by A. C. Arthur
“If you wanted a female in your bed I doubt seriously that you had to resort to kidnapping,” she whispered into the darkness.
“You came to Perryville of your own accord. You followed me and my men on a business trip and then you accompanied me up here to my suite. Not sure how that translates to kidnapping but remind me to give Nick a call in the morning to check the law on this issue.”
“How can we protect ourselves if we don’t know what we’re up against?”
Bas didn’t reply. For once in his life, he didn’t know how to.
She sighed and the room grew silent once more.
Bas heard each breath she took, he imagined the rise and fall of her breasts as she did so and slipped his hand beneath the sheet, cupping his length in his own hand this time, jerking hard before cursing himself. There was no way he was going to jerk off while lying right next to her, no goddamned way.
“If they exist, the truth will come out. Now, or later, it will come out,” she said quietly.
It was his turn to go still, his teeth gritting so hard his temples throbbed, because she was absolutely right.
Chapter 11
The dream had come again, like a thief to steal his night’s rest. Six shifters had circled her, moving each time she did, growling each time she screamed. It was a standoff, one they knew they would win. As for her, she had no idea what she was looking at or how they would hurt her. All she knew was fear, instinctive and so potent it pounded against her chest. Tears blurred her eyes but didn’t fall.
He thought that maybe she’d cried out louder before, maybe her face had been streaked with tears, but no, not this time.
She didn’t cry and she did not try to run, probably knew it was futile. Instead she squared her shoulders and shouted something to one of them. The shifter lunged forward as if to take her right then, but it was stopped by a bigger cat, a stronger jaguar with more years of hunting experience. This one moved closer to her and she watched it in anticipation. He could see the moment she resigned herself to her fate and the exact second she decided to fight instead of succumb. She jumped at the cat, knife in hand, bringing it down with an aim to the Shifter’s head. Unfortunately, the cat was faster and it moved so that the knife slid almost painlessly down its flanks. Then it came up on its hind legs and wrapped its powerful jaws around her neck.
She didn’t have a moment to scream and no tear ever fell from her eyes—her brown eyes.
It wasn’t Mariah, Bas thought with a start, his eyes jerking open while the rest of his body remained still in his bed. It was still night—early morning he guessed—and her eyes still flashed in front of him, now along with the rest of her face being pelted by the rain as he’d had to bury her body once more. How many times would he have to do this, would he have to relive this? But this time was different, he reminded himself. This time it had been Priya’s body.
As if somehow aware that he was thinking so intently about her, she turned over onto her side, hands cradling her face so that she looked innocent against the pillows of his bed. She was here, in his bed, Bas thought momentarily, trying to play catch-up from the real world to the dream then back to reality once more.
He touched a finger to her cheek, let it slide down to the line of her jaw, watched it shake as it moved and he sighed heavily. She couldn’t stay here, he thought to himself. And he couldn’t let her leave. Rome would have her killed because she was a threat to them, and whoever it was that had put her up to this would probably do the same if she didn’t deliver. He had no other choice.
It felt good to have a reason behind his actions, an excuse to do what was becoming all too natural where she was concerned. Bas moved closer to her, being as careful as possible as he scooped her body into his, wrapping his arms tightly around her. She made a noise and he held his breath, knowing that in about two seconds she might hurl some sarcastic remark at him. Instead, to his shock and pleasure, she snuggled closer into him, her palms flattening on his bare chest, her cheek following as she rested her head against him. Bas kissed the top of her head, inhaled her scent deeply and actually felt it permeate his bloodstream.
She would not leave Perryville and nobody would hurt her, not even his Assembly Leader.
* * *
Later that morning, Bas sat quietly at the head of the conference table. He’d turned his chair so he could look out the window while he waited for the early morning meeting to get underway. In the chair to his right, where he always sat during meetings was Jacques, looking contemplative and mildly concerned.
Jacques was a quiet shifter; he kept his opinions to himself and generally dealt only with the facts. Jacques had stayed in the Marines longer than Bas had, completing two tours of duty including Desert Storm. He’d come from a large family where both parents were still alive and strong in the shifter community. And yet Jacques hadn’t left Sedona in the ten years he’d been there with Bas. He was a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch-tall man with mixed heritage as his father was French and had migrated to the U.S. a few years after World War II. Armil Germain had met and married Renee Jones, a beautiful African-American shifter after meeting her during a protest in Washington, D.C. Now, the Germains resided in Maryland while Armil worked with the Department of Justice. Armil and Rome were working very closely together to help shape the Stateside Assembly. But Jacques preferred to keep himself separate from his parents’ endeavors. Actually, there were times when Bas thought Jacques was keeping himself separate from the entire world.
“What are you going to do with her?” Jacques asked in his monotone manner, interrupting Bas’s thoughts.
Bas didn’t immediately respond because he didn’t have an answer to that question. Or rather he did but wasn’t quite ready to discuss it, even with his second in command. “For now she stays here,” was his reply. “And nobody needs to know that she’s here.”
The last was said as Bas turned, meeting Jacques’s gaze.
Jacques didn’t even blink. “Is that wise?”
