She counted them. “Seventy-eight,” she said. “So the same number as ...,” she racked her brains, “a dog.”
Dumas nodded. “Or in this case, the same number as a wolf.”
Was it her imagination or had Blake stiffened at the mention of his namesake?
She suddenly felt as though she’d been plunged into a science fiction movie. “This isn’t anything I’ve seen before.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to.”
“But this is impossible. How have you done this?”
“We haven’t done anything, Doctor. These samples were taken from a specimen. The specimen has the ability to change from one thing to another, and we were able to take samples of its DNA as it did so. Those slides you’ve just seen are the chromosomes multiplying by themselves. As I said, we’ve already managed to create the protein we believe responsible for the multiplication, but it’s not having the effect we need. That’s where you step in.”
She knew her mouth gaped, but seemed unable to pull herself into a more professional stance. “A specimen? A live specimen?”
Dumas nodded.
“Can I see it?”
“I’m sorry, but that’s classified.”
Autumn took a breath and sat back as much as the stool would allow her to. They were asking her to manipulate the human genome to effectively become a new species. “You understand this goes against ethical law?”
Dumas’ cool blue gaze hardened. “We’re outside of the law, Doctor. Did you really think the government wouldn’t be working on this sort of thing behind the scenes?”
She turned to take in the rest of the lab and the amount of work that had already been done here. Whoever worked on this previously had known what they were doing. They’d already managed to isolate and manipulate the coding gene, which had greatly reduced the amount of work she’d need to do going forward, though she had no idea how long it would take her to figure this particular puzzle out. If she’d be able to figure it out at all.
She hesitated before speaking. “So who worked on this project before?”
He turned to her. “I’m sorry?”
“Who worked on this before me? They’ve done an awful lot of work. I’m amazed someone would get this far into a project only to abandon it.”
He scowled. “Some people don’t respect our need for confidentiality.”
“I assume I’d know them. Anyone who could get this far must be someone respected in our field.”
“I believe I just mentioned the word confidentiality. I think the same thing applies here.”
Heat crept into her cheeks. She felt like a school kid who’d been reprimanded by her head teacher. She didn’t appreciate being made to feel like that.
Autumn pulled herself up to her full height and pushed back her shoulders, lifting her chin. “And I appreciate your need for secrecy, but if something happened to cause my predecessor to walk out during the middle of their work, I think I’m well within my rights to ask a few questions.”
She sensed the other men’s eyes upon her and forced herself not to waver. She’d learned long ago that if she let people think of her as some young, blonde, push-around, then that was exactly how they’d treat her. She needed to have more balls than the average guy and not be afraid to show them off. She held Dumas’ gaze, wondering if he’d give in and tell her.
Instead, he broke his stare from hers and got to his feet. “Just do your job, Doctor. If I decide to tell you more at a later date, that will be my decision, not yours.”
The other two men took after him, Peter Haverly shooting her a small smile of sympathy. Blake also glanced back, but not with sympathy. Instead, he seemed to be studying her, as though he’d not quite made up his mind about her. They followed Dumas as he made his way to the elevator, leaving her alone once more.
The elevator doors closed and her whole body sagged in relief. That had been way more tension than she needed on a first day. She’d not even had any time to get her head around the job they expected her to do. Yes, she’d done plenty of biomolecular engineering, using viruses as vectors in order to implant new DNA into host cells and forcing the cells to accept the DNA as their own, but what was happening here was completely different. If the slide Dumas had shown her were accurate, the chromosomes were replicating in such a way as to create a different species from the one they originally started with. She’d never heard of anything doing something like that before.
Movement in the corner of the room caught her eye and her gaze shifted toward it. A camera swiveled to take her in. She sighed. Of course she would be watched. She didn’t know why she’d thought they’d leave her alone with highly classified material. They’d film her every movement.
Before anything else, she needed to figure out exactly what she was working with.
Autumn settled into her seat at the microscope and got to work.
Chapter Five
BLAKE STOOD IN the elevator, remaining silent in the background. He hoped this new scientist wouldn’t be able to achieve what Dumas wanted. Her doing so could mean the end of his kind living in any sort of secrecy. She seemed smart, a sharp light behind her aqua blue eyes that made him wonder if perhaps she might succeed where so many others had failed. And he’d enjoyed watching her try to take on Dumas, though he’d known she’d never win.
Dumas pressed his finger against the sensor pad to take them down to the bottom level. A red beam scanned his print. Something beeped and they began to move.
Only a couple of Dumas’ team were entrusted with the ability to make the elevators descend to this level. Blake was one of them.
The three shifters were still kept captive, the woman now back to human form, her arms and legs already almost healed. Blake had managed to convince Dumas to allow one of the medical team in to strap the limbs, allowing them to heal correctly.
Still, he hated that he’d not yet come up with any kind of plan to set them free without blowing his cover. Now that his cousin and some of the others from the reservation had suspicions that the shifters vanishing had to do with the government, he didn’t know how much longer he would be able to stay undercover.
