Pawn Among Wolves Ch. 05

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She's used in a fight between werewolves.
9k words
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Part 5 of the 20 part series

Updated 10/27/2022
Created 01/05/2012
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Gemma hugged her arms around her knees and gazed out of the tall, deep window across the broad valley to the sun sinking beyond the mountains. A beautiful, tranquil scene that should have calmed her inner tension. Her wool-clad toes were tucked in close on the soft cushion of the window seat - it was cold up here in the mountains with the window open, but less oppressive having the gentle breeze curling around her, shielding her from the cloying opulence of the suite.

After annoying her for three days, her guards had finally stopped coming in to stare disapprovingly every time she touched the window catch.What did they think she was going to do, jump?she thought broodingly. Then shivered lightly. The view was breathtaking in more than one way; the first time she had looked down, her stomach had lurched sickeningly and head had begun to swim, and that had been with the window closed. On that first day, when she had still been overawed, amazed at being transported into a palatial, elegant suite in a Bond-villain mountain-crag fortress.

Three days later, her main feeling was irritated boredom. The sleek madam – Louise – had even taken her phone from her that first night. "For security," Madam had explained smoothly as she deftly extracted it with a sweet, false smile – and without permission – from Gemma's shoulder bag, before waving her involuntary, unwanted guest into the suite and leaving with a brief, "Ask the men for anything you need," tossed dismissively over one silk-clad shoulder.

That was the last Gemma had seen of her, thankfully. The silence in the back of the car on the way down had been glacial, Madam staring out into the night, and Gemma wondering what on earth had happened to her normal life, where Mac was, and what was nigglingly weird about the car they were riding in - although the vehicle suited Madam. Plush, silent and sneeringly superior. The cubs had since filled her in - apparently Madam -Gemma always drawled the title sarcastically inside her own head - hadn't appreciated Gemma introducing her to the novel experience of having a mere girl - a human - argue with her. In front of four alphas, Dr. Maynard and half the senior pack members, no less. And then Marsh himself had listened to what the girl said! The cubs couldn't hide their glee. And Madam hadn't even attempted to hide her acute, violent dislike.

Gemma wrinkled her short nose.

Mutual.

The men weren't much better. The guards. Most of the time they just rooted themselves in the knee-deep carpet in the corridor outside the door to the suite, and ignored her varied polite and less polite requests to let her out to explore. She had sensed their pleasure at the futility of her physical, furious attempts to get out – it had been like trying to squeeze between two warm, immovable rocks, or a rock and the door jam, and their warmth had made her hairs stand on end and an uneasy churning sensation pool in her stomach, making her back off abruptly.

They did fetch on demand, as Madam had stated – that's what the guards called her, "Madam Louise," or, "Madam Marsh," and Gemma had spent a bad-tempered, bored period yesterday afternoon thinking up the most bizarre and pointless fetch-errands she could inflict on them. A Frisbee. Strawberries and champagne. Ten orchids. A zebra. Her favourite DVDs. Fish and chips. Chocolate and ice cream. A piano. A Picasso. Ostrich steak (she'd never had it – Gemma thought she may as well make use of this). Her old teddy polar bear from home. A BlackBerry. One of them silently stalked off after each request, or merely stated after a brief pause, "I'm afraid Madam would prefer you not to risk your security with that, Dr. Smith."

She got the piano though, to her amazement.

She hadn't really thought she'd get a BlackBerry. But when the dark haired one had returned with her fluffy old toy, BigWhite, she'd dried up and retreated, unnerved, to her favourite seat. This one, here in the window. How the hell had they gotten into her flat?

She didn't want to know.

"Anything more, Dr. Smith?" the craggy one had drawled sarcastically after her as she'd retreated.

Gemma wrinkled her nose again. No way were those surly hulks allowed to call her 'Gemma'. Especially not when she needed anything to keep them at a distance. To keep her cool. Her courage. Her distain. Every day. Every morning.

Every morning they checked her neck.

