I could smell that he was dead and quickly cooling. Putting a hand on his shoulder, I intended to turn him to see how he’d died, but I didn’t have to. His throat had been torn by something sharp and not very precise. Claws, teeth.
“What the—” one of Stafford’s soldiers exclaimed, peering over our shoulders.
Tyler stared down at him, lips pursed. Ben let out a sigh. I looked around. Wind had altered the tracks, making it harder to decipher what had happened. But I didn’t smell Vanderman. And the snow was only disturbed in one direction. I could almost see it: this poor guy had been walking by on some other duty. He spotted a crazed maniac, probably naked in freezing weather, running across the sidewalk. He’d yelled at the guy to stop. Threatened, his target had run at him. The soldier may not even have had time to fire the handgun now lying in its own bed of snow nearby.
Tyler retrieved the pistol, slid back the chamber, then threw the gun away.
“He got shots off,” Tyler said. “But the bullets aren’t silver.”
I crouched in the snow and rested my hand gently on the soldier’s body, as if it mattered. Taking a careful, searching breath, I learned what I needed to and quickly moved away.
“It was him?” Tyler said. He must have been hoping for a different outcome.
I nodded. Walters’s scent was all over the body.
Chapter 20
WALTERS, TRAILING blood across the snow, had gone inside. No one else had come back out. He and Vanderman were still in the building.
“Where is he? Where is he now?” one of the escorts said swinging his rifle around.
Tyler glared at them. “You two—go back and tell Colonel Stafford that Walters is here, at the hospital.”
The pair hesitated. One was searching wildly for the unseen killer. The other was staring at the bloody body. Tyler touched this one on the arm. “Go on. Tell Stafford.” He spoke it like an order.
The soldier nodded, grabbed the other, and they ran back to the Humvee.
“Thanks,” I said, relieved. I’d started to worry that they would either shoot us—or that we’d have to rescue them.
“They’re safer this way,” Tyler said.
The three of us went inside the hospital and locked the door behind us.
The building was quiet. The cars in the lot meant that people must have been there, and while I could smell them, none were out and about. I hoped that meant they were safely locked away in rooms and offices. A heater vented somewhere, a distant hissing. We found stairs leading to the basement—I didn’t want us getting stuck in an elevator. Ben was at my side, face tight with concentration, looking all around us. He kept flexing his hands, as if feeling claws instead of fingers. Tyler walked behind us, turning to scan all directions, above and below in the stairwell.
Before we reached the downstairs level where Vanderman was being kept, a noise began to echo. The crunch of something metal breaking, the scuffle of a fight. Of a body smacking against tile. Then more quiet.
“Hoo, boy,” I muttered.
Slowly, I opened the metal door and emerged into the corridor.
Tyler stepped in front of me—taking point, the term was. He and Ben kept me between them, a protective shield, which was sweet, but made me growly because I couldn’t see past them very well.
“I don’t need bodyguards,” I said, stepping away from them to get some breathing room.
A tangy-sweet smell cut sharply through the chilled air, stabbing from my nose to my brain, and lingering on the back of my tongue as a familiar taste. More blood, freshly spilled. The second time in ten minutes—we were too late.
Part of me wanted to leave—this was army business. Not our territory, not our fight. But it was—I’d promised to protect Walters, and he’d seriously overstepped his bounds. That meant he was also my responsibility. I should have stopped him, I should have stopped this.
Ben and I stood back to back, a natural defensive posture, as we scanned the area, looking for the body. Or bodies. Tyler ranged a couple of yards ahead, glancing down the hallway and back at us—scanning for danger, and looking to us for cues about what to do next.
The smell came from an intersection ahead. I approached it slowly, breathing deeply and listening, and turned right to follow the scent of blood.
We found the body a few feet in, hidden around the corner. In a white uniform, he might have been a nurse or an orderly. His blood streaked across the linoleum floor. I knelt beside him, started to turn him over, and got as far as seeing his ruined neck and face before letting him be. The muscles on my back twitched, Wolf growing in my awareness, listening for enemies, waiting for an attack. This time, I smelled both Walters and Vanderman among the blood.
