Sorry! I'm so so so sorry! I know I said I'd update soon and I didn't. Sorry. I won't even make excuses. Except I will say that I've been studying and doing exams lately.. And that I'm on holiday in Australia, so not a lot of incentive to stay indoors and stare at the computer... But I'm sure that means nothing to you so don't even bother reading this - carry on!

A big big big thank you to OwlTheWise; your review absolutely made my day 3 Also to Comrade for pressuring me and making me feel bad ;)

I don't own VA.

Now read.

Chapter Eleven

All the air left me at once. What did he just say?

The queen, on the other hand, obviously hadn't lost her ability to speak. A thundering murmur had abruptly begun to build in the crowd, Moroi gasping, exclaiming to each other, gaping at me, crying out in something like shock. She called the room to order and, reluctantly, the chatter began to die off. "Excuse me?" she finally asked Gerard.

The lawyer looked very pleased with himself. "We have acquired evidence that leads us to believe that Miss Miami Flynn is not only a participating member of the terrorist group attacking our people, but is also of a long forgotten and thought to be extinct race referred to as lycanthrope. Or more popularly known as werewolf," he finished with a haughty flourish, collecting a small pile of papers from his guardian and passing them to the queen.

Dizzy little birds flittered around in front of my eyes and my ears buzzed in an insistent static hum. I couldn't… I just couldn't process what I'd just heard. How did they know? How in the hell had they found evidence? What did I do now? I didn't think I could bluff my way out; the lawyer seemed pretty confident and the sharp little looks Queen Vasilisa was shooting me as she skimmed the papers were making my fingers twitch. My heart was shuddering, beating the air out of my lungs. My breath was shallow and weak. The lights suddenly dim. My muscles prickling. Oh God, what do I do?

"Should I repeat the question?"

It was hard to focus on the lawyer. I just stood there, quivering, eyes pulled open wide like an opossum caught in the headlights of a speeding car. My mouth hung stupidly, slightly agape as I tried to pull the suddenly thick air into my body. I closed it slowly and swallowed, hard. What do I do what do I do what do I do what do I do…

"Miss Flynn, how long have you been a werewolf?"

My face was cold and pressurised, the blood pulled down and out through my stunned veins. My head swam. Finally making my petrified body move, I shook my head jerkily. I couldn't answer that. I couldn't speak.

"It's in your best interests to answer the question, Miss Flynn," the other lawyer – my lawyer – finally spoke, leaning forward slightly.

I looked at him, trying to glare but not able to past the shock still tugging at my eyelids. He had no idea what was in my best interests. How dare he try and make out like he did. He had no idea. None.

I didn't like him.

I finally turned to look at Zeno. Something inside me froze. God, it wasn't just me here. His future depended on how I answered this question. His life or death depended on the next words that came out of my mouth. His face was a mirror of mine, only darker, smaller, and a whole lot more terrified. I couldn't answer the question. But I had to. I had to say something and that something had to be very, very smart. This was a glass house sitting atop a mountain of loose stone. If I moved the wrong way, if I stumbled even slightly, if I said the wrong words, it would fall and slice us both into a thousand scarlet pieces.

I forced my gaze down, fixating on my fingers, now picking at the hem of that pretty white shirt. I breathed slowly, in and out. I couldn't lie, that was one thing. The Moroi would have someone like that Adrian guy here, surely, and then that would be the end of it. I could twist the truth. Equivocate. But they were lawyers. Their job was to get the full truth out of people and they would get it out of me eventually. But how could I tell the truth? Everything in me rebelled against it. Every animalistic survival instinct raged at the idea. I couldn't. I just couldn't.

But I had to.

"Miss. Flynn."

I don't know who said it, my ears were dazed and filled with wasps, but it sounded like it hadn't been the first time they had. I stared up, not quite looking at anyone in particular when I said it. The room was silent and everyone would hear.

"Eight months."

The whole room exploded. The air shook with the sound of Moroi in outrage. This was the confession, the confirmation that there was a race so unlike their own stalking the world without being given even the faintest notice. The vampires, so afraid of the shadows while being shadows themselves, all but burst the room at the seams with their rolling swells of shouting. I was suddenly very afraid for Zeno, sitting down there, so close to the chaos. But he was now surrounded by guardians, all adopting a faintly protective stance. I'd found myself trusting Anatolii but how could I be sure these dhampir wouldn't turn on Zen just as surely as a Moroi would? They were of the same blood, the same community. They would have lost men to whoever was causing this mess. They had to have as much of a grudge as their charges did.

