THE FINAL CHAPTER
Stephen shook his head as he ended the call Caliban had made, feeling a surge of irritation rush through him. His hands shook, and he breathed in and out, counting from one to ten. Then he reached for a bottle on his desk and opened it, taking a few pills to calm himself down.
I won’t let it get to me, he told himself. He had been a perfectionist as a child, and it had blossomed into a form of obsessive compulsiveness, one that made him ineffective as a military officer and as the son of the President of the United States.
He felt calmness steal through him after a few minutes, and he took a seat, staring at the ceiling, enjoying the peace that ran inside his nerves. He looked at his diplomas and medals on the wall, knowing it was never enough against his older brother who, at age twenty-eight, had already been a war hero.
Stephen had been to wars, but these wars were within the country’s borders. He hungered for more action, instead of these incessant hot pursuits for experiments that had gone awry, or for civilians who were dissatisfied with the way his father helmed the country. He was, in a way, as ruthless as the men who were under his orders. Werebeings were under his orders, and these numbered a few hundred in the country’s military.
There was a confidence in his Division; they handled things well. His men followed his orders to the T -- even the weresoldiers. The weresoldiers were often volatile, especially when they were recent lab products. Medical measures, as well as military training, had been taken to ensure they would remain loyal to the government.
It was a given that they were all sterile, but the hundreds of tests had turned them into highly evolved soldiers with faster speeds and super human strength, compared to their human counterparts. They were also able to withstand significant drops in temperature if they shifted and could survive on raw food if need be.
Stephen took another deep breath, satisfied with the breather he had gotten -- a mere fifteen minutes was all he needed. He straightened himself and opened his inbox, his eyes fixated on the screen.
Reports, reports, and more reports. His week had been a deluge of Sector 12’s failure, a sector that was under his older brother. He was the muscle of the muscle, anyway. Why was he helping this sector out again? He sighed and read a recent email, sent in by an anonymous mailer. He stopped and had it scanned for suspicious content. Seeing there was none, he opened it. It contained a single file, a video.
Stephen pressed a button, drawing all his blinds down and locking his door. He sat back, relaxing himself, and clicked on the video. A young woman was being strapped down on an operating table; her face was covered by researchers. They moved around, attaching wires. When they stepped back, he saw her face. She was a beautiful young woman, and her eyes were a startling gray, almost like his mother’s.
He thought nothing much of it, wondering why he had to see this. He had begun to raise a finger to close the video, but then he heard a voice.
“Alexia, can you hear me?” a female doctor’s voice began.
The girl on the table nodded, and she looked groggy as the camera panned closer to her face.
“We’re doing a series of tests for your brainwaves.”
She nodded again.
A blue colored fluid ran down a tube and into her wrist. Alexia closed her eyes and spasmed a little. She took a deep breath.
“How are you feeling?” the doctor asked.
“Funny,” she responded in a quiet voice.
“It’ll only be just a little pain,” the doctor assured the girl.
“It’s burning my veins or something,” the girl voiced out. “It’s hurting me.”
“Just a little more.”
“Stop it,” Alexia said in a louder voice. “Stop it!”
Another voice came on screen. “Dr. Delaney, everything’s spiking up.”
“Just a little more,” Dr. Delaney muttered.
Alexia was violently shuddering. Her eyes began to roll up, and her mouth began to salivate first. She was fighting the chemicals in her system. As her mouth foamed, she shouted someone’s name.
“Juliet!”
Stephen’s heart was racing as soon as the video came to an end. Juliet. Juliet. It could mean anything. It could mean a code, Echo, Foxtrot, Juliet -- it was a battalion under him. Juliet could mean that it was someone’s name. Juliet had been his mother’s name… the video had been sent by someone unknown. Was the sender a sympathizer? Was it a warning?
The video unnerved him. There was something else he didn’t know about the facility. He knew pain was part of progress, and human subjects were always damaged one way or another. Female weresoldiers went through that, too. He had no hold on those experiments; he was just handed werebeings to train into soldiers, some as young as fourteen.
Juliet. The test subject’s voice reverberated in his mind. It seemed familiar, although he had never met her before. Stephen shook his head and moved the email to a private folder, his heart still hammering. He knew what he had just seen, but he couldn’t place what he felt. He had asked for whatever existing footage that they could salvage on the day of the subjects’ escape, and he had reviewed these, finding something questionable about Dr. Delaney’s visit to Ryker hours before his escape. He had seen the test subject A129, but he had never heard her speak, until today.
I must be tired, he told himself, rubbing his eyes. He wanted to forget what he had seen. It made him restless; it made him want to take more pills. Stephen stood up, turned off his monitor, and retracted the blinds. He walked to a window and saw some soldiers walking for a hangar; the others loaded army vehicles into planes. The search for A129 and X014 was costly and time-consuming, and it had to stop as soon as possible.
Juliet, he thought. He had faint memories of his mother and was glad he did. She had died when they were young, and his father never spoke of her. There were a few mementos, and she was immortalized in a beautiful mausoleum, with a statue in her likeness. He hadn’t gone there in years, but he was going there tonight.
