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“They set me up,” I said. “Getting my brother out of Chicago was too damn easy. I should have known.”
“Easy? Tempest, you almost died.”
“Lissa infected Jarred with this thing. She gave him back to me knowing I’d send him straight back here.”
I swung the passenger door open and stormed to the edge of the water. She used me. She’d been using me since the very beginning. I had only ever been bait.
“What do we do? How can we cure them? They’re getting better. It’s something to do with Anson’s blood. You tested that too.”
“I did,” she said. Dr. Olivet had climbed out of the Jeep and came to join me on shore. “Tempest, that’s the hard part. Anson has antibodies in his blood. When he fed some to your brother, it made him better. But that doesn’t entirely explain how your father and mother improved so rapidly. You said neither of them took Anson’s blood. They were just nearby. But Jarred and your parents are telepathically connected. Somehow, that was enough for them to get the benefit of Jarred’s new antibodies. But…the virus is mutating again. The new samples I took of all of their blood…I have some concerns about how long their improvements will last. This virus is still eating through them at an alarming rate.”
“Eating through them,” I repeated. “Are you telling me…”
“I don’t know how long this rally we’re seeing is going to last. This virus is slick and smart. It’s…I don’t know how to explain it…but…it’s like it’s sentient.”
“What? You mean it thinks?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. Tempest, I’ve not seen this before firsthand. But there were stories. Rumors. Experiments that went on within the Ring’s strongholds.”
“I’d heard those rumors too,” I said.
“Fae were never true shapeshifters. They could appear as different animals, but they don’t have the power to become one with those animals. Your wolf is part of you. Just like you’re part of it. You don’t exist without each other. It’s not like that when the fae shapeshift. They’re merely a mirror, a projection of the animal or the being they want someone to see.”
“Lissa would shapeshift into other people,” I said. “When I met her, she looked like an old woman. To Jarred, she appeared like a woman in her twenties. Then…when she touched me, when she brought me through some kind of portal, I felt like I could see her true face. She was barely more than a child.”
Dr. Olivet nodded. “The elder fae were trying to find a way to synthesize shifter magic. So that they could actually inhabit the animal form like true shifters, too. And they were doing it in a way that…well…they were trying to find a way to inhabit multiple animals at once.”
Terror snaked through me. “They were trying to build a shifter army.”
Suzanne Olivet nodded. Anson’s words thundered through me. The fae were trying to synthesize shifter magic. They had tried to use Anson, a full-blooded Alpha.
“It’s not a virus at all,” I said. “These enzymes or proteins or whatever they are. You said they’re sentient. You’re telling me that what is infecting my family…it’s part of one being?”
“Yes.”
“One fae.”
“Possibly one. It could be many.”
“They’re a puzzle,” I said. “All of them. The McGraws. The Tullys. Everyone at Wild Lake. If they come together, that being will have a chance to what, reform?”
“Or kill them all at once,” Dr. Olivet said. “Tempest, it’s a testament to your brother’s strength that he survived at all. He was the host.”
“Did he know?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“He knew about Anson. He knew he was X.”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Olivet said.
“How do we stop it? If Anson’s blood carries antibodies, can you synthesize more of it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know if I have enough time.”
“But more of his blood,” I said. “If we gave my father and mother another drop of his blood. And the other families. It would give them a fighting chance, wouldn’t it? Shifters are strong. This thing…their bodies are trying to reject it. If they were to get a boost…”
“Tempest,” Dr. Olivet said. “Anson’s blood is unlike any shifter’s I’ve ever seen. Something’s been done to him.”
