As Karen left the lab to walk up to her office she knew
she had made a terrible mistake. It happened every time she showed
even the smallest kindness to the specimins. She should have left
the matter of her food and hygene to the techs. But for the briefest
of moments she had seen Karina in it's eyes. Had wanted to calm it's
fears...
Her sister had done this to her of course... she'd gone and died
and left her to raise a child when she wasn't much older than Karina herself.
And now the only thing I ever cared about stalks around in the night outside
my home.
She told her assistant that she was going to leaving work early,
it was almost four and most of the work for the day had already been done.
She glanced out into the woods as she walked into the parking lot.
Beyond the woodline was a fense of course, motion detectors, security,
everything needed to assure that the private lab facility was secure.
When she was a teenager she loved the woods... she even perchased her home
close to the woods, but it had been ages since she had gone hiking, fishing,
or hunting. It had been ages because in her heart she knew the wolves
would kill her. And though she didn't believe her foster-daughter
would be one of them, she rather doubted that Karina would be there to
stop it.
On her way home, Karen stopped at an ABC store and picked up a nice
bottle of vodka. She had tried to convince her friends in medical
school that good vodka existed. It was not particularly successful,
but at the time the cold war was raging and it was not precisely a time
for someone to announce their Russian heritage to loudly.
She settled on her deck looking up at the moon with her bottle of
vodka, singing softly to herself the songs her mother had song to her older
sister and her as children. She couldn't speak the language... she'd
always wanted to learn, but she at least had the Russian habit of drinking
her problems through....
She had wanted to hit the little bitch. To scream at her just
what GLS did to people. To tell her how she had seen friends and
colleges ripped to shreds, and read field reports of victims ripping their
own families to shreds...
...and yet now the child thought she was the sick one. And
that is what she got for showing the specimin kindness, pity, and for acting
like a mother.
Karen Markova was brilliant, gifted, and more than a little bit crazy.
Once the director of research for Weaver influenced Developemental Neogentics
Amalgamated, a corpration which hunted down and experimented on Garou.
But the wolves had had their revenge on her, and after a police raid on
one of the facilities she was running she was arrested and sent to prison
with news stories of children and teenagers caged like wild animals, with
wolves and dogs. They'd all managed to be human and to act human
when the police were there.
Now out of prison, Karen has no where to go. Three graduate degrees
and she couldn't get a job in an animal hospital, much less as a doctor
for people. And she knows that every night she might be ripped to
shreads by a wolf seeking it's own form of justice.