the next morning.’ I decided to bite the bullet. ‘What do they say about me?’

  ‘I thought it was all a story, a sort of myth.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I know there are different versions of what happened. I suppose the general idea is the same, though.’ I held my breath. All I knew was that I was apparently a vicious animal, a murderer. ‘There was a pack in the south, somewhere near Hastings, who were led by this guy called Traye. Aside from the usual crazy that comes with being a wolf, he was a whole lot more mental. They say he once fell in love with a village and so, to prevent anything from spoiling it, he torched all the buildings and killed everyone nearby. And that was before he got turned.

  ‘I think whoever turned him probably thought they could control him, but no chance. That guy tore them to pieces, then went around making it his job to kill as many of us as possible.’

  I cut in. ‘Didn’t anyone try to stop him?’

  ‘Yeah, and they died too. Anyway, eventually, he gets bored and lonely, and decides he wants his own pack of torturing bastards who will live forever. Only it’s pretty hard to create a wolf and it doesn’t always work. After about two hundred years, he’s made a handful of bloodthirsty murderers and is ready to get back to the indiscriminate killing.

  ‘One night, he’s running with the moon when he hears this woman singing.’ I swallowed. Was that my mother? I remembered the song she sang. ‘She apparently has this amazing voice that bewitches him and he immediately falls in love. But he doesn’t want her for one day, he wants her forever. He tracks her down to the edge of this wood somewhere, and starts tearing her apart.’ He paused his story and looked at me apologetically. ‘That’s how you turn someone. All that stuff in films about a scratch or a drop of blood is bullshit. You rip out their throat and then offer up your own flesh to their body. If you’ve done it right, somehow they live.’ He rubbed his eyes, tiredly. ‘It’s not a skill you can learn. It’s luck.’

  My voice was stronger than I had thought it would be. ‘What happened to my mother?’

  He winced. ‘Mother?’

  I nodded slowly. ‘I know the song she was singing. I must have been asleep by the campfire when this was happening.’ It was an old memory but one that pulled on well-worn heartstrings. The last memories of feeling safe. Of feeling loved.

  He frowned a little. ‘No, not asleep. But you were in the forest.’ He winced a little as he continued, staring at the floor. ‘When she was on the point of death, they say Traye bit a chunk of flesh out of his wolf-form arm and was bending down to press it from her when this girl,’ his eyes shot to mine, ‘you appeared from nowhere. You somehow managed to sneak up on a man in wolf form – which is impossible – and threw yourself onto his back, tearing a chunk from his throat.’ He pressed a hand to his neck as if he’d told the story a thousand times.

  ‘He throws you off against a tree and guesses you’re dead. Since the woman is turning by this point, his attention is on making the bond with her. But you are not dead. Somehow you bite him again and again and again. You reach your tiny hands into the holes you made in his flesh and pull and twist and refuse to let go. Some determination keeps you there even though you lose an arm, a leg, your skin...anything that would give you life.’

  I waited patiently.

  ‘But then the stories differ. Some people say he ate your heart and it poisoned him. Others say the woman came back long enough to save you.’ He gave a shrug. ‘There’s no accounting for how you, a human child, survived, and yet he, a vicious werewolf killer, died. But you did.’

  ‘And after that?’ I wanted to hear more. I would eventually read the stories myself, if they were written down. But I wanted to know more now. ‘What is this Intervention everyone keeps talking about?’

  Vin
ce stood up and crossed his arms. He moved over to lean against one of the walls. ‘All new werewolves are a little bit crazy, Ceri,’ he said plainly. ‘But you were mental. And somehow you got away with it.’

  ‘Mental how? What did I do? Kill?’

  ‘Yes. A lot. And indiscriminately. Humans, wolves... You took down some of the great immortals that had been alive for millennia. No one could stop you. Even Traye had steered clear of the greats. So a dominant called Marcus found a way to cage your animal.’ He said the words with distaste. I doubted it was defiance on my behalf. The thought of his wolf being controlled angered him.

  ‘How?’

  He shrugged. ‘Old magick. I don’t know. They didn’t keep very detailed records and Wolfe destroyed anyone involved with what they did to you.’ Wolfe had assumed I was dead. He had killed them out of revenge.

  I frowned as I thought on what he was saying. ‘If I was so merciless, how did I become his mate? Is he stronger than me? Did he control me like he did upstairs and back at the lab?’

  He thought on my question. ‘I don’t know if he’s stronger physically. Or more dominant. You don’t seem to do what he says,’ he quirked a brow, amused, ‘which makes me think you might be on top. But that could just be the Intervention.

  ‘As for being his mate, that’s up to the wolf not the person. I don’t understand it. I haven’t found my mate yet.’ Was he embarrassed by the admission? ‘If your wolf liked him, you would have fought to protect him and those he protects. You certainly would have been no threat to him. Earlier today, your wolf listened to him. I mean,’ he laughed, ‘you certainly wreaked a little havoc, but you must have recognised him as your mate still. After all these years.’

  ‘Are there records of me as a human?’

  He shook his head. It seemed too definite an answer so he continued. ‘You didn’t change. For that whole time, you were the wolf. Most people can’t do that. If you stay wolf for too long, it begins to take over.’