“How old are Katie and Rachelle? Girls, I’m sorry but we need to expand the pack.”
Lisa's words shocked the rest of the pack. "Ex-excuse me?" asked Brenda.
"You heard me;" Lisa said firmly, "The pack needs to expand."
"But Lisa, neither of the girls is of age," Solange protested.
"That's no matter. The point is we NEED more members, and as daughters of the pack membership, they are a natural selection," Lisa said.
"What you're proposing is also known as statutory rape!" Solange snapped. "Lisa, I will follow your law as pack leader, but I also uphold the laws of the human world. Do NOT force me to choose!"
"I never said anything of the sort, Solange," Lisa growled, a threatening tone in her voice. "I said we need to expand, and that the oldest girls would be a natural selection. You know as well as I that there is more than one way to bestow the gift. But don't you EVER raise your voice to me again. Our pack is on the verge of war, and I will NOT have my leadership threatened!"
Solange hung her head submissively, "Yes, my alpha."
"Now then," Lisa said, "Debra and I are sending our daughters to Ireland until their first change. Within the next day, Rachelle and Katie should be gifted. We can send all the girls together. We also don't know where this Agent Ramer is, but we can assume he knows where we live, where we work, and the places that we frequent. Ladies, stay with your daughters, keep them close to you. As of right now, we have lost one pack sister, and she hadn't even had her first transformation. We should operate on the assumption that he can and will kill any of us, and possibly any of our girls."
The rest of them nodded in unison. "Well then," said Lisa, "Let's get to our houses; I know I want to be near my child tonight."
Solange's phone rang. She stared for a moment at the caller ID. "Hospital?" she mumbled, then answered, " 'Allo?" she asked, traces of her accent slipping out due to her stress. "Yes?....Yes?...Oh, yes,thank you, yes!" and hung up the phone, a broad smile on her face, and tears sparkling in her eyes as she said to the pack, "Merde Alors...Wendy...she is....ALIVE!"
Every one of the women broke down in relieved tears, hugging each other. Solange made a circuit of the room, kissing each one in celebration. "How?" asked Ebony, "Did they say how she survived?"
"A bullet-proof vest," Solange said, "Her heart, it stopped, but they started her up. They say she had massive organ bruising, and might have brain damage...but they don't know about how good a healer she is!"
"But if the bullets never passed through her vest, how could she be dead?" Anaya asked, realizing she'd not said much of anything since arriving. (Anaya was known for her silence, in fact it was quite easy to forget she existed much of the time.)
"Point blank range, when the bullets impacted, they would have scattered silver molecules into the air," explained Lisa, who was a remarkable font of information, despite never having been raised in a werewolf pack. "She easily could have inhaled enough to trigger an anaphylactic shock type of allergic reaction. Thankfully, though she was human enough to not have a truly and permanently fatal reaction, she was werewolf enough to be able to heal herself."
"Shit," Debra interrupted, "We need to get her the hell out of that hospital! When she's healthy tomorrow, they're going to have too many questions."
"So, Lisa," asked Solange, "Since Wendy has not died, does the order to gift our daughters still stand?"
Lisa paused, thinking before giving an answer.
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Blackhorn received the message about Wendy's revival at the hospital, thanks to a sharp-eared agent in the emergency room. Blackhorn had sent one to retrieve Wendy's body from the morgue, lest the coroner find out the bullets were silver. He'd been expecting only a simple message on his blackberry- "I got the pizza" (Pizza being a far less innocuous word than "werewolf corpse".). Instead, he'd gotten a phone call, relating how Wendy had survived.
This put Blackhorn in a seriously fragile situation. He realized that since Agent Patel had survived, she was undeniably a werewolf. The hospital staff would become concerned if she healed at the normal speed of a lycanthrope. Wendy HAD to be removed from the hospital. But if the government kidnapped her, they would be risking an all out war with the pack here, and if word spread, the war would spread as well.
Blackhorn sighed heavily, rubbing his temples. He had an agent at his disposal, one armed with silver ammo, and they were in the hospital. He could have Agent Patel executed, and hang Ramer out to dry. The pack wouldn't even question who did it. But was this what he wanted, to take the life of an agent, all to prevent a war that might still be averted? No matter what Ramer thought or felt, Blackhorn still thought of Wendy as an agent, and would continue to think of her as an agent until the day she'd betrayed him personally. Perhaps he should just retrive her and bring her in from the cold, he thought. Perhaps she'd like to work for the FBI still.
And then there was the issue of Vix, the special agent brought in from another division. He didn't like thinking about the problems Vix could cause. Vix had a reputation for making the game quite dangerous once brought into play. Right now, Vix was on a leash, but Blackhorn worried, because sometimes it felt like it was Vix holding the handle of the leash, and not the FBI.
Yes, it had been a long day for everyone even associated with the pack...