Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven 1)

The smile on that perfectly made-up face was the most chilling thing Lydia had ever seen: It was cold as a diamond—and just as indestructible.

“Go on.”

From out of the corner of Lydia’s eye, a figure stepped into view and she snapped her head in that direction. It was a man. Dressed in a camouflage uniform.

Between one blink and the next, she saw Daniel jumping on the back of that “soldier” out in the woods.

But Lydia was not going to be intimidated. It was so too late for that.

“You and Peter Wynne and Rick are doing genetic experiments,” Lydia said. “And Rick was the one poisoning the wolves because they were your subjects, and he had to both track the results and control the exposure of the program. Too many out in the preserve, and you all ran the risk of one of them falling into the hands of somebody else. A hunter. A truck driver who hit one. They were beginning to show genetic shifts and none of you were exactly sure whether they were going to lead to physical or behavioral changes—you hoped they would, but you knew that you couldn’t control nature, even though you were the ones who let the proverbial cat out of the bag.”

Lydia put her palm forward. “And before you deny this, I have everything thanks to Rick. A full dossier that includes the funds flow, the experiment details, the monitoring data. I’ve got it all, and your name is all over the documents. He’d decided to take his money and run, and to protect himself, he wrote everything down—it was his bargaining chip to stay alive and he didn’t trust either of you. Before he staged his own death, he killed Peter because he knew he himself was at risk and Peter was the weak link he could get to and eliminate easier.” She nodded toward the guard. “You, on the other hand, are never without protection. So he took care of Peter, and set about faking his own death. In the end, he really died, though. He killed himself—and his death, like Peter’s, is on your hands.”

C.P. Phalen’s composure was complete. There wasn’t a flush on that face, a flicker of an expression, a twitch or a stiffening.

She was utterly relaxed. Utterly in control.

“And now I’m probably going to die, too,” Lydia said. “That’s okay. I don’t mind laying down my life for my wolves. Just know that whether I walk out of here or my body is carried out, you’re totally done. I’ve made sure that everything is in the right hands. Your trying to create a hybrid species of wolf and human is fucking done tonight.”

Now came the jerk of that platinum head. “What did you say?”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. You’re more sophisticated than to play it stupid—”

“Hybrid species? There is no hybrid species.”

“Like I’m going to believe you.”

The woman stood up even higher on her spine. If that was possible. “You’re right. We were experimenting, but not to create anything that didn’t exist. The research was on the immune system and cell division as it relates to longevity. The wolves were used because the packs on the preserve are isolated and from a single line of ancestors courtesy of the reintroduction of the species that took place in the nineteen hundreds. Further, their life cycles are short enough so that we could measure whether the drugs were working to keep them alive longer. It was not to synthesize—werewolves or something.”

Lydia shook her head. “Like I said, I don’t believe a word you—”

“I don’t care whether you believe me. The truth is what it is without regard to you blessing it with your opinion.”

And then the woman just shrugged as she stared Lydia right in the face with a bored expression.

“You have your proof,” C.P. Phalen said. “And I have mine. Come, I’ll show you.”

I BOUGHT THIS HOUSE more because of what was under it than anything above ground.”

As C.P. Phalen’s narration started, Lydia walked along with her and decided this was like some kind of fucked-up museum tour, where the exhibits were unbelievable and the docent a madwoman capable of anything.

The two of them were descending a set of steel stairs that were shiny and new, positively sparkling, and when they came to the bottom, Lydia got a load of all sorts of whitewashed concrete walls.

Even though they were well underground, the air smelled fresh, like it was being blown in from the surface.

“Back in the seventies and eighties,” the woman said as they walked forward down a well-lit corridor wide as a living room and long as—well, the damned thing seemed to go on forever—“there was word of experiments being done on things that didn’t exist. Things that had no evolutionary basis and supposedly no existence outside of Halloween myth.”