Perhaps I should involve Chogan? Maybe he’s the one who can help free the other shifters?
But if he did, he would still risk blowing his cover, and his cousin and the rest of the reservation would learn how deeply involved he was in this whole thing. Would his people understand his reasons for being here or would they call him a traitor?
Blake wondered where his cousin was now. Despite Chogan following him through the forest, Blake had managed to lose him as soon as they’d hit the city. Chicago was his territory, a place unfamiliar to his cousin. Would Chogan still be hanging around, or would he have made his way back to the reservation?
Blake’s concern for the opinions of the people he’d left behind almost ten years prior wasn’t his only worry. If Dumas and his team caught Chogan trying to free the shifters, they would quickly make the connection to back him. His cousin would never be able to get inside the building without his help. How would he even get Chogan into the facility? Security was tight. To get Chogan into the building and rescue the shifters, Blake knew there was a chance people would die.
He pushed his worries for the captive shifters from his head. He couldn’t focus on that right now, couldn’t allow his concern for a few individuals to distract him from the bigger issues at hand. He needed to be right here, near the lab, just in case this new scientist did what the others had been unable to. If she failed, as her predecessors had, Dumas would be running out of options. Yet he couldn’t help feeling like there was something special about Autumn Anderson. When Dumas had been explaining to her about the chromosome number, Blake’s wolf guide had trotted up to Autumn, nuzzled its nose against her palm, and placed its big, shaggy head in her lap. Of course, she couldn’t have noticed anything, but for some reason she had chosen that moment to turn to him. On some subconscious level, had the young doctor been aware of t
he spirit in their midst?
The elevator doors slid open. Dumas and Haverly stepped out, Blake following close behind. He stopped short. Several other people waited in the room, facing the glass wall which separated the captive shifters from the people who held them prisoner.
His gut twisted at the sight of Calvin Thorn standing among them. Though technically he and Cal were on the same security team, no love was lost between the two men. Calvin made little secret of the fact he coveted Blake’s job as Dumas’ head of security.
Blake didn’t care about that; the other man was welcome to the job just as soon as Blake put an end to Dumas’ interest in shifters. But there was something about the man that didn’t sit easy with him. He knew Cal had seen plenty of active duty before coming to work for the department, and he couldn’t help but feel the man had gotten a taste for the fight. Though the man was presentable enough, with his well-built body, blond hair, and square jaw, there was something about him that made Blake uneasy. Calvin Thorn was hard. While Blake could act tough when he needed to, Cal didn’t need to act. Sometimes, Blake wondered if anything existed behind those cold gray eyes.
But the two men accompanying Cal weren’t part of the security team. They were part of medical.
He didn’t like this. Why would security need to oversee medical? And why hadn’t he been informed?
From the expression on Peter Haverly’s face, the subtle way the other man’s jaw tightened and a muscle twitched directly below his left eye, Blake guessed his comrade hadn’t been expecting these new arrivals either.
Haverly narrowed his eyes at Dumas. “What’s going on?”
“Doctor Anderson has all the samples she’ll need, so we should do something more productive than just have them sitting here. After all, we can’t send them back out into the rest of the world.” He rubbed his hands together. “A good old-fashioned autopsy. I want to see what happens to their bodies when they change.”
Haverly stared at him in horror. “How are you going to do that?”
“Open them up and get them to change into whatever animal they can. I want to watch how their bones alter, how their organs reform while they’re changing. I figured we’d need some extra backup, which is why Thorn is here.”
Blake could stay quiet no longer. “They’re not going to be able to shift if they’re dead!”
“I don’t want them dead. It’s possible to open someone up while they’re still alive, still conscious.”
Haverly’s jaw clenched. “This is unnecessary and barbaric!” he spat through gritted teeth.
He and Blake exchanged a worried look. They couldn’t stand by and let this happen.
Dumas rounded on Haverly. “I’m not asking for your permission, Haverly. This is my project and I’ll decide what happens.”
Calvin Thorn regarded the exchange, a cold humor barely hidden beneath the restrained surface of his expression.
The boy sat in the chair, his head down. Silent tears ran down his face, his hands still shackled to the armrests, rendering him unable to wipe the moisture away. A desperate urge overtook Blake, a need to go and reassure him, offer him some kind of comfort. But if he went in there, the boy would recognize what he was and there was a chance of his cover being blown. He shuddered to think what Dumas would do if he discovered his head of security was one of those he seemed to both despise and adore.
The head of the project nodded at Calvin. The two medics waited with small, slender boxes which Blake felt certain held hypodermic needles containing some kind of sedative.
“Take the man,” Dumas instructed, nodding toward the chambers.
Without a word, the men took the passageway to the right, which lead behind the glass screen and to the back of the holding cells. Cal folded his arms across his chest, the expression on his face never changing.
Blake watched through the one-way glass, his fists clenched. He was torn, desperately wanting to shift and rip these people apart, but knowing he couldn’t.
