Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

  And what the hell was that scent? Laboriously, he rolled his head over and saw a woman in a real hospital bed next to him. She smelled … sick. And not quite human. Sort of dead, in fact. Probably, his brain figured out after far too much time, the vampire everyone was so worried about. A bag of blood hung from a hook above her, with a line leading down to a needle in her arm.

  Her eyes were closed, but she opened them, seeming to feel his gaze on her, and smiled. “Hello, young man. I’m feeling much stronger thanks to you.”

  He wanted to protest that he wasn’t that young, sometimes he felt a hundred years old, he’d been in a war, dammit. But it just wasn’t worth the effort. The wolf was anxious, prowling in the background, but he didn’t have the strength to let it come out, and the McFoucher woman would have choked him down anyway, if he’d tried.

  Speaking of McFoucher, she heard the vampire lady speak and came over to have a look at him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired.” Still at one-word sentences. “Thirsty.”

  “That’s normal. This will … all be over, in a very short while. Nick, a glass of water, please.” She accepted a glass from her assistant and held it for Ben while he sipped through the straw.

  His throat felt better enough, after he finished drinking, to try a full sentence. “When are you going to kill me?” They had to. He’d seen their faces, knew their names. He wasn’t getting out of this alive.

  What frightened him, and didn’t frighten him, was that he couldn’t bring himself to care all that much.

  Janni …

  Would be better off without the burden of putting him together every time he fell apart, the insidious, poisonous part of his mind said.

  He’d gotten her out. Kept her safe. Done his job.

  Dying was easy. Living was hard. And he was too bone-weary to fight anymore, as evidenced by the fact that he was thinking in clichés.

  McFoucher wouldn’t look at his face. “I’m sorry,” she said, fiddling with her stethoscope, eyes sliding away from his face. She was conflicted, he could tell, but in the end, she’d do her job, whatever Ostheim deemed it to be.

  “No you’re not.” He closed his eyes, tried to take the sting out of the accusation. Hell, who knew what kind of hold her boss had on her? “Not really. Just … tell Janni I loved her, okay? Can you do that for me?”

  “Jesus,” she muttered, but before she could say anything more, the whole atmosphere of the room electrified as Ostheim swept in and came to a stop between the vampire’s bed and Ben’s table.

  Ben’s breathing, already too shallow and too fast, sped up even more, and his wolf whimpered.

  “How are you feeling, my dear?” Ostheim said to the vampire lady, ignoring Ben for the moment, which was just how he liked it.

  “A bit better,” the woman said. “My appetite is back.”

  “We’ve given her three units of the subject’s blood,” McFoucher said. “I’d like to see how she progresses without further intervention.”

  Three units. No wonder Ben felt like a discarded rag doll, and he wondered if this was why all the fight was drained out of him. The nanotech couldn’t heal him without something to feed on, and no meals, he knew, would be forthcoming. As nauseated as he felt, he couldn’t hold anything down anyway.

  “What about this one?” Ostheim asked, and Ben could feel the man’s focus shift to him. His throat closed, and his claws came out—the wolf wanted to flee the room. Maybe the country. Breathe …

  “Well, sir, those three units have weakened him significantly.” McFoucher’s scent sharpened with anxiety, and Ben wondered what she was worried about. “He’s stopped resisting us, at least.”

  “Open your eyes, boy.”

  Unwillingly, the wolf cringing, Ben did so. The face that stared back at him was implacable and feral, and if Ben had a tail it would have been clamped between his legs. Ostheim was pissed at him, and he didn’t even know why. The man curled his lip, baring a fang. “So insignificant,” he said. “How you killed a professional like my nephew …”

  Oh. Oh shit. Ben flinched and closed his eyes again. Not that he was sorry, because hey, cattle prod, and the bastard had threatened Janni. Now he was doubly sure that he wasn’t going to survive this. However, saying “He got sloppy and underestimated me” would be counterproductive, and a sentence that long was out of the question anyway.

  “Sir?” McFoucher’s nervous voice said, and Ben had never been so grateful for an interruption in his life.

