Emin felt a great, yawning pit open up inside of him.
Great, AJ thought. She was watching them fall in love before her very eyes. They were gonna have a quickie wedding and be pregnant in about three seconds. Great. Yeah. Maybe she’d have the honor of being godmother to their drop-dead gorgeous children. That would be nice.
“Where do I start?” Glory asked Katya.
“Tell about your mother. How you lived,” Emin said, absurdly satisfied to know something about her that the rest of the group didn’t.
“Okay, well, we live in the mountains. Just the two of us. My grandmother used to live with us, but she died when I was little. She was a Navuka tiger, too, when she was a little girl. She had a big white stripe down her spine.” Glory turned to Anton and again touched his small shock of white hair. “We stayed up in the mountains alone because my mother was afraid they would come for us, the way they’d come for my grandmother once. We hid from people so they wouldn’t know we were there. So no rumors would get started about the tigers living in the mountains. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand a lot of things. My mother had a collection of books in our cave, and she’d let me look at them, she taught me to read. But you can only learn so much about the world from a few books. And you definitely can’t learn about an organization like Navuka.”
Glory’s eyes were far away, distant, devastated. Again, Emin just wanted to pull her onto his lap.
“When she told me about them, I pictured bad men, with angry faces and weapons chasing me. But when they found us, when they came for me, it was this time last year. Autumn in the mountains. When they came it was a man and a woman. And they looked in love. They held hands and had a picnic. I crept to get closer. The woman saw me and smiled. She wasn’t scared. She held out her hand. I was - I was curious.”
Glory’s voice broke for a second. “If my mother had been with me, she’d never have let me approach them. But I was alone. I went to them. The woman smiled. I was so happy. And then I was so sleepy. And everything went dark. And I woke up in the bad place.”
“The testing site where you saw me a few months ago,” Dora said.
“Yes.” Glory nodded solemnly. “I had been there a while. I don’t know how long. And they restrained me and - and - and buzzed me.” She searched for the word. She put two fingers at her throat and vibrated her body.
Emin’s stomach turned. God. They’d tasered her.
“And they took blood from me and my fur. They put chemicals in me and they screamed and screamed. Because all they wanted was for me to shift to my human form. But I wouldn’t.”
“You did not shift for them?” Anton asked, his eyes wide as he surveyed Glory from where he sat next to her. “Even with their chemicals in your blood?”
Glory shook her head. “I knew it was what they wanted. And I hated them,” she whispered, as if she were saying something she was ashamed of.
“How did you get away?” AJ asked, her sweater between her fingers still, but her jealousies long forgotten. The sweet woman before her had had enough animosity in her life.
Glory laced her own fingers together. “They needed to move locations. They felt like someone knew they were there. Maybe it was you who knew?” Glory asked Dora and Dora treated her to a quick-fire grin.
Glory continued. “They moved a lot of their supplies first. And then they were going to move me last. But in the confusion, they’d forgotten to make me sleepy. They always made me sleepy. But I was much more awake that day. So I pretended to be sleepy and when they came to move me, I fought them.”
“I destroyed as much of the site as I could and I was gone, into the woods. I knew they’d never find me because I’m so good at hiding.”
“What about tracking device?” Anton’s voice was almost as hard as his expression. But his eyes were pained.
“Oh. The blinker? I took it right out as soon as I got to the woods.”
Emin watched as her hand floated to her side, as if to cover a wound, an injury.
“And then you stayed in the woods by the testing site?” Danil asked, squinting his eyes to understand.
“I knew it was abandoned. And it was the only place I knew in the whole world. I didn’t - don’t - know how to get back to my mother. So I stayed close. And then Emin came and found me.” She turned to him and smiled. Her white teeth glinted in the evening light and her green eyes changed shape with the smile. He was horrified to feel his heart flop over from one side to the other.
“Were you the only shifter in the lab?” Dora asked.
“Yes,” Glory replied. “But I could smell that there had been others. A bear. The one that attacked you. They made him there. And there was the fear of many, many animals on the air. I could smell that they had tortured lots of regular animals there, too.”