Hey everyone! Sorry this took so long! I'm expecting a steady stream of posts this week though.
*****
Rhys lost track of how long he had been sitting by her bed. It was long enough for guilt to wash over him and plenty of time for him to feel completely sorry for himself that he wouldn't be able to court her. He wasn't even sure why it bothered him so much. She probably wouldn't have been receptive to begin with and if courting her meant exposing his pack to open war with the Council? How could he be so selfish? Really, it was more the fact that it was no longer possible that bothered him so much. Like a child being told no, now all he could think about was precisely what he couldn't have.
Fortunately, every time he looked at her, guilt completely overwhelmed his senses. She was covered in bruises and deep cuts. The bite on her shoulder looked incredibly painful. Rhys had never bitten a mate, but he knew that he wouldn't have bitten her as hard as that bastard Marek had. It gave him a great sense of pride to know he was the one who ripped out Marek's throat. Even with his shredded arm, it had been Rhys who ran Analise out of the woods, carrying her in his arms. The woman was arrogant, there was no doubt about it, but for whatever reason he had connected with her and felt responsible for her.
She stirred slightly, quietly battling her unseen foe in her nightmares. He thought about waking her up, saving her from the bad dream, but then decided that she needed the rest more than she needed a savior. Eventually, some long while later, her green eyes weakly opened. She had broken out in a sweat as the virus took hold. In a day or so the transformation would be over. The worst of it was still to come.
"... Rhys?" She let out in weak surprise. It caught his attention.
"Analise... you're awake..." he turned to give her his full attention, eyes wide and attentive. "Are you ok? How do you feel?"
She smiled slightly. "You didn't happen to catch the license plate of that monster truck did you?"
Rhys pursed his lips in humor.
"What happened?" She asked. "No one has told me anything and they won't let me use a phone... And where the hell are we?" Analise had decided this whole "healing center" business was a load of bull.
Rhys swallowed slightly and looked away. "I'd tell you, Shepherd, but you aren't going to like it."
Analise's face wrinkled with concern, followed by the flash of understanding. "... I'm infected..." she didn't want to believe it was true, but of course it was. All of her research indicated that the cult members would bite their victims to transmit their virus. So little was known about it, aside from the fact Analise was about to start hallucinating that she could turn into an animal.
Rhys nodded. "Yep. You sure are," he said in a dark sort of dryness.
Analise let out a long and patient sigh. "God damn it." She stared at the ceiling for a moment hoping that this was just some sort of bad dream and she was about to wake up. That didn't happen. "Where am I," she asked again, though more flatly.
"Some place that knows how to handle the sort of disease you just picked up," he answered cryptically.
Analise flashed a disapproving frown. "No offense, Rhys," she told him in standard Agent-Shepherd-is-in-charge tone, "but I think I'd know if such a place actually existed."
"No offense, Analise," he replied sharply, "but I don't think you know what the hell you're talking about." So it was back to beating each other into submission. Great. Just great.
Rhys was deathly silent and kept his eyes locked firmly on hers. Her face hardened as she figured it out. Rhys was infected too. Had it been a set up? It didn't feel that way but... "I'm such a moron..." She whispered to herself, bringing a hand up to massage the bridge of her nose. "... I don't suppose me demanding to be let go is going to do any good, is it?"
"I'm not holding you here against your will," He answered confidently. "Though," he added with a shrug of consideration, "I wouldn't turn down the chance to hear you beg and plead anyway." That didn't elicit the chuckle he had been hoping for. This was going to be harder than he thought. "Sorry," he let out slightly.
He kept his eyes locked firmly on hers as he shifted approaches. "Let me tell you a story, Analise," he said finally. "You can choose whether or not you want to believe me, but I think you're smart enough to tell when you're being lied to or not. You think you know so much about this cult of yours, and frankly for an outsider your knowledge is frighteningly impressive, but... well, you've got a lot of it wrong. If you're willing... well, I am in a unique position to correct some of that for you." Rhys paused to look at her.
"Unique position." She stated as firmly as she could. Her voice was so weak it was hard to hear any bite in it, forced or otherwise. She paused for a while. "You know me, Rhys. At least, well enough to know what I'm going to do the second I get out. You're willing to risk this?"
Rhys gave her a firm sort of look someone offered an adversary. "I think if you hear the truth of it... well there's no doubt about what you'd do if me or mine were anything like those men that attacked you," he said finally. "But we aren't like that. And I don't think you're so heartless that you'd knowingly destroy the lives of so many innocent people."
