Page 16 of Wolf Bane
He wiggled his brows as I came around to his side of the desk.“I’m trying to sound more bad ass.Did a job for Waltrip last month and the lady who hired him said I sounded like a frat boy.Is it working?”
“Sounding like a frat boy or the bad ass thing?”
“Ugh.Never mind.That’s my answer.”His fingers flew over the old keyboard, jabbing hard at a few of the ones that’d been worn to blank little dips in the laptop’s surface.“Whoever he downloaded this from, itwasprotected.And the trail is old, too.It goes back through a few different owners.You can tell by?—”
“Tyler.Listen to me.I love how smart you are.Don’t tell your brother I said that.I’ll deny it till the day I die.But can you cut to the chase?It’s after midnight and I have to be at work in about five hours, I’m running on almost no sleep, and frankly, the smell of nag champa, weed, and spilled energy drink in this room makes me want to gag a little.So please.What are you leading up to?”
“You have no sense of drama.”He sniffed.“This is tracking data.They’re following the spread of some contagion in the were community.”He glanced up, lips curling in a frown at my nod.“It’s escalating.Did he tell you that?Only one or two a few months ago, back in June.We’re up to a grand total of one hundred and six cases as of a week ago, with a total of fifteen deaths.Fifteen, Landry.”
“Jesus.”The were and shifter communities were miniscule, compared to the rest of the human population.At least as far as I’d been told.No one was quite sure how many existed, just that it was over a thousand but less than a million, worldwide.And honestly, most of that was guesswork One hundred cases and fifteen deaths?
“That’s a fifteen percent fatality rate,” I rasped.“That we know of.”It wasn’t high, all things considered, but given the population size we were working with, it wasn’t insignificant.
“What is this disease, Landry?Does Justin have it?How contagious is it?”
I shook my head, reaching past Tyler to scroll down the list of data points.“He gave me a few print outs, but this is way more detailed,” I muttered to myself, ignoring Tyler’s grunt of annoyance.“Um.I don’t know.If there’s a way to test for it, I’m not privy.I think I may have a patient with it.At least one.”
Tyler clicked on a tab, opening up the document with the symptoms and a list of what systems they were affecting.Silently, he selected another one.“I don’t know what this all means, but I took just enough high school bio to know it’s not great.”
“Genomic sequencing.I didn’t do much with it in med school—it wasn’t my field.But I know what it looks like.”
“So they’re… what, DNA analysis of werewolves?”Tyler scoffed.“For what?Making purebred pups?”
“This isn’t human.Or mammalian,” I hastened to add before Tyler could get up in his feels about me possibly equating him to an ordinary human.“This looks like a virus’s genomic sequence, but I don’t know much else about it.”
Tyler let out a long, heavy sigh.“Then you’re going to love this next part.I traced the original owner of the information to an email address associated with Bluebonnet.Whoever started this little project worked for them.And the most recent updates to the files are just a few weeks ago.”
I swore, long and volubly.Justin snorted in the other room but didn’t make any noise about getting up.Tyler spread his hands as if to saywell now what.“Can you tell who it was?Is there a name or something attached?Who?—”
“I don’t know yet,” he interrupted.“It might be possible for me to find out more, but I’m going to need to do some hunting around in that’s a bit more of a risk than I’m willing to take right now.”
At my incredulous bark of laughter, he glared.“What?I have responsibilities while Ethan’s off fartin’ around the Midwest.There’s a meeting tomorrow—shit, tonight.”He groaned.“The… clans are unhappy about some recent bullshit.”
The fact he wouldn’t meet my eyes told me more than I wanted to know.“Me?”It shouldn’t surprise me, really.While most of the local weres and shifters were cordial enough, it wasn’t exactly easy to miss the way they gave me a wide berth at any event I attended with Ethan, or the uptick in these ‘special meetings’ and ‘urgent matters’ the longer we were together.
I’d asked Ethan, not long into our official status, if it was me specifically or just what I was as a concept that was rankling.He hemmed and hawed about it, then we argued about it.I want them to accept youhe’d said repeatedly, until I snapped and pointed out acceptance isn’t the same as liking.Something we should both know rather well since we were both gay men in a rural area not known for being realacceptingof our community.
That had been uncomfortable for both of us for a while, neither of us wanting to poke that bear again.
But it was starting to feel more and more like this acceptance wasn’t just fragile but actively cracking.
Tyler forced a small, too tight smile at me.“Hm?Sorry, I was distracted.Do you want some tea or something?You can crash here for a few hours if you want.It’s ridiculous to dive all the way back to your place just to get up in an hour or two.”
Was it possible for your eye to just pop right out of your head from a spike in blood pressure?I feel like I should’ve known the answer to that, seeing as I’d been to medical school and all.“Tyler.”
He groaned, scrubbing his hands over his face before reaching for one of the cans of energy drink scattered around his desk.“Damn it, empty.Fuck, am I out?I swore I bought some.Let me just?—”
“Did they wait till Ethan was out of town on purpose, or is it just a happy accident?”
That shut him up.
Tyler leaned so far back in his chair that it creaked and wobbled.“It’s coincidental.Possibly.Ethan’s been in and out so much the past few months, it’s impossible to pin him down.They definitely don’tpreferme, but I’ll be damned if they start making decisions for the pack without the Stone family being represented.”
Nausea flipped slowly and lazily in my belly.On top of everything going on, Ethan’s precarious position as head of the local clan was something I tried not to think about not because it didn’t matter to me but because it mattered so much.Everything he’d done since we’d been in high school—hell, probably since he was a toddler—was centered around being clan leader, taking over when his dad stepped down.Or, as it happened, died.Ethan had been working on dragging the clan into the modern era, away from infighting and isolation.
It was maybe working?
The fact he was in a relationship with me, though, had set things back at least as far as any goodwill he’d had with chunks of clan membership.And when he stepped down as sheriff?Yikes.