Bas wanted to shrug but he usually shied away from the callous response. “It is how I want it to be.”
Jacques nodded. “She booked a room and used her credit card to secure it. If someone begins looking for her she’ll be easy to trace here.”
Flattening one hand on the table, his other on the arm of the leather high-backed chair he sat in, Bas agreed. “Check her out of the room before noon today and book her on a flight back to D.C.”
Again, Bas looked to the window where the sun was beginning its glorious appearance. The sky was absolutely brilliant with color, gold and orange spheres spreading over the red buttes that stretched to the mountains. This moment of the day had always been Bas’s favorite. Each morning he awoke in time to sit on his deck and enjoy the solitary glory. It reenergized him, giving him purpose to continue on another day, when it would have been so easy to sleep through it all.
This morning he’d left his room earlier than was necessary, disturbed by the pure bliss he’d been experiencing in the hours before with Priya wrapped tightly in his arms. He enjoyed the feel of her softness against him, the warmth of her breath over his skin, and of course her scent. He was enjoying that way too much, he thought with finality. For a brief moment he’d thought of cancelling all his morning meetings and staying with her, keeping an eye and hopefully his hands on her. But Bas had never shirked his duty before and wasn’t about to start now. Correction, he thought glumly, he’d only shirked his duty once and had sworn to never let that happen again.
“Put a trace on her cell,” he said to Jacques as an afterthought. “I want to know who she’s calling or texting every second of the day. She has a laptop in her bag, and I want to know what she’s doing on that as well.”
Jacques didn’t flinch at the directives, but he did go a step further. “GPS?”
Bas nodded. “Yes.” Even though he didn’t plan to let Priya out of his sight until they both decided how this situation would end. His motto had always been to plan for the best, but
be prepared for the worst.
“Dialing the others,” a female voice echoed through the intercom that was perched in the center of the conference table.
Within the next five minutes each FL was on the speakerphone, all of them probably sitting in a similar room in their offices across the U.S.
Bas began immediately. “It was a setup,” he announced. “By the time we arrived the bulk of the shipment had been moved. We recovered less than one hundred pounds of product and detained three men. Not. Shifters.” The last was stated with emphasis.
The collective curses throughout the line confirmed the others felt just as pissed off about this as Bas had been last night.
“The three we detained were pretty low on the totem pole and broke relatively easily,” Bas continued. “So we now have a name. Palermo Greer was the lead on this shipment. He and another they say was called Black did the initial pickup.”
“Then where the fuck are they now?” Cole was the first to interject.
“That’s how we know this was a setup,” Bas continued, trying like hell to ignore the bitter taste in his mouth after saying that particular name. The fact that he knew Palermo Greer and actually had a gruesome history with the man, was nobody’s business but his own. “Nick’s message said an eleven o’clock drop, correct?”
Nick’s voice echoed through the room. “Right. I’m looking at the e-mail now. Eleven MST.”
“We arrived around eleven ten. They weren’t out in the open so we had to find the drop spot. It was a tunnel down under the buildings. One guy was in the tunnel loading the crates, the two others were in the building taking the product and putting it in trash bags.”
“But you said it was a small score?” Jace inquired.
“Very small,” Bas said, nodding. “Last time there were thousands of pounds.”
“So what happened to the rest?” Rome asked, his voice serious and grim.
“One of the guys said the drop was scheduled for ten o’clock. The delivery was actually late so they didn’t get started until a quarter to eleven. Palermo and his guy worked them hard to hurry and get their truck loaded. Then they took off, about ten minutes before we arrived, without the complete shipment.”
“Send us a message about a drop with a time that guarantees we’ll miss them completely,” Nick was saying. “Why?”
“To let us know they’re one step ahead of us,” Jace said. “They want us to know that they’re going to keep doing what they want and we can’t stop them.”
“What kind of product was it?” Rome asked.
Bas replied, “The savior drug. That same shield marking was on each of the blocks. And that’s not all we brought back. There were guns, Rome. Really sophisticated automatic weapons with some sort of heat-seeking mechanism that Jacques and my team here are still trying to identify. And…” Bas paused, looking over to Jacques who nodded in agreement while sharing this last bit of information. “There were two crates, inside were lined coolers and eighty packets of human blood.”
“What the fuck?” Nick exclaimed through the phone line.
“That’s not all,” Bas added.
“Fuck! There’s more than blood and drugs?” Jace snapped. “What the hell is going on out there?”
Bas wished he had an answer to that question, on more accounts than either of the persons in this meeting knew.
“The crates were from Comastaz Labs here in Sedona,” he said with a finality that rested on the ears of each of them.
“You’re telling me that Comastaz Labs, a United States government facility, had a shipment of blood samples mixed in with a shipment of the savior drug and this shipment was facilitated by rogues?” Rome asked in a tone that may have signaled for no one to answer for fear of not saying what the Assembly Leader really wanted to hear.
