Reese’s exhale stuttered.
“It has to be done immediately. Within hours or days.”
“Paul bit me a month ago.” Yet, for some reason, Reese’s fear swelled.
“Identical twins are rare. There are some bizarre stories about identical twins and the Fenrir. The only ones I can tell you are true are those about them sharing a wolf or when one twin dies, and their wolf moves to the other. It sees them as the same person. I don’t think the tie has been left unfinished. Rather it’s waiting for Johnathan to finish it.”
Reese balled up his fists in his lap to keep them from shaking. “But the Fenrir and the Sarvari aren’t the same. It’s not an independent. You said that. I heard you say it.”
“These Sarvari aren’t like the ones before them. If anything, they’re closer to the black Fenrir as they could get without one coming across the Varana. And that’s if the black wolf ever came across. We don’t know how it truly manifested. We have stories. That’s all.”
“And all you have about ties are stories. Not evidence. Hand-me-down old-wives-tales, not facts. Do you know how many cultural beliefs have a flawed perception of cause and effect? How many times anecdotal evidence is waved around like a peer-reviewed article?” Reese sucked in a watery breath. “All you’re doing is speculating about something you know nothing about.”
Seung took a breath deep enough to lift her narrow shoulders.
He prepared himself for an argument.
“You’re right. I'm speculating,” Seung said.
“Yes, yes, you are.”
“So you tell me what you think happened out there?”
“I don’t know. I panicked?” Reese tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“What made you panic?”
“I was worried about Luca. He took off and—”
“You wanted to run.”
“Yes, to catch up to him.”
“But why did you want to be chased?”
“Who says I—” Reese stopped because denying it made him a liar.
Seung pressed her lips together. “What about the Utah Facility?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You responded to those betas. Not in exactly the same way, but you were drawn to them.”
“The vibrations emitted from the ichor warped space-time—at least that’s the hypothesis. It was impossible to measure given the nature of the substance and the fact we lacked the proper equipment. But we’d recorded the change in magnetic fields and—”
Seung stared.
“The event was nothing abnormal. And I wasn’t the only person in the lab who felt the particle shifts. They were strong when they Phased but stronger when—” Koda drowned under the betas, his cries an anthem to pleasure. “Other people watched.”
It was impossible not to. Those men might have been using Koda’s body, but what they did wasn’t sex.
Reese had no name for it then and still didn’t.
“But they didn’t crave it.”
“Who said I craved it?”
“You did. Although the word you used was desiderate. I had to look it up.”