"See, this cult of yours didn't start thirty years ago. It's a lot older than that. Isa could probably give you the exact date; frankly I don't give a damn. Sometime in the early middle ages, people like me started banding together for protection."
Analise cocked an eyebrow. "From what?"
"From people like you," he answered surely. "For right or for wrong, we were being hunted for something we had absolutely no control over. To this day, a lot of us still see it as a curse. Only with modern medicine were they able to determine that it's a virus or parasitic hormone or something. I didn't do too well in biology; someone else could probably explain it better. The point is, we were scared. A bunch of real smart and real deadly people were trying to kill us. If that were you, what would you do?"
"I wouldn't play the empathy card right now if I were you," Analise warned. She already saw where this was going and if she had more energy, she'd have been out of the bed in a heart beat.
"Fair enough," He said, holding up his good hand in retreat. "But I think you and I have a lot more in common than you realize. I just ask you to keep an open mind is all."
"I'm listening," she replied through a tensed jaw. She wasn't happy, but she was trying to hear him out. It was a start.
"Good. Well... these people like me formed groups. We were safer in numbers and we mostly kept to ourselves, living out in the woods where the particulars of our condition wouldn't be so obvious. Advances in the rest of society made it easier in some ways and harder in others. It's pretty hard to explain not having a social security number when you were born long before that even became an idea." Rhys licked his lips nervously, trying to keep himself steady. Analise was beyond pissed and he knew he was testing her patience.
"I'm a hundred and six years old, Shepherd," he told her in complete honesty. "I know you probably don't believe that, but its true none-the-less. About a hundred years ago, this special disease of ours caught a disease of its own. The women started dying. The first to go were the strong ones like you. Left us without female leaders and folks sort of forgot what that meant. They were all dead by the time I came of age and the problem didn't get much better with time. The women who were left stopped having female pups-er, babies. By about thirty years ago, almost ninety percent of our... sub race, for a lack of a better word for it, was male. That's when the Council made their decision."
Analise nodded to indicate that she followed, but her tight jaw told Rhys that her anger had not subsided. "The decision that you assholes were going to kidnap helpless girls and rape their fucking brains out until they gave you cute little babies girls for you to raise up and do the same? You make me sick, trying to justify this shit to me..."
Rhys gave her a sour look. "You know, I feel the same way about it as you do," he told her seriously, which came as a slight surprise to her. "I'm a bit surprised you'd have thought I would have been onboard with to, Shepherd," he added with a bit of hurt in his voice. "But it is sick; no argument there. That's why me and mine didn't comply with the decree. Came at a high risk too, not following the rules. Following the rules is sort of something our kind does." Rhys shifted slightly in his chair.
"My pack is a family. I know you just see it as some cult that brainwashes people, and maybe some packs are, but we're far from it. Prior to the decree, we would never bring a human in unless there was a good reason and a consensus for it. Even after the decree, nobody is here by force. Nobody was kidnapped or coerced. If I even caught wind of something like that, I'd have slit the offender's throat personally. Now, you can choose not to believe me all you want but that's the god's honest truth. This is a family and family isn't built on lies and abuse."
"What happened to your sister was horrible," he told her finally, meeting her squarely in the eyes. "I've done everything in my power to prevent that from happening here." He paused, looking as deeply into her eyes as he could. "We aren't all like that, Analise. Some of us, like my pack, well... well we aren't that different from you, far as our principles go. I know if anyone even touched one of my kin like what happened to your sister, I'd stop at nothing until that bastard was dead."
Analise turned and looked up at the ceiling, her fists white as she clenched onto the sheets of the bed. "You going to let me go now?" She asked forcefully.
Rhys frowned slightly. He had been hoping for more of a dialogue than this, though in reality he wasn't fully sure what to expect. "Your body is accepting and integrating the virus. You're going to be one of us by the end of the week. 'At's why you've got a fever and feel like shit, I figure."
Analise flinched slightly at hearing the news. It was probably akin to a death knell to her, given her life's work. "And then what?" She asked, the fierceness and harshness of her tone back in full force.
Rhys let out a sigh. "That's up to you," he told her honestly. "You're welcome to stay here, and frankly I think you should for a little while, until after you get a hold of what's happening to you, but like I said, I won't keep you here against your will." He studied her for a moment before continuing. She wasn't carrying on like some child. No, her reaction was far more dangerous. She absorbed all of the information and seemed to be plotting Rhys's death.
Against his better judgment, he decided to show her one of his cards. "Isa thinks I should kill you. She says you won't show us any mercy and that you won't see the difference between my pack and the others that treated you so badly; you're a threat to us, she thinks."
