Saving Autumn Read online

  If only Blake hadn’t left her behind while he went to find Chogan. If he’d taken her along, she’d have been more than occupied. She hugged herself at the memory of being encased in his big strong arms, pressing her thighs together in pleasure at the recollection. He made her feel tiny and delicate and taken care of, a sensation she hadn’t experienced in a long time.

  You didn’t feel so taken care of when he abandoned you in the middle of that riot to save the other shifter, a little voice chirped inside her head. And now he’s gone off and left you again.

  The sensation in her stomach shifted from pleasure to unease. She tried to dismiss it, telling herself she was reading too much into things. She didn’t think she had misread how he acted around her, how she felt when he held her in his arms, what she read when he looked deep into her eyes.

  But he still left you …

  Yeah, maybe Blake did have some commitment issues after being hurt so badly in the past by his girlfriend and cousin, but his recent actions didn’t mean anything. Did they?

  To distract her thoughts from their destructive line, she turned her concerns toward Chogan. She hoped the other shifter hadn’t gotten himself in trouble. Despite what he’d done—exposing shifters—Autumn didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. He’d shown her some moments of kindness, tenderness even, and she’d spent a night clinging to his neck while he, in wolf form, ran her through the forest and away from danger. She might have only known him a few of days, but since he’d vanished, he’d left a wolf-shaped hole in her life.

  And now with Blake gone, that made two such holes.

  The burning desire to work struck her again, leaving her edgy and frustrated. One particular project burned at her, nagged her, refused to leave her alone until she knew the answers, and that was the very same one she’d been employed by Dumas to figure out. She glanced down at the inside of her wrist, at where the green-blue veins tracked a pathway beneath her pale skin. She wanted to find answers, discover if the story she’d been told by Blake’s father about her coming from the original line of people who’d changed shifters was true. Did her blood contain properties that could turn ordinary men into shifters? It still seemed so far-fetched, despite everything that had happened. Part of her didn’t want to believe it, while the other part of her needed to know. She only knew of one place where she’d be able to go and continue her work.

  Her father’s house.

  Internally, she wrestled with herself. How much did she want to continue with the project versus having to spend time with her father? He’d barely made contact with her, despite knowing the bare bones of what she’d been through. Government officials had gone to his home when Dumas had still been spouting the cover story of Blake having kidnapped her. The men had gotten no answer when they’d pounded on his front door, and so broke it down. They’d found Professor Anderson hard at work in his basement, so absorbed in his latest project he’d not even heard his door being smashed in. Her father didn’t watch television and rarely picked up a newspaper, so he hadn’t even heard about the apparent kidnapping. He’d been unable to help them locate her whereabouts.

  When Autumn had returned home, he’d called to ask after her, briefly muttered something about her being more careful about the company she kept, and then quickly hung up. The call had taken all of about two minutes.

  Not exactly the concerned parent figure she’d always longed for.

  Despite her reservations, her need to work won over. Autumn got to her feet. She needed to get hold of a couple of things before she went to her father’s house. Though she felt bad, she reasoned with herself that she was only doing what was necessary to get answers.

  AUTUMN GRABBED A cab across town. She found herself gripping the inside of the door, her neck craning, mouth open as she witnessed the results of Chogan’s actions. The protest she’d gotten involved in that morning seemed to have grown legs. Normally rational people had caught the fever.

  Sheets hung from the windows of apartments, trailing down the red brick of the multi-story buildings declaring ‘Were-freaks Go Home!’ As they slowed in traffic, she caught sight of a man with a bearded face and clothing that hung from his skinny frame, standing on a box on the street corner. The man lifted both hands to gesticulate into the air as he shouted. Something about the small group of people gathered around him made her hit the button to lower her window and his voice filtered through the noise of traffic to reach her ears. “The end of the world is upon us. God has forsaken us to leave us in the hands of these monsters. I’ve seen them for myself—hideous beasts bigger than you’ve ever seen before, with glowing yellow eyes and a taste for blood. Hear me now! The devil will take over the earth …”

  The man’s voice faded as the traffic crawled forward and they moved out of ear’s reach.

  The wail of a police siren overtook it. Autumn didn’t think she was imagining the increased presence of the Chicago Police Department. Was this all in reaction to what Chogan started? She thought she preferred when everyone believed the whole thing to be a joke. She sensed a seismic shift in the beliefs humanity had held true for as long as civilized society had existed. How would people react if the existence of shifters became a widespread fact rather than fiction? Would they see more of what she’d already experienced and what the city had already seen—more protests, riots even, building to panic and warfare?

  She realized the driver had said something, and she pulled away from the window and the scenes beyond. “Sorry?”

  He made eye contact with her in the rear view mirror. He winked at her and grinned salaciously, his gaze traveling as far down her body as the limitations of the mirror would allow. “I asked what you made of all this nonsense about people turning into animals.” He snorted at the end of the sentence to make sure she’d not missed his derision. Clearly, this guy was still one of those who thought the whole thing to be a fraud. She wondered how much longer his attitude would last.

