by Lauren Esker
"Mom," Ashley gasped, and she leaped away from the cage so fast she almost seemed to levitate. By the time the door opened, she was standing a good fifteen feet away, with the gun in her hands.
Evans stormed in. Now that Nicole knew about their relationship, she could see it, especially when they were standing side by side. The resemblance made them seem like inverse shadows of each other: as Evans bristled, Ashley seemed to shrink, wilting under her mother's wrath.
"What are you doing down here?" Evans demanded. Behind her, a rather anxious-looking henchperson, presumably Jeremy, loomed in the doorway. It was the big young man who had accompanied Evans on her first visit, the one Nicole had mentally dubbed Neckless.
"I wanted to talk to the prisoner." Ashley's reply was a fragile whisper.
"What on earth for?"
"I—I just wanted to ..." Ashley's voice dried up completely. Evans looked like she was about to hit her.
"She wanted to ask me about her father," Nicole spoke up. She didn't care if Evans was angry at her. Any mother should be able to understand that kind of errand, though from what she'd seen of Evans so far, she got the impression the other woman was not the understanding type.
Evans whirled on her. "What?"
"She asked me about her father. Alan, was it? I saw him the other night, after all, and she just wanted to make sure he was okay. I think it's interesting," Nicole added, "that it came from her, and not you. Don't you care?"
"Now listen to me, you miscegenating whore," Evans snapped, stalking close to the cage without quite coming in reach. "Don't you lecture me about my family. That's rich coming from someone who's willing to degrade herself as you do."
Nicole drew herself up to her full height, wishing there were a few more inches involved. "Oh, believe me, if I were going to lecture you on how you treat your family, honey, I haven't even begun." The whore remark stung less than it would have if she'd had the slightest respect for Evans as a person. "And if you think having a werewolf for a boyfriend is—I can hardly get this out without laughing—degrading myself, then maybe you should look in the mirror, since last I heard, you were married to one."
Evans had gone livid with fury, but she had also gone quiet, which set off Nicole's warning bells and made her take a few steps back, deeper into her cage. Professionally speaking, she had become much warier of people who locked everything down than the ones who let it all out; the first kind had a tendency to explode with messier results.
Ashley and Jeremy had taken advantage of the distraction to duck quietly out of the room. Nicole couldn't blame them.
"You made your bed, so now you get to enjoy the benefits." Evans spat each word. "You aren't leaving here. You're going to be the surrogate for the embryos we already have, and then we'll see if you and your animal boyfriend can breed true or not, if you're even still young enough for it. You're what, forty? If not, then we'll need to find a wolf bitch for him to get his pups on."
Nicole could only stare at her, speechless. As Evans stalked out of the room, and even after the door closed, Nicole was still staring, her hands opening and closing, flexing uselessly.
She had seen evil before, on the job. There were parents, and other relatives, who had done things to the children she worked with that could be described in no other way. But she had never had evil stare her in the face, naked and unashamed.
She's only a mother, trying to help her daughter. She's a wife who is desperately scared for her husband—
But it was all rationalization and Nicole knew it. Maybe Evans' intentions had been good in the beginning, but somewhere along the way she'd fallen.
You know what they say about the road to hell, and what it's paved with ...
The worst part was, Evans wasn't insane, like some kind of movie villainess. She had, in perfect cold rationality, decided that shifters were subhuman, useful only as lab animals. And apparently that extends to anyone who cares about them as people, Nicole thought. She was glad, now, that she hadn't revealed her koala-shifter status in the beginning. Having Evans and the others in the lab take her for human was the one bargaining chip she had, however debased the coinage.
Nicole flinched and looked up as the door opened again. It was Ashley, ducking in with her customary furtiveness, the gun still slung over her shoulder. She was carrying a tray.
"They were just bringing down your dinner. I said I'd take it the rest of the way. I wanted to apologize." Her voice was little more than a cracked whisper, and she looked like she'd been crying.
"It's not your fault," Nicole said gently.
