Page 46 of Curse of the Wolf
Did she have acurefor his curse? No. If she’d discovered anything, Duncan would have said so when I’d picked him up that morning—or he would have knocked on my door the night before. Still, I couldn’t help but hope.
“Not that she mentioned, but she washmming anduhmming when I left her apartment near midnight. She did smugly inform me, after she took her samples, that she could use the genetic material to clone me and create a Duncan of her own. I wasn’t that amused.”
“I’m sure she won’t do that.”
“Because it would be morally reprehensible to create a clone without someone’s permission?”
“Well, maybe, but mostly she’s pretty old to raise a test-tube baby.”
“So is Abrams, but that hasn’t stopped him,” Duncan said grimly.
“Did you ever learn the kid’s name?”
“Lykos.”
“Doesn’t that just mean wolf?”
“In Greek, yes. Abrams was never that original when it came to names.” He waved at his chest, reminding me that Duncan was a name he’d adopted. His original name, presumably also granted by Abrams, had been Drakon, the Greek for dragon.
“Did you get to speak to him?” I asked. “Lykos?”
“Not as much as you did, I think.”
“I only told him that Abrams and Radomir were bad guys, chocolate was worth trading medallions for, and that he’d rather have a salami log than pick a fight with me.”
“Those are more in-depth conversations than I’ve had with him. The couple of times our paths crossed, I mostly grunted at him.”
“Were you a wolf or bipedfuris on those occasions?”
“Less often than you’d think, given that degree of articulation.”
I glanced at him as I navigated the truck off the paved road and onto the meandering dirt route that led through the trees toward the cabin.
“I didn’t know what to say,” Duncan admitted. “I’m not even sure… Is he more like my son? Or my brother? Oh, logically I know we’re siblings—identical twins, I suppose—but the age difference makes it confusing.”
“The weird sci-fi cloning makes it confusing.”
He laughed softly. “That too.”
“Maybe just befriend him, if you can. We shouldtry to get him away from those guys. Being raised in a laboratorycan’tbe healthy.”
“I survived it,” Duncan said dryly.
“You had access to a library.”
“That did help.”
An oncoming SUV withLogan’s Real Estateon the side forced me to navigate to the edge of the road, my truck’s tire dipping into a deep pothole. The frame creaked in protest. The poor vehicle. It had endured a lot this winter.
The last time we’d driven up here, I’d noticed a for-sale sign on a property down the road from my mom’s. Since then, a clear case containing flyers had been added. Fresh bite holes in the wood post suggested that some of my relatives were taking umbrage at the prospective sale, probably because it was undeveloped land full of trees, and their hunts took them across it often.
Surprisingly, Mom stood in the driveway when we arrived, Lorenzo at her side. Her arms were folded across her chest as she glowered toward the road. His expression was more pensive.
I rolled down the window and pulled to a stop in front of them. “When Lorenzo said you’d be here when we arrived, I didn’t expect you to greet us at the head of the driveway.”
“We’re scowling fearsomely to drive away that presumptuous real estate agent,” Mom said.
I glanced back, remembering the SUV but nothing remarkable about the driver.