“I assume that’s Vanderman,” Ben said. “Walters got him out.” He looked in the opposite direction I did, and his breathing quickened. The two rogues could be anywhere now.
“I’m assuming,” I said.
“I could have stopped this,” Tyler said. “I should have kept better track of Walters. I should have made sure none of us got out. We shouldn’t have—”
“Stop it,” I said. He lowered his gaze. But I knew how he felt—I was the one who argued to let Walters out in the first place.
“Kitty,” Ben said, whispering. “Can you really talk them down?”
A couple of Special Forces–trained werewolves on the loose? I had to shake my head. I didn’t think I could, not with blood spilled. I remembered Vanderman in his cell, endlessly pacing, glaring out at me, murderous and unrepentant.
“We’ve got the gun,” Tyler said. “We can take them.” He sounded bitter, but determined.
That somehow didn’t make me feel any better.
“Come on,” I said, and retreated back around the corner from the direction Walters and Vanderman were likely to come at us. I hoped it gave us a more defensible position. It would at least give us some warning before the two werewolves launched an attack. “We need backup for this.”
The soldiers should have contacted Colonel Stafford, who would be here any minute now, but I wanted to make sure. Then I realized I didn’t have the first idea how to get ahold of Colonel Stafford. So I pulled out my cell phone and called Dr. Shumacher.
She answered before the phone had finished ringing. “Hello? Kitty?”
“Hi, Dr. Schumacher. I was wondering, could you give me Colonel Stafford’s phone number? I mean, if he even has a cell phone. Or if he has a secretary who has one. Or whatever.” My phone voice sounded like my radio voice, I realized—I came across far peppier than I was really feeling.
“Kitty, where are you, what’s happening, what’s going on?”
I hesitated a beat. “I expected Colonel Stafford would have called you the minute I showed up.”
“No, he didn’t,” she said, sounding frustrated. I couldn’t blame her for being put out. She probably thought she and Stafford were partners on equal footing. Stafford probably wasn’t thinking about her at all.
I sighed. “Fort Carson’s under lockdown. I managed to talk Stafford into letting us through because I thought I knew where to find Walters, and I was right.”
“He’s at the hospital,” Schumacher said. “He’s trying to release Vanderman.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He already has.”
“I should be there, I should have found a way there, this never should have happened.”
“Are you snowed in in Denver?”
“The news says it’s a storm of the century.”
“Hey, we usually get those every ten years or so,” I said. Ben was watching me, smirking—so I was still being too chipper. Tyler was braced like he was going to pounce on the first thing that came around the corner. He hadn’t drawn the gun yet. Maybe he wanted to do this with his bare claws. “Doctor, I need to get ahold of Stafford. I need to tell him what’s happening here.”
“I’ll call the colonel,” Shumacher said firmly, determined to be back in charge. I wanted to growl at her. That wasn’t what I asked, th
at wasn’t what I wanted to have happen.
“Doctor, how are you going to know what to tell him? You have no idea what’s going on here—”
“It’s my project. I’ll call him.” She hung up.
We were all going to die. I slammed my phone closed and shoved it back into my pocket. I didn’t want to think about what version of the story Shumacher was going to tell the colonel. He might just gas the place the place and call it a day.
“Someone needs to go outside and catch Stafford on the way in, tell him what’s happening,” I said.
Tyler said, “If we get to a land line we can call the front gate. They’ll be in radio contact.”
I smiled. “That’s so low tech it’s cool.”
“And in the meantime, we do what? Wait for our guys to stroll along and ask them to stop by for coffee?” Ben smelled twitchy, sweat breaking out despite the chill. He tapped his leg and looked like he was ready to start pacing.
“We have to keep them in the basement. We can’t let them get out.” We’d probably have to shoot them, which made me angry. And hopeless. I turned to Tyler. “Can you go tell Stafford that Walters is here and Vanderman’s out?”
