He would need help to take back what had been stolen from him--his woman and his son.
* * * *
It took an effort to throw off the after effects of the sedative. Erin’s first awareness was of discomfort, minor aches that nevertheless discouraged her from coming fully awake. Memories began to intrude, however, making it impossible to seek oblivion again.
She opened her eyes slowly, staring up at the ceiling for many moments before she allowed her gaze to sweep the room she found herself in.
It could’ve been the same room she’d been imprisoned in for nearly a year. It had the same institutional look to it, clean, cold and impersonal.
The inevitable sense of loss swept over her as she became fully conscious, aware of the aching tightness of her breasts, and she placed a hand over her flat stomach. Joshua was gone. For weeks now she’d thought of little beyond finding him. She’d thought, or at least made herself hope, in the beginning that they were only running tests on the baby and they would bring him to her once they’d satisfied their curiosity.
When one week had dragged into another and then another, the hope had dwindled and the determination had grown in her to find her baby and take him back. She’d refused to allow herself even to think of the possibility that she might fail, struggling to pump her breasts the best she could to keep her milk in production so that she could feed her baby when she had him back.
She’d been so focused on escaping and rescuing Joshua, she’d blinded herself to the ease with which she’d finally won her freedom.
They’d let her go in hopes of recapturing Jesse--or another Lycan, anyway. It was possible they thought he was dead considering how many times he’d been shot while escaping.
And she’d led them right to him.
Before the full implications of that could set in, she pushed herself upright.
She saw she was wearing one of the ugly gray shifts they had provided her with since she’d been imprisoned. Once she’d studied the room thoroughly, she was certain she was in the same cell, not just another one that looked like the one she’d occupied for so long.
Looking back, she realized her naiveté was almost pathetically laughable. Even after they’d drugged her and used her to collect the specimens from Jesse, she had been screaming the house down when she’d been brought here and imprisoned, demanding her rights, threatening to sue, threatening to bring charges against them.
It wasn’t as if they didn’t know they were romping all over her rights as an American citizen. Jesse, whatever he was, had those same rights and that hadn’t deterred them one iota.
They were the government. She had no rights unless they gave them to her, unless they upheld them and they weren’t the least bit worried about consequences.
She’d been afraid when she’d first come to the conclusion that they didn’t care about her rights. That the reason they were so unconcerned was because they didn’t intend for her to live long enough to make waves. It had dawned upon her after a while that that wasn’t necessarily the case. She couldn’t prove any of the things that they’d done to her. Even if they finally decided to let her go, it was much more likely that she’d find herself institutionalized for paranoia than that anyone would actually listen to her.
The sense of impotence made her blood boil. She tamped it. Raging wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
Throwing her legs over the side of the cot, she got up and used the facilities, then washed her face, brushed her teeth to get rid of the horrible cotton mouth from being drugged, and combed her hair.
They were watching, she knew. They were always watching.
As if in answer to her thoughts, a panel in the door slid back and a tray scraped along the floor as one of the guards pushed food in to her. She turned at the sound, just in time to see the arm disappearing again. The panel slid shut.
She had little interest in the food, but she retrieved it anyway, taking a seat on the cot with the tray across her lap.
As she nibbled at the tasteless food, she considered her situation. They’d brought her back and they hadn’t given her her baby, so it had nothing to do with any anxiety about his health. She refused to consider that they might have no reason to be concerned about it because he was beyond the need for care. He was alive. She felt it in her soul and she didn’t believe that was only because she wanted it to be true. She felt certain that she would have sensed it if he was dead. Maybe she was lying to herself. Maybe that was something every mother believed deep down, that they’d just know because the link was so strong between them and their child, but she refused to consider that it was only hope.
And if she was right, then there was only one reason that she could think of that they’d brought her back. They expected to have use of her.
Either they meant to use her to breed another hybrid.
Or they meant to try using her as bait to catch another Lycan.
Possibly both.
Either way, they weren’t going to allow her to escape. They’d already tried that and failed to capture the Lycan they wanted. If that was the agenda, then they would try something that gave them more control next time.
Unwelcome, thoughts of Jesse crept into her mind.
Guilt had swamped her for a long time after she’d orchestrated his escape, because so many had been killed, but mostly because, by releasing him, she’d been his executioner. She wasn’t certain how she felt about the fact that he’d survived. Relief was part of it. That she needn’t shoulder the guilt of having a hand in his death, and the death of her child’s father.
Her feelings went beyond that, though.
In the first months after she’d been imprisoned, she’d had nothing but time and her thoughts. As reluctant as she’d been to relive that time, she hadn’t been able to help it and every time the memories had replayed, she’d discovered some nuance in his expression and the things he’d said and the way he’d behaved that she hadn’t noticed before.
She’d convinced herself she cared for him and mourned his loss. She was no longer certain that it was anything else beyond a need to convince herself that what she’d been through hadn’t been the clinical nightmare she’d thought, though. Maybe some, or even most, of it was true. Maybe not.