  “I’m a scientist,” she said without looking at him and without answering his question. “I believe in facts, not speculation.”

  He arched an eyebrow, still looking in the rearview mirror at her, and a flash of irritation swept through her. “A scientist, huh? I’d never have guessed.”

  “No? Well from the way you’re checking me out rather than watching the road, I wouldn’t have guessed you to be a qualified driver.”

  His cheeks flushed and he at least had the grace to look away, focusing back on the road.

  What the hell is the matter with people?

  Perhaps she’d snapped because Blake had left her angst-ridden, and the troubles in the city made her jittery. But she knew her sharpness was also due to her anxiety about spending time back in her father’s presence again. She didn’t think he did it deliberately, but whenever she spent time with him, she ended up getting hurt.

  The cab pulled up alongside the curb outside of her father’s house. Without exchanging another word, she paid the driver and climbed from the vehicle. She trotted the couple of steps up to the front door, gave the wood a couple of perfunctory raps with her knuckles, and then, without waiting for an answer—she’d be waiting for something which would never come—she used her key to open the door.

  The house contained the same musty, unaired scent as always, a faint hint of chemicals residing beneath. She could barely think of this place as the warm, welcoming home she’d lived in before her mother died, though those memories were faint now, mere snatches of time that could just as easily have been a dream.

  Autumn walked down the hallway and stopped at the door beneath the stairs which led to the cellar. She opened the door and shouted down, “Dad?”

  As she expected, no answer came, though she didn’t doubt she’d find him in situ. Where else would he be? Her father got so involved in his work, he quite literally shut out the world around him, not noticing anything, even his own daughter. She sighed and got her feet moving down the stairs. Has he always been like this? Her mom had been pretty
and outgoing. Why would she be interested in a man who would barely have noticed her? Perhaps she’d been attracted to his fiercely intelligent mind, but Autumn suspected her father simply hadn’t been like this before her death. She was sure she had memories of him playing with her when she’d been small, carrying her upside down, teaching her how to catch a ball, reading to her at night.

  The laboratory her father had built was as well-equipped as anything she would find in a research facility. A fume cupboard was fitted into the far corner. High tech microscopes and computers sat on the wall-to-wall workbenches. Bottles and jars filled with numerous different colored liquids lined the shelves. Other, more toxic chemicals were kept behind cabinets with glass doors. An island stood in the middle of the room with another microscope which her father was bent over.

  “Dad?” Autumn said again.

  Professor Anderson lifted his head from his work and turned to her, blinking behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Autumn? What are you doing here? Is everything all right?”

  She stepped down the final stairs to bring herself level with her father. “Yes, everything is fine. I wondered if I’d be able to work alongside you for a few days.”

  He frowned, deepening the lines along his forehead and between his pale blue eyes. “Work here? Why?”

  “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “It's the last thing I was working on in my old contract, something I didn't get to finish.”

  “Yes,” he said, a hint of irritation in his tone. “But what exactly are you working on?”

  Autumn hesitated, unsure of how much she wanted to share with him. The problem was he would only need to peer over her shoulder a couple of times to figure out the basis of what she was trying to achieve.

  She chewed her lower lip for a moment and then relented. “I'm trying to learn if blood can act as a catalyst to cause a gene mutation to ... spread.”

  “What kind of mutation?”

  “An amino acid base pair substitution at position five of the polypeptide chain. The adenine-thymine pair for guanine-cytosine.”

  He frowned. “How would that kind of mutation spread to other cells?”

  She glanced away, feeling uncomfortable. “It produces a recombinant protein which causes the chromosomes to divide and replicate.”

  “During sexual reproduction?”

  “No. In every cell.”

  “Impossible. Such a thing would create a completely different organism.” He stopped and stared at her. “Whose blood are we talking about here?”

  She didn't want to lie to him, but she also couldn't stand the idea of telling him the truth. He hadn’t been present enough in her life for her to trust him with such knowledge. He hadn't been a good enough parent to deserve to know the truth.

  Her gaze shifted down, and she scuffed her foot against the floor. “I don’t know who the samples came from.”

  To her surprise, he took several steps toward her, his protective white lab coat flapping around his legs as he moved, and grabbed her upper arm. His wrinkled hand was surprisingly strong, his fingers digging through the material of her jacket, bruising the skin below. For the first time in years, she felt like he was truly seeing her. “What are you getting into, Autumn?”

  His voice was sharp and she recognized anger and … what else? Did she see fear in his pale eyes? Why did she suddenly feel like he knew more than should be possible? He might have seen some of the footage of Chogan shifting and put two and two together, but she was sure he had bought the story of Blake being responsible for her kidnapping. He hadn’t even asked any more questions of her when she came home, despite her telling him that she’d left with Blake willingly. He certainly wasn’t someone who followed local news channels or hung out on the web.

