Cats Got Your Tongue (Shifter Squad Six)

by Anya Nowlan

  Somehow, Grant and Grim had found themselves in a hall of horrors unlike anything they could have ever feared to see. It wasn’t a very big room—roughly twice the size of the central hall upstairs—and while many of the containers were hooked up to some sort of temperature and consistency control devices, the humming was coming from deeper still.

  Grant didn’t look at the dead bodies, trying his best to be blind to the twisted forms, the tufts of hair covering them, the tiny tails, and broken ears. The doctor in him figured out what it was fast enough. This was where they kept the bodies for research of all the super soldiers in production that had never quite “cut it.”

  Reynolds’s theory about Dante and Dylan being unique seemed to hold more and more sway, as none of the preserved bodies were anywhere near as old as the twins were. It was like a twist of a blade in his gut, promising if not threatening that soon, his own kids could just be a mark on the pages of some research gone wrong.

  It took a few steps, but then his brain was his own again. Grim scooted ahead of him, holding onto the rifle, having had a lot more clarity of mind to grab one than Grant had. The initial plan had been to take out the guards, grab their guns, and move forward, but the fighting had been so fucking rough that by the time Grant got through the last guy, the glow of the open room had been too appealing to pass up.

  And now here he was, stuck in a nightmare with only his knife in his hand, his mouth tasting of copper, and the adrenaline pounding through his veins barely enough to keep him moving forward.

  He let out a sigh of relief as they came to another door, Grim pausing on one side of it while Grant took the other. They wordlessly counted down from three before Grant pulled the door open and Grim swung himself inside. The words he yelled were mostly unintelligible but when Grant wheeled around the corner, he saw a woman and a man, flattening themselves against the tiled floor in a brightly lit, cold-as-fuck room.

  There were several large, roughly pyramid-shaped copper canisters in the room, about eight feet in height and maybe ten feet wide. Countless tubes and wires ran into them, all hooked up to a rack of computers, and the screens were spitting out data faster than Grant could attempt to read it.

  Put he could understand something else. He could see shelves lined with shiny metal containers, all with pressure valves, color coded and neatly stacked. And they looked a lot like the ones he’d seen on the plane.

  “Hands behind your fucking heads! Is there anyone else here?” Grim hissed, the two scared-looking, but blond and blue-eyed techs flattening themselves and trying to become as tiny as they could, as if that would save them.

  “N-no,” the woman said. “Please don’t hurt us!”

  “Don’t hurt you like you didn’t hurt those fucking children out in your little morgue?!” Grim asked, incredulous, and even with his back to him, Grant knew that Grim’s face was twisted in rage right now.

  Grant looked at the containers, reading the tags on them. They were definitely either the same or close to what they’d had on the airplane, PX-45 as Reynolds had called it. Finally, Grant could take a slight breath. The canisters were not big, maybe two pounds each, and Grant could feel his body leaping into action even if he consciously couldn’t really keep up.

  He made a beeline for one of the work spaces, long tables littered with notes and test tubes and blood samples, and rummaged through the shelves underneath them until he found two thick sacks. He walked back to the lined up canisters, noting that there were three different kinds, and started throwing them into the bags. He only took four of each, leaving the vast majority of the stores untouched.

  “Tie them up,” Grant said as he went back to Grim, depositing the bags on the floor next to the door.

  It was obvious now why upstairs had been so cold. He couldn’t stand next to the copper pyramids without feeling the intense chill wafting off of them, massive vents covering the tops and moving cool air up to the higher floors. Whatever was being done in those containers required a supremely low temperature, probably to keep the chemicals stable instead of violently dangerous.

  Grim zip tied the woman while Grant did the same for the man. Then, Grant leaned down, tugging the woman up by her ponytail, making her screech until she was on her knees. There was a faint line of pinkness around her pupils and that hardened Grant. They were using that stuff on themselves too.

