HAPTER ONE
I was twenty-six years old when I was kidnapped in the spring of 1983. Later, I wouldn’t remember much about my actual kidnapping, only my time in captivity. About my kidnapping, specifically, I would only remember being grabbed from the parking lot of the museum near downtown Detroit where I worked. A cloth of some sort was pressed against my face. Struggling against strong arms that held me fast, I smelled chemicals for maybe just a second or two. Then I was out.
When I came to, I was in a room similar to a prison cell, with a narrow cot, a metal toilet with adjacent sink, stone floor, and concrete walls. Disoriented and scared out of my mind, I called out for help, pulling against the locked bars of my cell. Almost immediately, a middle-aged man in a black suit came striding down the hallway, speaking in a flat, uninterested voice when he reached my cell.
“Please calm down, Miss Abbott, if you want an explanation.”
I did “calm down,” but only because I was stunned speechless.
Still seeming almost bored, the man continued. “We’ve abducted you because you possess something called the ‘were-gene.’”
“The…the what? And who’s ‘we?’”
The man may as well have been speaking Greek.
Standing in a relaxed lean against the bars of my cell a couple of feet away from me, he explained that “we” was the United States government. “And as far as what the were-gene is, it’s an extremely rare gene that will cause your offspring to become wolf shifters, which is to say humans who have the ability to shape-shift into wolves. Or, if you were ever to have a child with a vampire, that child would be a vampire-wolf hybrid, and probably the most powerful supernatural creature the world has ever seen. And that, by the way, is why we had to abduct you.
“With the Russians seeming to want to escalate this cold war business, we can’t ever allow a weapon such as a ‘vamp-wolf’ to be released into the world. The Russians could kidnap the child for their own, or ‘buy it off’ for its service when it gets older. And obviously, we Americans can’t ever allow that to happen.”
Stunned, and thinking that I’d clearly been kidnapped by a deeply delusional person, I couldn’t speak right away. “Look. I don’t know who you are, but you’re crazy. I don’t have some kind of a ‘were-gene.’ I’m just a regular human woman, and I know that ‘shifters,’ as you call them, don’t exist. Vampires don’t exist, either. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re clearly…well, you’re clearly crazy.”
I’d thought for a few moments before saying that last part, not wanting to make my strange captor angry, but had decided to say it anyway. He didn’t seem at all phased by the fact that I’d called him crazy, and instead just shrugged before speaking again.
“Think what you want…but shifters and vampires do exist…and you do possess the were-gene. We can show you video evidence of all this sometime of you’d like.”
Still stunned and disoriented, I didn’t respond, and the man abruptly turned on his heel and began walking back up the hall.
“You’ll be brought food and drink in a little while. You won’t be starved or mistreated here.”
I wasn’t mistreated, and over the next few days, after being shown video footage, I came to believe in the existence of shifters and vampires, as absolutely unbelievable as it all was. I still couldn’t believe that I possessed something called the were-gene, though. It just seemed impossible. On the other hand, I had been adopted, and I had no idea whether or not my birth parents had been some sort of supernatural creatures.
After several days of being confined to my tiny prison cell, with the various government agents who visited me refusing to tell me my fate, I was transported to a more comfortable prison cell of sorts. It was more like a comfortably-furnished one-bedroom apartment, located in the basement of some government building in the heart of downtown Detroit, and there I remained.
I didn’t have a choice but to remain. I was given all the material possessions and comforts I could want, but I wasn’t given my freedom. I wasn’t even allowed to call my few close friends to tell them I was okay. Essentially, I was being kept an indefinite prisoner of the government. I had hardly any visitors, no access to a phone, and no trips out to the city, even supervised. Which was probably smart on the part of the government agents holding me captive because I would have definitely tried to make some sort of an escape attempt.
Preventing me from doing this while being held captive, my apartment door was one that locked from the inside and the outside. The key to the outside lock could lock and unlock both, but, by some mechanism I didn’t even fully understand, I couldn’t unlock the outside lock from the inside. This was how Nora, the older woman who did my laundry and brought me fresh food every day or so, had been able to keep me contained.
She kept saying that it was for my own good. As a woman possessing the were-gene, there was great concern about something “happening” to me, like me being kidnapped by the Russians, if I were to be allowed to go out and about. I suspected that this was really less about something “happening” to me, and more about me trying to make an escape.
I’d heard a hushed conversation between Nora and one of the government agents in my kitchen, something about everyone being concerned about me “using my powers” to aid me in an attempt to flee. I hadn’t been aware that I had any “powers,” and I certainly didn’t know what they were. I still wasn’t a thousand percent sure that I hadn’t simply been kidnapped by a group of insanely delusional people.
Once I’d been in my “new apartment” for about a week, I seemed to fall into some sort of a depression and stopped really caring that much about being confined. Or at least, I stopped feeling as bothered by it as I’d felt the second day, when a low-level sense of panic I’d had since awakening in the jail cell had peaked in some sort of wild tantrum that had just kind of happened. The panic had soon left me, but while I’d been in the throes of it, I’d heaved my body against the door, unsuccessfully trying to break it down and yelling at the top of my lungs.
Then later, when Nora had come with some groceries, she’d seen me trying to break the tiny, frosted, high windows covered with steel bars with my shoes in some desperate, half-ass attempt to escape the apartment by climbing through one of these miniscule windows, which I wouldn’t even have fit though anyway.
They were so tiny that I probably wouldn’t even have fit a single leg through. I’d done the attempted window-breaking right in front of Nora, right when she was in the apartment, and I hadn’t even cared.
She’d called a government agent guard, some tall, stern-faced, gray-haired man in a black suit, and when he’d warned me to cease all efforts to escape, I’d thrown several pairs of shoes and a book at his face. He’d ducked, making me miss, and he and Nora had then removed all shoes and books from my apartment. Nora had said that anything else I tried to use to escape or attack people with would go, too.
That had been one of the very few things she’d said to me all week. She’d asked me if I finally believed in the existence of supernatural creatures, and I’d said yes; she’d told me that I was still in the city of Detroit; and she’d told me that she had no clue as to my “eventual fate,” so to not even bother asking her. Other than a few other things of no particular importance, that had been about it.
Now in the present, Nora had just left my apartment after coming by to inform me that the “head government honcho” had just returned from a trip and would be by to pay me a visit shortly. Whoever he was, I’d never met him before. Nora hadn’t said anything else, just this, and then had immediately left, leaving me to wonder just exactly what kind of a “visit” I was soon to receive, and just who, exactly, the “head government honcho” was.
If it was just a visit to make introductions and explain to me what the government was ultimately going to do with me, I was definitely ready for that. However, part of me wondered if the government had long since figured that out and the “head government honcho” was code for some sort of assassin who was coming to kill me. I knew this eventually might happen; there was just no way around it. Not unless I could manage to kill the assassin first.