Her Fierce Warrior (X-Ops #4)

by Paige Tyler

  Derek muttered under his breath as he tightened the straps on his own rucksack. “Yeah, well tell me this: What does that big bear shifter have that I don’t?”

  Angelo chuckled along with everyone else. The only member of the team who didn’t laugh was Second Lieutenant Ben Watson, and that was only because he was the new guy and didn’t know why the whole thing was so damn funny. Angelo felt bad about Watson being out of the loop, but it wasn’t like he could just come out and tell the lieutenant about the secret government organization called the Department of Covert Operations; or about humans known as shifters who possessed naturally occurring genetic mutations that gave them certain animal traits, like claws, fangs, enhanced speed and reflexes, and improved senses; or about man-made versions of shifters nicknamed hybrids; or any of the other crazy crap the team had been involved with in the past year or so. How did you explain to someone that there really were monsters in the world, complete with sharp teeth and even sharper claws? Worse, how did you explain that some of those monsters were actually the good guys?

  Angelo was about to point out to Derek that the DCO’s resident bear shifter had seventy-five pounds of muscle and six inches on him, not to mention a face that didn’t scare small children, when screams of terror from the far end of the village silenced the words in his mouth.

  Angelo had his M4 in his hands and was running toward the sound as the rest of the guys spread out behind him, checking for incoming threats. He rounded the corner of a dilapidated building and was heading down a dirt road lined with more crumbling buildings when a man covered in blood ran toward him. Two more men followed, fear clear in their eyes and blood staining their clothes.

  At first, Angelo thought it was an IED—an improvised explosive device—but that didn’t make sense. He hadn’t heard an explosion. He slowed down anyway, worried he was leading the team into an ambush.

  One of the men pointed behind him, shouting something in Tajik. Angelo’s grasp of the language was pretty good, but the man was speaking way too fast for him to make out what he was saying. Then he figured it out.

  Monster.

  He opened his mouth to ask where the “monster” was, but the man was already halfway down the road. Angelo picked up the pace only to skid to a stop in front of a mud-covered shack a few moments later. He knew he was in the right place because there was a guy who looked like he’d been sliced up by Freddy Krueger on the ground in front of it.

  Angelo got a sinking feeling in his gut. He’d seen damage like this before.

  He jumped over the dead guy and was through the door before he even thought about what he was doing—thinking only slowed you down in situations like this.

  Angelo raised his M4, ready to pop the first threatening thing he saw. If he was right about what had attacked those men, it would take multiple shots to kill the thing.

  But what he found stopped him in his tracks. Derek and Lieutenant Watson skidded to a stop right behind him.

  There wasn’t a square foot of wall space in the one-room shack that wasn’t splattered with blood, and in the middle of it stood a pretty, dark-haired woman, gazing down at two dead men at her feet. Her shirt was on the floor beside them, one of her bra straps was torn, and her skirt was ripped. Her feet were bare and covered in dirt, and her long hair hung down around her face, almost to her waist.

  Angelo felt a rage build inside him like nothing he’d ever felt before, and he was torn between staying where he was and going after the rest of the men who’d tried to rape her and killing them, too.

  He glanced at her hands, hoping to find a knife there and praying he was wrong about what she was. But she didn’t have any weapons—unless you counted the wickedly sharp claws on each slender finger. And given the amount of blood in the room, those hands certainly qualified as weapons.

  As if just realizing he was there, the woman lifted her head and looked at him with glowing red eyes. She growled, baring her teeth and exposing some seriously long canines.

  How the hell had a hybrid turned up in Tajikistan? More importantly, what the hell was he going to do with her?

  “What the fuck is that thing?” the lieutenant asked hoarsely even as he raised his carbine and sighted in on the woman’s chest.

  The woman growled again, louder this time, and crouched down on all fours, like she was getting ready to pounce on them.

  Shit. Things were about to get ugly.