  “Are The Arctics trying to breed soldiers now? Is that why all of those… those… tissue samples are out there? Failed pregnancies?” he asked, wrestling with himself to get the words out, to keep it as clinical as possible.

  She hesitated for a moment, but when Grant yanked her hair back, she gasped, tears rolling down her cheeks now though they seemed less than convincing to Grant.

  “Yes! Yes. We’re trying to get the dosing right. It’s an offshoot of some work we’ve done in Detroit earlier,” she stammered.

  “But you’re using pregnancies instead of soldiers now?”

  “We think it’ll work better if the subjects are used to having it in their bloodstreams from the beginning. In adults, it makes them… unhinged,” she said, her eyes going wide as Grant’s expression went blank.

  “Where are they?”

  “Who?”

  “The women?” Grant asked, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.

  “The last batch all had complications and had to be… um, put down. We haven’t started new trials yet,” the man piped in, sounding almost proud.

  Grant looked up, sharing a moment with Grim. His brother looked as disgusted as he was.

  “Good,” Grant said blankly, slamming the woman face-first down on the ground again.

  “Delta Three, we have the goods. Repeat, we have the goods. Delta Seven, come in for pickup," Grim spoke into the headset, his words slightly slurred, coming out pained.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out why that was. The sheer vileness of what Grim and Grant had witnessed was enough to send anyone reeling. The Arctics weren’t just monsters, they were trying to create more, bringing up a new generation of fanatics straight from the womb. And they didn’t care who it hurt.

  “Delta Six, mopping up,” came Tex’s voice over the comms, allowing Grant to let out a small breath of relief.

  At least his team was still alive.

  Standing up, Grant surveyed the room one more time. A lab, cold and sterile, with more high-tech equipment than most scientists could hope to ever see, let alone afford. All of it used for evil. An idea struck him.

  “Is this the only place that’s working on this project?” Grant asked, kicking the man in the side with his boot.

  He gurgled a groan but then nodded when Grant moved to kick him again.

  “Yes, I think it is,” he gasped, obviously in pain from the deftly placed hit to the kidney.

  “Good,” Grant said, as if his vocabulary had shrunk to a wisp of its size.

  “Delta Six, I think we have a job for you,” Grim said, addressing Tex.

  The sly smirk on Grim’s lips told him that his twin was thinking what Grant had been thinking. And it was just in time too, when Kelis’s voice came over the line, flickering with static and obviously frantic.

  “You guys won’t fucking believe what’s coming your way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Kelis

  Kelis wasn’t sure if the helicopter could take how much she was pushing it, but she didn’t particularly care. The moment the call came in for pickup, she was whirring back toward the compound, going full-out on the throttle.

  She’d been circling the area since dropping off Connor and Thatch, and every second that passed by without an update felt like it was stealing years from her life. It was even worse when she got bad news over the comms.

  But now her hands were actually pasty with sweat and there were chills rocking her body. As she flew toward the compound, it was hard to miss the very large convoy of black armored vehicles, an impossibly long line of them, coming in from three directions. The wors
t part was she couldn’t tell whether they were friendly or bogeys. Odds were in the favor of the latter.

  “Delta Seven. I count thirty vehicles altogether heading in. Advise immediate pickup of the entire crew,” she said, moments from reaching her spot on the roof.

  “Negative, Delta Seven. Delta One, Two, Three, and Six staying on base. Delta Five, Four, and package for pickup,” Connor replied, his voice terse.

  “It’s fucking suicide!” she yelled, her heart throbbing out of her chest as she hovered above the building, setting the chopper down gently.

  “Delta One has been informed that incoming are not bogeys,” Connor answered dryly, though it did little to calm Kelis of the fact.

  A second later, as the chopper touched down, the door to the roof was flung open and Dutch and Connor came running toward the chopper, carrying a heavily bleeding and unconscious Thatch between them. They pulled the side door open, tossed in two sacks heavy with something, and then hauled Thatch in. Dutch hopped on as well, his hands covering a gaping chest wound in Thatch’s left side. Connor’s face was contorted with rage.