It was unnerving, unsettling, the worst part of the day. They came in a pair each time – for protection against her contaminating human presence, it felt like, in the increasingly tense unease. They requested gruffly that she stand in the middle of the living room, loosen and fold down her collar, and let them, in turn, scent the fading mottling. Their breath against the tender spot made her skin writhe and tension clench in her stomach. She could feel the tautness of dislike oozing off them also, the shudder of their skin as they sniffed, the wrinkle of their noses, and the hardness in their eyes as they had to bring themselves to approach. And they shimmered with increasing antipathy and disappointment each day as the colour slowly faded - she could tell that they wanted her to get worse, wanted Mac tried and convicted.

Dogs.

She hated them for that. Her skin was so tight, tense even at the thought of the impending inspection tomorrow – made worse after another long, lurid night of Mac visiting her dreams and whispering to her skin what he'd like to do to her in that damned massive four poster in the luxurious bedroom, rolling her under him, pressing her down into the soft mattress. She knew they could smell it on her – the heat from the dreams. Eugh.

Damn him. Damn she missed his touch. Missed it more every day.

She used the opportunity, their enforced interaction, to question the guards – it was also a useful distraction from the revolting, real reason they were there. But they never said any more than they absolutely had to, never answered her questions about Mac or the trial, infuriatingly, which was why she'd ended up playing that stupid fetch game with them like the dogs they were. They liked keeping her in the dark. Madam liked it.

Luckily, Mac didn't.

Here it came.

Silently, twirling on the breeze, lowered on the spindly, almost invisible fishing line, today's offering spun gently into sight. She grasped the line, tugged lightly, and it stopped. Swiftly, sparkling with pleasure, Gemma unclipped it from the karabiner on the end of the line, hooked in place her own reply, and then tugged twice, gently. She breathed more easily as she watched the little packet disappear silently back up the cliff face. The guards came in at any moment and she really did not want to get the kids into trouble. They were so proud of themselves for working this out. Even if they couldn't get her a replacement mobile phone, which would've been a damn sight easier. Apparently wolves didn't use cell phones much, and they had no chance to buy one, especially without any of the Marsh wolves noticing.

A small smile was playing around her mouth. Megan, the youngest of the trio, had explained in her first note. Mac knew why Madam Marsh had taken Gemma's phone, but he'd wanted to check that she was OK himself, not rely on the reports, so he'd set up this relay with the MacKeld trainees at Marshmont.

There were three of them, up there in the dusk, perched on the wall of the roof terrace, the two boys hanging onto the legs and waistband of Megan so that she could lean out far enough to get the fishing line lowered past the rocky outcrop above this window.

They loved doing this, the excitement was evident in their scrawled messages – and the pride, the pride that the Alpha had given them this assignment, trusted them to work out how to get a message to Gemma. Which they had. He'd been right.

Today's package held four notes. The one dictated from Mac she saved until last. James, the eldest of them, had drawn her a meticulous, detailed map of the fourth floor – the floor below – to go with the one sent yesterday of this floor, with the position of her suite. She'd explained in her first note how frustrating she found it, seeing only these four rooms when she'd been dazzled by the bewitching array of lights shimmering down from above as the car purred its way up the valley on the night of her arrival. So he'd decided to map the place for her.

Kyle drew people, mainly pictures of her guards, there was one today of the two hulks who'd been outside her door at midday – he didn't have great talent, but she could tell who they were, and appreciated the short notes underneath."Lars – he's a bit irritable, but not bad. Teaches us restraint." "Mike – he works in the North quad usually, but I've never seen him come in empty handed, he can run like the wind." Kyle's notes left a lot of questions, but apparently all of her guards to date – they rotated three pairs during the day, and someone new had been substituted in yesterday – all were high-ranking and awesome and seemed to be snappy about being dragged in to guard a human.

Megan was the chatty one, explaining all about them, their classes, extra training, the Marshmont and how hard it was to get into the academy here. She reminded Gemma of her cousin Tina's daughter, and her notes had her smile with their joyous enthusiasm for life.

Then there was Mac's.

"Picchu, please try not to take out your irritation on the guards by making highly skilled warriors run after candy, flowers and teddy bears. It might come back to bite you someday. Although your demanding errands are already legendary and there was some joking around the council that I've obviously gotten you pregnant.

Before you panic, that's impossible.

