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“Yeah.”
His free hand gripped her shoulder between the dislocated joint and her neck. “Do you want me to count to three?”
“I don’t think it ma—”
Gordon pushed with his left hand, forcing Laura back and pulled with his right at the same time. The dull throb echoed through Laura’s clavicle with a pop.
Gordon positioned her arm close to her chest. “Keep it there.”
Laura did. “If I’m right, when another cur goes after Dr. Dante, it could kill him.”
“You don’t think the Mah would protect him?”
“Absolutely, but even ants can take down a lion if there are enough of them.” And Max had made it clear there were plenty of people sitting in prison waiting to be utilized.
Gordon waved a hand in the direction of the driveway. “Denton said they’d done other test runs. If he wasn’t lying, why would one from this batch go after Dr. Dante and not the others?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know enough about Urja to be sure. Or I could be wrong about everything altogether.”
Laura rubbed her forehead; blood flaked off with bits of dirt and fragments of what might have been drying brain matter. If it hadn’t been winter, she would have been ripe and fighting off flies.
A thought occurred to her. “How long does it take for a person to change if they survive a bite?”
“You mean before they turn into a cur?”
“Yeah.”
Gordon scratched the stubble on his chin.
“No idea. We don’t know much about bites. Some tie a pack, an alpha to a beta, form a meta-pack. Those are just the bonds we know about, and we don’t know jack shit about all the ways they work.”
“Which means possibly delayed biological changes in Dr. Dante may be why none of the curs noticed him until recently.”
Gordon huffed. “Fuck me sideways. Ingrid was right.”
“Ingrid?”
“A historian who used to sit in an Apex seat. She was a hundred years old when I was in training. She used to wag her finger—” Gordon gave a demonstration. “—and tell us not to come crying to her when we needed to know something we would already know if we’d listened in the first place.”
“Seems like the Senate isn’t the only one who’s let themselves forget.”
“Yeah.” Gordon gave a half shrug. “Yeah, I guess they ain’t.”
“We might not have Ingrid but I bet Palmer would know the answer.” Laura just needed a way to contact him. “Is there anywhere around here to acquire a disposable cell phone?”
“Grocery store about twenty miles out. I’ve seen them there.” Gordon took a sling out of the bag and helped her put it on. “But are you sure that’s wise?”
“Calling Palmer?”
“Yeah. You said you didn’t know how far this went.”
“Palmer wouldn’t go along with this.” He’d made his stance clear after the Utah Facility. Nash Kelli had to be destroyed along with the VrK. He was also one of the few Varu who continued to accept the loss of their wolf as a price to pay for the death of the first Anubis.
It wasn’t that he didn’t mourn like the others. He’d simply acknowledged it was better to live forever with a fractured connection to his Fenrir than millions die.
And the Anubis wouldn’t have killed his people. The Senate would have continued to punish the Varu because they didn’t have a way to take out their fears on the Mah.
In the shadow of the Anubis, they’d been untouchable.
