Page 17 of Blade's Battle
Those big blue eyes of hers held fear as her words sank in. Guilt. Shame. That’s what he read in her face, but he had to be reading her wrong.
“The truth, Anna. I need the truth.”
The light in her eyes dimmed, and he knew; she was telling the truth. He stepped back. First one step, and then another, until he was at the stream’s edge, a good twenty feet from her.
From the last report, over two hundred shifters had died from the virus, and those were only the handful of packs Damien had contacted. His own pack had been fortunate not to have been hit, despite the WSSO’s attempts. Or maybe the vaccine Alex had devised for them was working. Alex still wasn’t sure how effective the vaccine was, and they didn’t have the manufacturing capability to produce the vaccine for more than a few dozen shifters.
Last week, Damien assigned a team to research if manufacturing the vaccine on a larger scale could be accomplished through private means, but that meant more than simply finding a facility. It meant a lot of money and keeping their activity secret from the WSSO and the government. All were huge obstacles. In the meantime, more shifters died every day, all because of this one woman—thishuman.
His stomach churned. Anna had created a virus intended to kill his race. Genocide, that’s what it was. And he had killed four shifters to save her. No wonder Drake had her as his prisoner.
Blade considered taking her back to Drake and letting the alpha finish whatever he’d planned to do with her, but the very idea made him wince.
“I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt,” she said, her eyes cast downward. The pine that towered over her by at least fifty feet made her look small and insignificant, and yet she was asdangerousas any alpha. Worse. An alpha only killed to protect his territory, his pack. Anna had created a virus to indiscriminately kill shifters,allshifters.
As Anna limped her way toward him, Blade found himself unable to pull away. His wolf was content, but then again his wolf didn’t understand what she’d done. Blade barely understood it.
“Blade, please,” she said as she placed a hand on his arm.
A fire burned through him. The need to touch her, to wipe away her tears and soothe her was too great to ignore, but he had to. He stepped back. He didn’t want to hear the lies he knew would come. Like the lies he told himself that night he had returned home. That the massacre hadn’t been his fault. That if he had been there when the WSSO had attacked, he could have saved his pack, his family. . . at least some of them.
The truth was that he hadn’t been there, and he’d returned to the aftermath of a massacre. He was the last of his birth pack. And now Anna and her virus were threatening his adopted pack.
The moment she reached for him again, he took another step away, shaking his head. He could see the truth in her eyes, her face, even her body as she wrapped her arms around herself. She was trembling again, and part of him didn’t want to care, to wonder if she was merely cold or suffering from what Drake’s pack had put her through. The other part of him wanted to wrap his arms around her and tell her everything would be alright.
He had believed Anna an innocent. He hadtrustedher, allowed his instincts to guide him, all because of her smile. Was this how the WSSO had gotten past his pack’s security? Had a similarly enchanting female wormed her way past the perimeter guards and betrayed his pack from within? He’d been gone two weeks and returned to find nothing but rotting bodies, both in shifter and wolf form. They’d been caught off-guard. Very few had the time to shift before they were cut down by a storm of bullets.
“I should return you to Drake,” he said, the words spilling out of his mouth before he considered their impact.
Tears filled her eyes, but she wasn’t backing away from him or running as a guilty person would. “I tried to stop them!”
Anger bubbled up from his wolf, the wolf that smelled her fear. His wolf needed to strike out at someone, and this anger Blade harbored only fueled his wolf’s thirst for blood. God help him, for as much as he wanted to make her pay for all those dead shifters, Blade couldn’t bring himself to walk away from her.
“I was researching the shifter gene,” Anna continued.
“Research?” A sliver of hope seeped into his soul. Had she accidentally created this virus without intending to harm anyone?
“I was doing research into the major histocompatibility system comparing the alleles of humans, wolves, and shifters, with a focus on the leukocyte antigen.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” he said, trying to hold back the condemnation in his voice, to keep her talking. He needed answers.
She wiped back tears and struggled to compose herself. Even now, he could smell her fear as if she dreaded what he’d do to her. He couldn’t hurt her. God help him—he’d killed four shifters in defense of her, and her virus had already killed hundreds, and still, he couldn’t conceive of doing anything to endanger her, let alone returning her to Drake.
She’dcreatedthe damn shifter virus. He still couldn’t wrap his head around that fact, let alone what the hell he was going to do about her.
“I was trying to decipher the genetic code that allows shifters to move between human and wolf forms.”
“And you created the virus by accident?” he asked, hoping, praying for her sake that it had been an accident. Anything less would mean she’d intentionally unleashed a virus that may yet wipe out every wolf shifter on Earth.
“I identified the genes.”
“Did you create the virus?” he asked, unable to keep the anger out of his voice. He had to know for sure, because he really liked this woman, thishuman,who didn’t look like she could hurt a fly, let alone wipe out the entire shifter race.
“That was someone at the WSSO, but they couldn’t have done it without my work. They needed to know which genes to target, the genes that left a shifter most vulnerable.”
That’s precisely what the virus did. He’d seen how it had destroyed Tess’s ability to shift, trapping her wolf. And Tess was lucky; she’d survived. The virus killed most infected shifters. Anna hadn’t created the virus, but she’d given the WSSO what they’d needed to create it. Quite frankly, he didn’t see much of a difference. She was just as responsible.
A thought occurred to him, giving him a glimmer of hope that she wasn’t guilty of attempted genocide. Did she know what she was doing at the time?