I've been acquitted of endangering you, as the evidence clearly shows that you are healing. The Argen charge is still open but I've been released on condition that I leave you in Marsh custody and don't come near you. I said some slightly disrespectful things to the council in response to that, and they got snippy and demanded I promise to stay on the Range until you're fully healed or they'd stick me back in a cell. Wish you'd been there to shut me up – you excel at it."

That was it. Her hit for today.

Megan had told her that as kids – cubs – they weren't old enough to distance communicate in words easily, wolves worked more with impressions, feelings, and images sent mind to mind – "conveying", they called it, and the concentration required to receive words was exhausting, requiring a lot more control – they wouldn't be able to exchange words with even their parents at this distance. Only the Alpha, and it took the three of them the whole day, taking turns, to receive that many sentences even from him.

So a wolf only conveyed in words when he had feelings or images that he didn't wish to share, that were liable to leak through. Gemma had blushed scarlet when she'd read that explanation for why the dictated notes were so short. If Mac had any of the same feelings and images in his mind as cavorted repeatedly through hers whenever she thought of him, then she was damned glad he was sticking to dry words for these kids to write down, even if it left her aching for more and gave them a bit of a headache. And it's not as if he was that reticent! She snorted, blushing again. Pregnant. HAH. She wished shecouldshut him up.

Her nipples tingled and her mouth watered lightly.

The cubs had been astonished and immensely proud when Mac first spoke to them – they'd only each heard from him once before, mind-to-mind, when he congratulated them on gaining entrance to the Academy. But even then, he'd conveyed in words – their parents said that now, since the start of the third invasion, four years ago when they were only little cubs, the Alpha only ever conveyed in words. With everyone.

Megan's notes also left a lot of questions.

Gemma stroked the short pieces of paper, over and over, as she re-read the notes and studied her new map. Then with a little sigh, she went and hid them with the others, as instructed, in the empty, rinsed shampoo bottle behind the other toiletries in the bathroom cabinet. Scent masking, it was called.

The long night stretched ahead. What wouldn't she do to have the opportunity to shut Mac up.

Again.

And again.

Bedtime. Dammit. Her pulse was racing and she was so, so wet. Maybe a boring tome would cool her thoughts.

Later, much later, Gemma lifted her head and stared at the wall, unfocussed, mind working furiously with the book open on her lap.

Unbelievable.

Impossible.

Unthinkable.

But...

Distantly aware of the cold slowly spreading through her veins, she re-focused on the formula scrawled in the workings box at the chapter end. She'd only started flipping through the old textbook out of sheer boredom. When she'd demanded her own clothes as part of her frustrated game yesterday, the jailers had somehow retrieved the other girl, Anne's, rucksack, together with her own coat and gloves from the lab. No doubt they had thought it was hers. If she hadn't been skulking, unnerved, in her windowseat by the time the hulky one had dropped it in, she might have pointed out his mistake, and would never have found –

This.

It was a standard chelation chemistry textbook, she assigned it to students herself, and the scribbled workings in the boxes would not have held her interest if she hadn't begun to notice the predominance of silver in each working. In fact, in all workings. And once she'd begun to look, she found that the formulas had little to do with the questions, although someone was developing the knowledge shared in the chapters for their own use. And that use seemed to be -

Unthinkable.

Gemma checked again, feeling the cold dread deep inside her hardening. The moon was glowing softly on the peaks opposite, lengthening the silver shadows, echoing her mood.

Mac had mentioned poly, when talking about the chemo he was taking to rid his body of the residue silver. She had brushed soft fingers over the cold, shiny, stretched skin on his stomach. And the standard polymer for silver cleansing was right here, in these formulas. And...

She was staring at the wall again, shivering as her brain raced through the implications.

Poison.

Here, unless she was very much mistaken, was the painstaking working out of a method of coating silver, sealing it away, hiding it inside another compound. It was meticulous. It was fiendish. The majority of the calculations estimated how much of the coating compound would react with any of the standard cleansing polymer added to the body to eradicate silver. And the reaction would free the additional silver hidden inside.

So.Gemma found that she was shivering lightly. Was this Argen? True Argen - the silent killer? Or something else entirely? What had Anne been doing with this knowledge?

