As Hope and Promise Fade

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Ariana became aware she was somewhere cold and dangerous. She could hear what sounded like an engine humming softly somewhere low beneath her. There were voices in the mix but she couldn’t make out what exactly was being said. Marc….she remembered him being there. Something went wrong, very wrong. She was terrified something happened to him. She struggled to open her eyes and when they finally pried open it was in time to see a steel door open and her father step inside. “Dad.” She cried as she laid eyes on the man putting her through all this hell. She came to realize she was strapped down to a hard surface, a table, with sliver chains holding her down. She knew it was silver by the way it was biting into her skin. “Dad, why?” there were so many questions and emotions but only one she needed to know first.

“I never wanted any of this for you.” Hal paced across the empty space in front of the table. “I tried so hard to give you a normal life and yet here you are still mixed up with this. Maybe it’s God’s will that no matter how much I’ve sheltered you, you still found your way into this travesty. Thankfully there’s a way to spin this to the company’s benefit.”

Bone chilling fear brought tears to Ariana’s eyes. She knew she had to keep him talking to make any bit of sense of the whole situation and gain some real answers. “What does that mean?” she hummed with pain still tearing into her body. “What are you doing to me?” her eyes landed on an IV pole, she followed the plastic tubing to her right hand.

“It’s a mixture of fluids and pain medications to help make you comfortable. Do you remember what happened when you arrived here to the facility?” his calm careless tone only added to her fear of the answers.

Ariana closed her eyes and forced herself to fill in those important blanks. She remembered the car crash, Marc’s scream with the silver net encircled his body. There had been someone, a man wearing a uniform she had seen her father wear many times before when he returned from work, that man pulled her from the backseat. After being placed behind the back of a van she was stuck with something that left her drowsy.

When she would open her eyes again she was locked in some room lain across the floor with Marc chained to a wall. The room looked bare and sterile, emotionless with a chill that made them both wary.

Marc’s expression was stark with pain and fear that didn’t look right across his usual in control exterior. She tried to open her mouth and ask what had him scared only to gasp at the stabbing sensation around her bones.

Marc tried to help. “You have to fight it, listen to my voice, fight it Ariana.” He was pleading with her to do something she didn’t understand. She couldn’t think with the bone cracking pain ripping her from the inside. “Ariana, damn it.” he pulled at the heavy chains and tried to get closer to where she was crumbled on the floor.

She lifted her head and saw him through the tears burning her eyes. She wanted him to get closer and whisper how it’d all be ok like he did for Julie. Her heart froze as the dots connected. “How?” her voice cracked trying to say one word.

“I don’t know sweetheart. I don’t know. I need you to stay in control and fight back what your body wants you to do.” He tugged on the chains again with hopeless hope they’d actually give way.

It hurt, it hurt so badly and she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to fight back anymore.

Ariana snapped out of the memory and focused her eyes back on her father. He was watching her closely and knew from the look across her face she remembered the biggest details of what happened. “Please,” she cried an ugly sob. “tell me why this is happening.”

His voice was sickly with its cool emotionless drone. “This is happening because you got mixed up with those people. You were protected against your curse but they unleashed it.”

Ariana knew she had to figure out the answers through his constant riddles. “How can I be able to shift if you and mom are human?” she remembered Charlie’s similar situation and but Marc had taught her of the dos and don’ts, cans and cannots of the shifter world.

“It’s a long story I never wanted to tell you. I hate that you’ve forced my hand into doing this.” he stopped pacing and stood at the foot of the table. “You were five months old when I found you during a raid.” He continued to stay neutral and rely on the facts only to tell the story. “It was a special night because we had never been able to track down any of their kind. Your mother, your real mother, cried and begged that we spare you because the genetic marker inside of you skipped a generation and you were human. I’ve heard of this before and knew to believe her. You were so beautiful in your little crib. Your mother and I had been trying to have kids but nothing worked. I took you home to be raised in a happy normal house and yet here you are mixed in with wolves and even a true mate to one of them.” he shook his head and let his deep disappointment show.

Ariana grew numb and thought it was the drugs he was pumping into her system or maybe it was all too much to swallow. “What did you to do my real parents?” she knew deep down.

“They were disposed of, they were higher on the danger scan and there was no other choice.”

“You wouldn’t have used another choice even if there was.”

“True. You know me; best options always first. I’ve always been so proud with how much you turned out like me. I wish it could’ve been enough, I really hate seeing you here.”

“Your code ranks higher than personal interference.”

“Yes. It has too.”

“What happens now?” Ariana quickly shook her head. “No wait.” her brain was turning into mush but there were still answers she needed. “What were my parents?” she remembered as he described them as something foreign.

“You always knew how to ask the right questions. Your father was a wolf and your mother a panther. You take after her but your father’s genes explain why you’d be mated to a wolf. You were attracted to them without having the answers. A call between animals I guess.” He seemed intrigued but that was quickly put out with his sense of duty. Duty to destroy shifters.

Ariana was sure she knew the answer to her next question; if she was supposed to be all human how was she able to shift? She suspected the answer was the same it had been for Charlie. Her genes were never all human, just dormant, and now they had awoken.

Hal had been foolish to think a child from a wolf and panther would be a hundred percent human.

Her thoughts settled on the subject she was most afraid to face. “My baby?” she was a quick study and knew this team of hunters knew everything about their hostages including the fact she was pregnant.

“The shift triggered a miscarriage. You tried to fight it for as long as possible but the full moon always wins. Something happened in the last thirty days to make you shift during this moon and not during others.” Finally something he didn’t have the answer to.

The problem was Ariana didn’t have the answers either.