by Julie Frost
She closed her eyes. “You gave the ex-Army Ranger with PTSD something that’ll make him hallucinate—when he has flashbacks enough as it is, and this is nearly the anniversary of when he got captured by insurgents? Seriously?”
“Wait, what? You’re kidding. Anniversary? Shit.” Alex scrubbed his face with his hand. “He had a flashback, I think, when he woke up from his surgery, but I didn’t tie it to the date on the Silver Star citation. Hell, I don’t even know what today’s date is; I have Megan for that stuff. But it’s not like we had a choice. Dammit.”
“What can we do?” Janni asked.
“Mike’ll be here in less than an hour. Anniversary? Really?”
“Really,” Janni confirmed. “He’s been a little erratic the last month or so, which is why my mom wrapped most of the cases and went to Australia. She wanted to give him a break.” She snorted. “We thought this one would be easy.”
“Could the timing of this suck worse?” Alex squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead, swearing under his breath. “I am so sorry. If you guys want to cut and run, I wouldn’t blame you at all.”
“That’d be a neat trick if we weren’t already hip-deep in it,” Janni said. “We’ll see it through.”
O O O
Megan’s nose twitched. Something about Ben was definitely off, and getting worse. She racked her brain for something she could say without outing herself. “I’ll be right back,” she mumbled, grabbing the phone on her way out and dialing Mike’s office at the lab rather than his cell.
As she’d hoped, the line was picked up by Mike’s assistant, Brandon Kincaid. “Brandon, Megan Graham. Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, Miss Graham. What’s up?”
“Has Mike been acting, I don’t know, strange, or anything, lately? What’s he been working on?”
“Just normal stuff. Why? Is something wrong?”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. It might be nothing.” It wasn’t nothing. “I guess I’ll ask him when he gets here. I just wanted a heads-up if it was something weird.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Graham, I don’t know of anything out of the ordinary.” She could almost hear him shrug over the line.
“All right. Thanks anyway.” She ended the call. “Dammit.” Whatever she smelled on Ben had the tang of the vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was.…
And then it hit her. “Shit.”
O O O
Brandon hung up the phone with shaking hands. Yeah, it was high time he bugged out, because he really didn’t want to be around when the whole thing went to hell. He debated calling Ostheim, decided he couldn’t be bothered, and started cleaning out his desk. With any luck, everyone would be too busy dealing with the fallout of this little uncontrolled experiment to wonder where he’d gone.
O O O
Mike stood on the porch, switching his medical bag back and forth from hand to hand, until Chambliss answered the bell.
“They’re down in the lab, sir,” the butler said.
“Thanks, I know the way,” he answered with a confidence he didn’t feel.
And when he saw Ben, any remaining confidence he had evaporated. This had gone beyond the realm of bad right into disastrous. Ben lay asleep or possibly unconscious on the bed, shivering and sweating, while Janni mopped his brow with a wet cloth. Nothing overt had manifested yet, but time wasn’t on his side.
“I need to get Ben sedated and back to my own lab as soon as possible,” Mike said. “He’s having a reaction to the nanotech. Maybe allergic.”
“He’s gotten much worse just since we called you,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. What’s going on, Mike?”
“No time to explain.” If he could just get Ben out of here—
Janni pushed her way into the conversation. “Why can’t you do whatever you need to do here? He doesn’t look like he should be moved. Doesn’t Alex have everything in this lab you have back at yours?”
“Well, yes, but—” Mike took another look at Ben. Janni was right. The situation was spiraling out of control. “We’ll need to restrain him, then.”
“What? Absolutely not,” Janni said. “That is the worst idea in the history of terrible ideas. If he wakes up tied to the bed, you will not believe—” She stopped and took a breath. “He lost his shit when I suggested that he tie me to the bed once. He’ll only wear a friggin’ seat belt if he’s having a really good day. I don’t even joke about that stuff with him.”
“And if we don’t tie him down, then he’s going to hurt himself or one of us.”
