Quinn brought his fist down on the desk hard enough that a cup of pens spilled over and the surface cracked, the sound echoing like a gunshot in the lobby.
“Bullshit!” he snapped. “I’m tired of the runaround. This is my mother we’re talking about. You people have a lot of explaining to do, but you can’t keep me from seeing her. You’re going to take me to her—”
“Excuse me, sir,” a voice said from behind him.
Quinn spun to see a young, broad-chested security guard approaching. The guy unsnapped the holster on his hip and drew out a Taser gun.
“Please step away from the desk and put your hands behind your head.”
Quinn glared at him. “You must be joking. If you want to call the police, please do so. I’d like to speak with them myself. But I’m the wronged party here, kid, so you just stay where you are.”
“Sir, I’m not going to ask a second time,” the security guard said, coming toward him, ready for a fight, the Taser aimed at Quinn’s chest. He thrust the Taser forward, about to pull the trigger. Quinn snarled, grabbed his wrist, and slammed him against the wall, shaking the Taser from his hand.
“Anyone else want to try keeping me from my mother?” he growled.
The tick-tock of high heels echoed off the linoleum and Quinn glanced over to see a tall, shapely woman approaching. She had ginger hair and wore a well-tailored skirt and jacket combination with old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses.
“Not at all, Mr. Quinn,” she said. “I’m Dr. Sondra Delisle, the new director of resident services. I’m sorry for the delay and I understand your frustration. Your mother’s in our newly renovated dayroom with some of her friends. If you’d like to follow me, I’ll take you to her.”
“I thought she was in physical therapy,” Quinn said, glancing at the clerk.
Dr. Delisle smiled thinly. “The therapist is out today. I’m sorry, Mr. Quinn, have we given you some reason to distrust us?”
Quinn stared at her, heart pounding, teeth still gritted but feeling foolish. He released the security guard, happy he hadn’t broken the guy’s wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m usually in better control of my temper.”
“Not at all,” Dr. Delisle replied. “A man only has one mother. Come this way.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Quinn tried to give her his most charming smile but thought it must have come off as awkward. He shoved his hands into his pockets as if they were just as embarrassed by their actions as he was and accompanied her down a corridor, up a short set of steps, and then into another side corridor, where their footfalls echoed oddly off the walls. He frowned as he listened to their steps, surprised that he couldn’t hear the voices of the residents in the dayroom yet.
“How far is the dayroom?” he asked.
“Just at the end of the hall and through a set of doors. Wait till you see it. The residents have all sorts of games, computers for their own use, a separate reading room . . . and the upgrades continue. We’re putting in a new gym, specially tailored to the needs of our less able residents . . .”
Quinn inhaled, frowning deeply. He smelled something unpleasant. In a nursing home, that in itself was far from strange, but this was something else. A musk. A pheromonal scent he hadn’t expected to find here—true fear. Not the confusion of madness or the dark dread of illness and death, but something inching closer to terror.
As they reached the end of the hall, the double doors swung open. Quinn started to back away, but too late, as a man stepped through with a rifle aimed at him and pulled the trigger, firing three shots.
Quinn tried to throw himself out of the way, but the corridor left little room to move. He hit the wall and slid to the floor, twisting to look at the darts that stuck out of his side and leg.
Tranquilizers.
Quinn roared, lurching up at Dr. Delisle. “You bitch,” he slurred. “Where’s my mother?”
The man shot him with two more darts.
“You’ll see her soon,” Dr. Delisle said with a beatific smile, as blackness swam in at the edges of Quinn’s vision.
Then he was out.
He did not dream.
Heavily sedated, his muddled thoughts buried under a thick blanket of drugs, Quinn sensed consciousness somewhere above him, as if his mind were a deep lake and he had begun to drown. Again and again he swam toward the surface of the lake, toward the world and reality, toward the tangible thing that meant awake. Time after time his fingers broke the surface and more than once he managed to get a sip of the air of awareness before being dragged down again into the gray, muzzy depths of numb nothingness. In those moments when he strove to wake, he felt panic and desperation and—beneath all of it, at the very bottom of the lake of his muffled thoughts—rage.