Ashley knelt and began taking items from the tray, sliding them through the aperture into the cage: a bowl of soup, a package of crackers, plastic tableware wrapped in a napkin. "She's not a bad person," she said, to the floor rather than to Nicole. "She just wants to help me."
"Ashley." Nicole crouched to bring herself to the girl's level. "Is anyone listening to us right now?"
Ashley hesitated, her hand resting on the used dishes from the earlier meal as she retrieved them. "No."
"Would you be willing to get a message out? Talk to some friends for me?"
Ashley shook her head quickly, and pulled her hands back from the bars as if she thought Nicole might try to seize her thin wrist. "I'm not going to turn in my mom. And besides, what'd happen to Dad if I do? I—they'd probably kill him, or put him in a cage."
Like the cage I'm in right now? But the words had tumbled out in such a rush that it was plain Ashley had thought about it, which Nicole counted as a hopeful sign. "I'm not asking you to call the police or anything of the sort. I just want to get in touch with my family and let them know I'm okay. Right now I'm sure they're terribly worried about me, and that is exactly the sort of thing that's going to make them call the police."
Ashley was still shaking her head, the chopped-off hair swishing above her shoulders. "Mom said no one would find you."
"Is she sure about that? Because from what I know, the people she kidnapped before—"
"They weren't people," Ashley protested, her voice rising.
"They were. People just the same as you and me. Those people were homeless and didn't leave anyone behind to call the police." Just an old man, living alone with his memories in the belief his kids had abandoned him. "But I have a job and friends and a family right here in Seattle. And Avery works for a federal agency, like the FBI." She saw Ashley jerk with reaction. "Yeah, that's right. Your mom got careless this time. She made a real mistake. She kidnapped a federal agent. She is going to be in a world of trouble when they find him, especially if he's not in good shape when they do." Nicole tried not to think about what kind of shape Avery was in right now.
"But she only wanted to—"
"Help you and your dad, I know. Do you think a judge is going to care? Or a SWAT team? Because that's what's going to happen. You can't save your mom from the consequences of her own bad decisions, but you can make the right choice now. Let me send a message to my family, and maybe we can stop this from turning into a disaster that'll get your whole family killed, okay?"
But Ashley was backing away from the cage, the tray in her hands, looking tormented. "I can't. I'm sorry. I've done as much as I can. I—the cameras are going to be back on in a minute. Be careful. Please."
She all but fled from the room.
Nicole sighed and sat down. Dinner, Ashley had said. Did that mean it was now Sunday evening? Or had she lost another whole day, or even two?
She couldn't imagine eating. Her stomach was a tight knot, queasy with drug withdrawal and stress. Still, she needed to at least try, for Avery's sake.
She unhappily began to unwrap the tableware, and then froze when something fell out of the paper napkin. It was about the size of a credit card, with a magnetic stripe down the back. Otherwise it was identified only with a generic company logo and a little band of numbers at the top; it didn't have a photo and ID information like security badges on TV. But that had to be what it was. This couldn't get
her out of the cage, but it would open doors in this facility.
Was the camera back on? Was it already too late? Wearing no clothing, she had no pockets to put it into. Hastily, she shoved it under the edge of the pad on the floor, the only hiding place she could think of.
Hang on, Avery. I don't know how I'll get out of this cage, but when I do, I'm going to find you.
Chapter Twenty
Avery hoped desperately that they'd take him back to the room of cages when they were done with him. (Nicole! his heart cried.) Instead, they unlocked him from the restraints on the table and put him in heavy shackles on wrists and ankles. He was allowed to use the bathroom, somewhat awkwardly with the shackles in place. The door was left slightly open, but he seemed to be allowed a minimum of privacy.
In the bathroom, he examined his left hand. It had felt like Evans was flaying him, but the actual damage had already healed to a tracery of fine pink lines, half obliterating what was left of the ink marks she had used for calibration.
Well, he thought with bleak gallows humor, I do heal fast, it's true. Even for a werewolf.
The door opened, and Mike peeked in warily. "You fall in or something?"