  “If Idna shows no improvement after three hours, then use your next protocol.”

  McFoucher swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Bring me a chair. I wish to sit by my wife for a while.”

  Ben was thankful when they set the chair on the other side of Idna’s bed rather than between the bed and the table. Being in the same room with Ostheim was unnerving enough; having him right there would have been torturous. More torturous. Shit. Tied to the table with a needle in his arm.

  He retracted his claws and reminded himself to breathe.

  O O O

  Megan punched the addresses of the likely locations she’d found into the GPS in her car and let it calculate the best route to take to hit them all that night. She had no idea what she’d do if Ben was at one of them, but she’d cross that bridge if and when she got to it.

  Four hours and five dry holes later, frustrated and angry, she pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store and banged her head on the steering wheel once before going in and buying a cup of bad midnight coffee. She knew she looked like hell, and the expression on the cashier’s face confirmed it, but the kid was polite enough not to remark out loud on it, and she made her escape with her dignity mostly intact. Looking for the next place.

  O O O

  Ben zoned in and out. Mostly out, out enough that he didn’t quite register when the climate in the room changed to something more purposeful and everyone’s tension ratcheted up a notch.

  The low-volume argument in the corner got his attention, though.

  “I’ve given you the time you asked for, plus some.” Ostheim’s voice was rough. “She hasn’t gotten better, and is in fact getting worse again, I can tell. Do it. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.” McFoucher sounded resigned. “Nick, let’s prep the subject, please.”

  The subject. Ben had figured out early on that she was referring to him when she used that phrase, but only when she had to do something to him she didn’t particularly like. He tensed as she flipped the blanket down to his waist with an unreadable expression.

  The bald, tattooed werewolf stood by the counter, stripping paper off something that turned out to be the hugest fucking needle Ben had ever seen, and it was heading for his chest. His eyes slammed closed, and he tried to burrow through the table to the floor, scrabbling for purchase, not finding it. The oxygen had vacated his lungs and left no forwarding address.

  McFoucher’s hand rested in his hair. “Breathe, Lockwood,” she said, and his eyes snapped open and his fangs snapped shut a quarter-inch from the arm she snatched back barely in time.

  “You don’t get to do that,” he snarled, and now he was breathing, breathing way too damn fast, the heart monitor was going insane and Ostheim was standing over him, the scent of infuriated alpha overwhelming and frightening not just Ben but his wolf as well. Ben froze, hyperventilating, for an instant, before trying desperately to get away again.

  “This is very very nice—whoever thought of it should get a raise,” Ostheim said, sliding the silver chain off the cloth and up under Ben’s jaw. Panic clawed his throat closed without needing the chain, but Ostheim pulled it tight anyway, and the smell of both his and Ben’s burning flesh filled the room, while Ostheim growled in his ear with lips pulled back from naked fangs.

  “Hans,” Idna said. “There is an easier way to do this.”

  “What if I don’t want to do it the easy way?”

  “Please, dear. For me.” Ostheim relented with ill grace, putting his te
eth back where they belonged, and the chain too, and stepping away.

  “Ben.” Idna’s quiet voice pulled his gaze toward her. “Ben, look at me.” Deep black pools, he was going to drown right there in her eyes. Her long red nails stroked gently up and down the inside of his forearm, and he couldn’t remember why he was afraid. He stilled, and his breathing evened out.

  “You’ll feel a couple of pokes.” McFoucher’s voice came from far away. Two needles slipped between his ribs, into his heart. They hurt, distantly, and a brief flash of an Afghani insurgent sliding a heroin-filled hypodermic into his arm was sublimated by Idna’s gaze dragging him back to the present.

  “I’m in,” Nick announced.

  “Here too,” said someone on the other side of Idna’s bed.

  All Ben could see were Idna’s dark, dark eyes. He could feel people doing things around him, smell the tension in the air, but he was powerless to look away from her face. Machinery hummed to life behind his head, and renewed panic made his breathing accelerate and his fingers clutch at the table, as his heart constricted and more blood he couldn’t afford to lose flowed through plastic lines from his body into hers.

