Page 79 of Meeting Her Mate

“Must be the backup generator,” Alexis sighed. She stood at the stairwell, her gaze darting up and down to see if anyone was approaching. After a long while of both of us standing there and just biding our time in silence, feeling that our nocturnal advantage had been taken from us, we descended down to the sub-basement.

The first thing I noticed immediately once I stepped inside the sub-basement was how murky it smelled. Like something had died in there. As opposed to the rest of the building and the parking space, this place was completely unkempt and resembled an underground shelter bunker. It was dimly lit, dusty, and decrepit. At the center of this unseemly space was a cage that housed the elevator’s base.

Alexis was two steps ahead of me, already at the cage, pulling it open. It struggled just a bit, but when Alexis and I pulled it together, it swung cleanly open. I peeked inside the shaft and became immediately woozy. It was unending, dark, and cold. As the gears, ropes, and wires moved, the elevators swung up and down on their tracks. There would be plenty of space for us to traverse upwards.

I shifted first. Immediately upon shifting, the coldness that had crept into my body gave way to a comfortable warmth that was always accompanied by the presence of fur. The elevator passage that had moments ago seemed quite dark now looked lit enough for me to make my way to the top.

Alexis shifted behind me silently. Our gradually honed telepathic communication in wolf form had matured gracefully, allowing us to talk without using words.

I’ll go in there first,I said.

Remember, the laboratory location has been shifted. It’s on floor twenty-three,Alexis said.

An elevator was descending. As it reached the ground floor, I leaped into the shaft and held on to it. Alexis followed soon after, also latching onto the same elevator. As we ascended, we began counting the floors. The elevator seemed to be going to the top. Both of us jumped off at the twenty-third floor, digging our claws into the framework lattice of the shaft for support. I was on the left of the elevator doors. Alexis was perched on the right. We both pierced each side of the door with our claws and pulled the doors open.

Alexis climbed into the floor. Once she had scouted the entrance, she beckoned me to follow. I climbed through the entrance just in time to avoid the elevator coming down into the shaft.

She was right. This was the floor for the new laboratory. Everything looked like it was recently renovated. The equipment even had a plastic covering on top of it. It made sense that the place was shifted from one floor to the other, given how much I had wrecked it when I was here last.

Shifting back, I saw that the place was a little too impeccable. Functional premises were not this spotless. Perhaps this was how modern labs were, and maybe I was being a little too paranoid. Alexis was speculating at everything on the other side of the floor, squinting, analyzing, and rifling through the files and folders on the shelves.

I made my way through the maze of glass walls and entered the main chamber where I suspected the Wolf’s Bane was being kept. I could see something blue and luminescent in a glass tube at the center of the maze in the hermetically sealed room. Alexis followed behind, peeking over my shoulder at the ethereal blue liquid. In the otherwise dark laboratory, this shining vial looked otherworldly and haunting.

I breached the hermetically sealed room, letting the door open, and the air hissed as it escaped the locked room. The plastic curtains rustled as we slid them apart to make our way into the room.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Alexis said.

“Now that you mention it, there’s something odd about the whole thing being a little too easy. Where are all the goons, the henchmen, the guards? There was practically no resistance,” I said, unlocking the glass box containing Wolf’s Bane and taking out the bottle of blue liquid.

“And the three culprits…they’re nowhere near the potion,” Alexis said warily. She retreated towards the door. “You don’t think this was a ruse, do you?”

My heart sank, and the earth seemed to sweep from under my feet. I could not fathom what had just happened.

In my hand, the vial containing the blue potion, instead of saying Wolf’s Bane, had a smiley face with a text written next to it:Thanks for making it easy for us and walking right into our trap.

“Get out,” I said. “Alexis. Get out. Right now!”

But it was too late.

The door slid shut, and the air hissed out, sealing us inside the tempered glass.

“What the fuck?”

“This isn’t the potion! They knew we were coming. We walked right into their trap!”

Alexis banged against the door but to no avail. It did not even budge, let alone shatter. What was a dark lab mere moments ago was now lit up with red flashing lights, often the prelude to an emergency or a security breach. Right on cue, alarms started blaring alongside the flashing lights.

I slammed my body against the glass walls, hoping that they would give in and break, but nothing of the sort happened. Instead, from the ceiling, green gas began billowing out and filling the small glass container we were trapped in.

“Well, well, well, would you look at that, kids?” This was the grimy voice of Blair issuing from the overhead speakers. Just then, the elevator doors opened, and Ralph, Blair, and Maurice walked in. “It would appear I gave you more credit than you deserved. You really thought that I wouldn’t be alerted of someone hacking into my system? What do you think I’m running, some sort of a clown company?”

“Fuck you!” Alexis yelled and slammed her fist against the glass door.

“Mind your breath,” Maurice said. “Or don’t. I don’t care either way. In about three minutes, poisonous fumes are going to choke both your lungs and kill you where you stand.”

“Look at these two pups caught in a cage of their own making. You know, Wilhelm, I always thought that your imprisonment the first time around was a matter of luck. But as I see you here, so helpless, so weak, trapped a second time, I can’t help but think that you’re the dumbest werewolf that I’ve ever come across. To be trapped a second time so shortly after getting your freedom,” Ralph cackled.

The bottle of the fake potion slipped from my hands and crashed on the floor, spilling warm liquid everywhere. I held my breath and Alexis’s hand as I stared at the three despicable figures standing there. If this was not Wolf’s Bane, where was it? Why make such a fuss about that potion if their plan was to kill me with fumes instead? Did some part of them perhaps know that fumes alone were not enough to kill werewolves?