Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

  “Down here.” She led them down the stairs.

  Alex stopped short at the bottom. “This … is all kinds of disturbing. Reed, Reed, Reed, my man, what in the hell were you doing in your spare time?” He walked past cage after cage of rabbits. Most only held one, but a few had two, and several contained a mother and babies. Other rabbits in various stages of dissection were spread open on lab tables. The smell of formaldehyde and the coppery taint of blood overlaid the room like a particularly unpleasant blanket.

  Jeremy stayed at the foot of the stairs, arms crossed and gun drawn and ready.

  The shivery feeling on the back of Janni’s neck wouldn’t go away as she looked around the lab, and she rubbed her arms, although the room wasn’t cold. The rabbits’ eyes were entirely the wrong color, light amber instead of warm brown. Many of them lunged at Alex as he went past, but flinched away from the cage sides as if they were hot.

  They had fangs. Big ones. Their claws were ridiculously oversized. The food dishes contained raw meat, and the water bottles were filled with something Janni was sure was blood. Gross.

  Alex crouched down in front of one cage and put his finger up, just out of reach. The rabbit inside went practically insane, leaping and snapping, growling.

  “These cages are made of silver, Janni,” he said, moving down to a family of bunnies. They reacted the same way, the mother rabbit especially, but the babies, too. One of them burned his nose on the wire and backed up, sneezing and pawing at it.

  “And they’re breeding true.”

  “Holy hell.” Janni felt like her head wanted to explode. “Please tell me you would’ve fired him if you’d caught him doing this?”

  “So awfully fast.” He nodded firmly. “Let’s get this all packed up. And remember to keep them away from Ben.”

  O O O

  Ben stirred from a mercifully dreamless sleep when he heard a voice whispering in his ear. “Ben. Wake up.” Janni. She stroked his arm with the backs of her fingers like she did when things were …

  Normal.

  Except nothing was normal. He was dressed in someone else’s pajama pants in a billionaire’s basement laboratory. Said billionaire banged away on a computer keyboard, wearing a pair of torn jeans and a T-shirt that looked like he worked on cars in it. Megan—Ben’s alpha!—had changed into clothes that looked like they belonged to Alex, and tapped on a datapad, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Doc Allen had a manila file open on his lap, sitting in a chair leaned back at a dangerous angle with his feet propped on a shelf.

  Ben’s new reality crashed onto his head like a twelve-story building as the wolf made its presence felt. He flinched, and Janni squeezed his shoulder.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said.

  “It’s not okay.”

  “No, and that’s not what I said. But we’ve got Mike Reed’s computers now, and you need to work your magic so we can find out what he was doing.”

  Ben sat up, pulling the blanket around himself, staring straight ahead at nothing. The pain in his chest had nothing to do with being recently shot. “I have to leave.”

  “Leave?” Janni actually squeaked. “Leave and go where?”

  “Somewhere I won’t hurt you again.” He wrapped an arm around one of his legs and hunched inward, fisting his hand in his hair.

  “Oh, for—” She pushed him, not gently. “Ben. Look at me.” He glanced sideways without moving his head. “You’re not going to hurt me again.”

  “I might. And if I did—” He squeezed his eyes shut. “You don’t know what this, this thing is like. I barely have control. If I slipped for a second … I could kill you. Could kill everyone here.”

  “You won’t. Ben, your first impulse was to get away.” She hugged him, and he stiffened for a moment before leaning into her. Feeding off her strength, because he knew she needed to give it to him as much as he needed it from her. “You whacked me by accident when you took Mike out. And he was standing over you with a friggin’ syringe when you woke up from a nightmare. Plus, he’s the one who thought we should tie you to the bed in the first place, and who was also, might I remind you, responsible for the whole werewolf thing to begin with.”

  Janni was the only one, aside from a couple of military psychiatrists, who knew about the role syringes played in his flashbacks and why. Ben swallowed and took a deep breath as sweat slicked his palms at the memory. Needles and restraints, a combination guaranteed to cause a freak-out of massive proportions.

