by Laura Taylor
“And the third girl?”
“Her results were… inconclusive.”
“Inconclusive how?” Jacob demanded, sounding more impatient.
Phil tried hard to stop stuttering and just get on with the report. Jacob was hardly going to be impressed with this bumbling idiot routine. But the sirens kept wailing in the background, keeping his nerves on edge. Were the alarms getting louder? “The… uh… her initial reaction was promising. Elevated heart rate, increased neural activity, muscle convulsions – all the same signs Andrews reported in his successful test case. Except now she’s…”
“She’s what?”
“She doesn’t seem to be able to shift.”
Jacob’s eyebrows rose in an expression of utter disdain. “Oh? Do explain.”
“We’re running more tests. Blood samples, subjecting her to electric shocks, monitoring her neural activity. We will find answers, I assure you, but it will take time.”
Jacob snatched the papers out of his hand and gave them a cursory once-over. “Has Melissa reviewed these results?”
Phil fought not to bristle. Ever since that meddling woman had been placed on his team, it had been clear she was a favourite of Jacob’s. Despite his own greater experience and technical knowledge. “Yes sir. She’s currently with the shifter, trying to coax some more information out of him. Damn waste of time if you ask me-”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“No, sir.”
A booming explosion suddenly rocked the lab, and Phil actually fell off his stool as the noise sounded far, far closer than was safe.
“What the fuck is going on out there?” Jacob asked no one in particular. He pulled out a gun, headed to the door and cracked it open, before quickly closing it again. “Where the fuck is that Khuli woman?”
“I haven’t seen her since the shifter was brought in-”
“Shut down these computers,” Jacob snapped at the entire room. “Secure the samples. Lock everything of value in the safe. We can’t lose this again.”
Something large thudded into the door. “I want this lab secure!” Jacob barked, then hastily made his way to the back of the room. “Upload everything you’ve got to headquarters.”
What? But he’d already started shutting his computer down…
“And do not open that door for any reason,” Jacob finished, opening a cover to a key pad on the far wall. He tapped in a code, and Phil’s eyes opened wide as a panel in the wall split open, revealing a secret passageway. How the hell had he not known that was there?
“Protect this data,” Jacob ordered as he stepped inside the passageway. “We’re closer to winning this war now than we’ve ever been!” A dozen scientists leapt up from their seats, computers and test tubes abandoned, and dashed for the passageway. But Jacob jabbed a control panel on the far side of the door, and the panel slid closed, the exit sealed up before their eyes.
Son of a bitch! He was running away, leaving the rest of them to face the carnage. The scientists pounded on the door, desperate for a way out.
“Bloody hell,” Phil muttered, reaching under his desk to retrieve the hand gun he kept beneath it. The lock to the hallway door groaned, and he snapped his laptop closed, tucking it under his arm, then took cover behind a filing cabinet.
The lock shattered as two bullets were fired rapidly into the mechanism. The door burst open, revealing three men. Three dangerous, armed and angry men. The one at the front of the group was terrifying, tall and broad-shouldered with golden eyes and a flaring trench coat, but it was the man beside him that turned Phil cold with terror. A young man, little more than a boy, but the look on his face was one of pure malevolence.
Shifters.
And suddenly, Phil knew that every story, every fairy tale he had ever been told about them was true. Ruthless, vicious, merciless… and at once he remembered the threat from the shifter in the cage – the promise that his days were numbered.
Fuck me, he thought, as he raised his gun with surprisingly steady hands. Perhaps the shifter had been right after all.
As per her instructions at the briefing in the library, Dee broke off from the rest of the group and followed Mark and Raniesha along the hall to the experimentation rooms. If the Noturatii had a new shifter captive, they would have wasted no time in kidnapping more ‘test subjects’ to convert. And depending on the state of said subjects, their job was to either rescue them, or put them out of their misery, and then blow the lab to smithereens.
