Weres

60. The Plan

"You have no idea how badly I want to strangle you right now." Eden glared at Iosif.

"Maybe you can control until we stop Dimitri," Iosif responded to his glare.

"He has to, now that he's letting Marley fight that vampire," Thea interjected, giving Marley and Eden a disapproving look. 

She was opposed to letting Marley anywhere near any knight. Hell, the she-wolf wouldn't let Jared fight Dimitri even though he was a lycan. It was too dangerous for anyone, much less a human.

Eden sighed at the thinly veiled antagonism he was receiving from his friend. The others in the room—his parents, Oliver, and Hunter—were curious how the Alpha was convinced, when they themselves had objections putting Marley's live at risk.

"As you all know by now that I look like Dimitri's mate," Marley started, gaining everybody's attention. "To complete the look, I have to get other things right too, like my clothes and scent, which Iosif has already taken care of."

"Scent?" Hunter asked.

"A person's scent cannot be completely masked, but it can be fainted greatly," Iosif replied. "A few natural fragrant can make her smell close to Selene, which will be enough to trick Dimitri. Like she said, I have taken care of that."

"He would be expecting me to come to him with Iosif and Kyle," Marley continued, and Eden's fist tightened. "The real challenge is to keep up the act until I make him drink my blood."

The wolves, besides Eden, looked at her dumbfounded.

"Marley!" Catherine gasped. "You do realize if he bites you, you'll turn one of them. We can't—"

"No, she won't," Iosif interrupted. "The whole process to turn into a sired knight takes hours, and to turn like one of us more than a very excruciating day." His lip twitched upward, fiddling with a small object in his pocket. "And if somehow during the change the knight who bit you dies, the process stops. You're back to being a human."

"But how Dimitri drinking her blood is going to kill him within a day?" Thea inquired.

"With this." Iosif slipped his hand out of the pocket and presented to everyone a finger-long thin vessel. A water like liquid was shaking inside the tightly sealed cylinder. "The drops of Valinor flower, the plant rare to find even in the deepest parts of amazon, yet somehow Odis had a bundle of them planted in his backyard." The knight shook his head, smiling. "The man was always two steps ahead of us."

"Bundle of them, that's why you have so much of it," Hunter commented sarcastically, eyeing the tiny vessel.

"This is more than enough." Iosif replied. "Absolutely harmless to humans, but a tiny drop of it can shut down a knight, leaving him paralyzed. And vulnerable."

"This will be injected inside Marley, so when Dimitri feeds from her..." Thea drawled out, before looking at the vessel sharply. "Is it sterilized?"

"Yes." Eden answered for Iosif. He had grilled Marley for every single detail in the forest, and her plan did come out impeccable, yet the Alpha's doubts and pessimism didn't go away. After all, it was his Marley whose life was on the line.

Oliver frowned. "If this vale flower-"

"Valinor," Iosif corrected.

"If this valinor flower's sap needs to be inside Dimitri. Why Marley is needed for it? Why couldn't you have injected him with it when he was sleeping or slipped it in his food or drinks or blood."

"Because vampires are highly sensitive to its smell, even in sleep. A nature's protection for them against it," Eden replied, receiving a sharp look from Iosif for the use of v-word.