  Wrong place, wrong time, sorry, Reed.… He couldn’t smell Mike’s blood anymore and wondered, vaguely, what had happened to it. “That’s a pretty rationalization—”

  “It’s an objective assessment of what happened. Look at us now.” Her hand roamed through his hair, and the wolf whimpered. “Tell me that whatever is inside you really wants to hurt me. If it does, then fine. You can go with my blessing.” She kissed the top of his head. “But if it doesn’t, then you’re just being silly. Stop it.”

  Biting his lip, he delved inward. What did the wolf want, anyway?

  To his surprise, it didn’t want much right now. It seemed content to just lie in the background, alert for danger but feeling …

  Safe. He was safe here.

  And a huge part of that safety was Janni. Hell, she wasn’t his safety net, she was his safety hammock. The wolf knew it. She was pack, along with everyone else in the room. She, especially, was to be protected, and cherished, and loved.

  She was his mate.

  Ben let out a breath he didn’t even realize he’d been holding. “Oh. I am so very dumb.” He’d let B-movie clichés dictate what he thought, rather than his own experience and what Megan had been able to tell him. He scrubbed at his face with his knuckles. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “As long as you’ve come to your senses, I’ll forgive you.” She squeezed him. “Are you ready to do some work now?”

  “I guess so.” Work was good. Work let him forget for a while. “What’ve we got?”

  Ben stood up, dropped the blanket, and walked over to the workstation. “Huh,” Janni said behind him.

  “What?”

  “Your back is healed. Also, Megan’s pajama bottoms don’t fit too well, and the blue frogs just aren’t you.”

  “No? I’m kind of liking the frogs.”

  Alex looked up from a computer. “I’ve got some clothes that’ll probably work.” He pushed the intercom button. “Chambliss? Are you back from your … errand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Great. Could you bring down a pair of jeans and a T-shirt—” Megan whispered in his ear, and he continued. “And underwear? Thanks.”

  “Yes, Mr. Jarrett, very subtle.” Megan rolled her eyes.

  “My middle name,” he said, grinning. “Have a look at this while you wait on the clothes, Ben.”

  Ben wheeled an office chair over and sat in it backwards. Alex had a directory on one of the laptops up, and he tapped the screen with his pen. “Reed partitioned his drive and encrypted it somehow. Think you can break into it?”

  “Let’s find out.” Ben started tapping the keys.

  “Well, shit,” Doc Allen said, smoking a cigarette that no one quite had the guts to call him on. His feet thumped to the floor.

  “What?” Alex asked.

  “Okay, side effects notwithstanding, we’re damned lucky Reed showed up when he did. Because, yeah, sorry, Ben.” Allen shrugged and blew out a stream of smoke. “I still kind of think you would’ve died. The wound was ugly as hell and you were bleeding out.” He waved a sheet of paper around. “But Reed’s still not telling us what he used. It’s a code. LV-14.”

  “Gives us something concrete to look for anyway.” Alex pushed himself over to a table with a microscope set up on it and fiddled with the knobs before pushing a button that sent an image to his computer.

  He stared at it, blinking, for several seconds before he found his voice. “Oh, fuck me.”

  O O O

  Megan, Alex noticed,
was doing something on her datapad. Email triage, probably, but it didn’t stop her from snorting and saying, “In your dreams, Mr. Jarrett.”

  “I’ll take what I can get,” he snarked back automatically, enlarging the picture. It showed Ben’s DNA sequence. And instead of a normal double helix—

  He enlarged it again, because he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

  “Triple?” he muttered. “How…?” He rubbed his goatee. He and Janni hadn’t shown Reed’s demon rabbits to anyone else, but they would have to sooner or later. Probably sooner, if this DNA sequence was any indication. He hit another button and pulled up the structure for the nanotech.

  “Triple what?” Ben asked. Alex had forgotten that Ben’s hearing had become far more acute.

  “Triple helix. Apparently what Reed used added another strand to your DNA.”