But I had little cause to worry. Most of the yelling was directed at me. And the majority of it was very nasty.

"Filthy animal!"

"Unnatural…"

"Monster!"

"Evil child!"

"Kill it! Kill them all!"

"Cannibal!"

Talk about calling the kettle black.

"Order in the courtroom!" the queen cried, standing now with no gavel to bang. "ORDER, DAMMIT!"

With the help of the rest of the royal council, a few other official looking Moroi and the quiet, soothing guardians, the room eventually numbed to a droning purr of indignant conversation. I just stared down at my hands, an earthquake thrumming through my bones.

That went well.

"Order or I'll have this hearing declared private," Queen Vasilisa barked at the still chatting audience. Gradual silence. "Right," she huffed quietly, shuffling the papers in her hands, seeming a little bit ruffled. She turned to me. "Miss Flynn. So you openly admit to being a… werewolf?" She stumbled over the unfamiliar word a bit, as if saying it would make it more real.

I suddenly felt something very angry ball together at the pit of my stomach. I was insulted. How dare these people judge us when it was them who forced us into hiding in the first place? These people all but made us extinct. It was their fault that the races had to separate. It was their fault that the true evil, the true darkness roamed the earth. It was their selfishness and gluttony that created the real monsters in this world. "Yes. I do." I raised my voice. I was proud of who I was and these assholes would damn well hear it.

"Do you also admit to plotting and carrying out a series of unprovoked, violent and malicious attacks against the Moroi and dhampir people?" Gerard piped up, his tone both hostile and polite in that way only lawyers have. I decided he had a really grating voice.

"Objection. The prosecution's use of adjectives are hardly necessary." My lawyer finally started doing his job.

The lawyers watched the queen a she deliberated for a moment. "Sustained. Mr. Ivashkov, this is a courtroom and I expect your questions to be strictly professional."

Mr. Ivashkov nodded respectfully before turning back to me. The glint in his eyes was hard and smothered in distain. "Miss Flynn, do you admit to committing the acts of terrorism you are so accused of?"

That was easy enough. "No."

"So you plead–"

"Objection. The defendant has not been formally asked to enter a plea by the court."

The queen was quicker this time. "Sustained. Mr. Ivashkov, do your job and let me do mine."

"I would like to request that the defendant enter a plea for the benefit of this case, your highness."

Queen Vasilisa pursed her lips, her eyes flicking between the two lawyers. After a while her gaze landed on me. "Miss Flynn, do you wish to enter a plea?"

I don't know, do I? I looked to my lawyer and he shook his head calmly, like he knew what he was doing. Could I trust him?

My stare shifted to Anatolii, still standing resolute at the foot of the witness stand. He wasn't looking at me but I thought he could feel my eyes on him. After a long, agonising moment, he nodded, ever so slightly. I wasn't even sure if it was a conscious message to me or just what he thought. It was such a tiny movement, I couldn't even tell if it was a nod. Maybe he was adjusting his hair.

It didn't matter. Something settled in my stomach and I was sure of what to say. "Yes… your highness," I added uncertainly. I didn't know what the hell to call these people.

My lawyer looked like he was going to swallow his tongue. Gerard looked like a cat given the cream. A very soft murmur fired up in the gallery.

"What do you plead?" the queen asked.

"Not guilty."

The murmur turned hard and rumbly. Not one person in that audience believed that I was innocent. I didn't care. They could think what they wanted. It wasn't up to them.

But the queen wasn't giving anything away and neither were the council members. Even the younger one – the queen's sister – had her face carefully blanketed with indifference. I got the feeling this was going to be a tough crowd.

Over the rumbling mutters, Gerard said, "I'll conclude my line of questioning for now," and ambled back on over to his table. My lawyer turned and stalked back to ours, taking a seat beside Zeno, shaking his head in dismay. That obviously hadn't been a part of his plan.

"You may take your seat now, Miss Flynn. We will call you back to the witness stand later on in the hearing," the queen said dismissively, already sounding tired. I didn't think she knew the half of it.