Alex hit the intercom. “Chambliss, could you bring my restraints down here please?”
Jarrett’s butler was unfazed. “The leather ones or the furry handcuffs, sir?”
“The leather ones with the sheepskin padding. Thanks. Fast as you can, if you don’t mind.”
“I didn’t need that mental image, Alex,” Janni said.
“Well, you started it, so you’re stuck with it now.”
Chambliss came down carrying a bundle of buckles and straps and handed them off to Alex, who thanked him. The butler made a dignified retreat.
Janni looked close to tears as they eased her away. “Please don’t.”
“He’s … not going to be himself when he wakes up,” Mike said gently, as he and Alex worked to get Ben’s wrists and ankles fastened to the rails of the bed. “He’ll have no idea where he is or even who he is.” Or what he is, he didn’t say. He pulled a syringe and a bottle of sedative out of his bag.
“What’s really happening here, Reed?” Alex asked.
“Yes, Mike. Why don’t you tell us exactly what’s going on?” Megan walked into the room from somewhere, and she stopped right into Mike’s personal space and crossed her arms. “Do you know what you’re dealing with?”
Mike opened his mouth, closed it again, and tilted his head. “How do you?” Her eyes … “Oh! You—”
She cut him off. “Don’t. You don’t get to go there. You get to fix whatever it is you did to Ben, and then you get to have a long discussion with Mr. Jarrett about whatever this project was.”
He looked away. “I never intended this.” He put the needle in the vein in Ben’s arm, but before he could press the plunger, all hell broke loose.
Chapter Seven
Ben was engulfed in a nightmare. The experiences with the kidnappers and the insurgents had merged in his mind, and all of them were taking turns on him. Paralysis held him immobile, though nothing strapped him down, and this was more panic-inducing than physical restraints. People with fangs and talons moved in and out of his field of vision. Bones and muscles shifted under his skin.
Someone dressed in the fakest doctor outfit Ben had ever seen stood over him with a huge hypodermic right out of a horror movie, ohholyfuckno, not the heroin again, please. The fake doctor flicked the tube, squirted a bit toward the ceiling far, far overhead, and plunged it into Ben’s arm without so much as a swab of alcohol.
Just like that, the paralysis broke. Ben howled, brought his other arm up and around, and the man’s throat disappeared in a spray of blood.
When had he grown claws?
No time no time to think; he was surrounded and needed to get the fuck out, now—wait. He knew these people, but it was coming through a filter he couldn’t process.
He was awake.
His hand was still covered in blood. And he still had claws.
Trapped.
Something unbalanced that hand, something around his wrist, had he ripped the rail off the bed? Bones still shifting, they shouldn’t be doing that anymore because he was awake now dammit. People dove for cover, and they seemed to be doing a lot of that around him lately. Someone gurgled and thrashed on the floor.
He could smell, and hear, and see everything so, so, so sharply, too sharply, almost painfully sharply. He had to get out. No effort at all to break free from whatever had him tied to the bed. Bones still shifting, clothes slipping off and ripping
off, along with whatever had been around his wrists and ankles, and he stood on four legs on top of the covers.
He shook his fur out, leaped to the ground, and crashed through the French doors of the basement to the yard.
Had to get away.
O O O
Megan swore as Reed hit the floor, clutching his ruined throat. Her wolf was yanking on the leash, hard, with the blood that had just exploded across her shirt and the proximity of another wolf, and she wanted out, right now.
Megan didn’t think, she just went, chasing Ben through the shattered door into the daylight filtering down through the cloud cover while everyone else stood around in various states of shock. She thought she heard Alex call her name before she was out of earshot, but she ignored him, because here was yet another mess she had to clean up. At least this disaster wasn’t Alex’s fault. For once.
The wolf lent swiftness to her feet as she followed Ben’s scent up the hill into the scrub. She hid her clothes behind a handy bush before she Changed, and tracked him on four feet instead of two.