  Ben lifted an eyebrow but didn’t react otherwise. Alex wondered just how much this had drained him, if the sudden information that he had extra genes was just one more thing in a long line of Awful Stuff and it had all become routine.

  “That can’t be good,” Ben said.

  Janni looked up at him from sketching something or other on a pad she’d appropriated from somewhere and rubbed his back. He leaned into her touch like a cat.

  “No. No, it’s not.” Alex put the specs on the nanotech in a window beside the picture of the DNA and scrubbed his hand through his hair. “This isn’t making sense. My head hurts.”

  Janni’s phone rang. She walked across the room to answer it, then returned a few minutes later with a bounce in her step, leaning over Ben and hugging him. “I just got a callback on that movie.”

  He turned and grinned up at her. “That’s great, honey. When?”

  “Tomorrow morning, at ten.” She stepped back and chewed on her knuckle. “And then I have a catering gig. Will you be all right?”

  Ben spun the chair to face the computer again. “I think I can manage to keep it together for a few hours.”

  Alex watched them out of the corner of his eye, and his brow creased at the utter lack of sarcasm in Ben’s tone. “You can stay here,” Alex said casually. “I need help with all this crap anyway. We’ll be working on it for days.”

  Behind Ben, Janni shot Alex a grateful look, which he pretended not to notice. Rubbing his face, Alex came to a decision. “Speaking of which. You guys should probably see what else Janni and I brought back from Reed’s house.” The rabbits were still in the panel truck, in the garage. “Because I need a blood sample, and I’ll probably want some help with that.”

  A few minutes later, Alex stood with Megan, Janni, and Doc Allen around the rear of the truck. They had firmly left Ben behind in the lab, because damned if Alex wanted to see were-Ben’s reaction to this particular load of bunnies. Chambliss had come down with the extra clothes, in any case.

  Alex wasn’t above a little theater, and he threw the doors to the panel truck open with a flourish. Megan stumbled backwards, fanning her face with her hand and coughing. Alex watched with some amusement. “Really, Miss Graham, the smell isn’t that bad.”

  “It’s … near my time of the month, Mr. Jarrett,” she said, still flapping her wrist. “Smells like that affect me a little more than usual when I’m getting this close.” Recovering somewhat, she turned and headed toward the lab. “If you need me for anything, you know where I am.”

  Doc Allen puffed hard on his cigarette. “What the hell are those?”

  “Near as I can tell, they’re rabbits infected with the same sort of nanotech that Mike injected Ben with. Only they’ve got something extra.” He scratched the back of his head. “And that’s why I need a blood sample.”

  “And how the hell do you propose to get one?” Allen eyed the snarling rabbits. “Because I’m not touching a thing that looks like that.”

  “Er. I guess we could … kill one.”

  “Yeah?” Allen crossed his arms and tongued his cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. “Go for it. I’ll watch.”

  “Janni? Little help?”

  “No way,” she said. “Finding the damned demon bunnies was horrible enough. You haven’t paid me enough to play with them.”

  “I can pay you more.…”

  “Alex, sweetie, there isn’t enough money on the planet for me to help you get one of those things out of its cage.”

  Fists on hips, Alex surveyed the truckload of rabbits. “I have some that are dead already,” he mused. “But I don’t know if he used the same tech on them as the live ones.” He made a decision. “Janni, go through his notes and see what you can find out about the bunnies. Doc—”

  He jumped up into the truck, opened a refrigeration unit, pulled out the dead rabbit labeled with the most recent date along with a vial of blood with the same info, and hopped back down. “Take this and get some samples microscope-ready for me. Centrifuge a few others. You know the drill.”

  “You’re the boss.” Allen took a drag on the cigarette, blew the smoke through his nose, and walked out, dangling the rabbit by its ears. Janni followed, muttering under her breath.

  And now Alex had to figure out how, exactly, he was going to kill one of these things.

  He pulled a cage holding a single rabbit out of the truck and set it on the floor while the beast inside snarled at him. The cage was made of silver, and he’d seen the one burn its nose on the bars, so that was a substance that obviously could do some damage. The classic method was a silver bullet. “Who am I to argue with the classics?”