How long had he been out when his eyes fluttered open?
Quinn didn’t know.
What he did know was hunger.
An IV drip hung by the bed, maybe keeping him sedated but also hydrated. He blinked and tried to move but his body felt as if it weighed twenty tons, and at the same time as if it weighed nothing and he might just float away.
“Hello, Mr. Quinn,” a voice said, gentle and soothing as a caress.
His head lolled to one side, barely in his control. Dr. Delisle stood over him, smiling and lovely, her ginger hair framing her face. Quinn tried to reach for her, intent on breaking her neck, but his wrists were bound and he heard the clank of metal restraints. Normally he could have broken free, but the drugs sapped his strength just as they sapped rational thought.
His vision swam and faded for a moment, but he took a deep breath and stared at Dr. Delisle, forcing himself to see her clearly.
“You have the prettiest eyes,” she said to him. “I’ve never seen that shade of purple before. But then, you’re not just anyone, are you, Mr. Quinn?”
“Mmffhh,” he said. All he could manage.
“I’ll bet you’re hungry. You must be. You’ve had a long couple of days.”
Quinn’s throat felt dry. His lips were chapped and he ached all over.
“My mother . . .” he managed to groan. “If . . . you . . .”
“Hush,” Dr. Delisle said, and her smile vanished. She stepped back from his bed. “Your mother is an uncooperative bitch, Mr. Quinn. She has been unwilling to give us what we wanted, but that’s all right. We knew that eventually you’d come to look in on her and we’d have a fresh opportunity.”
Darkness pulsed at the edges of his vision, exhaustion and hunger and the drugs all dragging at his thoughts. He shook his head to clear it and saw the three men who were in the room with them. Two were big guys with guns, one scarred and bearded with the air of a hunter, and the other neatly groomed and hollow-eyed, a soldier or mercenary. Quinn had met his share of hunters and mercenaries before. The third man wore a brown suit with a yellow shirt and a green tie with a diamond stickpin. He had silver hair and smelled like money.
“Enough,” said the man who smelled like money. “There’s no value to mystery here, Dr. Delisle. Can he understand me?”
The man had a slow drawl Quinn thought hailed from Alabama, but what did he know? He was doped to the gills.
“I’m not sure how much he’ll remember, but he’ll understand what you’re saying,” Dr. Delisle said.
“Kill you,” Quinn growled low in his chest.
“See?” Dr. Delisle observed, smiling. Pretty as a picture.
“Mr. Quinn,” the man said, “I’ll give it to you plainly. I represent a . . . consortium . . . of private military contractors who have been attempting to utilize the creatures referred to as ‘the two-natured’ for combat. Combat for hire, essentially.”
Quinn’s fingers opened and closed. He felt his skin bristle, felt his nails lengthen, and he snarled, thinking that he had begun to change. But when he ran his thick tongue o
ver his teeth, vision blurry, he realized that he had not changed at all. Perhaps his teeth were a bit sharper, but he was still human. He could not focus enough to will himself to shift.
Go to hell, he thought, and tried to say. It came out a groan.
“There were two ways to go about it,” the man went on. “We could recruit existing weres or try to create our own. Recruitment bore some fruit initially, werewolves and a handful of panthers, even two bears, but few of those who willingly signed on to our program had any prior military experience. Not good with authority outside their own packs.
“Creating our own two-natured has been more reliable in that we can draft volunteers from a pool of existing Special Forces military personnel, enlisting our recruited weres to bite the volunteers, passing on their nature. As you know, that process can be long and frustratingly unpredictable.”
“My mother,” Quinn managed, glaring at the man, thinking about the ways he might kill him if only he could clear his mind . . . and control his limbs.
