Page 76 of Meeting Her Mate

“Oh, please, you need me to run this town for you,” Maurice said.

“Tomorrow night, gentlemen. Mark it on your calendars. We’re going to hunt a wolf,” Blair stated.

“See you tomorrow,” Ralph said, then hung up. Maurice hung up after that.

The call may have ended, but my work was not. I immediately searched up other usages of the term Wolf’s Bane. The lab reports detailing the production of Wolf’s Bane version 19.1 came up, stating that the chemical was at 93% completion. The estimated time for completion was eighteen hours.

Will and I had an eighteen-hour window to stop the production of Wolf’s Bane.

My legs were shaking as I left the room. It had been one calamity after the other. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Out of the fire and into the lava pit.

“Hey, aren’t you going to drink this? I made it with love!” Maliha called after me from the kitchen.

“I don’t have time,” I said.

“I’m going to delete that program. Is that okay?” she asked.

“Delete it,” I said.

“If they catch us for this, plead the fifth!” Maliha called.

My heart was racing. How would we penetrate the security of that building and get to the lab where the serum was being finalized? Wouldn’t Blair, Maurice, and Ralph be there, waiting?

***

I did not wait to wake Will up in the morning. It was thirty minutes past four when I reached his home. I went to him immediately and shook him awake.

“Did I do something again?” he asked nervously.

“No. But something happened while we were asleep,” I said. I briefed him on everything I had learned and told him about the call between Ralph, Blair, and Maurice. When I shared the news that the Wolf’s Bane would be done in less than eighteen hours, Will sprang out of bed.

“I can’t have people playing dice with my life. This ends today,” he said. He put on his clothes in a hurry as I told him everything else that I had seen on Maliha’s computer.

“But Will, the lab,” I said. “The lab’s in the main building, and we can’t seriously just infiltrate it in the middle of the day. Since last time, they’re bound to have increased their security. They’re probably going to expect us.”

“Be that as it may, we have an absence of time on our hands. Had we a week to plan something, I would have engaged all the wolves of the pack, and we would have come up with an offensive strategy. But there’s no time. It’s just you and me,” he said.

“So what do we do?” I asked. “The three of them are going to meet tomorrow at the lab. That’s what they said.”

“You’re not seeing this for the opportunity that it is. We get to kill four birds with one stone. Blair, Maurice, Ralph, and the serum—all of them will be in the same location tomorrow. If we play our cards right, we can eliminate all our problems in one fell swoop.”

It hadn’t struck me before he said it out loud. Now that he mentioned it, how could I have overlooked something so glaringly obvious?

***

The plan was not simple by any means. But as far as foolproof plans went, it was as ironclad as the two of us could come up with on such short notice.

We used Will’s dining table to hatch our scheme. At this moment, twelve hours before the serum would complete, the dining table was cluttered with charts, markers, and notes.

Although Will’s initial suggestion was to eliminate all three people and destroy the serum, the more we thought about it, the more obvious it became that none of them could do anything without the serum itself. Our first priority was to get our hands on the serum before they could. Provided that the serum was in their home territory, it would be a challenge. It would be even more of a challenge to break in there in the daytime.

“The elevator shaft goes all the way down to the second basement. That’s our way in,” Will said, looking at the schematics of the building on the dining table. Getting my hands on the blueprints of the building was as simple as giving Maliha a call and asking her to do it for me. She sent me the PDF, which I printed from the printer in my home.

“So we’re going to sneak into the second basement where all the cars are parked and break into the elevator shaft,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then we shift and use our wolf forms’ litheness to our advantage. Then, we can simply climb to the twentieth floor,” Will said, pointing to the blueprints, “where the main lab is.”

“After that, we’re going to pry open the elevator doors on that floor and prepare for the worst,” I added.