Avery resumed washing his hands, taking as much time as possible. "You mind if I ask why you're doing this? She's some kind of fanatic, but what are you getting out of it?"
"What else?" Mike asked. "Money, of course."
"She's really paying you enough to make it worth it?"
Mike shrugged. He wasn't a large guy, but he was heavily muscled, and obviously spent a lot of time in the gym. "If she does what she's trying to do, and figures out how to bottle that healing thing you guys have got? Then we'll all be rolling in it. You have any idea what people would pay for that? No need to do security work for rich assholes all my life if I can get a solid nest egg to retire on."
"How very humanitarian of you all," Avery murmured. There was something almost reassuring, though, about knowing that Evans's helpers were hirelings rather than acolytes. Hired help was less likely to stick around if the going got rough.
"C'mon, let's move," Mike said, giving the shackles a sharp tug.
Avery thought about trying to make a move while it was just the two of them in the bathroom, but he was still weak and shaky from after-effects of the drugs and Evans's torture. And Mike wore a snub-nosed pistol in a shoulder holster. Avery was not at all confident he could get it away before Mike could draw and shoot him. Also, the second of the two men was still guarding the closed lab door with the dart gun. Resigned, he allowed himself to be shepherded out of the bathroom, with Mike's hand steering him by a firm grip on his shackles.
His relative equanimity lasted only until he saw where they were taking him.
In a corner of the lab, there was a cage. The floor-to-ceiling cages where he and Nicole had been kept earlier were a couple of Hilton suites compared to this. It was perhaps four by four feet square, and so overbuilt he might have laughed if his heart wasn't trying to climb up his throat—steel bars as big around as his thumb, top and bottom of solid plate steel, just tall enough for him to crouch on all fours. There were no amenities here. Just this tiny cage.
Rational thought deserted him. All he knew was that he would not, could not go in there.
He jackknifed his body and cracked the back of his skull into Mike's face. There was no plan, nothing but blind panic, but it gave him a desperate, devil-may-care strength. Mike staggered back and Avery lashed out with his shackled hands, cracking the metal against Mike's sternum and then flinging himself away. Brought up short by the shackles, he landed hard on the floor and Mike's weight slammed on top of him an instant later. Furious and bleeding from his nose, Mike drove a powerhouse fist into Avery's face.
Avery shifted by instinct, and suddenly Mike was trying to restrain a writhing, snapping, panicked wolf. In his wolf body, Avery lost any remaining shreds of rational control. The stink of cleaning chemicals, the bright lights, and worst of all the cage drove him to madness. His paws slipped out of the shackles, which might have been able to restrain a larger wolf, but Avery had always been small for a shifted wolf, no bigger than a large dog.
Mike's nerve broke with wolf teeth snapping in his face and he rolled off. Avery leaped away and found he had nowhere to go. The door was closed and there was nowhere else to run; the lab wasn't large.
"Don't shoot him!" the man at the door bellowed. "She won't like it!" A dart clattered off the floor by Avery's paw. Having no other option, he tore around the room, trying to stay as far away from the men as possible.
"Fucker tried to eat my face!" Mike snapped. "I tried the other way and I'm done! What're you gonna do, wait'll he rips your nuts off?"
Mindless with panic, Avery had no more ability to strategize than a real wolf in his situation, and he ended up crouched under one of the lab tables, his sides heaving. When the man with the dart gun knelt to line up a shot at him, Avery snarled at him, but made no move to dodge. He no longer understood what the gun was for.
Behind the dart-gun wielder, Mike had his pistol leveled at Avery's face. "Give me a reason, you damned animal."
The dart hit Avery in the chest. He yelped, and both men flinched back, but all Avery managed to do was stagger a few steps before the walls of the lab telescoped in around him, giving way to darkness.
***
Avery woke groggily, with the world spinning and the floor seeming to rise and fall like the deck of a ship. He lay still, eyes screwed shut, until his stomach stopped trying to rebel. He wasn't sure how much more of the drugging his body could take. Then he became aware of warm fingers wrapped around his own.