My whole body shaking, knees threatening to buckle, I slunk down from the stand and followed Anatolii back to our table. It seemed as if our little troop of guardians had clustered in closer than they had been before. Probably worried I was going to go all furry and start ripping out hearts right there. It didn't matter. They wouldn't get much of a show from me and at least they acted as a sort of barrier between us and the spitting, quietly cursing Moroi behind us. I hated having them at my back, but I forced myself to keep my eyes forward, not wanted to appear uncomfortable. The last thing I wanted was for them to see how they were getting to me.

"Prosecution, defence; you may enter your evidence and call up your witnesses," the queen's voice rung out.

The next hour or so was taken up with speech after debate after speech full of meaningless legal jargon that did nothing to sooth my sparking nerves. I picked and bit relentlessly at my nails until they were all but completely annihilated. The two lawyers didn't alternate with each other at the stand like in human court but kind of just stood up the front and took turns asking their questions.

It seemed – from what I could gather around the senseless courtroom drivel – that the prosecution had actually had done their homework. The evidence against me was pretty substantial. I mean, not exactly against me in particular, but against the 'wolves. And seeing as how Zeno and I were the only two werewolves they could get their hands on, they were more than willing for us to take the fall. It was stupid, throwing the blame of a race on two people. I thought maybe I could bring that up later, make a big speech about it. Or would my lawyer pick up on that? He hadn't said anything about me not being the only werewolf in existence yet. No matter. I could defend myself. This was probably just another job for him. Actually, he would probably be one of the only other people in the room who could rival me in not wanting to be there. I couldn't imagine how they'd managed to persuade any Moroi to defend the people accused of declaring war on the vampires. He was probably the worst lawyer they had, just picked to stand in a place no one else wanted to stand in and paid a hell of a lot of money to do nothing but let the prosecution have their hearing. Somehow, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.

I was just glad they hadn't asked Zeno up yet. Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they had something against questioning minors. It seemed like too much to hope for but I clung to it. If they could pin it all on me, he might be safe.

They did have a hell of a lot of info. One witness (a guardian) talked icily about how in one attack on his charges, a high ranking Moroi family, nothing was touched but the hearts of the victims, ripped out of the vampires' chests and devoured. They'd found some long forgotten books in an ancient library somewhere that suggested that this was a common trait for the lycanthrope. That surprised me a little. Ian had made out as if they had absolutely no records of us anywhere at all. Well, I guessed even he couldn't know everything about the vampires.

Once, they had a scientist on the stand. He was a forensic scientist; a blood expert. This struck me as ironic and when they announced his occupation I had to bite off the head of a nervous laugh before it had a chance to voice itself. He said that his team had identified the blood of many dhampir at the cabin. My lawyer was quick to jump on that, though. They had this big debate over the fact that plenty of guardians had been injured at the cabin when they'd raided. But, apparently, they'd found traces of what could be Moroi blood as well, yet not one Moroi had been at the raid. Only, with the hearing being pushed forward so drastically, they hadn't had a chance to fully process the blood and come up with a sure result. I got the feeling the prosecution was pulling at straws with this one. They'd probably just found some contaminated blood and thought 'let's see if we can over process this, boys.' It was probably 'wolf blood that they didn't know what to make of. There couldn't be Moroi blood at the cabin. We didn't even hunt humans, let alone vampires.

Of all the titbits of evidence they had stacked against me, one in particular sprung out. They had this contact who ran in human circles by the sounds of things and did not want to be named in court. Their contact had acquired video footage from human surveillance cameras outside the residence of three middle-class Moroi. The room went deafeningly silent as they projected the video on a screen lowered behind the royals' seats. They even dimmed the lights a little, like a freaking movie theatre.

It was night in the film and the action began instantly. The scene was set with a quarter of the view cut off on the left side by a big grey wall, a little fuzzy as the focus zeroed in on three silhouettes sliding through the wet darkness like pools of oil over a rain-slicked tarmack. There was no audio. Every now and then a fat droplet of water would careen into the glass of the camera, blurring the scene until another would strike it and force it to fall out of our view. It wasn't the best footage ever, but you could see very clearly what happened next.

The figures approached the wall and paused. Soon, the air around them seemed to ripple and crack as steam roiled off their shoulders, the rain retreating from the heat of there bodies. One dropped to his knees, swinging his upper body back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Another threw back his head in a silent howl, the gaping black maw of his mouth elongating, morphing into something not-human. The third just stood, his shoulders hunched but his face glowering forward, as his skin writhed and his muscles stretched to fill a new shape.

