by Nene Adams
Unhooking the cuffs one-handed, she heard the click of Lunella’s claws on the concrete floor. The wolf had drawn closer.
Dempsey obeyed her order, his hands drifting upward in a gesture of surrender.
Okay, this is going to be a piece of cake, she thought, holstering her revolver and reaching for Dempsey’s wrist. She needed both hands to secure the suspect.
Without warning, Dempsey dived for the shotgun, snatching it up by the stock, turning and firing almost in a single motion.
Annalee realized she wasn’t hit and fumbled her .38 out of the holster, internally chiding herself for not taking more precautions. She got off a single shot, winging Dempsey in the upper arm.
He dropped the shotgun and ran, headed toward the back of the laboratory.
She was about to pursue him when she heard a low moan.
Lunella had been caught by the shotgun blast.
Chapter Five
It felt as if someone had pulled the plug on her anger, sending it whirling away to be replaced by a profound fear that left a coppery taste in her mouth.
Annalee cursed and fell to her knees beside the stricken wolf. “Oh, shit, honey, what’s he done to you?”
She remembered Ezra in agony from silver poisoning, the writhing lumps in his body, the foul-smelling pus. She had to repress a shudder. Dempsey was getting away—the sumbitch had obviously considered Lunella more dangerous than an armed law enforcement officer, considering he had had a choice of targets—but she remained where she was.
Lunella shivered, her forepaws scrabbling futilely as Annalee performed a quick examination. Dempsey had fired at an oblique angle, thank God. If Lunella had taken the full brunt of the blast in the head at close range, she would probably be dead.
She found a half-dozen or so buckshot pellets were embedded in the wolf’s sharp muzzle, a couple of bleeding nicks in one of the upstanding ears, and a deep graze perilously close to an almond-shaped eye burning gold. She knew Lunella must be in serious pain, so she kept her movements deliberate, not sure if Lunella might forget herself and snap.
“All right, let’s see what we can do here,” she murmured, retrieving a folding knife from her pants pocket. Lunella’s answering yelp was shrill. “Calm down, I’m going to have to dig the pellets out before…hey, can you change? You know, back to human?”
Lunella struggled to get up. Heedless of the danger of being bitten, Annalee dropped the knife and flung an arm around the wolf’s furry neck. “Honey, you got to stay still!”
Lunella wriggled, panting harshly. Her breath hit the side of Annalee’s face. It smelled unexpectedly sweet, like Coca-Cola and vanilla extract.
Annalee tried to hang on to the squirming wolf, getting a mouthful of fur for her trouble. Suddenly, Lunella twisted in her arms and broke free. Halfway to the cage that contained Bear, she collapsed, whining softly.
Annalee’s knees were bruised and aching. Getting up, she went over to Lunella and squatted, ignoring further protests from her abused joints. “Listen, I need to take care of those silver pellets,” she said. “They’re poisoning you. Hold on and let me—” She squeaked when Lunella took hold of her calf, the sharp-toothed jaws closing carefully, but firmly. “Uh, honey, you want to…” Not bite my leg off was what she almost said but thought better of it. “I can’t do anything for you like this,” she said. “Let go.”
Lunella braced her paws on the floor and pulled her head back, very nearly knocking Annalee on her ass.
The huge, razor-sharp canines pierced the cloth of her uniform trousers. She felt the fangs pressing into her flesh but not breaking the skin. Not yet. She repressed the instinct to pull away, knowing she might be badly injured if she did. She stayed perfectly still and said in as calm a tone as she could muster, “Honey, you need to let me go so I can help you.”
Instead, Lunella pulled again.
Annalee inhaled. Not good.
Lunella growled, sounding frustrated and irritated, out of patience.
Annalee put a hand on the wolf’s muzzle, feeling the swelling, the poisoned heat. Lunella’s nose was hot and dry, as if she was feverish.
At last, Lunella released her grip, only to roll over on her belly and attempt to crawl to Bear’s cage.
“You want to be there so bad, let me help, goddamn it.” Annalee rolled to her feet, bent, and grabbed Lunella just above the forepaws. Putting some power into it, she dragged the wolf across the floor, trying to be as gentle as possible while hauling a not inconsiderable weight. Her back muscles screamed with the effort. “Damn, girl, you’re solid,” she muttered.