  All three of the men looked banged up as hell, but it was Thatch who was obviously in a fuck-load of trouble.

  “Connor, what the fuck?” Kelis yelled, frantically glancing between the leader of Squad Six and the door, expecting Grim and Grant to appear any second. “We can’t stay! Even if it’s The Firm, they’ll fucking gut you guys for going behind their back like this.”

  “We’ve done this shit before,” Connor said tersely, already sliding the door closed. “Get Thatch to the base. Get what’s in those bags to Reynolds. And for the love of the fucking spirits above, only take one of each canister to Reynolds. Hide the rest. I don’t care how. Don’t tell anyone,” he hissed, slamming the door shut and sprinting back into the building.

  Helplessly, Kelis looked over her shoulder at Dutch, who was ripping open some congealing powder that would shut the violently bleeding wound for a while.

  “You heard the lieutenant. Go or we’ll have three bodies on our hands in a bit,” he growled, his eyes flashing gold.

  Kelis pulled up, her body responding but her mind screaming its protest.

  “Delta Two, Delta Three. Are you all right?” she asked, not managing to stop herself.

  She needed to know that everything was going to be okay. That she wasn’t leaving the men she loved to die in a fucking Arizona factory building.

  “We’re fine, sugar. Go,” Grim’s voice answered, soothing, if maybe a bit on edge.

  “Save our boys. We love you,” Grant answered, his tone much more somber.

  “I love you too,” Kelis whispered, her voice breaking.

  “I love you three. Now get the FUCK OUT OF HERE,” Dutch snarled, making Kelis whip back into the moment.

  She turned the Night Hawk around, gaining altitude as the bright headlights of an endless convoy of cars seemed to gather around the compound. She was maybe seventy feet out from the border of the fence when the helicopter was thrown forward by a massive blast of an explosion, which demolished the building behind them.

  Kelis struggled to get control of the bird, gritting her teeth as her first reaction was to stabilize the flight, and only then to think of the consequences. She craned her neck to look back as she finally managed to pull the chopper up again, the damn thing having tried its hardest to careen into the low shrubbery lining around the compound.

  Dutch grumbled as he peeled himself off the wall, having used what little balance he’d had to keep Thatch—who was blissfully passed out at that point— mostly stable.

  “Always with the fucking injuries, Thatch,” Dutch sighed, as if the world wasn’t seemingly ending behind them.

  “What the fuck was that?!” Kelis asked, wild-eyed. “Delta Two? Delta Three?” she called into the comms, receiving nothing but static in response.

  “You won’t get anything. The explosion will have put too much interference up,” Dutch said, deathly calm.

  “Fuck that. Are they alive?!” Kelis demanded, her hands sternly flying the chopper back the shortest way to San Francisco, but her mind reeling with the need for answers.

  “Probably,” Dutch said, peeking out through the window. “We’ll see when we meet in the Crypts if there are seven or three of us.”

  His dry sense of humor was really rubbing Kelis the wrong way at that very moment.

  “Dutch, come on. Talk straight with me. Are they okay? Was that Tex who did that? Was it planned?” Kelis asked, rattling off questions as she felt the slick heat of tears on her cheeks.

  She bit down on her lower lip, feeling a quiver running through her as she finally passed over the last black armored vehicles, out of the range of anything that could harm the chopper now. In the back of her mind, she realized that she’d been half-expecting to get shot down at any moment, while “enjoying” the flaming inferno swelling behind her.

  Kelis could feel the heat of the explosion and the resulting fire all the way into the helicopter, her ears humming with the deafening noise and her heart thrumming so hard that she could barely tell the sounds of the engine apart from everything else.

  “It was planned,” Dutch said, though he didn’t say much more on the matter. “I don’t know how or if they made it out of there. Trust me, it doesn’t matter. It needed to be done. You need to go, Kelis. For your boys and for Thatch’s. There’s no way to tell whether Grant, Grim, Connor, and Tex are fine, but we can do something for Dylan and Dante and Thatch.”