“Kitty, you should just go upstairs and wait for him. You can explain it all when he gets here,” Ben said.
“I don’t think Stafford would even listen to me. He’ll listen to Tyler.”
“He won’t have a choice. Would you please just go upstairs?”
Ben wanted me out of here—he didn’t want me to face down Walters and Vanderman. We looked at each other, and I saw so many unspoken words. So much fierce protectiveness. I had a sudden urge to throw myself at him and wrap all my limbs around him. My hands itched from wanting to grab him.
“Ben, you should go,” Tyler said. “Stafford will listen to you.”
“Like hell. I’m not leaving Kitty here,” Ben said.
“Kitty has the best chance of talking them down,” he said. “And if she can’t talk them down, there’s me. So you have to go talk to Stafford.”
“I hate to say it, but we’re way past talking,” I said. It wasn’t just Vanderman who’d be up on murder charges now.
“You have to try,” Tyler said. “It can’t be too late.”
He wasn’t worried about Walters or Vanderman; he was worried about himself. He had to believe it was possible for them to come back from that dark place. Because then it would be possible for Tyler.
Ben said, “I’m not leaving you.”
I grabbed hold of his collar and pulled him to me. He cupped my face in his hands. Our kiss tasted hot and anxious after all the cold and stress of the day. It melted me, just a little. Enough to keep going until we cleaned up this mess.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, a statement made mostly on faith .
Ben nodded, but his frown wracked his whole face. “There’s got to be a phone in one of these offices. Shout if you hit trouble.”
“Hell, yeah,” I said.
Ben trotted back down the hallway and ducked into the first unlocked office. I almost yelled at him to close and lock the door behind him—but he did so without me having to tell him. Couldn’t have anyone sneaking up on him.
Tyler and I continued, toward Vanderman’s cell, looking for the rogues.
“Where else could they go?” I asked in a whisper.
“There’s the elevator.”
The elevator was at the other end of the hallway, around the next corner. “They wouldn’t take the elevator, would they?”
Werewolves on the edge of wild, on the hunt, would follow the trails of human scent. Their animal sides at the fore, they might not think of taking an elevator—the scent trail would be cut off. And even if they did think of it, they wouldn’t want to get trapped in a tiny steel box. At least, I wouldn’t.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If they know the stairs are cut off because we’re here—yeah, they might.”
“So we should go lock the elevator.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It all seems so futile.”
“Don’t say that. Remember, we’re here to save Walters.” We’re here to save you.
He shook his head. “Captain Gordon would have hated this. Hated what we’ve all turned into. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“I’m sure he was a very nice guy, but right now I’m royally pissed off at him.”
Tyler actually chuckled.
A crash rattled the hallway behind us, like a door breaking—I thought it was behind us, but these hallways looped back on each other, and with all the tile, they echoed. It might have come from the office where Ben had locked himself—or it might have come from around the next corner. Tyler and I were looking in opposite directions.
“That’s gotta be Van,” Tyler said.
“And Walters, right?” I said. “They wouldn’t have separated, would they?”
Or maybe they would. They were a wolf pack on the hunt—hunting us, the rival pack in their territory. They’d be moving to flank us.
“Go,” I said, and Tyler ran, back to where we’d left Ben.
So, either we’d split them up, or they’d split us up. We wouldn’t know which until it was all finished and we figured out who won. Except no one was going to win this thing.
Another crash sounded, and this time I was pretty sure it had come from the next hallway, where the elevator was. Maybe I could shut down the elevator. I stepped carefully, a Wolf creeping in this mad human forest—and smelled werewolves all around me, hunting, spilling blood. I had to listen, watch, smell, feel.
I turned the corner to find Vanderman throwing himself at a locked door. He was naked, as if he’d just woken up from shifting back from wolf and hadn’t bothered with clothing. He looked primal, his muscles flexing as he shouldered into the door, rattling it in its frame. Teeth bared, snarling, he grabbed the handle and wrestled with it, twisting, wrenching, looking for all the world like a dog with a chew toy.