  But instead of leaping at them, her eyes darted around, like she was looking for a way past them. Unfortunately, they were blocking her access to the door and windows, and she knew it. For some reason he couldn’t explain, Angelo suddenly didn’t see a hybrid monster like those he’d fought in Washington State and down in Costa Rica. He saw a woman who was scared as hell.

  “Derek, get everyone outside and away from the building,” Angelo ordered softly, never taking his eyes off the woman. “We’re freaking her out.”

  “Freaking her out.” Watson snorted. “Are you kidding me? She’s the one freaking me out.”

  “Outside, LT,” Angelo ordered again, more firmly this time. “Trust me on this one.”

  He knew the lieutenant wanted answers, but he didn’t have time to give him any. Behind him, Derek was herding the officer toward the door.

  “LT, remember when we told you that you’d be seeing some weird shit in the field that they never mentioned in training?” Derek asked. “Well, that weird shit just started. But trust Angelo. He knows what he’s doing. He’s dealt with these things before.”

  Their voices faded as they moved outside.

  The woman’s eyes followed Derek and Watson until they disappeared from sight; then they slid to Angelo. He slowly lowered his weapon, carefully set it on the floor, and raised his hands, speaking softly in Tajik.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe now. No one is going to hurt you.”

  The red glow in her eyes flickered, then began to fade. Angelo released the breath he’d been holding. Maybe he’d be able to get out of this situation without killing her. He couldn’t explain why that mattered to him all of a sudden. She was a hybrid and clearly dangerous. Some might consider killing her to be a mercy—and the only sure way to keep her from hurting anyone ever again.

  From what he’d seen, the woman had had a pretty good reason to attack those men. But more importantly, Angelo knew for a fact that not every hybrid was beyond reach. Tanner Howland from the DCO was one of those. The former Army Ranger had learned how to control the rage that defined his kind, and if he could do it, maybe she could, too. At the moment, she certainly seemed to be trying.

  Angelo kept up his calm chatter, reassuring the woman that she was safe, and soon enough, her eyes turned to a normal, beautiful brown. There was still anger there, but there was also confusion, maybe even hope.

  Raised voices echoed outside, drowning out Angelo’s soft words. The villagers had worked up their courage and come looking for blood. The woman’s head snapped in that direction, and like a switch being flipped, the veil of calmness that had descended over the female hybrid disappeared.

  She tensed, anger warring with what looked like frustration mixed with honest-to-goodness fear on her face. As those emotions ricocheted, her eyes changed from red to green to brown over and over, in a dizzying display like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  But then, just as it seemed like she might have a chance, the internal struggle was over, and the hybrid leaped at him.

  Every instinct in Angelo’s body screamed at him to lunge for his weapon, or at the very least to pull out his knife. But he ignored his instincts and instead set his feet for impact, blocking her slashing claws with his forearm, then ducking down and tackling her. It wasn’t the nicest way to treat a woman, but considering the fact that she was trying to kill him, he decided she’d just have to forgive him.

  He twisted at the last second, letting his shoulder take the impact. He’d planned to immediately roll his weight onto her, hoping to keep her from getting away by pinning her to
the floor like a wrestler, but the hybrid didn’t give him a chance. She spun in his grasp, trying to break his hold on her. He wrapped his arms around her, doing his best to trap her clawed hands safely against her breasts as he pulled her back down. She twisted in his arms again, trying to sink her teeth into his shoulder. He hugged her tightly to his chest, whispering over and over that it would be okay, that she was safe, that no one would hurt her.

  When she buried her face in his neck, he just about freaked, sure she was going to tear out his throat. He resisted the urge to shove her away and go for his gun, instead continuing to talk to her. Unbelievably, she didn’t bite him. She kept struggling to free herself, though. But after a few moments, she went still, all her fight gone.