Getting to their destination was a long, slow slog, guards filling the hallways, gun fire blocking their passage until Andre had waded into the thick of things and taken out a dozen soldiers with precise shots, every single bullet finding its mark, and one of them taking out two guards at the same time.
Raniesha was no slob with her own gun, though, cutting a path through the wave of security. Mark wasn’t far behind, engaging one in a brief hand-to-hand scuffle before slitting his throat, then shooting him in the head.
Scientists and office workers scattered, screaming, trying to flee, and while she had a gun in her hand, Dee found herself not quite able to shoot it. Taking life was abhorrent to her, no matter how evil these people were, and she ducked and weaved down the hall, taking shelter behind furniture and a fridge… A fridge? Really?... while Mark and Raniesha did the dirty work.
The door to the experiment room was locked, but true to form, Raniesha pulled out a wad of explosive tape, set a charge and yelled for Dee to duck. She did, barely making it behind a filing cabinet before an explosion ripped the door off its hinges, the heavy metal slab thudding to the floor with a loud clang.
More guards inside, more guns, and Dee didn’t even have time to glance around the room before the fight was on again. She found herself raising her gun, pulling the trigger once, causing a dark-haired guard to buckle then collapse, and then suddenly Dee was no longer a woman with a gun in her hand, but a wolf, teeth bared, hackles up. Faeydir launched herself into the fray, the wolf clearly harbouring none of Dee’s doubts about killing. She tore out throats, broke bones with powerful jaws, and toppled men who paled in terror at the sight of her, no matter how battle-hardened they might have been.
A sharp pain in her shoulder made Dee flinch, but Faeydir ignored what was most likely a bullet hitting her Kevlar vest, turning her attention to a small woman in a lab coat, who was desperately trying to hold her ground beside another woman strapped to the table. Faeydir leapt for her, missing the woman who moved with surprising speed as she tried to flee the room. But she didn’t get far. Faeydir grabbed her leg, biting down hard, then went for her throat once she hit the ground. A moment later, the woman was dead, Faeydir discarding the body with a sense of pride as she sought out new prey.
Finally, the room was clear, though gun shots and yells still sounded from down the hall, and suddenly Dee was back, lurching unsteadily on her feet as her wolf retreated. Their orders had been clear – the shifters had been split into three teams, each team with an objective and firm instructions to focus solely on that, trusting the other teams to take care of matters in other areas of the building. So Dee set about assessing the room while Mark and Raniesha guarded the door.
Three women were strapped to metal tables – they seemed to have expanded their operation since Dee was last here, as she clearly remembered being the only one in the room during her captivity – and she looked around, a cry of dismay escaping her as she examined the first woman and found that she was dead.
The second woman was a mess, screaming hysterically, her words incomprehensible. She had an IV line taped into her arm and a series of surgical cuts over her body. A wealth of medical equipment was attached to her – a heart monitor, a blood pressure cuff and ECG electrodes.
Shifter? Or human? Dee checked in with Faeydir, who scented the woman carefully and answered Dee’s question by presenting her with an image of a rabid wolf, crazed and slobbering. A rogue, then. Fuck. But maybe they could still help her, Dee thought frantically, working
to unlock the cuffs around the woman’s wrists and ankles. “We’re here to help you,” she yelled over the woman’s screams. “Please, if you’ll just calm down-”
The instant her hands were free, the woman grabbed the gun at Dee’s side, shoved the muzzle into her own mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood splattered the far wall as her body slumped over, then slid gracelessly off the table.
Dee sorely wished she had time to throw up as she forced herself to retrieve the gun, sliding it back into its holster with shaking hands. She took a deep breath to steady herself, and then wished she hadn’t, the scent of blood thick in the room.
Numbly, she went to the third woman, and a cursory glance suggested she was dead as well, until Dee saw a flutter over her ribs and realised she was breathing. Her eyes were open, but she lay still as a corpse, her skin pale, her eyes vacant.
“Hello?” Dee waved a hand in front of her face. “Can you hear me?”