Lunella’s grumbling little growl seemed like the wolfish equivalent of “fuck you,” so Annalee smiled, kept her mouth shut and heaved until Lunella lay in front of Bear’s cage. As soon as she was in range, Lunella snapped at the IV line.
“Quit that! He might need—oh, wait a second.” Annalee realized the IV had been set up to drain Bear’s blood, not to replace it.
The bag was about three-quarters full now. She stuck her hand through the bars, peeled the tape off Bear’s shaved foreleg and managed to remove the large bore needle. She had no idea how to reverse the flow or if it would even be safe to do so, considering the risk of air embolism. Bear slept on, unmoved and unmoving, apparently drugged unconscious. She turned back to Lunella. “Are you going to let me get those pellets out now?”
Lunella closed her eyes and relaxed, except for a very slight quiver in her pale ruff.
Annalee retrieved her knife. Taking a deep breath, she knelt next to Lunella’s head—Christ, her knees! The concrete was killing her knees!—and after wiping the blade on her pants and wishing she had antiseptic, she used the point to dig out the first pellet.
Lunella held still, letting out a long rusty whine through her nose. A mixture of blood and dirty yellow pus ran freely down her muzzle.
Annalee continued digging at the silver pellets lodged beneath the wolf’s skin, working as quickly as she dared. At least there were no grotesquely writhing lumps to distract her, just the slipperiness of blood on her fingers and the rusted iron smell of it mingled with the stink of her own fear, acrid and thick. Every soft, pained sound Lunella made struck her to the heart. Finally, the last pellet popped free. She threw it into the corner and mopped at her sweaty face with her shirtsleeve. “Honey, I think they’re all out. You hear me?” She patted the broad skull. The fur was spiked and sticky with drying blood.
Like an answer to her prayers, the wolf’s form shimmered, elongating and thinning to mist. An after-image hung in the air for a second, resolving into a naked female figure prone on the floor. Lunella lay panting, several scabbed wounds marring her face, but she was the most beautiful woman in the world as far as Annalee was concerned.
“Bear,” Lunella whispered, reaching out a hand to touch the caged wolf’s paw.
“We’re going to break him out, I promise,” Annalee said. “Can you stand up?”
Lunella’s skin was slick with sweat. Tendrils of hair were stuck to her face, which was tinged slightly green with bruised-looking pouches under her eyes. Nevertheless, she heaved herself to her feet with Annalee’s help.
Annalee stretched, trying to relax her knotted muscles.
Lunella tugged on the cage door, but it was fastened with a padlock. Bear didn’t stir. Lunella pulled harder, her teeth set in a snarl.
“Hang on! Hang on!” Annalee cried out, grabbing Lunella’s arm. Her grip slipped and she nearly fell. She yanked herself upright. Pain flared across her ribs, the familiar hurt of muscles stretched beyond their limits. She managed a backward step and forced down the heartfelt desire to curl up in the corner and cry like a little girl. “Look, we need the key or a crowbar or a bolt cutter. Lunella! Focus.” She tried not to betray how much her side hurt, like a lick of hot lightning wrapped around her ribcage. “Key, crowbar, bolt cutter. Yeah?”
Lunella heaved a sigh. “Key, crowbar, bolt cutter. Got it.” She glanced at her and frowned. “Sit down before you
fall down.”
“I’m good to go.”
“No, you’re not. I can tell you’re in pain.” Lunella took her arm, guided her across the laboratory and gently pushed her into a chair. “Stay put.”
How sad it is, Annalee thought, watching Lunella putter around, searching inside drawers and cabinets, that I’m too hurt and too tired to appreciate a naked woman right now, especially when she bends over like that. Hubba frikkin’ hubba.
About five minutes later, Lunella located bolt cutters, which she used to snip the padlock off the cage door. Bear remained unconscious, even when Lunella shook him. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to walk out of there.
