Beta (4 page)

The handle popped off easily in his hand after that.

Stark opened the cell. It was tiny inside, barely more than a closet, and utterly lightless. The smell of feces rolled out, thick and cloying. Deirdre gagged on it.

A woman cowered at the rear.

“Get her,” Stark said.

Deirdre was the only one with him now, so the order was clearly directed at her.

She held her breath and went in.

This prisoner, unlike the others, was completely naked. She had rubbed her own effluence on her arms, as though finger-painting with her flesh as canvas.

When Deirdre touched her shoulder, the prisoner jerked away.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Deirdre said. She silently added,
Probably
. There were a lot of terrible people in the detention center, but this was the one that Stark had sought out deliberately. Deirdre didn’t doubt that she was the worst of the lot.

Still, she lifted the woman carefully off the floor and helped her walk to the doorway.

“My name’s Deirdre,” she said. “Who are you?”

The prisoner didn’t reply. It didn’t seem like she could.

Stark didn’t help when Deirdre pulled her into the hallway. He was watching the prisoners release the others trapped within solitary confinement, satisfaction radiating from every line of his body.

This was Stark at his finest, his most triumphant.

Their mission had been accomplished.

“Now we can go,” he said without even glancing at the woman Deirdre held. He strode back toward the door.

“Who’s this?” Deirdre called to his back, slowed by the prisoner staggering beside her.

“Vidya,” Stark said.

She’d heard that name once before. Vidya had been a member of Stark’s pack until her arrest by the OPA. Niamh had theorized that Vidya was dead—or as good as dead, considering that shifters who vanished into their detention centers never returned.

But here she was, looking underfed and pale, collapsing into Deirdre’s arms because she could no longer walk.

There was a time that Vidya must have been a beautiful woman. Her thick eyebrows were offset by a button nose, full lips, and dimpled chin. When she’d weighed about fifty pounds more, she’d probably been pretty curvy, too.

Now she was skeletal. Vidya weighed nothing when Deirdre bent to scoop her up.

“Need help?” Andrew asked. He was half-carrying another one of the naked, filthy denizens of solitary confinement, a man whose body was more scratches than skin.

“Keep my path clear and get us out of here fast,” Deirdre said.

The burly female prisoner who had followed them down cracked her knuckles. “With pleasure.”

Moonrise struck as they emerged from the detention center. The entrance was hidden underneath a barn and surrounded by cornfields. It was a dark night lit only by stars, the new moon a black patch in the sky. Its hidden presence was heavy, anticipant.

Deirdre set Vidya down by the doors, no longer able to hold her. Her calf was cramping from where she’d been shot by a silver bullet. She could barely support her own weight, much less the weight of the other woman.

Vidya slumped to the ground, landing on all fours. She crawled into the cornfield and vanished.

Stark let her go. He let them all go. Every last prisoner that they’d released from the detention center went whooping into the night, arms open in joyous greeting to the starlight.

Deirdre stood aside to let them pass through the barn doors. Most immediately broke into sprints, whether on two legs or four or none at all.

“Please, gods, let this be the right thing,” she whispered to the invisible moon.

Deirdre hadn’t gone into her evening intending to release hundreds of convicts into society.

Just like she had never planned to become Everton Stark’s Beta.

She was strangely good at being an accidental villain.

Her calf cramped again, harder this time. She sat down with a grimace to inspect the damage.

Silver-sucker
.

After her confrontation with Reuben, she hadn’t thought twice about shooting the other guards. They certainly hadn’t hesitated to shoot her back. They probably thought of her as poorly as Reuben had. They probably deserved it.

Then why did she feel a hard knot of regret lodged behind her breastbone?

Stark kneeled beside Deirdre as the convicts continued flooding into the cornfield. “They’ll be back,” he said, as though she’d asked him a question. “They’ll all come to me when this night is over. We’ll have a full house at the asylum.”

“They’re all coming back with us? Do we have the room?”

“We’ll make the room.” The starlight reflected in his eyes, making them look almost more silver than gold. “Nobody gets left behind in my pack.”

That was a key point of Stark’s platform in opposition to the standing Alpha, Rylie Gresham. She had organized shifters into groups: those who were safe to join her in the sanctuary or one of its satellite ranches, and those who weren’t. Deirdre had been among those outside the fold.

On the other hand, Stark insisted that he would have no fold at all. He planned on all shifters being equal, beyond societal structure, governed by individual pack rather than by a larger system.

It was a nice idea. Deirdre had always thought that was how it should be, long before she ever met Stark.

She’d never realized that affecting that kind of change would involve such violence.

Deirdre studied Stark out the corner of her eye. He was a broad-shouldered man, like a mountain that had grown legs and gone for a walk. His beard, hooked nose, and craggy face were striking. The kind of features that people would want to put on dollar bills.

He was also incredibly cruel.

It was hard to remember that when they were surrounded by joyful shifters freed by his actions, but it was true.

“Aren’t you going to shift and join them?” Deirdre asked.

Stark glared at the dark moon. The bolts of red in his beard looked almost blond in the depths of night. “I’m stronger than the fall and rise of lunar energy. I’ll stay human tonight.”

“All of this was to get Vidya, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Who is Vidya?”

“A weapon,” Stark said.

He drew a knife from his boot. She tensed, but didn’t draw away, even when he approached her with it. Stark sliced her pant leg open around the bullet wound. Deirdre hissed as fresh air rushed over her stinging skin.

“Open your mouth,” he said, and she obeyed. He put the hilt of his knife between her teeth. “Bite down.” And she did.

He didn’t give her any other warning before plunging his fingers into the wound, searching for remnants of the bullet. Deirdre groaned around the knife, screwing her eyes shut.