And then the figures were decidedly not human.

There were a few starled, babbling noises behind me as the Moroi proccessed this. I didn't turn around. The scene on the projecter pulled at my eyes, the muscles behind them working to take it all in at once. I felt something in my stomach flip and dive and roll. I wasn't breathing. My heart was the double kick of a heavy metaler's bass drum. The shadows on screen had no scent, no physical form in the world I was in, but their beasts called out to mine and inside I was raging. I had to clamp down on a growl as the thing at the back of my mind lifted its head, waking, gnashing its blood-thirsty jaws. Everything inside me seemed to fall in on itself, cramping and drowing in the fevor rushing through me. It was all I could do not to launch myself across the table, thunder through the line of royals and fire headfirst at the projector screen. My throat squeezed down tight as I strained against the sudden urge to change with these figures, follow them, fight them, tear at their fur and claw at their necks. Run with them, run after them, run from them. My thoughts weren't lining themselves up properly. I couldn't make sense of anything even as the hulking 'wolves crashed through a window that must have been set in the wall and pushed into the house beyond.

As soon as their shapes left the screen I tore my gaze from it and bowed my head, clamping my eyes shut so hard little starbursts exploded in the darkness behind my lids. I dragged in a long, quiet breath that echoed in my ears. My heart began to slow. There was a cold, fine mist of sweat coating my face and neck. My hands relaxed out of the fists they'd clinched into and I opened my eyes to see my fingers trembling in delicate waves of shock. I let my breath out slowly, hoping I wouldn't blow away with it.

Anatolii's hand came into view as he reached out to touch the back of mine. His fingers were nothing more than the soft kiss of butterfly wings but his concern flooded through me like cool, calming water. He wanted me to look up. At him. At anyone. The fact that I couldn't stand looking at the evidence against me probably would look so good for my case.

Then I saw his watch.

It was small and silver with a simple but eligant circular face. It was almost feminine but not quite; it wouldn't look right on a woman's wrist. It suited him. But it wasn't that that turned the blood in my viens to lead. It was the time. Ten twenty seven. The moon would be well on its way into the sky.

We needed to start wrapping this thing up.

I hoped my face didn't look too green as I lifted it to the still rolling film. No one had noticed my little meltdown apart from Anatolii. They were all too caught up in the movie. I didn't look at Anatolii but I also didn't move my hand, and after a few seconds he must have decided that I wasn't going to lose it and the pressure of his fingers retreated.

Mr. Ivashkov pointed a techy looking little remote at the screen. The room was silent for a few long, agonising moments as the tape zipped forward, skipping out about four minutes of non-action. At five minutes fourteen, the tape resumed at normal speed as an oily black head slithered out through the unseen window, like something off Paranormal Activity. Someone behind me actually squealed a little. The shadow twisted and squirmed through the hole and back onto the pavement, just barely avoiding landing on its face. The second followed with just as little grace as the first. The third with the ease of an eel through the clasping hands of an overly curious child. I was certain that he was their leader; he had the feel of an Alpha. I could feel it – the assurance, the dominance – buzzing through the air despite the fact that he was in a different place at a different time. He was most likely the eldest as well, considering how smooth his change was and how confident he was in his Other body. He made the other two look like blind, featherless ducklings. I couldn't distinguish colour from the shitty night image that the film provided but I thought his shade of black was deeper than theirs, truer. They were probably some lighter tones of brown or grey and one had paint splotches Jackson Pollocking his back and sides, but the Alpha was black all over. Something dark and thick oozed from their lolling tongues, something that stank of copper and salty sweet warmth, even through the divide of the projector screen. I could feel something tingle at the back of my throat and I took a deep breath as a swell of nausea swamped me. Stiffening my back, I pushed the sick, rolling waves back someplace where they couldn't be seen, but I wouldn't be able to keep face for much longer.

As a 'wolf progresses further and further through the stages of the Change, the Phases become more and more frequent, but also more predictable. At a wild guess I'd say I had less than two full moons until I changed fully. But considering how quickly my Phases had been developing and how early they'd began in the first place I may not have even that long. Phasing in a room full of vampires – or any kind of people – was one thing...

Changing was another matter entirely.

I'm not even going to say anything...

Sorry.