"Avery?" a familiar, infinitely welcome voice whispered. "Are you awake?" Light fingers stroked his hair back from his face.
He turned his head to the side, all the motion he was capable of at the moment. Nicole was lying alongside him, holding his hand through the bars. Behind her, he glimpsed more of the cages. They'd put him back with her. And she looked fine—more than fine; she looked beautiful, gazing at him with liquid dark eyes that warmed him to his core.
Despite his physical misery, all he could think was, Thank God. Thank God.
"Did they shoot you again?" she whispered.
He tried to nod, which brought another surge of nausea.
"Is there anything I can do?"
"Just what you're doing," he managed to croak.
So she lay beside him, stroking his hair and caressing his hand in her loose grip. As the initial sickness and flu-like achiness began to wear off, he became aware of a hundred other pains, especially from his leg and hip. Fragmentary memories of his struggle with Mike and his panicked flight around the lab came back to him. His damaged body hadn't appreciated the wrenching and twisting at all.
When he finally, wearily pushed himself up to his elbows, Nicole sat up too. He spared a quick glance for her body, mostly to make sure if she was all right, which she seemed to be. He'd gotten so used to their shared nudity that he hardly noticed it anymore.
"What happened?" she asked him. "Was it ..." Her fingers lightly traced the healing injuries on the back of his hand, and an odd expression entered her pretty eyes. It took him a moment to recognize it as anger—no, fury. It looked so out of place there. "—this?"
"No, that I handled pretty well, I guess. It was ..." He hesitated, breathing deeply. He seemed to be managing to hold the panic at bay, for now. Being back in the cage was hard, but being in that little cage would have been worse. He could feel his chest growing tight just thinking about it, his breathing locking up, and forced himself to think of other things. Forests. Wide-open streets. Sky.
Being locked in a dog kennel for days, being forgotten about, with no water and no food—and the worst time, that time, not long before the social worker took him away; the time when two wolf children went into the kennel, but only one of them was still alive to come out—he'd tried to keep Hunter alive, he had, but he'd been only seven; he hadn't known what to do ...
"It's okay," Nicole murmured. She pressed herself against the bars so she could slide her whole arm through, wrapping it around his shoulders; he didn't realize he was shaking until he felt her shivering too. "It's all right. Whatever they did to you, I'm just glad to have you back with me."
He leaned into her, closing his eyes, but even the light was striped with the bars' shadows. It seemed the lights were never turned off in here, and wasn't that a technique for breaking down prisoners, as well?
But he felt a little steadier now, at least. She still shivered against him, and he squeezed her hand. "Cold?" he whispered.
"Among other things," she sighed. "It's my—my meds. You're not supposed to just stop taking antidepressants."
Fear cleared his head like a shot of adrenaline to the spine, and he sat bolt upright. "Is it dangerous?"
"No," she said, summoning a smile. She looked wan, but some of it could be the harsh white lighting, which did neither of them any favors. "Just uncomfortable. I'll be okay. Are you okay?"
"Thirsty, mostly." Now that he had said it aloud, thirst was a torment, and his mouth tasted awful. He squeezed her hand again, and got up and lurched over to the steel water dish bolted to the cage bars. Dipping water with his hand, he rinsed his mouth thoroughly several times—spitting on the floor outside the cage, as there was nowhere else—and then drank palmful by palmful. He felt a little better afterwards.
Nicole was sitting up with her arms wrapped around her knees. When Avery rejoined her, she snaked an arm through the bars and so did he, until they were wrapped up in each other again, the cold steel bars warming against their skin.
"I learned a few interesting things, while you were gone," Nicole said.
"Me too."
A spasm of laughter passed through her, felt more than heard. "Go ahead."
"I'm hoping your news is less dire and more upbeat than mine, so ladies first."
"I am not sure if 'upbeat' is the word I'd use. Actually, let me start with the worst part first. I know what they want us for. Or, I should say, I know what they want me for."