The captive man turned as if he’d heard something, and the next moment a hidden door in the metal wall at the back of his chamber opened. The men in white coats entered the room, syringes in hand. The man’s eyes widened. He struggled, yanking his bound feet and hands. The cuffs didn’t budge.
He turned to the front and locked eyes with Blake, though Blake knew he couldn’t see him through the glass. The eye contact must be coincidence, the man had no way of knowing another shifter stood on the other side.
The man’s eyes flared a golden yellow.
Blake knew what that meant. He launched forward, slamming his hand down on the button which allowed him to speak into the chamber. “Get out! He’s shifting!”
The world seemed to pause as the man’s whole body tensed. His hair withered and vanished and what appeared to be quills spiked from his body. He roared in pain as they stabbed through his skin. His body yanked one way and the next, then the quills unfurled.
Feathers, Blake realized.
The man’s face changed, his nose and mouth molding together and elongating, covered in a hard, brittle material. His whole body shrank, his arms and legs slipping from both his clothing and the ties which bound him. His clothes fell in a pile on the floor.
The men took a couple of steps away, their backs against the wall, looking on with a mixture of amazement and horror. Where only moments before a man sat, now a huge eagle stood perched on the chair. The bird was larger than any of them had ever seen before, easily four times that of a regular eagle.
The bird opened its beak and screeched.
It spread its massive wings, spanning almost half the room.
Dumas seemed to remember himself. He pushed Blake out of the way to get to the microphone. “Sedate it!” he yelled at the doctors.
They exchanged a glance and both lunged forward. The bird flapped its wings and lifted into the air. The men tried to grab hold of it, but it fought back. Huge talons swiped at the men, opening a huge gash in one of their cheeks, almost taking out an eye. The man cried out and fell back, his hand clutched to his face, blood pouring from between his fingers. His colleague took one look at the blood and dropped to the ground. The bird dived at him with another screech, two-inch talons open to grab him.
Dumas rounded on Blake and Cal. “Well? What are you waiting for? Get in there!”
With uncertainty, Cal looked between the scene behind the glass and Dumas. It wasn’t often Blake had seen him rattled, but right now the other man didn’t seem to know what to make of what was happening. It’s the first time he’s witnessed a shift, Blake realized. Nevertheless, Calvin’s hand automatically went to the weapon holstered on his hip.
“What are you playing at?” Dumas yelled, clearly frustrated with their lack of response. “You want to hold each other’s hands?”
Still, Blake hesitated. He knew the other shifter would be able to sense what he was, would feel the extra heat radiating from his body. He didn’t want to go into the chambers with the other shifter. If the man blew his cover, this whole thing would be over.
Dumas glared at him and then reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small pistol. “Damn it. If you want something done—”
Blake put out a hand to stop him. “I’m on it.”
Calvin stood there, confusion written on his face.
At a jog, Blake followed the same route the two men in white coats had taken, running down a narrow corridor which led to the back of the holding cells. He entered the chamber through the same metal door as the two guys from medical.
The bird sat on top of one of the men. The man cowered, crying and gibbering, his arms held over his face for protection. The bird’s bright, black eyes focused on Blake as he entered the room.
He put his hands up in defense. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The bird opened its beak, revealing a soft, pink palate, and screeched again. The sound echoed around the small space, enough to make Blake’s ears hurt.
“You need to shift back,
” he hissed. “They’ll shoot you if you don’t.”
It spread its wings and flapped, causing a gust of air to blow against Blake’s face and body. One of the doctors cried out in alarm.
Blake spread out his hands, a pleading gesture. “Please. Just shift back. If you don’t, they’ll kill you. There’s no getting out of this place like this.” He stared into the bird’s eyes, desperately trying to communicate what was in his heart, in his head.
I’ll help you. As soon as I can.
The bird ducked its smooth round head, its wings still outstretched. It went rigid, shudders racking its body. The feathers retracted, pulling back beneath the skin to leave pink, smooth skin. The wings first reduced in size, and then grew bigger, fingers sprouting where long wing-feathers had just been. The beak shrank, molding back into the face to create a nose and mouth. The bird’s eyes burned yellow and then returned to the man’s normal color.
Now back in human form, the naked man crouched on top of the doctor.
Blake didn’t care too greatly for the injuries of the doctors who’d been intent on hurting the shifter, but he didn’t want the shifter to be harmed. He approached with caution, his hands held out. “Everything is going to be all right. We’ll work this out.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “How can you say that?”
“I’ll do everything I can.”
“Get word to my family—”
Dumas’ voice blared into the room. “Don’t talk to it, Blake. Just get them out of there!”
Blake grabbed the injured doctors, and, using his huge strength, hoisted them out of the room, through the small corridor and back into the surveillance unit where Dumas waited. The men continued to cry, clutching their injuries. Blood stained their white coats like a butcher’s apron.
“Goddamned freaks,” Dumas muttered. He rounded on Blake. “What the hell was that all about?”
Autumn's Blood: The Spirit Shifters, Book One Page 4