Here was a poison which hid silver inside it. If you mixed it with a little pure silver – there were calculations as to how much was a good mixture – then any time a wolf tried to cleanse out the visible silver with the standard chemo polymer, more of the hidden silver would be released, making matters worse, not better. Poisoning himself.

There was even a rough table of results of some experimental live tests. Survival rates noted coldly. Gemma wondered briefly, bleakly, who the guinea pigs – the guinea pig wolves – had been. If they had volunteered. Yeah, like Nick's wolf-girl Anne had volunteered for sex.

Gemma's blood was aching in her taut skin as she lifted her head to stare again at the wall, fingers clenching and unclenching, brain settling into cold certainty.

Anne, chemistry postgrad, had been, however involuntarily, part of Nicolas's pack.

Her heart was pounding hard inside her chest as her conviction deepened.

Mac's stomach was taking longer to heal than it should - the wound from the silvery spear that Nick had driven through him that first night still frozen into his abdomen. She suspected that it had spread, grown larger since she had first bandaged it.

No. No. No. No. No.

Unless she was very much mistaken, Mac was poisoning himself further every time he tried to heal himself. This would be the sixth day.

How much silver did it take to kill a wolf?

How much time?

Cold, cold clenched muscles ached throughout her body. A shiver of fear, and a wrenching-tight knot in her stomach. Memory of warm green eyes, the gentle touch of his lips brushing hers. Gemma flinched away from the idea of the cold wound spreading, spreading, leaching the heat from his skin, his eyes.No.

She had to get in touch with him.

Now.

Somehow.

After another long, long, pause while her thoughts echoed around her aching skull, Gemma padded through to the bathroom, and pulled out the packet hidden behind the shampoo, riffling through for the maps.

So.

Marsh's office was downstairs, two windows to the right. Or to the left, if you were looking out of your own window, deliberately not focusing on the distant, distant specks of trees marking the base of the cliff.

Gemma felt slightly light headed, divorced, like she was ludicrously part of a fictional children's adventure story as she hauled spare sheets out of the ornate chest at the foot of the bed, and knotted them together. Enough of them to make a long enough rope. With checked and double checked knots.

Not looking down.

Not.

That's long enough now.

One more for luck.

Thinking resolutely of Mac slowly poisoning himself, Gemma tied her makeshift rope to one of the bedposts, turned her back to the window, and wrapped the ridiculously silky fabric around her arms and across her back for a classic abseil. She leaned against it, testing, in the comfort of her room and took a deep breath.

It held.

Another deep breath.

He's killing himself. You're the only person who can tell him. Stop him.

Gemma shut her bedroom door to pretend she was asleep, and with careful footsteps, backed out of the window, walking slowly down the wall, resolutelyonly looking at where she carefully placed her feet.

For some reason, the lyrics, "On a rope, on a rope, got me hanging on a rope" were echoing repeatedly in her head with each slow step. She smiled, her heart lightening as she became more adept at moving smoothly, carefully with the sheet-rope– Mac would like the idiotic aptness of the words. Although, actually, it was probably a good job he couldn't see this. He was overprotective anyway, and Gemma wasn't sure that objecting to this activity qualified as "over". Her Dad would also ground her if he could see her now, having made her swear to always act sensibly on the rock before he even took her up that first boulder with her brothers. But thiswas sensible. In light of the alternative.

It's worth it.

She smiled softly, wryly, to herself again.

Therewas a phone on the desk.Hurrah!She could see it through the glass, a beautiful, sleek white model quietly waiting to be used.

And the next-door window was open.

Stealthily, Gemma edged herself closer, and peeked in.

The decadence of this bedchamber – it definitely wasn't merely a room, it was a chamber – surpassed even the outrageous opulence of her own. It was staggering, the vast, mountainous silk-hung four-poster dwarfing even the looming shadow of the heavy gothic carved wardrobe. Mirrors and beautiful, sumptuous tapestries vied with each other for wall space, and the dark red carpet looked as though it had been planted years ago, sprayed with hairgro, and left to run riot – while the drapes – hmmm, the drapes. Handy.

Gingerly, Gemma reached in and hauled herself behind the fall of heavy, dark red velvet, as silently as she could. She stood, unnerved in the heavy silence of this arrogant, masculine room, and listened carefully, heart hammering.