Upside Down

(35) A Storm Coming

Chapter 35

Answers : Good :: Questions : Bad

Something was wrong, I could smell it. Not really, like smell-smell but like when you see the look on the people's faces around you and you know something is wrong and you start to get mad because no one will tell you what is going on? Yeah, that kind of smell. I couldn't understand the doctors face when he called me back into his lab room.

"Okay," the doctor inisiated with a hand running through his barely there hair. "I probably should start with your friend, Grant, correct?"

I nodded as he lead me to his desk.

"You say he's been acting a lot more aggresive and violent? You're other friend too?"

"Yes, it's really strange because even they have noticed themselves being more hostile and Drew is not one to be getting angry easily."

"Right, right, the answer to this is quiet simple. I had taken some blood samples of your friend and in it was epinephrine, or adrinaline if you will, lots more than normal. This can make anyone, let alone a shifter angrier and more tempermental because it can make their bodies more on edge like every second of the day they are in a fight-or-flight situation. But this spike of epinephrine was not pruely coincidental."

"You believe someone planted it?" I asked incredulous. I couldn't think of anyone who would want to do that.

"Yes, maybe it wasn't ment for them to consume or maybe it was but this level of epinephrine couldn't be gained by simply eating epinephrine rich food. Someone had to inject it into them directly or in some food or something. Do you have any idea of when this could have happened?"

Yes.

The chocolate.

We hadn't even known who they had come from but they said they were for Kriss and then right after Grant and Drew ate them they got in a fight with each other and started acting weird.

"Well, someone sent chocolates the other day and right after that the boys started acting weird," I told Dr. Jensen.

"Do you know who they came from?"

"Well no," I admitted.

"Oh, well I advise you to find out and quickly. Something is stirring and I don't like the feel of it," Dr. Jensen mumbled and I had to strain to hear him. "There's a storm coming."

"What do you mean?"

Dr. Jensen sighed then looked up at me and it didn't seem like he was the same man from a minute ago. He seemed more withered, older some how. "Kriss had been talking to me, about ... werewolves."

He stood and I followed, boggled beyond comprehention.

He took a large brown book off of a shelf of his and laid it down on a random white counter and beckoned me to come over. "She had said things about her childhood and from what I put together I figured she grew up in a lab of some sorts that ... that tested on shifters. Ah, here it is."

When he flipped the page my eyes widened as I took in the gruesome picture of a werewolf. Like the ones in the movies that stood ten feet tall on hind legs and ripped humans apart with sharp teeth in one snap.

"In the nineteenth century, there was a family of shifters in Germany. They were wealthy and popular among their quaint little town," Dr. Jensen told me as he turned back to one of the first pages to a picture of a browned looking picture with a mom, dad, and two sons. "They were inventors, the father being famous for many things and his wife renown seamstress and their son Joshua was a brave and loved soldier in the army. But his other son, Jameson, was a troublemaker.

"No matter what his father and family and town tried to do they couldn't get the boy to calm down and he grew crazed mix-matching animals, trying splicing their genes together and throwing fits of rage whenever he failed.

"After one particularly bad failure Jameson had seem to stop messing with the animals and the citizens had thought he turned over a new leaf but soon children of the town started to disappear one by one then later found dead in some kind of twisted, half animal half human form. They didn't know what to make of it until Jameson strolled into town one day with a large cage of some sort covered in a tarp.

"He had seem so excited that the whole towns people had gathered, glad to see him like this. Then he lifted away the tarp and the citizens were horrified for there in the cage was the most monsterous looking creature they had ever seen, a child half morphed into a wolf creature. They realized Jameson had been the one stealing the children and twisting their genes until he created this half-and-half monster. So they drove Jameson out but not before he pledge to seek revenge."

I sat there stunned.

What the hell? Why had I never heard this story before? I never even thought anyone would want to do that and yet to have it happen. Those poor families of the town, their own children killed or turned into monsters.

"I-I'm sorry doc, but I'm not sure of what this has to do with me."

He took off his glasses, wiping them off on his lab coat then slipped them back on before turning to look at me. "I-I'm not sure of how to say this but ... Emerson, I think someone has been trying to do what Jameson failed to and they have already succeeded."

"What? How do you know?"

"Because ... Kriss is one."