He blinked, realizing that he had begun thinking a bit more clearly, that Dr. Delisle must have cut back on the sedatives feeding into his system. Quinn bared his teeth but purposefully did not focus on his visitor, this military contractor. He didn’t want the man to know that he had begun to regain his focus.
“It might take being bitten three times for an ordinary human to become two-natured, or it might take considerably more,” the man said with a thin, humorless smile. “But then, I don’t have to tell you that, do I, Mr. Quinn?”
The were population was hardly plentiful. Only the first child born of a coupling between two full-blooded shapeshifters would be two-natured and able to shift at will. Any further offspring would be human, with maybe a little enhancement. One could become a shapeshifter by being bitten, but the bitten weres could not manage the full transformation from human to animal, only something in between, and could only change during the three nights of the full moon.
“Soldiers who’ve been bitten would be perfectly suitable for our needs,” the man went on, “if their ability to change form weren’t tied to the full moon. That’s a bit of a handicap, don’t you think? Yes, the bitten have their uses . . . but my employers are thinking more long term, planning for the next generation.”
The man bent over and peered into Quinn’s face. The smell of garlic and onions on his breath was wretched.
“In the meantime, though,” the man said, “we’ll have to make do.”
“I want to . . . see my mother,” he managed to rasp, his head lolling slightly. His heart thumped in his chest and he willed adrenaline to surge, anything to give him the power to kill this son of a bitch, but chemistry defeated him.
“And you will!” the man pronounced. “All we ask is for a bit of indulgence from you in the meantime.”
“You want me to . . .” Quinn began, blinking and shaking his head, forcing his lips to form words. “Want me to go to war for you? Not a . . . not a chance.”
Dr. Delisle tutted and came nearer to the bed. “We’ve done a thorough background on you, Mr. Quinn. We know you’d never be a willing recruit. But you’re a weretiger, sir. You and your mother are the only weretigers we’ve encountered.”
“You see,” the garlic-breathed man said, “a small squad of soldiers who could transform themselves into tiger-men—even if only one night a month—would be invaluable to a mercenary force. Our clients would pay millions for the efficiency a kill team like that would achieve.”
Dr. Delisle sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on Quinn’s leg, as gentle as a lover, but her smile might as well have been carved from ice.
“We have the trained mercenary volunteers, Mr. Quinn,” she said. “All you have to do is bite them.”
Quinn felt a terrible, dawning horror. “Where . . . where is my mother?”
The man gave him a lopsided smile. “Ah, the lovely Mrs. Quinn. You’re wondering why we didn’t just get her to do the job for us. The mad old thing’s crazy, after all, so you’d think she’d be snapping away at every orderly, never mind people we’d actually want her to bite. She had a history of nipping at the staff at her last residence, so you’d assume, wouldn’t you?”
His smile turned to a sneer. “But no. She flatly refused. No matter what we did to her.”
Quinn roared, straining against his bonds, and the man jerked back a step. Dr. Delisle stayed where she had seated herself, stroking his leg.
“What did you—?”
“She’d already lost many of her teeth,” the man said. “It shocked us all when she smashed the ceramic edge off her bathroom sink and used it to break the rest. Just to thwart us. She’s mentally unstable, your mother . . . but she’s still got enough of her wits about her to be quite the bitch when she—”
Quinn roared again. This time he could feel his teeth elongating and the familiar ripple on his skin as fur began to sprout.
Dr. Delisle jumped from the bed. “Let me adjust that,” she said nervously, rushing toward the IV.
“Not yet!” the man snapped. He crossed to the door, opened it, and stuck his head out. “Bring her in!”
Heart full of fear and worry for his mother, who had already endured so much cruelty in her life, Quinn strained at his bonds, trying to see out into the corridor.
The man leaned over and whispered into his ear.
“She’s no good to us now, you understand,” the man said. “Except as leverage.”