  “Shhh,” Idna said. Her soothing voice and hypnotic eyes combined with the light stroking of her nails to settle him, and he relaxed—almost, but not quite, against his will—because it was good to just relax for once. He felt … mushy. And warm, for the first time since they’d taken Janni.

  They were pumping blood from her body into his as well, he realized. That probably wasn’t good; a vampire’s blood running through his veins was, in fact, all kinds of bad. But he couldn’t move, her eyes pinning him like a butterfly and the tranquility she radiated weighing him down.

  Even when the heart monitor stuttered and his breath caught, all he felt was a warm lassitude. He knew he was dying, knew it to the marrow of his bones, knew he should be fighting this. But her nails still caressed his arm, and he was going down, down, deep, so deep he’d never come up again. And that was all right, because he was calm, for the first time since Afghanistan, and he hadn’t realized what a state of strain he’d lived in, for years, until it disappeared, leaving him floating and serene, even as his heart struggled to beat and his lungs fought for their next breath.

  His eyes slid shut, and he exhaled softly. He didn’t inhale again.

  O O O

  Six more hours, three more cups of coffee, seven more places Ben wasn’t, and the sun was peeking over the horizon.

  Megan had been to more shady parts of the city than she ever wanted to visit again, from abandoned strip malls to empty apartment buildings to vacant warehouses, and she wanted to cry.

  Instead she drove back to her house to shower and start the day.

  O O O

  McFoucher shut the pump off and pulled the needles out of Lockwood’s chest and arm, trying to hide her shaking. Using the rabbits as living dialysis machines was one thing. Using a human being was quite another. Tight-lipped, she released the straps holding his body to the table, flipped the EKG leads off his chest, and pulled the blanket up over his face.

  “He was very brave,” Idna said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” McFoucher squared her shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m much better, thank you.” Idna smiled. How could she smile? “Time will tell if I’ve completely healed, but it feels … promising.”

  “That’s good.” McFoucher guessed. What time was it? She stared at her watch, wondered if it meant AM or PM, and decided that if she didn’t know, she should probably go home and go to bed.

  “You’ve done good work, Dr. McFoucher,” Ostheim said. “You can expect a fat bonus in your next paycheck. Thank you.” He gripped her hand, and she only stopped herself from pulling away and wiping it off on her lab coat with an act of titanic will. “Thank you for giving me my Idna back.”

  Idna hopped off the bed, and her husband squired her out the door without a backward glance for the still figure under the blanket. For someone who couldn’t walk just a few hours before, she was remarkably spry now. Vampire constitution coupled with werewolf nanotech, McFoucher supposed. Cure for what ailed you. All hail.

  Shit, she was tired. But she definitely hadn’t signed up for this. She told the techs to clean up and stumbled to her office to decompress.

  Before heading home, she typed up her resignation and emailed it to Ostheim.

  Tossing and turning in her bed later on, she knew there was one more email to send. With a sigh, she heaved herself up and turned the computer on. She set up an anonymous account through one of the free services, filtered the message through three or four other anonymizers, and fired it off.

  Her conscience quelled for the moment, she was able to sleep. Badly.

  O O O

  Alex rubbed his eyes and peered through the microscope yet again. He hadn’t slept at all; instead he’d stayed up looking for answers that remained stubbornly elusive. Janni lay on the battered couch with a laptop and a thousand-yard stare, hunting down more Ostheim properties.

  Megan sat at the desk doing email triage. Some board members were making noise again, and Alex told her to tell them that he was involved in a special project and couldn’t make a teleconference for at least a few more days. She opened the next one, and—

  Inhaled sharply. “No. Oh, no.”

  “What?” Alex asked. He looked up and caught her with her knuckle in her mouth, eyes wide in shock as she stared at her computer screen. “Megan?”

  “It’s …” Megan glanced at Janni and dropped her voice “probably nothing. Just startled me, is all. I mean, I don’t have any reason to believe this …”

  He walked to her desk and read the email over her shoulder. “Shit. Other than, well, that.” He tapped the screen.