The woman blinked, eyes sliding sideways to meet Dee’s. “It’s in my head,” she whispered, horror struck, face turning even paler. “It speaks to me.”
Shifter? Dee asked Faeydir. And then she all but burst into tears as Faeydir again brought up the image of the wolves in the snow, and then very deliberately inserted a new wolf into the picture. So this one wasn’t crazy. Yet.
Not wanting to repeat her previous mistake, Dee stepped closer and carefully took the woman’s hand. She was freezing, her fingers clammy. “We’re here to help you. Do you understand me? We’ve come to get you out of here.”
Faint comprehension dawned in the woman’s eyes. “You’re police?”
Dee figured she could just run with the easiest explanation for now, and nodded. “That’s right. We’re police, and these people are terrorists, and we’ve come to stop them.”
“Oh, thank you, God. Thank you. Oh God, get me out of here.”
“I’m going to unlock the cuffs. You’re going to come with us, and no one is going to hurt you.”
“It’s in my head,” the woman repeated, on the verge of hysteria. “It’s in my head.”
“I know,” Dee told her, remembering her own fear when Faeydir had first made herself known. “I know. And we can help you with that.”
Hope flittered onto the woman’s face. “You can help?”
“Absolutely.” Actually, Dee had no idea if that was true. Baron had said that converts who couldn’t accept the wolf went mad. But then again, she herself had beaten the odds, hadn’t she? “What’s your name?”
“Gabrielle.”
Dee activated the controls to unlock the cuffs, then helped Gabrielle sit upright. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”
“I think so.” She was unsteady on her feet, but willing enough to stagger along with Dee, her arm around her shoulders.
“Let’s get out of here, guys,” she said to Mark and Raniesha, who both regarded the dazed woman with carefully blank expressions. “She’s one of us,” Dee said shortly. “So let’s get ghost, shall we?”
Left to the cages, Mark had said, and Baron ploughed his way through a dozen or more security guards, fists and elbows employed to carve a path just as often as bullets. He grabbed one dazed guard and spun him around, using the man’s gun to shoot another guard behind him, then slammed his elbow into the throat of a guard coming up on his right, crushing his wind pipe before shooting him in the head.
He, Caleb and Caroline were tasked with getting Tank free – or putting him down – and he glanced back down the hallway to see how the other teams were faring. Andre, John and Simon had just busted into the main laboratory and were no doubt causing terror and mayhem in there, while Dee, Mark and Raniesha had disappeared into the experiment room at the far end of the hall. Caroline shot two more guards who popped out of a room to their left, while Caleb fired at one who had noticed them retreating from further down the hallway.
Around a corner, along another hall, then through a door to the right. Holy fuck, Baron thought. It was Fort Knox for creepy science wannabes. Steel bars, electronic locks, motion sensors, cameras, alarms, and a whole bunch of other things he didn’t recognise. He hoped that Skip and Silas had the cameras off line by now, or there was going to be some real interesting video footage for the Noturatii to analyse later.
The first row of cages was empty, so he kept going, gun drawn, walking on silent feet as he flattened himself against a wall and peered around the corner to the next row…
Bingo. A small huddle of soldiers and one scientist stood outside one of the cages, ignoring the sirens blaring down the hall, and he supposed they must have a naïve sort of faith in their security team if they were content to just sit around here and chat while all hell broke loose.
He held up his hand to Caroline and Caleb behind him, four fingers, indicating the number of opponents they would have. He gestured for Caroline to take the guard on the far right, Caleb to take the one on the left, and he would take the middle one. The scientist was less of a threat and could be taken out after the main defences were taken care of. He held up three fingers, then two, one…
Caroline swung out from behind the row of cages, gun drawn, taking a split second to locate and target her enemy. And in that split second, Baron realised they had walked straight into a trap. Fuck! It wasn’t a huge surprise to think the Noturatii would have set up a few extra defences along the way, and they’d planned this assault on the assumption that not every security measure would be detailed on their database, but fuck…
A thick row of bars sprang up out of the floor behind them, no doubt triggered by a pressure sensor Caroline had just stepped on. Another panel sprang up in front of the group of Noturatii workers, Caroline’s perfectly aimed bullet colliding with the barrier… and going no further. Bullet proof. Fuck.