It only took a few moments. Stark swept the wound clean and then flicked her blood to the soil.

“The bullet passed through,” he said, pulling bandages from a pocket of his vest. “You’ll heal.” He wrapped her leg tightly, with expert motions. This was a man who had bound a lot of injuries before.

He rested a hand on her shoulder. She tensed at the contact, prepared for the bone-crushing pain of having his hand snap her clavicle.

That pain never came.

“I’ll have to thank Niamh for introducing us.” His voice was emotionless when he said it, but warmth suffused Deirdre anyway.

That was the closest thing to praise she’d ever heard from him.

And she hated herself for loving it.

The breakout wasn’t on the news the next day, or the day after.

Deirdre was waiting by the TV in her bedroom at seven o’clock, ready to see the chaos they’d inflicted aired on every channel. But nothing about the breakout aired at seven o’clock, or at nine o’clock.

When the eleven o’clock news came around, the report was just as boring and ordinary as it had been in the earlier hours.

“What’s going on here?” Andrew asked, standing in front of the TV with a plate of ribs. He always ate standing up. He joked that calories didn’t count if he wasn’t sitting. “Where’s the report on all the nasty evil people we’ve set loose on the poor widdle mundanes?”

Deirdre steepled her hands in front of her face, watching the newscasters talk about the weather. Apparently there was an unusual weather pattern that would bring more rain into New York City soon.

Just her luck.

But even the annoyance of incoming rain wasn’t enough to distract from the fact that she wasn’t on the news.

She was grateful for it on some level. It meant that her former roommate, Jolene, wouldn’t see Deirdre’s face beside Stark’s again. Her old friends wouldn’t be reminded of the fact that Deirdre was working for a known terrorist.

Unfortunately, it also meant that someone was controlling the news.

“It’s the OPA,” Deirdre said.

Andrew ripped a piece of rib off the bone with his teeth and swallowed without chewing. “Come again?”

“They’re controlling the media. It’s the only explanation.” She stood and began pacing. Deirdre had to do something with all her pent-up energy. “They’ve caught on to the fact that Stark’s most powerful weapon is public relations, and they’re trying to choke it back by putting an embargo on news surrounding what he does.”

“Can they do that?” Andrew asked. “Isn’t the media free?”

“It’s supposed to be,” Deirdre said grimly.

“And it will be once I’m in charge.” Stark stood in the doorway. He’d replaced the flannel he usually wore around the asylum with a tactical vest and black shirt. Normally, that would have meant that they were about to go on another mission, but he also held a video camera in one hand.

He was getting ready to produce another video. A different kind of assault.

“You ever think about the things you say?” Deirdre asked, planting her hands on her hips. “You talk about what’ll happen when you’re in charge in the same breath that you talk about anarchy. Doesn’t really fit.”

Stark held the camera out to Andrew, who slurped the rib juice off of his fingers before taking it. “My vision for the future involves the skeleton of a representative democracy and independence for each self-governed pack. I’ll be the one enforcing equitable law.”

“More like judge and executioner than a dictator.”

“Whatever shifters need me to be. My life belongs to the people.” Stark turned off her television. “Niamh is setting up lights and sound downstairs. Both of you are coming with me.”

Deirdre wasn’t feeling social, especially not since their asylum had been filled with convicted criminals they’d freed from the detention center, but she knew better than to argue.

He’d broken her face too many times for her to talk back.

Stark had set up an amateur television studio in their foyer, green screen and all. The lights standing in a crescent around the chair were so bright that they heated the entire room. It was actually pretty nice, considering how drafty the asylum was.

Niamh was in her nerdy element, fluttering around the cables, making sure that everything fit, and getting the teleprompter set up for his shoot.

“Hey, Dee!” she called, wiggling her fingers in greeting.

Deirdre half-heartedly returned the gesture. She hadn’t been spending much time with Niamh in recent weeks. She hadn’t been spending time with anyone other than Stark, really. It was a kind of self-flagellation, an ongoing vigil for lost friends, a punishment for her failures.

There was a television-quality camera set up among the crescent of those lights. “What’s Andrew’s camcorder for?” Deirdre asked.

“He’ll be shooting behind-the-scenes footage for the documentary Niamh is putting together,” Stark said.

She stared at him. “A documentary.”

“As time goes on, I realize that assassinating Rylie Gresham at her town hall wouldn’t have helped us, no matter how satisfying it might have been,” Stark said. “She’s long since won the war of public opinion. Martyring her would only solidify her laws after death. Before I can kill her body, I must kill her spirit. We must curry favor among the masses.”

“I had no idea war was such a popularity contest,” Deirdre said.

“The media has always controlled wars.”

“So do you hate that the Office of Preternatural Affairs has the ability to control the media right now, or do you hate that it isn’t you who’s got the control?”

She knew she had finally pushed his buttons a little too hard when he gave her that look—that dead-eyed expression that said he was about to punch her, put her in her place, show her who was in charge.

Reflexively, Deirdre curled in on herself, hunching her shoulders and lowering her eyes.

It was how werewolves showed that they acknowledged an Alpha wolf’s dominance. Deirdre wasn’t a werewolf. She’d never used the posture in any of the group homes she’d lived in before, nor had she used it as an adult. Not until she lived in Everton Stark’s asylum.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

She wasn’t meeting his gaze, so she didn’t know if she’d satisfied him with the show of submission. But he didn’t strike her.

Andrew stood nearby with that camcorder. He was filming Stark and Deirdre’s exchange, immortalizing the fact that she had lost her spirit and no longer stood up to a man who deserved to hear the criticism.