The silence after Damien left was the loudest sound I'd ever heard.
I stood frozen in the sterile laboratory, the ghost of his confession clinging to the air like chemical smoke. My eyes tracked to the biohazard bin where the empty syringe lay. The liquid inside had stopped swirling, now just a dark sludge at the bottom.
My mind raced, connecting jagged pieces. The scars on his arm. The deliberate, pain soaked injection. His unnatural stillness. He wasn't just cursed. He was treating it. Or trying to.
Driven by a chemist's instinct, I moved. I snapped on a pair of gloves from a wall dispenser, fished out the syringe, and carefully decanted the residual drops onto a glass slide. Under the lab's powerful microscope, the substance wasn't just black. It was alive a crawling mass of microscopic, silver flecked parasites writhing in a viscous base.
Moonbane. I'd identified it correctly. But this was Moonbane fused with something else. Something biological.
A soft chime echoed through the penthouse, followed by the hiss of the main door opening. I shoved the slide into my pocket just as a tall, wiry man with glasses and a lab coat entered. He didn't look like one of Damien's security wolves. He looked human.
"Ms. Martin. I'm Silas. Mr. Blackwood's head of research." His voice was reedy, his smile not reaching his eyes. "I'm to show you to your quarters and outline your duties."
He led me out of the lab, down a stark hallway to a room that was more luxurious cell than bedroom. A large bed, an ensuite bathroom, all in shades of grey. The window, like all the others, didn't open.
"Your first duty begins tonight," Silas said, placing a tablet on the dresser. "Mr. Blackwood's biometric readings will stream here. You are to monitor them. If his heart rate drops below forty or spikes above one fifty, you press this alert." He pointed to a red button on the screen. "You do not leave this room. You do not approach him. Understood?"
"What happens if I press it?"
"We contain the situation." His gaze was unsettlingly direct. "You are here, Ms. Martin, because you are a Null. Your unique… emptiness… makes you the only viable assistant for this phase of his treatment. Do not mistake utility for importance."
The dismissal stung, but the word treatment hooked me. "What are you treating?"
"That is not your concern. Your concern is the data." He turned to leave.
"He's injecting himself with parasitic Moonbane," I said flatly.
Silas froze, his hand on the doorframe. Slowly, he turned back. The pleasant mask was gone. "Explain."
"The silver flecks in the solution. They're not metallic. They're organic. Nano parasites, likely engineered to bind with the Moonbane alkaloids. A delivery system." I kept my voice clinical, despite my pounding heart. "You're not suppressing his shift. You're replacing one biological process with another. A controlled parasite instead of an uncontrolled curse."
For a long moment, he just stared at me. Then, a slow, genuine smile spread across his face. It was more frightening than his coldness. "He said you were sharp. I see he undersold you." He walked back into the room, closing the door softly behind him. "What else do you see?"
It was a test. I took a breath. "The dosage is wrong. The parasite density in that syringe was too high by at least fifteen percent. You're overloading his system to force adaptation. It's killing him faster than the curse would."
Silas's eyes lit with a fanatical gleam. "Finally. Someone who sees." He leaned forward. "The curse isn't magical, Lydia. May I call you Lydia? It's a bioweapon. A prion-based pathogen that rewrites shifter DNA into something… monstrous. Damien's family was targeted with it a decade ago. He's the only survivor. My parasites are a countermeasure. They eat the prions."
My stomach turned. "And the host tissue along with them."
"A side effect. One we're close to solving." He tapped the tablet, bringing up a complex DNA helix model. "With your help."
"My help?"
"Your Null biology. It's not an absence of power, my dear. It's a different genome. One that is completely immune to the shifter prion. I need to sequence you. Isolate the immunity factor. We can splice it, create a targeted therapy instead of this brutal suppression."
He made it sound so logical. So clean. But the fervor in his eyes was anything but. This wasn't just research. This was an obsession.
"And if I refuse?"
His smile didn't waver. "You were sold here, Lydia. Your consent is a courtesy. One I'm extending because cooperation will be faster." He opened the door again. "Rest. The blood draw will be at dawn."
He left, and the lock clicked softly behind him.
I was trapped. Not just in the room, but in a nightmare of someone else's making. Damien was a prisoner of his own blood. Silas was a fanatic playing god. And I was their new lab rat.
The tablet chimed. Damien's biometrics appeared: heart rate 48, temp 94.5 and falling, cortisol levels spiking. The numbers were all wrong for a living werewolf. They were the vitals of a man in suspended animation.
As I watched, his heart rate plummeted to 42.
Then 40.
The red alert button glowed softly on the screen.
I remembered the shudder that wracked his frame after the injection. The pain in his winter grey eyes. You're the only one who can be near me when I finally explode.
My hand hovered over the button.
The heart rate hit 38.
A cold sweat broke out on my neck. Protocol said to press it. Silas said they would "contain the situation."
But something in me rebelled. Contain him? Like a monster?
The numbers stabilized at 37. Dangerously low, but steady. I pulled my hand back. I wouldn't send them to cage him. Not yet.
An hour passed. The silence stretched. Then, a new low sound, ragged scraping like metal on stone, coming from the hallway.
I pressed my ear to the door. The sound grew closer, accompanied by a wet, labored breathing that was all too human.
Fear spiked, cold and sharp. The lock on my door was electronic. I had no key, no way out.
The scraping stopped right outside my door.
The breathing hitched.
Then, Damien's voice stripped of all its cold control, raw and shattered, whispered through the gap at the bottom of the door.
"Lydia…" it was a plea, a broken thing. "The keypad… code is 0913. My… turning date. Let me in. Before I become what they fear."
The tablet in my hand screamed an alarm. His heart rate was now 180 and climbing. His body temperature read 106 degrees.
The red alert flashed furiously.
Outside, the scraping began again, moving away down the hall, toward the sealed lab where all the dangerous, reactive materials were stored.