Annalee’s knees gave an almighty twinge at the thought of hauling his heavy carcass up the ladder. Wait a second. Dempsey hadn’t run off in the direction of the corridor and the steps to the storage barn. He had gone the opposite way. Either he was lurking in the lab, which she found preposterous, or there was a second exit. She went to check while Lunella remained crouched beside Bear, crooning to him.
Annalee found an elevator and would have done a dance of joy if the pulled muscles in her side had allowed it. She backtracked as swiftly as she could, eager to tell Lunella the good news. She quickened her steps when the muffled sound of weeping came to her.
Lunella lay stretched out on the floor, her upper body wedged into the cage with Bear. Her face was buried in her brother’s fur and she was crying.
“What’s wrong?” Annalee asked, suppressing panic. “C’mon, talk to me.”
“He’s dying.” Clutching handfuls of Bear’s wheat-blond coat, Lunella turned her head to show a face slicked with tears. “He’s dying and I can’t help him.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“He’d have to change. That’s the only way.” Lunella scooted out of the cage, her bare ass wriggling in a way that would have been enticing had matters not been so dire. She dashed more tears away with the back of her hand. “When we change, it’s kind of like a do-over. I don’t know why, that’s just the way of things. We don’t heal at once,” she indicated the scabbed wounds on her face, “but we do heal a lot, real quick. Faster ’n humans. Not with silver inside, though. It’s poison. Keeps us the same shape till it’s removed. Bear ain’t changed to skin in years, and he’s lost too much blood. I can’t reach him.”
Annalee noticed Bear’s eyes were slightly open. “Can he hear you?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe, maybe not.”
“Talk to him, honey. Do your best.” Annalee spared a thought to jogging back to the cruiser and calling for an emergency veterinarian to be dispatched to the location. When she mentioned the idea to Lunella, she got an emphatic refusal.
“We have to get him out of here,” Lunella insisted. “We have to get him home. He don’t have much time. Maybe Aunt Rachael can do something.”
“Okay, that’s not going to be a picnic, but I think we can manage. There’s an elevator to the top.” Annalee paused, thinking. “We’ll have to rig a travois and drag him out, ’cause I’m pretty sure neither of us can carry him for very long.”
Lunella nodded, looking grim and sad and about a half step closer to putting her fist through a wall. “If nothing else, he’ll die free, not caged like an animal.”
“Hope for the best,” Annalee said, bending to plant a brief kiss on Lunella’s bare shoulder. “Ain’t nobody dyin’ tonight.”
She gathered the things they needed to jerry-rig a way of getting Bear to the surface. In her estimation, Dempsey had been staying in the laboratory instead of the church. She found empty fast-food wrappers and pizza boxes, a pile of dirty laundry and a cot with several blankets folded at the foot.
She brought the cot and blankets back to Lunella and spent a few minutes using the miniature sawblade on her knife to remove the cot’s back legs. Between them, she and Lunella managed to wrestle Bear onto the makeshift travois and strap him in with torn strips of blanket. Her side ached like a bastard, but she would be damned if she’d sit back and let Lunella do all the work.
Dragging the travois to the elevator wasn’t as easy as it sounded in her head. The thing didn’t corner well by any stretch of the imagination, and the rough stumps of the sawn-off legs sometimes snagged on a bump on the concrete floor. She was sweating heavily and in considerable pain from the strain.
When she and Lunella reached the elevator, she almost wept in relief, deliberately not thinking about the hard slog ahead and having to drag that goddamned travois over grass and earth and Hell’s half-acre when they got to the surface.
In the elevator headed up, up, up, Lunella shot Annalee a look from beneath lowered brows. “I told you I know you’re in pain,” she said. “What did you do?”
Feeling stubborn and pissed off that Dempsey had gotten away, Annalee shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied.
“I can smell it on you,” Lunella went on, still giving her the stink-eye.
Annalee straightened, stifling a gasp when her side cramped. “You can smell me?” she asked, horrified by the notion. She had put on deodorant after showering that morning, but… Hey, she thought with a touch of resentment, it’s been a strenuous day. So I’m not daisy-fresh anymore. Cut me some slack here.
“Yes,” Lunella huffed impatiently. “I can smell lots of things, even in skin. Like I can tell by your scent if you’re in pain, or if you’re happy, or if you’re excited. You know.”