She found him under a bush, licking his bloody paw obsessively. The human part sympathized; she’d never killed other than deer and rabbits, things like that, for food, but he was startled when he saw her and leaped up to run again.
She wuffed at him, and he stopped, but only for a second before he took off. This was getting old, and she growled. Caught him after a couple of strides, tackled him, rolled over and over in the wet scrub. Careful not to bite him for real because they might still be able to reverse this.
He was still in panic mode, however. He tore her shoulder open before she pinned him to the ground with her jaws around his throat, on his back. His tail came up to cover his belly, and he closed his eyes. She shook him a little, he whimpered, and she decided to let him up. Watched for a minute to make sure he wouldn’t run away again, but he lay there, panting and submissive. Good boy.
She Changed back to human, because she needed to talk to him and wolf language was inadequate to the task. “Ben. Look at me.”
He stole a glance before closing his eyes again, his tail tightening. She rolled her eyes. “Is it the naked thing? Get used to it.” She’d never seen herself or another werewolf, not in wolf form, and good grief, he was beautiful. Ben was … a smaller wolf than she was. About half her size—in fact, pretty much the same size he was as a human, and she wondered at it briefly. His luxuriant blond fur matched his hair, and she dug her fingers into his ruff and scratched his skin. “It’s scary, I know, okay? But you need to get control of this thing, Ben. You can’t lose yourself in the wolf, tempting as it is.”
He whined and waved the paw that had killed Mike, and her lips tightened. “You didn’t do it on purpose, right?” He snorted a negation through his nose. “This would be easier if you’d Change. It kind of needs to be a two-way conversation.” He probably didn’t know how. Crap. “You have to push the wolf down and make the human come out. Concentrate.”
He took a few tries before he succeeded completely, but he managed it—and proceeded to have a panic attack right there, curled up on his side, arms over his head, hyperventilating and shaking with his eyes squeezed shut.
She put her hand on his shoulder, stroking him, trying to soothe him. “Breathe, Ben. It’s all right. Really. You’re going to be okay.” Inwardly, she berated herself for the blatant lie, but he needed to hear it, and the shakes eased after a while, although they didn’t completely go away.
He sat up and rested his forehead on his bent knees without opening his eyes. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he whispered hoarsely.
“It’s not easy. You have help. You have more help than I do.”
“Alex doesn’t know about you,” Ben said. “Am I right?”
“No one does, other than other werewolves. Except you, now.” She raked her nails through her hair. “You know, there’s a chance we can reverse this in you. My lycanthropy is mystical with a shot of biological. Yours seems to be a result of whatever the hell Mike gave you, so it might be technological. Give Alex a chance to poke it and see what he comes up with.”
“Like you have?”
Ouch. “It’s different for me. I’d been dealing with this for two years before I started working for Alex. Keeping it a secret had already become second nature.” She shook her head. “I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t figured it out, but Alex can be remarkably dense for someone who’s supposed to be a genius.”
“It’s a secret you keep from everyone, but here you are. Out here in the scrub with me.” He raised his head and lifted an eyebrow. “Naked.” He flinched and put his head back down. “And bleeding. I made you bleed.”
“It’s already closing up, and I wasn’t naked when I left. I stashed my clothes under a bush and then Changed out of eyeshot of the house. You learn to do that.” She huffed. “Well. I learned to do that. Seeing as your girlfriend already knows about this, you don’t have to be as … circumspect as I do.”
His shakes started in earnest again. “Janni was standing right there when I—the blood, it went everywhere, on her …”
“Breathe, Ben.”
One minute, two, six, and he pulled himself together. “Okay, I don’t know about you, but … clothes. I need clothes. I can’t do this like this.”
Megan eyed the scrubland that surrounded them. “Getting back to them will be easier in wolf form, so we’re not walking barefoot on rocks and stickers and who knows what. Can you do that?” He needed to do that, she thought, so he could learn to control it better. Practice made perfect.