*
Alexia woke up to find snow covering the grounds outside of the small cave they had slept in the past two nights. Ryker had done his best to bring back whatever edible plants there were. It was Ryker who scouted the area, looking for probable shelter and a path out of the forest which didn’t lead to civilization.
It spelled disaster for her, but not for Ryker.
Ryker saw the look on her face as she looked out, seeing the thin layer of snow on the ground.
“Are you sure you aren’t a werebear?”
Alexia frowned. “If I was, all those years of torture should have made me shift by now.”
There were moments she wished she was a werebear, at least that would make her invulnerable to cold or the need to eat proper human food.
“I’ll find food for you,” Ryker said. “I also need to feed, so stay here.”
Alexia wanted to say something, but she stopped. Stay?
“What?” he asked her.
Alexia shook her head. “Do you know where we are?”
Ryker shrugged. “I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon enough.”
He had said “we.” Perhaps she wasn’t so useless after all. Alexia found herself nodding to get rid of the awkwardness growing in her. Ryker slipped out of the cave, and she heard him break into a run, ready to shift in the cover of the thick trees.
Shifting was painful. She had seen it happen so many times; she never forgot the sounds that came from it. She would hear bones break and skin tear apart like cloth at the seams; she would hear their pained cries. It was no wonder Ryker never shifted in front of her. It showed their vulnerability, but she had heard that the weresoldiers didn’t care how painful it was. Adrenalin lessened the pain, along with the drugs they took before they shifted. She had seen that, too. Constant shifting had negative implications, but of these implications, she had no idea. Some died, and that was the most that she knew. They were taken to a different sector once they had been deemed soldier-worthy.
Alexia shifted, feeling the cold creep into her from the ground. She had no idea what time it was; all she knew was that she was hungry and that she had to wait for Ryker. There was something about Ryker’s tone that made her stay put, even if she wanted to explore the area with him. Perhaps it was his icy blue eyes or his no nonsense demeanor. He had gone through unspeakable things, like most of the werebeings. Children were no exception to this.
She had been dreaming of her childhood more and more as of late, whatever her mind could conjure. She kept seeing a woman’s blurred face. She kept hearing a woman’s voice. She heard a man’s voice as well, one that was rather chilling. There were children in that room with her. Were they tortured like she had been? Were those memories? Or was everything just a figment of her imagination?
The moment she started to remember her childhood clearly, everything was already about the laboratory and Dr. Delaney, and the other researchers who came and went. Dr. Wallace had been a terrible paternal figure, and she had known pain as part of daily life. She had thought she was born in the lab, maybe inside those little tubes…
It was the only possible explanation for her fragmented memories and childhood. Alexia felt something run down her nose, and she wiped it away, thinking it was just part of getting colds. When she withdrew her hand, she saw blood. She quickly wiped it away with her sleeve, hoping it wasn’t going to turn into a deluge of blood. She’d had nosebleeds, sometimes near deadly ones in the lab. It was nothing that the ‘vitamins’ couldn’t cure, but Dr. Delaney was no longer here…
She heard grunts and snorts, and she knew it was Ryker. He came back, adjusting the dirty pair of pants he had removed prior to shifting. Alexia didn’t look at him. Ryker sniffed the air.
“I smell human blood, and it isn’t mine,” he said in a quiet voice. “You didn’t tell me you were injured.”
“I wasn’t. It’s just the cold,” she told him. “It’s just a nosebleed.”
“How often do you have these?” he asked, sitting across from her, his head nearing the ceiling that was filled with roots.
“Only when the temperature changes too quickly…” she replied. She’d had those once a week at least in the lab.
“Well, you’d better learn to adjust. I don’t care how you do it, but try. The others can smell this a mile away,” Ryker told her dispassionately.
She nodded.
“You hungry?” he asked her. In his hand were a few wild mushrooms. “I cleaned these up.”
She looked at them questioningly. “Why does it look like a-?” she stopped, not quite sure how to describe it.
“It’s called lion’s mane in some parts. These are pretty good. I survived on these as a kid,” he told her.
“Survived?” Alexia began, taking it from him. She quickly put one in her mouth, tasting its meatiness and mild taste, with a rubbery texture. She didn’t care, she chewed on one quickly and swallowed it, feeling the hunger. Her stomach growled, as if it asked for more food.
Ryker let out a snort. “So, you really are hungry.”
She paid no attention to the comment. “I like these. Is this what a lion’s mane really looks like?”
Ryker shrugged. “I saw one once; there was a small zoo I went to. The lion looked sad, and its hair wasn’t as grand as I imagined it would be. Maybe because it was imprisoned.”
“Maybe that’s why I look like this…” Alexia said, pausing for a moment.
“Look like what?”
“I look sad, and my hair looks dead.”
“You were locked up for a while. I guess that’s what the lack of sunshine and fresh air does to you.”
“I have sunshine and fresh air now…”
“Let’s put it this way. We’re still trapped; we aren’t truly free. All this sunshine and fresh air is on loan. We don’t even have proper food; I can’t even give you good, human food unless we steal from houses or something.”