  She realized she hadn’t answered him and tugged her arm away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  The mild-mannered, distracted man she had struggled to connect with most of her adult life vanished. In his place stood an individual of almost frightening focus, and his focus was on her.

  “Don't give me that, Autumn. How did you find out? Did they find you or did you go looking for them? And tell me the truth, mind. You always were a terrible liar ...”

  “Unlike you, apparently,” she said, blinking in surprise.

  “I need to know what you know.”

  “Why am I thinking the exact same thing?”

  His eyes narrowed behind his glasses, and he spoke from between gritted teeth. “I’m not playing games here, Autumn. This is a matter of life or death.”

  His words shocked her, aftershocks of alarm jarring through her. “What are you talking about?”

  He held out his hand. “Give me the samples.”

  She didn’t feel she could argue. She reached into her purse and brought out a Styrofoam box which contained several vials. A couple held samples of her own blood and the others contained something she still felt guilty about—a few strands of short, dark hair she’d lifted from her pillow. Blake’s hair. Using a centrifuge and chemicals she knew her father would have in his lab, she’d be able to remove Blake’s shifter DNA and isolate the gene that caused the mutation. Then she’d be able to figure out if her blood proved Lakota Wolfcollar’s story to be true and the results she’d witnessed in Dumas’ laboratory to be real.

  Professor Anderson took the samples from her and carried the small box over to the counter with great care, as though they contained something explosive. He set the box down, removed the lid, and carefully withdrew one of the vials. Inside the glass, her blood appeared to be almost black. Only at the very edges, where the fluid had sloshed up the sides, did it appear red.

  He turned to her and lifted the vial as if about to do a toast. “Yours, I assume?”

  Autumn forced herself to stand up to him. She didn’t know why he had such a hold over her. It wasn’t as though he intimidated her; more that she always seemed to revert to a child in his presence, a child who was never quite good enough to capture her father’s attention. But she was good enough. While she’d never quite met her father’s level in his professional field before he’d supposedly retired, she’d far surpassed most other scientists of her age.

  But she needed to find out what her father knew about all of this. She needed him on her side.

  “Yes, that’s my blood.”

  He held up the vial containing the few strands of Blake’s hair. “I’m going to assume this belongs to one of them.” He spat the last word, the vehemence in his tone shocking her.

  “Them?”

  “One of the monsters responsible for your mother’s death?”

  The world suddenly felt as though it had been pulled out from under her, no longer solid. The walls of the underground room closed in, while the mental walls her father had built began to crumble, leaving her feeling both claustrophobic and hideously exposed all at the same time.

  Her voice was barely audible as she asked, for the second time in a matter of minutes, “What are you talking about?”

  Her father focused in on her, and once again, he seemed truly present with her, no longer with his mind occupied with some other project while he was half-heartedly having a conversation with her.

  “I’m talking about how your mother died.”

  “It was an accident. A freak accident.”

  He shook his head. “Your mother’s death was no accident. They just made it look that way.”

  “No, her death was down to a fault in the hot air balloon’s gas.”

  She thought back to the day she’d only ever been told about. Her father bought them the balloon ride as an anniversary present, something her mom had always wanted to experience. But on the ascent, something had gone wrong. Her dad tried to convince her mother to jump, he’d realized they would only go higher before they came down, but she’d refused. He jumped, hoping to be able to get help for the distressed balloon, but he’d broken his leg on the fall and had been lucky
to survive himself. When the gas finally ran out, the balloon had been hundreds of feet higher before plummeting down. Her mom and the man operating the balloon were killed upon hitting the ground. Her father had never forgiven himself, both for buying her the balloon trip and for jumping without her. He’d told Autumn on several occasions that he felt as though he’d simply abandoned her to her death.

  “No, it wasn’t. It was sabotage. A group of those people found out what she could do and they wanted her dead.”

  “Why?” Autumn asked, though she suddenly had a feeling she already knew the answer. “What could she do?”

  “From what I’m holding in my hand, I’m guessing the same thing as you. Her blood held the ability to turn regular people into freaks.”

  “They’re not freaks,” Autumn snapped.

  “Don’t let them fool you. I’d been hoping that by keeping my distance from you—making you grow up with Mia’s family—and keeping myself out of the public eye as much as possible, that they’d never suspect you may have the same ability.”

  The realization of the reason her father had been so distant with her slowly sank in. He never thought she wasn’t good enough, and he hadn’t been traumatized by her mother’s death. No, instead, he’d been trying to protect her. But from what? Not shifters, surely? All the shifters she’d met were good people. Not people capable of cold-blooded murder …

  Not like you haven’t seen both Blake and Chogan kill when they needed to.

  Something cold and oily coiled around in her stomach. A wave of nausea washed over her.