Quinn heard his mother yelp in the hallway, then heard her roar, crying out without words. Savage and desperate. The door banged open fully and three men dragged the tigress in, each using a control pole that ended with a noose around her neck. The fur of her muzzle was matted with blood and her shoulder had an open gash. They surrounded her, forcing her through the door and into the room.
“Let her go!” Quinn cried.
When the tiger heard his voice she swung her big head around and stared at him, just for a moment giving up her fight against her keepers. All the breath seemed to go out of her and she changed before his eyes, slowly and painfully, bones shifting and fur withdrawing . . . and then she was just his mom, covering her naked body with her arms as the three men glared at her, using the control poles to make certain she couldn’t attack them.
“Baby boy,” she breathed.
Quinn slumped against the bed, no longer struggling against his restraints. An abyss of despair opened up within him. He turned toward the man, tongue still thick, thoughts still blurred. I’m going to kill you, he thought. But those weren’t the words that came out of his mouth.
Instead, what he said was, “Tell me . . . what you want me to do.”
The next time he woke, he was in chains. Better safe than sorry, they told him. The man with the garlic breath had a name, as it turned out—Bartholomew Teague—but Quinn saw him only rarely. Teague and Dr. Delisle kept him drugged despite his acquiescence, and the days blurred into nights. Doctors came and went, some with their faces hidden behind masks. They took blood and tissue samples. Orderlies brought him food, gave his chains just enough drag so that he could feed himself, and changed his bedpan. On the first day, when a nurse woke him by roughly inserting a catheter, he clawed her arm purely by accident. He didn’t see that nurse again.
There were five volunteers—four men and a woman, each of them dead-eyed, stone-faced soldiers whom Quinn wanted to hate. Instead, he marveled at their courage. To put out their arms or bare their shoulders and willingly allow him—half man and half tiger in those moments—to bite into their flesh, knowing that he could have shifted further and snapped his jaws shut, taking the limb or the shoulder completely off . . . that was impressive. Not that he respected them. Those four men and that one woman knew that he was a captive, that whatever he did was done under duress, but they cared nothing for the distinction. He admired their courage and wished them dead, all at the same time.
<
br /> For his mother’s sake, he would not harm them any more than Teague wanted them harmed.
Almost constantly, Quinn pondered the question of how long it would take before his half sister, Frannie, or his girlfriend, Tijgerin, would wonder why they had not heard from him. Frannie had started a new and busy life with her husband in New Mexico and Tij was in seclusion, as was the custom of weretiger women when they had recently given birth. Tij intended to raise their son in secrecy, and though it hurt his heart not to see his child, Quinn had acceded to Tijgerin’s wishes out of love for her and for the sake of the baby.
His clients would have noticed his absence fairly quickly, but when he did not return their calls or appear for events, they would be more likely to contact the parent company of Extreme(ly Elegant) Events than the police.
A prisoner, he slept. Sometimes the supply of drugs they were feeding him would run thin and his thoughts would crystallize enough for him to put his will into devising an escape, but he could not conceive of one that did not leave either himself or his mother—or both of them—dead.
So Quinn obeyed. It killed him to do it, made him strain against his bonds and roar at the ceiling in the middle of the night, but he obeyed. The drugs made it seem almost acceptable, blunted the edges of his hatred enough that submission began to seem a strategy instead of a defeat. Other times he screamed his throat raw demanding to see his mother, but they would never bring her back to visit him.
He bit the soldiers on Teague’s command and they bled, and then he ate and he slept, trying not to wonder where they would be sent when his bites transformed them. Whom they might kill, these children of his violation.
The irony was not lost on him. It sickened him. Once, many years before, his mother had been raped by a group of men and she had lost her mind. His mom had never been the same again. Now dementia had crept in to add insult to that injury, and a new group of tormentors had torn down all the reassurances she had built up over the years to persuade herself that those terrible men were not still out there, waiting for her.
Dead But Not Forgotten Page 5