“You’ve done more than enough,” Alexia said, “and you don’t even know me.”
Ryker took in a deep breath. “Yeah, sure.”
He didn’t know her, and he didn’t see the need to get to know her better. But had he done more than enough? If he had, they wouldn’t be here. If he hadn’t taken her out of that lab, she would have had three square meals a day with a change of clothes and her own private quarters. He observed her as she ate her meal while she stared at the floor. She was thinner than she had been in the lab. Her pallor hadn’t improved much, but at least her cheeks were a bit flushed as opposed to last week. Had it only been seven days since they had escaped? It felt like months, and he felt helpless. He didn’t know where they were or what he was going to do. It was different now that he was in charge of another person’s welfare and life.
Back when he had been a recent orphan, it was easy to shift and digest meals fit for wild animals. He had been a smaller werebear back then, and he had looked every inch lovable, despite his maiming and killing tendencies. People took pity on him as a boy, but when he shifted, it was an altogether different story. Control was something that had taken years, and Ryker had all the isolation he had needed back then. This isolation was for survival, and it slimmed with Alexia in tow. She had no survival skills whatsoever, and any knowledge she had learned was gleaned from the adults that had performed tests on her.
“Ryker,” she began.
Ryker looked up, surprised that his name had come from her mouth. She barely called him by his name. A sudden draft of wind rushed into the small cave.
“I’m cold,” she told him.
Ryker swallowed. It had come across his mind, but he didn’t want to entertain it. She was shaking; he had seen it early on. What month had it been? He had won the games mere months ago… He took a deep breath and crawled for Alexia, sitting beside her.
She inched for him, now just millimeters away from his body. She could feel the heat emanating from Ryker, and she felt relief from the frigidness that had begun to envelop her body. Ryker rested his head against the dirt wall, closing his eyes. He felt Alexia’s arm brush against his own, and he held his breath momentarily. A discomfort rose in him at the fact that a stranger was so close to him. He could hear every breath she took, he could hear her heart beat, and slowly but surely, he could feel the cold in her body dissipate.
Alexia closed her eyes and leaned against Ryker this time.
Ryker’s jaw hardened, and he knew he didn’t need to move. She was too comfortable, so he let her be, swallowing the strange feeling coming over him. No one had been this close to him since his parents had died. Alexia was a complete stranger, and yet here she was, her head rested on his arm, her body snuggled close to his.
The whores in the capital couldn’t even hold his hand. The lab scientists had forcibly done so. But he could not find it in himself to push Alexia away. He looked down at her as she closed her eyes, falling into a deep sleep. He saw her thick eyelashes and saw the scars on her arms and even on her head. Her wrist was still healing; he could smell an infection growing where he had taken out her microchip.
He knew they had to find medications soon. No hospital would take them in without alerting authorities; no home would give them a roof over their heads, even just for a night. He was in too deep to leave Alexia alone…
Ryker saw her brows furrow in her sleep. She was probably dreaming. He had kept still for over an hour now, just staring at the small hole that gave their cave subdued daylight. The snow would thicken soon, and he would need to shift once in a while just to survive the cold. His plans to reach Washington in less than two weeks had become a dream. He felt his hopes for emancipation ebbing away…
Ryker closed his eyes once more, knowing that worrying wouldn’t get him anywhere close to Washington. Their scents would have strengthened by now, after staying in the same place for two days. Ryker remembered what his father had taught him. Follow the stars, Philip had said. And he would.
He would follow those stars to safety, or at least to a better direction. He needed Alexia alive and well. Dr. Delaney had told him she was as important as he was for the country’s future. Not everyone was a werebeing. Why, Dr. Delaney? he thought.
He moved a bit, trying to get some blood running back to his arm. Alexia stirred a little, but she continued to sleep. She was as exhausted as he was, only hers showed prominently. He looked back at her again, and he saw her lips move, as if she were murmuring someone’s name.
Ryker wondered who it was. He couldn’t make out the words. They both dreamed every night, and he didn’t want to ask her what it was about, but he could hear her crying in her sleep. It was not his business to ask her about what plagued her in her dreams. He had his own demons to face, and there were more coming for them.
“What’s going to become of us?” he wondered, looking at her face. The both of them were too young to go through what they had gone through, all the torture, the alienation, and the losses of loved ones. Both of them had numerous scars, physical and mental. They both had been alone, and now they were alone, together.
His heartbeat began to sync with hers, and he found himself closing his eyes, tired from his earlier hunt. He felt his muscles relax and his breathing deepen. He and Alexia were safe for now, something he wished would last for even just a couple of hours. He felt Alexia’s head burrow deep into his arm, and he gave a small smile as he closed his eyes, his first smile -- no matter how minute -- in many, many months.
To Be Continued.....
* * *
Ready for the next part of the story?
Dear Reader,
I want to personally thank you for taking your time to read “The WereGames” I really hope you enjoyed it and you are hungry for the next part in the story.
This is the first book of a TRILOGY and you can get the final 2 books at the links below. Discover how it all ends!
See you in the next book :)
Jade x x