  Whoever Janni is, he wanted her to know he loved her.

  “But they don’t say where he is.” Megan raked her fingers through her hair. She’d left it loose this morning, although her business suit was properly severe and she could probably kill a vampire with those stilettos.

  “Maybe they think it doesn’t matter, if—” Alex couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  Megan’s eyes flicked to Janni again. “We can’t tell her yet. Not without some kind of confirmation.”

  “We may never get confirmation.” Alex didn’t want to think of what Ostheim’s people would do with Ben’s body, but chances were they wouldn’t leave it anywhere it would ever be found.

  She crossed her arms in front of the keyboard and hid her face in the crook of her elbow. “I know.”

  He debated putting a hand on her shoulder. Screw it, he thought—she could shrug him off if she was offended by him crossing the employer/employee boundaries that he crossed on a regular basis anyway. She leaned into him, briefly, before leaping to her feet, sitting on the edge of the desk, and scrubbing at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She kept her voice low. “I just … I was responsible for him, you know? And this happened to him on my watch and I messed up somehow.”

  Alex tilted his head and frowned, because her sense of obligation for this whole massive screw-up seemed inflated. Yeah, she’d gone after Ben when he’d turned into a wolf, but that didn’t make it her deal. “If it’s anyone’s fault in this room, it’s mine. I’m the one who hired them to look into this industrial espionage thing. If I’d known it was Ostheim, I would never have gotten them involved.” He felt haunted. “It was monumentally stupid.”

  He’d had Harris, his spare driver, pick Phelps’s widow up the previous day and bring her over so he could talk to her in person. He hadn’t fortified himself with his scotch beforehand, and it had been … really, really difficult. Mrs. Phelps hadn’t screamed at him—had, in fact, been nice, which made it that much harder. He’d sat on the living room couch with his head in his hands, after, to give himself time to recover before slipping his mask back on so he could be the person everyone expected him to be Out There.

  Sometimes he hated being Alex Jarrett.

>   Megan’s jaw firmed. “Well, then, let’s put the blame squarely where it belongs, which is on Ostheim. So what are we going to do about it?”

  “Hah! Gotcha, you bastard,” Janni said triumphantly.

  Alex gave a guilty start. “What? What’d I do now?”

  “Not you, Alex. Ostheim.” She jabbed a finger at her computer. “I bet this is the place, right here.”

  “Why do you say that?” Megan asked.

  “He hid it under about seven layers of dummy accounts, but it’s in that warehouse district he seems to be so fond of, and the city’s got cams set up there. Look at all that activity, in the middle of the night when every other place is shut down.” Jerking her chin, she said, “And there’s the man himself, going in last night, and coming out right before sunrise this morning with his lovely wife.”

  “That’s pretty slick work, Janni,” Alex said.

  “Ben taught me some things. Let’s go rescue him so he can teach me some more.” She stood up and checked her gun, racking the slide back and making sure she had a round in the chamber. “You wanted to show me how good you are with weaponry, Alex? Let’s go.”

  “But—”

  “Most of them are gone right now, just a few cars in the lot. They won’t be expecting us. We’ll go in, do some recon, and get Ben out if he’s there.”

  “Okay, yes. But I think you should see this first.” He gestured at Megan’s laptop.

  “What?” Janni scanned the email, and her expression crumpled for a moment. “Oh.” She swallowed hard, blinking. Then her chin came up. “You know what? It doesn’t matter if it’s a rescue or a recovery. It needs to be done.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Alex picked up his Beretta from his desk, where he’d placed it after killing the last lycan-bunny, and slipped it into his waistband.

  “Alex?” Megan put her hand on his arm, and he stared at it, startled. “Be careful.”

  He gave her a jaunty grin he didn’t feel. “I’m always careful, Miss Graham.”

  O O O

  Megan sat at her computer with her eyes closed for a few minutes after they left. Alex hadn’t known the reason she’d hidden her face in her arm was because her wolf was too close to the surface for comfort, and she needed to hide from him. She’d taken several seconds to get her eyes back to the right color. Again.