  Angelo glanced down at her. Her cheek was resting against his chest, her eyes closed, and her fingers curled into the front of his uniform. He wasn’t sure if she was asleep or had simply passed out from exhaustion. Either way, her breathing was rhythmic and even. The sight of her made his heart ache. This close, he was finally able to see past all the dirt and blood. While he’d thought she was pretty when he’d first seen her, now he realized she was absolutely beautiful—and that she looked vulnerable as hell.

  “Damn, Tex-Mex,” Derek said from the doorway. “You’re good with the ladies when you want to be.”

  Angelo didn’t laugh. “Get on the satellite phone and call Landon. If you can’t get him, try Ivy or Clayne. Tell them where we are and that we’ve stumbled on a hybrid. We need a priority airlift to get her out of here. And whatever you do, don’t let LT get on the line to the battalion.”

  * * *

  “Why does Thomas Thorn want to meet with Ivy and me anyway?” Landon Donovan asked.

  He and his wife-slash-partner Ivy were sitting across from John Loughlin, their boss and director of the DCO, in a small, nondescript building in a suburb of Washington, DC. After coming back from the rescue mission in Costa Rica, he and Ivy had spent weeks believing John was working with the people creating the hybrids they kept going up against. John had quickly figured out they were spying on him and told them to meet him in this building if they wanted to know what was really going on.

  That was back in December. Since then, he and Ivy had been meeting with John a couple times a week, reading through the meticulous files he had on the members of the Committee that ran the DCO.

  After they’d gotten a look at the files, especially those on three particular members of the Committee—Thomas Thorn, Rebecca Brannon, and Xavier Danes—it became impossible to believe John was the bad guy. All of it was circumstantial stuff that would never be allowed in a court of law, but if even half the information John had collected on these three was true, then they were some of the coldest, most ruthless people around. Landon would rather fight a hybrid bare-handed than face politically powerful monsters like them.

  The files, along with proof that John’s signature on a document Landon had found months ago showing the DCO had bankrolled Keegan Stutmeir’s hybrid research was a forgery, was enough to convince him and Ivy that their boss was clean. It didn’t hurt that John had opened up about the strange shifter Ivy had run into on the rooftops of Crystal City a while back, the one with the reptilian eyes and the disconcerting presence. Turns out, he was Adam, the first shifter the DCO had ever recruited—the one who’d supposedly gone rogue and killed his teammates.

  “You should know by now you can’t trust every classified file you read,” John had told them months ago. “The real story about what happened to Adam and his team is a lot different than what’s in that file. He’s been on the run since 2003. If the people who framed him back then knew he was still alive, they’d go to any lengths to hunt him down and kill him.”

  In response to Landon’s question, John looked up from the report he was currently perusing on the other side of the table to regard Landon over his reading glasses. “Why does Thorn want to meet you? Because I’ve made sure he’s aware of the fantastic work you two have been doing for the DCO. And more importantly, I may have implied that you two have a habit of keeping certain…inconvenient…details out of your official reports.”

  Landon exchanged looks with Ivy. If John only knew.

  “Why would you tell him that?” Landon asked.

  “I’m hoping you two might be able to get close enough to former senator Thorn to finally have a chance to get some real intel on the man,” John admitted, “because reading thousands of old classified documents I’ve collected over the last ten years isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “Where and when are we meeting Thorn?” Ivy asked. “And what do you think he’ll want to talk about?”

  “You’re scheduled to meet him at Chadwick-Thorn’s corporate offices tomorrow at nine,” John said. “As far as what he’ll want to talk about, your guess is as good as mine. Mostly, he’ll size you up to see if you’ll be receptive to working with him, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he brings up what happened in Costa Rica. If we’re right and someone else on the Committee was backing the hybrid experimentation going on down there, he’s going to be sniffing for details.”

  Landon still couldn’t understand how a man who had stepped down from his senate seat three years ago to take a hand in running his defense contractor company was still on the Committee. But according to John, once a person was selected for the Committee, it was a lifetime position.

