“I think you should go to bed now, Lauren. You’ve done enough.” Beth told Lauren hastily as she and Axel lifted up the bleeding boy and placed him back on the bed.
Lauren, with tears in her eyes, shook her head. “No! I’m not going anywhere!” She protested. She hovered around the door way till Aidan reached out and grabbed her shoulders, drawing her back.
“Let’s go to your room, Lauren.” Aidan whispered in her ear. “Come on now. Beth and Axel will fix him up, I promise.”
“No!” Lauren screamed and freed herself from Aidan’s grip. She ran forward and collapsed on the bed beside an unconscious Eric.
“Lauren!” Beth yelled at her, her eyes full of alarm. “Go to your room, now!”
Aidan dragged her out of the room as she sobbed in despair. He led her to her room, opened the door and took her inside.
Immediately they got there she collapsed on her bed and sobbed, her tears wetting the bed sheets.
“I know you feel like you’re a terrible person but you’re not. All of this isn’t your fault, Lauren. It isn’t.”
Lauren looked up. “How can you say that? All I have caused Eric is pain! I am a bad person even if you don’t want to believe me.”
Aidan walked over to her bed and sat beside her. He grabbed her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “Trust me, Lauren, you’re not a bad person. All you’ve ever done is protect him. From the truth of what you are, the real truth. If that isn’t good enough, I don’t know what is.”
“You… don’t know.” Lauren growled.
“Know what?” Aidan asked, frowning. He grabbed Lauren’s hand and turned her to face him, then his eyes widened at what he saw.
The colour of her eyes had changed from its usual brown to a blinding red. Before Aidan could do anything, she grabbed his hand and flung him across the room, all the while yelling at the top of her voice.
“You don’t know!” She screamed, then came for him again. But this time he was ready. He landed on his feet and faced her with his fangs and claws extended. When she came he hit her with his body with so much force that she flew back and hit the frame of her bed, landing with a hard thud on the bed. He flew at her and landed on top of her, pinning her arms and legs down with his. She snarled at him with all the venom in her body, her eyes unfocused like that of a mad woman.
“Lauren, what’s wrong with you?!” Aidan yelled. “Snap out of it!”
“You don’t know!” She screamed like a banshee “You–don’t–know!”
Her eyes began to glow reddish with a manic light. She screamed with agony and threw Aidan off her. He landed on her vanity mirror and hit his head hard on the frame, almost passing out. Her screams were so loud that it sent Beth, Axel and Katherine running into the room.
Axel immediately jumped on the bed and held her hands while Katherine held her legs. They continued to hold on to her till her trashing reduced to a shudder and then stopped totally. They let go of her limbs and she curled up on the bed, sobbing.
“Make it stop.” She sobbed. “Please, make it stop.”
Katherine climbed the bed and took her in her arms, rocking her gently and murmuring words of comfort. Axel and Beth went to a still dazed Aidan and helped him up.
He grabbed his head and groaned. “Ow! Where’s Lauren?”
“She’s…” Beth looked back at the whimpering girl on the bed. “She’s fine. How are you? What happened?”
“Lauren and I were talking after you sent us out of the guest bedroom.” He said. “Then she began crying, and when I tried to console her, she threw me off and tried to tackle me.”
Lauren was still whimpering and whispering “Make it stop.” Katherine noticed the bracelet around her wrists and said “Hey, come look at this.”
They all gathered around Lauren and stared at the bracelet. It was glowing blue and pulsing like a heart. A dull boom boom sound was coming from it and it seemed to be choking Lauren’s hand. Her fingers and wrists were already white from lack of blood.
“Wait.” Aidan said and climbed the bed, taking the braceleted wrist in his two hands. He turned her hand this way and that, staring at it. Then a blue light similar to that of the bracelet pulsed in his neck for a few seconds, then died down. Beth, Katherine and Axel watched with bated breaths as they were not sure what was going on.
Aidan turned his neck and twitched as though he was in pain. Then just as suddenly as it had started, the blue light in the bracelet started to fade until it was gone completely. Lauren’s fingers began to regain colour and her whimpering turned to soft snores as she drifted into sleep.
“What was that all about?” Axel asked.
Aidan looked at the adults around him. “I think we should discuss this in the kitchen. Let’s leave Lauren to sleep.”
☆
They all filed into the kitchen and sat around the table the way they had with Lauren just a few hours ago. By now, the faint light of sunrise was filtering through the kitchen windows. They had spent a whole night awake.
“That bracelet around Lauren’s wrist was placed there by her father when I… when he took her as prisoner.” Aidan began. “He told me he put it there so she wouldn’t escape from him. I thought he meant escape from the laboratory, but obviously it meant something entirely different. He meant that she shouldn’t be able to escape from him.” He paused and stared at their rapt faces.
“As long as that bracelet is around her wrist, she wouldn’t be fully her, the Lauren we know. The alchemical substance that is in his very infamous werewolf serum was placed inside that bracelet, but because she wasn’t injected by it directly, she wouldn’t exhibit total animalistic behaviours like Dr Makovsky’s mutated wolves.”
Katherine stood up “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” She asked. “You betrayed Lauren to that man, the least you could do is tell us about this!”
“I didn’t know too!” Aidan said and ran his hands through his long black hair in frustration. “I didn’t even know she still had the bracelet on. I thought she would have taken it off by now. I only took a guess, because I saw Dr Makovsky turn a few people into wolves. I saw him inject them with the same blue stuff that flowed from that bracelet.”
“She has been trying to take off that bracelet for weeks now.” Katherine whispered. “There’s nothing she didn’t do to it, but it didn’t come off.”
“I’ve been having the same problem.” Aidan said. They all looked at him in surprise.
“What problem?” Axel asked.
“He… he put a chip in my neck when I agreed to be a spy for him.” Aidan confessed. “It’s made of the same stuff that’s in Lauren’s bracelet. I can’t take it out myself too, and he didn’t take it out for me, despite the fact that he promised he would. He said he still needed me.”
Beth stood up and came closer to Aidan. She turned his neck and examined the ring of reddened flesh there. There was a lump on his neck too, where the chip was lodged. When she touched it, it pulsed faintly with a blue light.
Axel joined her and they kept examining it. “Do you know what I think?” Axel said to the whole room.
“What?” Beth asked.
“Think it’s a sort of tracking device.” He replied. “Dr Makovsky put it in you to monitor you. That’s the same thing he did with Lauren and probably all his mutant wolves. He knows where we are right now. He could attack anytime.”
“Oh, Lord.” Katherine said and collapsed to the chair with her head in her hands as Beth patted her shoulders in consolation.
Beth could imagine how the woman was feeling now. To be kept hostage by her ex-husband for almost twenty years, only to be freed and then faced with the possibility that he could come for her again was something not everyone could handle.
“So we need to get this out, somehow.” Axel continued, tapping Aidan’s neck. “We can perform a minor surgery on you, but I don’t know about Lauren. The only two ways she could be free from the bracelet is if the Doctor suddenly decides to tell us how from the good of his heart, or if we cut off her wrist. Neither are very palatable options, but there’s really no other.”
As he finished talking, footsteps came from the kitchen door. Beth released Katherine and walked to the door, throwing it open. Mike and Lia walked in, looking dirty and exhausted.
“Hey, guys.” Mike said. “We have news.”