Black Howl

I didn’t know how to tell them how sorry I was that it was my father, my kin, who had torn their children’s minds away from them and left them broken.

I didn’t know how to tell them that this might not work, despite the fact that progress with the restored adults had been positive. Children’s brains were different. They were still developing. There could be permanent damage, even if Chloe did manage to restore their memories.

I felt the weight of all my failings crushing me as Wade strode up to me. He held hands with a formidable-looking African American woman who wore a denim vest over jeans and a flannel shirt, much like her husband. In her arms I recognized the small toddler I’d carried through the caves—their daughter.

“Madeline Black, this is my wife, Roxie Wade. Roxie, this is Madeline Black.”

I held my hand out to her, unsure if she would take it.

Her face crumpled suddenly and she threw her arm around me. The toddler was crushed between us as Roxie sobbed into my shoulder. I looked at Wade in panic.

He gently extracted their daughter from between the two of us. Roxie put her other arm around me and tried to speak through her tears.

“Th-th-th-thank…you…so…much,” she managed. “Thank you for bringing my baby back to me.”

“Uh. Of course,” I said. I didn’t know what to do with this woman. She shouldn’t be thanking me. She should be hitting me for bringing her daughter back in such a state.

Chloe peeked her head out of the room. “I’m ready.”

I patted Roxie’s back awkwardly. “Ma’am? Mrs. Wade? They’re ready for us now.”

“Y-y-yes. Of course.” She lifted her head and wiped her face, and then she smiled brilliantly. “I know this is going to work. I feel it in my bones.”

I wished I were as confident as she was, but I didn’t say so. I indicated that she should enter first, and I let everyone file in ahead of me. Jude and J.B. were last, at the end of the line. I tried to give them both a watery half smile but wasn’t sure I succeeded. They waited for me to go into the room before them. Jude squeezed my shoulder once before dropping his hand.

Chloe was talking to the mothers, determining which child should be positioned in which chair. The children were the same perfect little automatons that they had been in the woods after I’d started ordering them around.

“Wade has instructed the children to do exactly as their mothers say,” Jude whispered. “The power of the alpha.”

I looked at Wade, so strong and compassionate and wise. His pack was lucky to have an alpha like him. What happened in packs where the alpha held so much power and used it cruelly, to subjugate those beneath him?

I wondered briefly if that was the greater purpose for which Amarantha and Focalor had been holding Wade. They’d never tried to extract his memories. Perhaps Azazel had been working on a machine to draw on the power of the alpha, that all-powerful word. I regretted not destroying Azazel’s workshops when I’d had the chance.

I had discovered that I regretted a lot of things.

The children sat obediently in the chairs, and Chloe went down the line turning on the machines. As each cub’s eye was scanned by the laser, the child would go rigid. A few mothers stepped toward their children, as though wanting to pull them away.

“You have to wait,” I said, and they turned to look at me. “I know it’s hard. I know they look like they’re suffering. But we can’t stop the process once it’s begun.”

A couple of the mothers whimpered, but most of them took their cue from Roxie Wade, who nodded regally at me. She watched, unflinching, as her toddler stared into the eye of the camera.

Since some of the children were so young and had correspondingly short memory lives, the cubs did not reach the crisis moment all at the same time.

The first to cry out was Wade’s daughter, and that was the only time I thought Roxie would break.

“Mama!” the little girl shouted, and her voice was so plaintive that I almost ran to her myself.

“This is the hardest part,” I murmured like a mantra. “Don’t give in. Wait it out.”

Some of the other children also cried out for their mothers, and Chloe had to restrain one woman who would not listen to admonitions to wait.

It was unbearable, almost as bad as listening to the children scream when we’d taken them off the machines in the caves.

One of them began to wail, a cry of pain so piercing that it broke the ice that encased my heart. All the grief I’d suppressed the night before rose up in my throat, and tears overflowed. Roxie took my hand and gripped it tight. And we waited.

One by one, the cubs fainted in their chairs.

“You can take them now,” Chloe said.

Roxie and Wade rushed to their daughter. Wade scooped her up and rested her head on his shoulder.

“Papa?” the little girl said sleepily.

Someone had put a little pink barrette in her dark hair, and the barrette stood out in bright relief against Wade’s vest. She opened her eyes to half-mast, as if to affirm that it was indeed her father who held her. Then she laid her head back on his shoulder and began to snore.

Roxie laughed and cried at the same time, her hand over her mouth. Wade just gave me a long look, and in that look was all the gratitude that he wanted to say but couldn’t speak because of the lump in his throat.

I only nodded, and left the room. My work here was done. I had something else to do now. I was done with the living. Death was coming for Azazel, and I was going to deliver it.