The guards had spun around immediately, guns drawn, wary eyes on the three intruders, but the scientist stayed where she was, a triumphant smile sliding onto her face as she continued to stare at whatever was in the cage. Presumably Tank, but Baron couldn’t be sure from this angle.
“Well, well, well. What have we here?” She turned to face them, looking them up and down like a cat eyeing a trapped mouse. “Three shifters. So good of you to visit.”
Baron said nothing, and knew that neither of his companions would either. There was no point baiting the tiger, and anything they said was likely to give away information that the Noturatii were better off without.
“What? No angry accusations? No threats? Your fellow pet has been full of them.” She jerked her thumb at the cage, and Baron eased sideways to try and get a better look inside. It was Tank, all right, bleeding and unsteady on his feet – he’d probably been drugged. But he was at least able to stand, and that meant that hopefully they’d be able to extract him, rather than put him down.
“Nothing to say? Pity. Oh well. How about you tidy yourselves into the cage, then?” The woman tapped a few buttons on a control panel attached to her wrist, and the cage door adjacent to Caleb opened with a clang. Baron merely sighed and gave the woman a ‘you’ve got to be kidding’ look.
“No? That’s fine. How about we give you a little motivation, then?” She nodded to one of the guards, who opened the door to Tank’s cage – God knows what they’d dosed him up with if they weren’t afraid to let him out – and tugged the man out to stand in the middle of the hallway. He stepped behind him and put the muzzle of his gun to Tank’s temple. “Into the cage,” the woman commanded. “Or your friend dies.”
Interesting. Baron retreated just a fraction, allowing his wolf senses to come to the fore… and immediately knew that the woman was lying. Tank was far more valuable to them alive than dead – they couldn’t keep testing new converts without a live shifter, and whoever ran this hell hole would not be happy about losing their only captive.
Of course, he didn’t consider himself and his team to be captives, bars and barriers aside.
“How about we work on a different kind of deal,” he said, watching the woman’s reactions close
ly. “You let him go, and we won’t kill you all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
John surveyed the room as he followed Andre into the lab, and felt his blood boil. Scientists. White lab coats. Computers and needles and instruments of torture all around him.
A dozen or more unarmed scientists stood gaping at him like sheep for the slaughter. Andre was already in action, taking down the closest ones, one who threw himself at them with reckless abandon, quickly killed with a bullet to the head, and another, who tried to run through the door to freedom – a doomed plan that saw him choking on his own blood a moment later.
John took his time focusing on the other men and women in the room. Even members of his own Den feared him at times, and he turned the full force of that predatory air on these devils. He grinned and shifted, slowly, so they could get a good look at him and anticipate what was going to happen next. He was fearsome in his armour, and he knew it. In addition to the regulation Kevlar vest and body spikes, he’d also crafted a helmet of sorts, with short spikes over the brow of his head, wicked blades that curved back from his ears to his neck, and when he bared his teeth and growled…
One of the men fainted, and John rolled his eyes. For fuck’s sake, this was supposed to be a challenge! The Noturatii, their worst enemy, and they were wetting themselves like schoolgirls. One man grabbed a knife, holding it in a shaking fist before him. “Stay back, you demon. Or I’ll kill you!”
Finally, a little backbone in one of them. John growled, paced forward, dodged the clumsy blow aimed his way, and was on the man in an instant, his long, sharp teeth ripping through the flesh of his neck like it was a tender steak.
At that point, pandemonium broke out. The scientists scattered, some racing for the door, to be cut down by Simon and Andre, some hiding behind cabinets or under desks… Really? When a wolf is after you? And some fled to a panel in the far wall, thumping their fists on it, desperately punching numbers into some sort of control panel.