A memory burst into the forefront of her mind—the first time she had visited the Skinner place, walking down the trail with Lunella, entertaining lustful thoughts while she watched the woman’s amazing denim-covered behind swaying back and forth in front of her, within touching distance. “So you can tell when I’m…ah…”
“Uh-huh.”
Annalee felt a blush heating her cheeks. “Oh.”
Lunella moved closer. “You’re my mate.” She reached up and touched a lock of hair that had come loose from Annalee’s braid. “I’m tuned to you. So, is it broken?”
“Huh?” Annalee wished she could stop the dumb-ass things coming out of her mouth.
“Your rib, is it broken?”
“No, just pulled a muscle.”
Lunella nodded. “Better let me haul the travois alone.”
“But you’re—”
“Fast healer, remember? The silver’s out and I’m feelin’ much better.”
The elevator coasted to a smooth stop with no alerting ting to tell them they’d reached their destination. Annalee’s pride didn’t let her enjoy feeling useless, but she had to admit Lunella was right. The woman was in much better shape than she was at the moment.
The doors slid open. The first thing Annalee saw was the muzzle of a gun.
The next couple of seconds passed in an adrenaline-fueled blur.
Annalee started to draw her .38. Training had her pivoting to present a smaller target even as her vision re-focused on the person behind the gun—male, red hair, green eyes, the black swirl of a Nineties tribal tattoo on his neck. The gun was a Beretta semi-automatic. Her mind supplied the facts: seventeen 9mm rounds in the clip, one in the chamber. Not as much stopping power as a .45, but deadly at close range.
Lunella’s snarl echoed off the elevator’s metal walls, clanging inside Annalee’s skull.
The red-haired man’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Several shots split the air, momentarily deafening her.
The gunman fell forward into the elevator, his Beretta clattering into a corner near her foot. She kicked the gun away from his outstretched hand and covered him with her sidearm. He lay face down in the boneless sprawl of unconsciousness or death. The elevator doors tried to close but bounced off his legs and rolled back.
Annalee’s body zinged with flight-or-fight energy. Impossible as it was, she felt as if her hair was standing on end in a porcupine bristle and her heart was lodged behind her tongue. She gripped her .38 and waited for the shooter to appear. The enemy of her enemy wasn’t necessari
ly her friend, especially in these uncertain times.
Noah Whitlock appeared, his expression grave and furious, the rims of his nostrils pinched white. “You couldn’t have called for back-up?” he complained. To Annalee’s momentary fascination, Noah’s eyes glinted gold in a manner that was becoming familiar.
Lunella shouldered past him, unconcerned about her nudity. Her skin was streaked with blood and sweat, patched with grit from the floor. The scabs on her face were crusty dry, looked disturbingly like pork rind scraps, and were already starting to flake off, revealing pink new skin beneath. “You seen anybody else out there?” she asked.
“Nope.” Noah holstered his weapon. “You okay?” he asked Annalee.
“Shit, Whitlock, your timing could be better, but not by much,” she replied, trying to catch her breath. She had never lost bowel control before, but she’d come close to hollering for fresh brown trousers. “Who is this red-headed asshole?”
“I spotted a black Hummer when I was coming into the property,” Noah said, bending to check the gunman’s pulse—a formality, she thought, since the man was clearly as dead as a department store dummy, unlikely to rise till Judgment Day.
Noah straightened. “There were two men inside the Hummer, driver and passenger. This guy was riding shotgun. Some other guy joined them—male, Caucasian, about six feet, average weight, gold-framed glasses, a limp. Consistent with our suspect Dempsey, but I followed the redhead here instead. Damned good thing I listened to my gut instead of following the car when it left.”
Lunella growled and pushed a shock of blonde hair off her forehead, a jerky movement eloquent with impatience. “They’re getting away,” she snapped. Her gaze was focused somewhere beyond the immediate area.
Annalee stepped out of the elevator. “I think our red-headed friend was sent to get rid of witnesses, maybe retrieve stuff from Dempsey’s lab. I heard Dempsey mumbling about a serum. Bet that’s what he gave Ruth Lassiter and Aiden Thompson.”