“I don’t know.” His forehead was back on his knees. “I guess so.”
“I’ll go first. Watch.”
He turned his head, and she Changed for him. She’d never actually done it in front of anyone before, and was a little self-conscious about it, but he needed this, needed to know he wasn’t alone, and she felt responsible in some stupid way she couldn’t define but probably had to do with Alex somehow.
“Oh.” He reached his hand out and touched her back. “You’re pretty.”
She flattened her ears and waved her tail. If she looked anything like he did as a wolf, “pretty” was a given, but it was nice to hear.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. Nothing happened. “Shit. I don’t know how.”
She’d have to walk him through it, then. The wolf was getting almighty tired of getting pushed back, but she’d adopted Ben as pack even before this had happened. Megan Changed again. “The wolf is in there, right? He wants out?”
“Yeah.”
“You just have to let him. It’s okay. The less you fight it, the less it hurts.”
He closed his eyes, and she watched his inward struggle. Finally, he managed the Change, not smoothly, but with a minimum of prompting.
“Good. Now it’s my turn.” A second later she stood beside him on all fours, and he swiped his tongue across her healing shoulder by way of apology. She bumped him with her nose and led him back to the bush where she’d hidden her clothing.
He was better at Changing back this time. “It gets easier,” he said.
“Yeah.” She handed him her pajama bottoms and took charge of the underwear and oversized T-shirt. “Better?” she asked when they were as dressed as they could get.
“Much.” He sat on a rock and rested his head on his bent knees again, looking at her sideways. “What in the hell am I going to do?”
“Live your life? Do the Dance of Joy if Alex can manage to fix this? It’s not the end of the world.” Megan sat cross-legged and put her elbows on her knees. “I’ve been doing it for over seven years. You adjust.”
“If you haven’t noticed, I’m … not that well-adjusted to begin with.” Ben hid his face in his arms and hunched his scarred shoulders. His thumbs stroked the handcuff marks around his wrists, over and over. He looked incredibly lost and small and alone.
She tried to reassure him. “I know. Janni told me a little. But you’re not doing this by yourself, Ben. All rig
ht? You’re not. You have people who care about you, and it’s okay to lean on us.”
“Us?”
“Sometime when I wasn’t looking, my wolf decided that you and Janni are pack. So, yes. Us.” She glanced at the sky. “The full moon is in two nights, and I’ll be here with you. Although, this being what it is, I’m not sure it’ll even affect you the same way. You might be able to skate by without the forced Change.”
“How do you…? I mean, you work for Alex Jarrett. He just lets you go with no explanation during the full moon?”
“I told him a long time ago that I get horrible, painful periods and nothing helps but to go home and lie on the couch with a heating pad on my stomach and a cold rag on my head.” She laughed. “He’s male, so he doesn’t ask questions about stuff like that.”
“Ew, no. Crafty.”
“Like I said. You adjust.” She stroked his arm with the backs of her fingers. “Ben, you have to adjust.”
A moment of silence. “Do I?”
“Yes,” she said firmly.
He made a noncommittal noise. Anxiety knotted her stomach. “Are you ready to talk to the others yet? See if we can get this thing figured out?”
He rubbed his hair, leaving it sticking up all over. She could smell waves of stress hormones coming from him. “Do I have a choice?”
Giving him back a modicum of control was important. “We can wait. Take as long as you need.”
“Janni will be worried.”
“Janni will be fine.” Janni was probably sedated. “I’m worried. You’ve got a support system. You should use it.”
“Hate leeching from them all the time…”
Holy— Her wolf growled. Had she been this ridiculous when it had happened to her? “Ben.” And then she remembered that, yes. Yes, she had. And maybe she was still being ridiculous, because, really, what would Alex do if she told him? Fire her?
She forced herself to relax. “Look, I won’t say it’s okay, because it’s obviously not okay, it sucks beyond the telling of it, and I know that because I’ve been there. But I think you can handle it.”