It didn’t really seem to matter now one way or the other. If she had guessed right and he had had feelings for her beyond lust, he hated her now and she doubted she could change that even if she wanted to.
That thought had no sooner crossed her mind than she realized she did want to. It didn’t really matter how she’d come to care for him, it seemed, whether she’d fallen for him by way of fantasy, or because of who and what he truly was. The bottom line was that she did care--enough that it hurt to think he hated her and the need filled her to try to make him understand that none of the things that had happened were things she’d done or even had any control over.
It seemed unlikely she would get the chance. The agency wasn’t through with either one of them. If they captured him again, particularly if they used her to do so, he would hate her all the more and she didn’t think it was likely that he would allow his desire for her to influence him in her favor.
She wasn’t even certain he desired her anymore for that matter. It seemed to her that he had been pretty damned good at teasing her and remaining aloof. In the end, he had given in--just long enough to discover her secret--and he probably hated her even more for that.
It was hopeless, she realized. If there had ever been a chance, there wasn’t one now.
Worse, she didn’t know how he might feel about Joshua. If he’d been human, there was probably at least a 60/40 chance in her favor that he wouldn’t give a damn about the baby one way or the other--certainly not enough to challenge her for the child. He wasn’t human, though. He was Lycan, and she had no idea how strong his parental instincts might be. If they were strong enough to goad him into going after his child, he would take Joshua and she would never see her baby again because he hated her, because she
was human and she knew that as much as he despised humans in general and her in particular it was very unlikely he’d allow her near his young.
If the worst case scenario was that Jesse would find Joshua and take him away from the agency, then she could rest easier with that than to think the agency had their hands on her baby.
What were the chances, though, that he could find Joshua when she hadn’t been able to? He hadn’t even been able to find her. If she’d understood what she’d heard correctly, he had had to rely on her returning to the lab.
God only knew where they’d taken Joshua, she thought, swallowing against the knot of misery that formed in her throat.
He could be in the same facility where she was, but she didn’t think so. She’d been transferred to the current facility after his birth. He was either still at the hospital where he’d been born or they’d taken him to a different facility altogether to prevent any chance that she could get near him.
When she’d finished eating, she got up and set the tray on the floor in front of the panel on the door. They hadn’t given her anything to eat with. She’d used the utensils before to destroy the cameras and tried to work the lock open. Since then, she’d gotten nothing she couldn’t eat with her hands.
She searched the room for the cameras anyway, squirting a good dollop of mustard on the lens of each--there were three, two in plain sight and the last ‘hidden’. She would’ve used the catsup except that she liked catsup. She wouldn’t be getting any more mustard.
It was a lame rebellion, but the only thing she could do at the moment. For now, she had a little privacy at least.
She moved back to the cot and settled on it, trying to jog her memory of her outward trip the day she’d escaped. Assuming she was in the same facility, she had to be on one of the lower levels, which meant underground. The walls were poured concrete. She wasn’t going to be able to dig out.
There was a dropped ceiling in the room, but she knew the metal was only strong enough to support the tiles, which meant they wouldn’t support her. The vent in the ceiling was no better. The opening was so small she doubted anything bigger than a rabbit could climb through the duct work.
That left the door, and unfortunately, electronics wasn’t her field. She might be able to beat the panel off of the lock, but she didn’t have a clue about changing the wiring to open the door. If she had time, she might manage it by trial and error, but she knew that if she disabled their ability to see what she was doing, she wouldn’t have much time before they came to check on her.
A sense of frustration and urgency washed over her. She had to figure out some way to escape and find Joshua.
* * * *
“Dis is an ant hill, mon ami. How we supposed to sneak in and grab the female? I count ten guards around the perimeter. I guarantee we stir dis ant hill, gonna be a lot more pourin’ out of the hill.”
Jesse glanced at Tavian. “Which is why I’ll need help. It’s gonna take a hell of a diversion to pull this off.”
Tavian exchanged a look with Billy Ray. “Dynomite? I doan mind rock’n roll, but there’s only three of us. Gonna take some big noise to create the distraction you talkin’ about,” Billy Ray muttered.
Jesse frowned but shook his head. “I need to have a look inside first.”
Tavian and Billy Ray exchanged another speaking glance. “How you gonna have a look in the ant hill without sneakin’ in? I ain’t seen no way in or out but the front door,” Tavian put in.
“There’s always a back way, mes ami,” Jesse said, smiling grimly. “No matter how secure, any place with people, ant hill or not, gotta have air, gotta have power, gotta have water supply and sewage. I found the air shaft. I’m goin’ in the back door, see if I can tie in to their computer system and have a look see. When we know what we can expect inside, you two gonna convince the pack to help with the diversion.”
Tavian looked troubled. “I doan know, Jesse. The pack is pissed about these doin’s, but it’s gonna take some fast talkin’ to convince them this is somethin’ we need to do.”
