Maybe the scary truth about this place wasn’t that they studied monsters. Maybe this was where monsters were truly made.
Chapter Thirty
The Doctor was a consummate gentleman.
He held doors open for me, pulled out my seat at a lavishly set dinner table, and waited until my beverage was poured before helping himself. I stared at the wineglass, wondering if he expected me to drink it, and whether I’d be punished if I didn’t.
The dress he’d made me wear was pretty, and under normal circumstances I’d have been thrilled to receive it. It was knee-length chiffon with a swishy hem and a sweetheart neck. My collarbones stuck out, showing how much weight I’d lost while being here.
The blood-red material made me seem paler than I did normally, but without a mirror I couldn’t tell if it made me look sick. I couldn’t imagine I was very attractive.
Thankfully the dress fit tight in the waist, meaning I didn’t have to worry about it slipping down without straps. He’d even provided me with shoes, a nice pair of flats so I couldn’t contemplate using the heel as a weapon.
I played with the dress’s hem and stared down at the empty plate in front of me, wondering what kind of experiment this might be.
“Can you eat?” he asked.
Ah. So this was going to be the old “see if a rat will eat a cupcake” scenario. He knew I needed blood to live, but now he’d see how I responded to human food, was that it?
“I can. ”
“What can you eat?”
I lifted my gaze from the plate and met his. I hated that he could meet my eyes fearlessly, yet I got squeamish from his attention after mere minutes.
“What can you eat?” I wasn’t necessarily trying to be defiant, but I wanted him to know who I was. I was not a meek and cowering puppy. But I would flinch if he came at me.
“Touché. ” He took a sip of his wine, and I watched his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed with each swallow. I could almost see the quivering pulse in his artery, could practically taste the flavor of his blood laced with the wine.
“What do you prefer to eat?” he asked, maintaining a polite tone.
My stomach growled, a comically timed response that made him chuckle. “Steak,” I admitted. If I was going to pretend to be a willing participant in his fact-finding mission, I might as well play along for a while. “My werewolf half can get sustenance from meat, but the closer to raw it is the better. Wolves don’t eat their kill off a barbeque, and I guess our internal wolves are no different. I can eat anything a normal human can, but I don’t gain anything nutritionally from it. Blood and meat, that’s it. ”
I half-expected him to start taking notes, but he set his wineglass down on the table and regarded me with quiet contemplation for a moment. “Internal wolf?”
Mine growled at him, but thankfully the sound was something only I could interpret.
“You’ve never asked a werewolf about it? How it works?”
“I’ve observed the mechanics of it a number of times, but most of those subjects were not as forthcoming as you. ”
“Shocking. ”
“Please, go on. ”
“I can’t speak for others, only myself, and for obvious reasons my experience may be different from theirs. I…coexist with my wolf. She is her own entity, has her own thoughts and her own personality. I can feel her as if she is a part of me, but she is independent as well. If that makes sense. ”
“And why do you believe this to be different from the experience of others?” He seemed utterly fascinated. I don’t think Jane Goodall would have been this thrilled if her gorillas walked up and started talking to her one day.
“I was born with active lycanthropy. ” I wasn’t going to get into the finer details of how werewolves turned one another. He didn’t need to know about the Awakening ceremony, or the hierarchy of the werewolf pack. But any idiot who had seen a creature feature would know it’s not normal to be born a werewolf.
“Born?”
“Yes. ”
“Is such a thing even possible?”
I held my hands up in front of myself as if to say, Well?