  Landon was about to ask how much detail he and Ivy should get into with the ex-senator when his cell rang. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and frowned when he recognized the number of the satellite phone Angelo and his team carried. There was no way in hell they’d call unless it was important.

  He thumbed the button. “Angelo?”

  “No, Captain. It’s Derek. We’re in Tajikistan and have a situation. We need your help.”

  Landon glanced at Ivy to see her looking at him in concern. With her feline shifter hearing, she had easily picked up the words.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked Derek. “Is everyone okay?”

  “We’re fine, Captain. But Angelo captured one of those unique individuals like we met in Costa Rica.”

  Derek couldn’t say the word hybrid over the satellite phone because everything was recorded. But there was no doubt that’s what the Special Forces medic was talking about. Landon was about to ask how the hell they’d stumbled across such a unique individual in the middle of Tajikistan, but Derek continued.

  “Captain, Angelo thinks this is one you’re going to want to see. She’s kind of…special.”

  Landon saw Ivy’s dark eyes widen. They’d never encountered a live female hybrid before. “What do you mean…special?”

  There was an uncomfortable pause. They could only say so much over the satellite phone. “Well, Captain, there’s no other way to say it…she kind of reminds me of Ivy. The way she moves and behaves…it’s a little eerie,” Derek said. “Angelo thinks you need to come and get her.”

  Beside Landon, Ivy went pale. He almost reached out to take her hand but caught himself just in time. While John might have been honest with them, they hadn’t come clean with him about a lot of things—like the fact that they were married.

  Landon glanced at John, wishing for about the hundredth time that they’d been able to tell him about Stutmeir capturing Ivy and stealing her DNA. It would have made what he was about to ask a whole lot easier.

  “Hang on, Derek.” Landon lowered the cell phone. “John, Angelo and his Special Forces team have captured a hybrid in Tajikistan. They need help getting her out of the country and back here to the DCO.”

  Landon’s gut clenched at the look of horror in his wife’s eyes. He knew she was terrified of the female hybrid being brought back to the DCO, and he couldn’t blame her. They needed to hide that her DNA had been taken, and he knew she felt responsible for it having been used in this way. But if Angelo had taken the thing alive, it was because he thought the creature had a chance to conquer the hybrid serum running through her veins, like T
anner had done. Ivy might be too scared to see that at the moment though, so he hoped she would just trust Angelo’s judgment, like he did.

  Across from him, John was already on his cell. Landon heard him saying something about a priority airlift out of Bagram Air Base.

  “Derek,” Landon said into the phone. “We’re setting up an extraction now. Can I get in-country transport to where you are now, or do you need to move to a secure location first?”

  Landon glanced at Ivy again as he wrote down the grid square location Derek gave him. She was pale as a ghost and her hands were shaking. He tried to comfort her with a look, but she wasn’t paying attention. He had no doubt that, in her head, she was right back there in that lab in Washington State as Stutmeir’s doctors tortured her and took her DNA. All these months and it was still like it had just happened yesterday.

  He prayed that finding this hybrid wasn’t going to destroy everything they’d worked so hard to keep hidden. But right then, he didn’t know if God was going to answer that particular prayer.

  Chapter 2

  Angelo looked out the window of the Black Hawk at the rapidly approaching asphalt and concrete maze that was Bagram Air Base. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to be heading for any of the main terminals. That was good. Angelo had no desire to parade this woman around a couple hundred curious people. He’d already figured out that she didn’t like crowds much.

  He twisted his wrist around to see his watch—something that was rather complicated since the woman was sleeping in his arms at the moment—and saw that it had been barely more than six hours since the hybrid had latched on to him and refused to let go. He had to admit, he was impressed. He knew the DCO had some serious pull, but getting a priority clearance helicopter flight all the way from southern Tajikistan to the huge airfield in northern Afghanistan complete with an in-flight refueling in that amount of time? The SOCOM commander himself didn’t get that kind of service.