“Then you’ll have to make them understand that I ain’t the only one these bastards is after. They got it in mind to use the Lycan for some kind of war toy, make no mistake. They stole my seed to breed half-breeds. They ain’t gonna stop there. If this is where the research is being done, it’s a threat to the whole pack--and not just this pack. I ain’t just talkin’ about retrievin’ what’s mine. I’m talkin’ about protectin’ the brethren from the humans. This is ain’t just personal. It’s all out war.”
There was only one guard within sight of the mouth of the air shaft. Jesse studied him a while. It wouldn’t take much to take the guy out, but then they would know something was up and they’d beef up security at the very least. The place was already swarming with security. He didn’t want to make it any harder to crack the nut.
It took patience and three nights of watching to learn the pattern. The guy was shy, though. When he needed to take a piss, he went off into the trees. The fourth night, Jesse waited until he disappeared and bounded across the short distance to get a closer look at the shaft.
The cover, not surprisingly, was locked down, but the lock was a simple pad lock. Just inside was a powerful fan. Below that, rungs had been set into the concrete for maintenance of the second fan, which looked to be about twenty feet down. About twenty feet below that he heard the whir of a third fan.
A quiet entrance was going to be a bitch.
It took fifteen hours to figure out how to interrupt the fan sequence without alerting the breach to security. When Jesse returned to implement the plan, he discovered the guard he’d been watching had been replaced. Two days later, the guard returned and Jesse went down the shaft. As tricky as it was to interrupt the power supply and crawl through the ventilation fans, it was worse on the return trip. It had taken nearly thirty minutes to install the remote device that he would need to hack in to the facility’s computer system. Afterwards, he could do nothing but wait for several hours and hope the guard ran true to form.
He ran out of luck when he at last climbed out of the shaft again. He was scarcely half way back to the cover of the trees when the guard reappeared from the brush. He had no time to consider what to do, only time to react.
Tamping the instinct to shift and confront the threat, he raced for the tree line. A shout went up behind him. Cursing under his breath, he realized as he reached the woods that he only had two choices: He could risk getting caught in human form and hope, if he managed to elude them, that they thought it was only some curious human. Or he could shift and allow them to know that a Lycan had been nearby.
It wasn’t much of a choice.
If he was caught, he was going to be too busy trying to escape to do either Erin or the baby any good. Shifting abruptly, he outpaced the pursuit fairly quickly. When he’d eluded them, he circled around to the Hummer he’d left parked in the woods three miles away and returned to his apartment in the city.
If his objective had been to hack into the data, it would very likely have taken him a matter of days to crack the security. Since his only interest was in getting into the surveillance system, it took him only a little more than half a day.
The layout of the facility and the guard stations were fairly predictable. It was obvious from observing the guards and the lab technicians that security had been beefed up since his intrusion, but he saw nothing to indicate that they’d realized he’d breached security and actually entered the facility.
It was as much as he could hope for. It might be months before they took security down a level. At the very least, they would be looking at weeks. He wasn’t willing to wait that long.
As hard as he’d tried to focus strictly on the objective, he knew they were experimenting on the baby and possibly Erin, as well.
As soon as he’d mapped the layout, counted the guards, located watch stations and the cell where they were holding Erin, and studied Dr. Wagner’s movements over a three day period,
he met with Tavian and worked out the assault of the facility.
It was strongly in their favor that the humans thought of them only as sub human. They would be expected to behave as animals, not intelligent beings.
When Tavian went to summon the pack that had adopted him and nursed him back to health after he’d been wounded in his escape the year before, he returned to his own pack to convince them to take part in the operation. In a general way, each pack was more inclined to see other packs as their enemies and it was a rare thing for two packs to join forces. The experiments and threat to them all went a long way toward convincing the majority. The possibility of a sanctioned attack on the humans convinced the remainder.
Half the Lycans participating were to launch an all out frontal attack. Once they’d diverted the humans into retaliation and pursuit, the remaining half would enter the facility through the air shaft.
* * * *
Three times a week a guard came and took Erin to an exercise room where she was allowed an hour to expend excess energy and work to keep in shape. Without a clock or a window in her cell to help her to guesstimate the passage of time, it was hard to keep up with how many days she’d been imprisoned or when to expect the events that made up her daily routine. And yet, Erin sensed that something was off the moment she heard the mechanical click of the lock to her cell.
She tensed, studying the guard suspiciously as he stepped inside her cell, but she could see nothing outward that seemed to indicate they had anything in mind for her. It wasn’t until she’d obeyed his demand to come with him and stepped outside the cell that she discovered she’d been right to begin with--something was in the wind and it wasn’t going to be something she would like.
A lab tech stood just outside the door. As she stepped through the doorway, he grabbed her wrist and stabbed a syringe into her arm. By the time her brain had caught up with the surprise attack, the drug was already circulating through her system and the world seemed to shift around her. Pocketing the syringe, he gripped her upper arm.
Wolfen Domination Page 8