As the lab and this shipment fell squarely under Bas’s jurisdiction, he spoke first. “Yes, that’s what it looks like. We know the circle the drugs are running, there’s no big mystery there. Sabar brought this drug over from the Gungi, he put it on the streets through Athena’s with the plan to branch out. Darel Charles took over after Sabar’s untimely demise. Palermo’s most likely heading up the West Coast division of rogues while Darel takes care of the East.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“The Comastaz connection is the problem. Why blood samples and why with this shipment?” he asked.
Rome spoke up next, his tone representing the authority he held over the group. “So let’s deal with this Palermo Greer, first,” he said.
X spoke up then, no doubt he and Nick were at Rome’s side, most likely in Rome’s private conference room in his suite at Havenway. It was early so the First Female, Kalina, may not have been in on the meeting, but there was also no doubt that Rome would fill her in immediately. They were a very close couple, Bas thought, even more so than the norm for joined shifters. But it wasn’t like Bas was some type of expert on that, just something he’d observed.
“First and foremost,” X began. “Greer hasn’t been in the States for a while. Nobody’s seen him in years. Some say he was also one of Boden’s boys.”
“Boden Estevez, the first rogue who was eventually beheaded,” Cole stated.
“Allegedly beheaded,” Jace added.
Rome interjected then. “What do you mean ‘allegedly’? Is there some proof otherwise?”
“I’m sending you all a picture on your cell,” Jace told them. “It came across my desk a few weeks ago as someone seeking representation.”
Jace owned Maybon Artist Management, one of the top five talent agencies in Los Angeles. He worked with A-list actors, supermodels, and best-selling authors, both foreign and domestic. He was renowned and well known for his sharp candor and killer instinct—if the humans he worked with only knew.
There was silence as everyone checked their cell phones and then some grumbling as the picture appeared on each of their screens.
“She’s hot, but now is really not the time,” Cole replied with a chuckle.
“She’s Bianca Adani,” Jace continued seriously.
“Boden’s mate,” X added.
Silence throughout the room again.
“So now we have Palermo—one of Boden’s boys, and Bianca, Boden’s mate, here in the States,” Rome stated. “After years of both of them being away.”
“Not a coincidence,” Jace replied.
Bas was already shaking his head. “I don’t believe in coincidences.” No, there was absolutely no way Palermo Greer running around this close to Perryville was by chance. There was a reason he was here, a reason beyond the revenge Bas had vowed fourteen years ago, that one of the men that had slaughtered Mariah was neatly placed within his reach.
“Neither do I,” Rome said. “If you’ve gotten all you can out of the detainees, turn them over to the cops.”
“Whoa, the cops?” Cole questioned, something which normally wouldn’t go over well with any other leader of a tribe of shape-shifters. But Rome was different. He respected everyone’s opinions and to that end didn’t mind hearing feedback—to a certain extent.
With Cole, everyone knew he was still carrying a chip the size of Texas on his shoulder after his parents’ divorce, so that was taken into consideration whenever they had to deal with him.
“Take them to the cops and say what? We just happened to roll up on these dudes during a drug transaction? How do we explain being there in the first place without bringing heat on ourselves? The last thing we need is more exposure and possibly another reporter running some insane story about cat people.”
The last was obviously directed at Bas, but he wasn’t biting, especially since he had his own little reporter lying upstairs in his bed.
“None of my team shifted. We all remained in human form throughout the entire exchange. But I have to agree with Cole, here,” Bas admitted, albeit reluctantly. “If I take them in, the question is going to be what we were doing all the way in Nogales in the middle of the night
at a deserted strip mall.”
Rome was quiet for a moment. “Then what do you suggest?”
“Well, I’m guessing they’re illegals so we can always turn them over to border control. They won’t ask questions because they don’t give a damn why they were here, they’ll just ship them back to Mexico.” He told Rome what he and Jacques had already discussed.
“Fine,” Rome replied after some contemplation. “X will gather more intel on Darel and Palermo. Bas, you work on those weapons, find out what they are, who made them, and how these low-level dealers got their hands on them. I’m meeting with the president’s advisors this week to talk about their position on the war on drugs and gun control so all the information you can get me on this new drug and these guns will help.”
“He’s running for a second term, Rome, and I know you want to stay in his corner, but do you really think he gives a crap about what’s going on in the streets when he’s got all that international bullshit to deal with?” Cole inquired.
“I think it’s important that I build a relationship with the highest political party in the United States, especially since I am the highest party in the Stateside Assembly.” Nobody commented on the fact that the president of the United States had no idea he was taking personal meetings, in addition to monetary campaign donations, from the leader of a shape-shifter tribe that had planted roots on U.S. soil.
“Wilson Reed and I have known each other since the days when he and his wife hung out with my parents. He was a highly respected attorney in D.C. before I even passed the bar and I consider him a good family friend. So the answer to your question, Cole, is yes. I believe he cares very deeply about what’s going on in the streets of the city he grew up in as well as across the world,” Rome stated firmly. “Jace, you follow up on Bianca. Find out what’s she’s doing here and who she’s hooking up with. And Cole, I want you to keep an eye on your borders too. This is the second takedown in your zone, Bas. They may not try to go in there again. Nick’s got eyes down in Florida, so I want you to be on alert as well. Finally, Bas, I want you to find out what the hell is going on at Comastaz and do it fast!”