  Of course, first he’d have to either make or find a silver bullet, because that wasn’t something he personally had just lying around. Maybe Reed—

  He rummaged around in a toolbox they’d packed into the truck, and in the third drawer from the bottom hit paydirt—a whole box of fifty silver 9mm rounds. He pushed the intercom button on the wall. “Miss Graham? Would you bring me the Beretta from the bedroom I sleep in, please?”

  A long pause. “Dare I ask why?”

  “Reed provided a method of killing the lycan-bunnies. But I need my gun.”

  He could almost hear her palm hit her face. “Please don’t tell me you have silver bullets down there.”

  “Okay, I won’t. But I still need that gun, because it’s the right caliber.” Silence on the other end. “Miss Graham?”

  “I’ll be right down.” He thought he heard her mumble something else, but it might have just been static on the intercom.

  True to her word, she came in a few minutes later carrying his Beretta in its leather case. When the rabbit saw her, it went crazy, throwing itself against the sides of the cage without regard for the fact that the smell of burned hair was filling the garage and it was injuring itself.

  And then, as if the day hadn’t been surreal enough already, it turned into a tiny little wolf with the same markings it had as a rabbit, black spots on white fur. Alex was equal parts horrified and interested, leaning forward and watching the thing as it raged.

  Megan, however, took an involuntary step backward. “Whoa.” She shoved the gun case at Alex. “I’ll just—yeah.” She jerked her thumb toward the lab and beat a hasty retreat.

  Alex removed the gun from its case, ejected the ten-round magazine and the round from the chamber, and replaced all eleven bullets with the silver ones from Reed’s box. The rabbit, meanwhile, calmed after Megan left, morphing back into bunny shape and huffing in the center of the cage.

  Alex opened the gun case back up to store the regular bullets and found a note he’d left himself last time he’d used the Beretta: “Hearing protection, dumbass.”

  Rolling his eyes, he nevertheless pulled out a pair of earplugs and put them in. He flicked the safety off and aimed straight down at the rabbit’s head between the top wires of the cage. “Thanks for your sacrifice to science,” he said, and fired.

  “Hell.” The creature didn’t die instantaneously like he expected it to. It leaped into the air, hit the roof of the cage, and actually screamed before t
urning back into a wolf.

  “Holy shit,” Alex breathed. After what seemed far too long but was really only a couple of seconds, it collapsed, panted twice, and expired, re-shifting back into what passed for its normal form.

  “Okay, that sucked.” But at least it was done, so he flicked the safety on again and stored the gun back in the case, along with the earplugs. Picking up the cage, he carried it to the lab, whistling nonchalantly to hide just exactly how disturbed he was by this whole business.

  O O O

  Ben tried not to react when Alex brought the dead rabbit in, but his muscles stiffened under Janni’s hand and he could feel the hairs on his arms stand straight up, like they had a mind of their own. He wondered if a time would come when Alex would have to put him down the same way he’d done the bunny. He hoped it’d be quick.

  He was still sitting backwards on the chair, and he rested his forehead on it for a moment.

  Janni stroked his shoulder blade. “They’ll figure it out,” she whispered.

  “Yeah.” Breathe, he reminded himself. Although with the scent of fresh rabbit blood now permeating the room, he wasn’t sure that was a good idea either. The last couple of years had been good for his self-control, but nothing had prepared him for, well, this. The rabbit Doc Allen was working on was bearable, because it had been dead for a while, but a fresh kill was a whole other ball game.

  “Do you—” The words came out in a choked gasp, and he took another few breaths before trying again. “Do you need me here, in this room, Alex? Because, seriously …”

  Alex shot him an alarmed look. “No, go on upstairs. I’ve wired the whole house with intercom for a reason.”

  Ben shoved himself out of the chair and stumbled up the stairs. Janni walked beside him with her arm around his waist. He collapsed onto the sofa in the living room, elbows on knees, fisting his hand in his hair. Remembering to breathe, which was much easier without the scent of blood in the air.