He was being threatened. Those he cared for were in peril. Inside him, Fenris was awakening. Fenris, who was the very thing his own grandfather had tried to create. Fenris, who might be a match for Stefan Boroskov.
“If you cooperate, I’ll have no need,” Boroskov said. “I do not worry that the doctor will expose us. No one will believe her—they will merely think her infected with her patients’ madness. And May is merely a child.”
“If I do as you tell me, you’ll let them go,” Quentin said.
Boroskov shrugged.
“And if I don’t cooperate, you’ll kill them.”
“Johanna, perhaps. The girl I may simply return to her father.”
Quentin lunged at the Russian. “You scum—”
“Yes.” Boroskov’s eyes lit. “Yes. Let it go, Quentin. Remember who you were meant to be.” He held out his hand.
“Come, my brother. Take what I offer. You have no place in the human world, or in that of your brother. You are not the weakling you’ve believed yourself to be. You are one of the true, new blood of the werewolf race, the hope of our people. Your future is in my hands. Our future.”
Johanna watched in horror as Quentin took Boroskov’s hand.
Chapter 23
He’d forgotten who he was.
He hung, suspended, between two wills, two souls. One cried out for release, for a peace he had never known; the other screamed in triumph, sensing final liberation from all the chains that had bound him.
Only one anchor offered itself. He clutched the extended hand.
It anchored him to the present as memories crashed about him like a storm. The first time Grandfather had taken him to the cellar, a few months after Mother’s death, and explained what he was to become. The years of beatings, starvation, promises of dire punishment he’d kept hidden from Braden and Rowena—yes, even from his twin, who thought she knew everything about him. How he’d fooled them, laughing his way through hell.
Sometime, in those years, Fenris had been born: to take the punishment, to endure the pain—and, in the end, to turn against his tormenter.
Alien, terrifying images spun in an endless loop through his mind. Grandfather’s face, grim and merciless, leaning over to administer his brand of “discipline”… his expression dissolving into astonishment. And fear.
Victory. Grandfather never took him to the cellar again. The beatings didn’t stop, not entirely. But the terror did. Eventually Grandfather died, and he’d thought himself free. The memories faded. His other self had little reason for existence, and went into dormancy. Whatever he had once known, or guessed, of Fenris was buried under layer upon layer of protective armor.
But he remained haunted still. He looked for escape in every sort of harmless debauchery available to a young man of good family who possessed a generous income. He gained a reputation as a rake and gamester, ever amiable and full of high spirits.
Those spirits had led him to join the Queen’s Army as a subaltern on the northwestern frontier of India. He’d sought adventure, and found violence instead. And his other self, so long asleep, woke to kill when he could not. Details of the battle he hadn’t remembered formed an explosion of bloodred, smoke gray, and smothering black behind his eyelids.
He’d awakened in the hospital and, after his swift recovery, was prompted to resign his commission. Boroskov was right; he’d been a hero who’d saved his troops, but what he had done was too terrible for his comrades and officers to accept. He’d never known why, until now.
Fenris was responsible.
So home he came, to take up the threads of his civilian life, running occasional errands for his brother the earl and otherwise losing himself in the pursuit of pleasure. Everyone knew that the honorable Quentin Forster hated any sort of conflict.
Then the year of the Convocation had arrived—that grand meeting of the world’s werewolf families on Braden’s Greyburn estates in the far north of England.
Boroskov had disrupted the proceedings with his challenge to Braden. And when Braden won the fight, Quentin ran. Ran all the way to America, and had never stopped running.
Because Fenris could no longer be forced back in his dark corner. Because the memory lapses had already begun, and the implacable urges, half recalled, could no longer be borne.