  “Okay,” Kelis whispered after a small pause, steeling herself against the voice screaming in her to turn back, to go search for her men.

  She knew she had to do what her boys needed. The rest of the ride was mostly in silence, with occasional mutters and growls from Dutch, cursing Thatch for trying very hard to die on him. Kelis knew she couldn’t do much for him if she didn’t get to San Francisco right now, so pushing the helicopter to the very limit of its tolerance was all she could do.

  When the chopper touched down on the roof of the San Francisco headquarters of The Firm, Kelis had reached a level of calm that always descended upon her when things became so frantic that she could only hold on and do logical things one after another without thinking about anything else. She radioed in ahead, and the moment the chopper touched down, Reynolds and his team were running up to it, rolling a gurney between them.

  The door was ripped open and Dutch launched into an explanation of what he’d been doing and what state Thatch had been in as countless hands reached for the gravely injured body of his friend. His voice was tense and shaking a bit, driven by the fact that Thatch had arrested twice during the flight.

  “Okay, Dutch. We have him now,” Reynolds’ calming voice said, soothing him in a way.

  “Dutch,” Kelis said, twisting herself around in the seat, looking back before Dutch could hop out of the vehicle. “The canisters.”

  Dutch’s eyes were sunken, haunted, and Kelis imagined hers had to look much the same. He seemed to be in a daze, but the haze cleared and he nodded, grabbing two canisters, one of each. Shoving them under his arm, he hopped out of the helicopter, keeping his head low as he ran after the frantically working medical team, their hands moving to help Thatch while the gurney rolled forward.

  From her seat, her eyes burning with tears and blinded by the early morning sun breaking over the horizon, she could see how bloody Dutch was. The dark blood seeped through his black clothes, making the fabric stick to his skin. She had to wonder how much of it was his and how much of it was Thatch’s.

  But aside from the medical team, someone else ran through the doors leading to the roof, heavy boots thumping deafeningly.

  Firm guards, Kelis realized, seeing the guns and the determined looks on their faces.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why they were there. She was sure that Spade must have called ahead and told them to stop her before she could leave.

  Grant and Grim must have been right, she thought with mounting ho
rror, pulling the helicopter up as soon as Dutch cleared the blades.

  Her stomach was in knots, the suspense growing as she saw the men raise their weapons, taking aim. For a maddening moment, she was expecting them to fire on her, bringing the helicopter down in a hailstorm of broken metal and flames. But instead of pulling the triggers, they lowered their guns a second later, their expressions tense and unhappy.

  She didn’t let out the breath she was holding until she was fully out of the range of their weapons, zooming out over the slowly awakening city of San Francisco. It was only when she set her course to bypass a major airport in the hopes of making anyone who might have been tracking the helicopter on radar lose her trail, that a painful stab ran through her heart, the cold and honest pain jolting through her.

  Oh God please, make sure my babies are fine… and the men I love…

  She’d been so close to Dylan and Dante and it had nearly killed her to put distance between herself and them. Kelis hoped that if something had gotten drastically worse, Reynolds would have told her.

  Or would he? Wouldn’t he wait until I was out of the large mechanical deathtrap?

  Doubts and fear nagged at her, gnawing at her thoughts as she made her way back to Troy’s hidden hangars. She set the chopper down and shut off the systems one by one, staring at them numbly. When she was tearing off her helmet and unclipping the belt, the door was pulled open. Troy’s smiling face stared back at her.

  His expression fell immediately when he saw the look she was giving him, almost looking through him as if he wasn’t standing there at all.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice dropping low, a flash in his eyes telling her that like any good soldier, he was ready to roll out and do whatever it took to make things right for someone he cared about.

  “I… I don’t know yet. But I need you to do something for me. I need you to hide something and not let anyone know where it is.”