The dead bolt cracked the frame; the door wrenched out of place. On the other side, two women screamed. Their footfalls pattered as they scrambled away from the door, and two sets of heartbeats raced. Vanderman doubled his efforts to break in.
“No!” I shouted and ran at him. I didn’t think about it. If I had, I would have run the other way. Of course, then he would have chased me. Wolves love nothing better than chasing after prey. This way maybe I had a fighting chance.
He jumped away from the door and faced me down. His eyes lit. Tendons and muscles stood out as he sprang at me with hands outstretched. Claws grew—he showed a sheen of fur. I scurried, trying to change direction midstride. Dodging didn’t help. He tackled me, smashing me against the floor shoulder first. It hurt.
Kicking, clawing, I tried to get out from under him. My breath came out in a whine. I had to get off my back or he would claw into my belly, rip into my throat. An arm free, I swiped at him, catching his face, ripping my nails across his cheek. I didn’t have claws yet. In a few more seconds, I would, like him.
He put his knee into my belly, pinning me. He was so damn heavy. But I didn’t stop struggling. Pain throbbed in my shoulder; I could feel ribs popping under his weight. Panic tightened my lungs.
“This is all your fault,” he growled into my face. His breath was foul, tainted with old meat. “You come into my territory, you steal my pack. I’ll murder you, I’ll—”
“Van, no!” Walters’s voice echoed. He appeared at the other end of the corridor, behind Vanderman. Also naked, glaring, wild—as much wolf as human. He might have been looking for Tyler, where the hallway turned back around to the elevators. And where was Tyler?
Walters continued, pleading. “She’s helping us, she’s on our side. I came to get you so she could help you, too.” The submissiveness of his posture was painful to watch. He was groveling, his back curled, his limbs bent, almost on all fours, only daring to take quick glances at Vanderman out of the corner of his eye. If he’d had a tail, it would have been between his legs and tight
against his belly. In another moment he’d be on the floor, his stomach to the ceiling.
When Vanderman faltered, I snarled and kicked, hitting his unprotected crotch. He took it with little more than a grunt. Raking claws down his sides, across his ribs, I got him to flinch. I rolled to my belly and pulled myself away—his knee went into my back. If I shifted, I could get out of this . . . I tried to steady my breathing, tried to keep it together. I heaved, growling, and rolled away. Jumping into a crouch, I turned to face them. Wolf stared out of my eyes.
Vanderman stared right back. Pure hate, pure challenge passed between us. It was okay, I could take it. Sure, he was big and scary. But the more I looked at him, the angrier I got. He’d ruined things for the rest of his squad. They’d all be alive now if he’d been able to keep it together. I could blame him for the whole terrible sequence of events, since Captain Gordon wasn’t around to blame.
I tried to talk him down, as I told Tyler I would. Even though breathing hurt. “Sergeant Vanderman. You need to get ahold of yourself. If you expect to get out of this alive, stand down. In a minute this place is going to be filled with soldiers carrying rifles with silver bullets. They will shoot you. Please.”
“Van, come on,” Walters continued, backing me. His body acted on its own to give every submissive signal it could, at once. He fell to the floor, exposing his neck and belly even more, putting himself as low as he possibly could. He was trying to get the sergeant to stop and listen, to feel some compassion for this pathetic creature. To evoke some of an alpha werewolf’s instincts to protect the weaker members of his pack. “I came back for you—like we all promised. We’re in this together. We’ll get out. We’ll get away from here. They can’t stop us.”
Vanderman wasn’t listening to anyone anymore. The skin on his face furrowed as his nose wrinkled; his grimacing lips showed all his teeth. The expression was lupine. He was a very angry wolf. He stepped toward me, head leading, arms bent. On my hands and knees, I stepped backward. I just had to hold out until Ben or Tyler got here.
Kitty Goes to War Page 18
