Carrie Vaughn - 08 Kitty Goes to War by Carrie Vaughn

Author:Carrie Vaughn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter14

TWO DAYS before the next full moon, I met with Dr. Shumacher to discuss her patients. She sat behind her desk, looking harried, her hair slipping from its bun, gray shadows under her eyes. She kept glancing at the pages on her clipboard as if they would start speaking, telling her what to do.

“Tuesday’s full-moon night,” I said. I sat across from her, staring her down, playing a dominance game and putting her on edge. “I’d like to give them the chance to get out, with my pack.”

She blinked at me. “Do you really think they’re ready for that?”

The truth was, I wasn’t sure. The safest thing would be to keep them locked up, but that wasn’t the goal, ultimately. “If they’re going to move on, either to go back to civilian life or to active duty, they’ll have to do this eventually. My pack can keep an eye on them. We ought to be able to keep them safe.” As well as surrounding civilization . . .

“I suppose they deserve to have that opportunity.” She was reluctant. I wondered what she wasn’t telling me.

“I’d like to ask them. See if they feel up to it.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. I got the feeling Shumacher wasn’t used to giving her lab rats a choice. “But Kitty—do you really think they’ll ever be able to lead normal lives? Don’t you think they’d be safer—better off—staying under supervision?”

“What? For the rest of their lives?” I almost laughed. But Shumacher just looked at me, matter-of-factly, as though the suggestion wasn’t outlandish.

Then I realized that maybe she wanted to keep them locked up for the rest of their lives. Not for their own good, but for hers.

“Do you even see them as people? As patients? Or just as an experiment?” I said.

“That’s not fair—I’m trying to do good work here.”

“You can’t keep them locked up forever. They’re not guilty of murder.”

She spoke with passion—desperation, almost. “We’ve never had a chance to study the long-term effects of lycanthropy like this. I’ve never had subjects I could study this closely. It’s too good an opportunity—”

“At the cost of their sanity?” I said calmly. “They’re people, Doctor.”

She looked away.

She’d seemed so different than her predecessor at the NIH, but maybe there wasn’t any difference at all. The only results she wanted were raw data.

“Doctor, you have Vanderman. I’m not going to argue with you about letting him loose. But you have to let the others go. Please.”

She leaned forward, resting on her elbows. “I’ve been to see Vanderman. He hasn’t spoken in days. He paces, sleeps. If we try to confront him, he shape-shifts. He throws himself against the walls of his cell. I don’t know how to bring him back. My only option is to keep him sedated. That’s not a good baseline, even for a werewolf.”

Tyler and Walters I could help. Vanderman . . . I didn’t even want to see him. “I’ve heard stories of werewolves going so far that they don’t come back. I wondered sometimes if it was just stories.

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