by Lauren Esker
"Making a bunch of werewolf-human hybrids," Avery murmured, his head resting on her shoulder.
She straightened a bit, and kissed his hair. "Damn you, Avery Hollen, snaking my news!"
"Well, that was mostly my news too."
"Really? You mean I've outdone the big, bad federal agent in the information-gathering business?"
She told him about meeting Ashley Evans-Lopez, and learning of Alan's true nature, and the fate of Chester's children.
"But ..." Avery protested. "It's not transmissible like that. You have to be born this way. You don't become a werewolf by getting bitten, or by getting a blood transfusion."
"What about a heart transplant?"
"She didn't become a werewolf," he countered. "She just got a little of our healing abilities for a while. Which ... is really interesting, I guess, and probably has all kinds of medical implications, but you can't turn a human into a shifter, you just can't."
"According to Tim and Erin's theories, we were all human once, or all shifters once, so maybe you can. Or at least you can come close. Poor Alan isn't really a shifter, he just kind of looks like one. Ashley said there were emotional changes as well. He became unstable and confused. Animal-like."
"A werewolf caught halfway through his change," Avery murmured. "Trapped. All the animal traits and urges, none of the control. Poor guy."
"That 'poor guy' helped torture and kill a number of innocent people, and if I'm reading between the lines correctly, was at least partly responsible for creating four kids simply to use them as a convenient supply of werewolf blood." She hesitated. "Who do you suppose their parents are? Chester's kids?"
"That's horrifying."
"There's nothing about this situation that isn't horrifying."
"True," he sighed. "You think humanity's found rock bottom, and then they keep digging."
"I hate to say it, but I think we're still pretty far from rock bottom." She folded her hand around his again, her fingertip brushing across his knuckles in a soothing pattern.
"You're holding up well."
"I wasn't for a while," she admitted. "But now I'm just pissed. These jerks have no idea what's coming to them."
"What about the kid?" he asked. "Ashley. She was the girl in here earlier, right?"
"Yeah, that was her. She's as bad as the rest," Nicole said bitterly. "It's clear she has no intention of helping us."
Tired and fuzzy-headed as he was, Avery took a moment to realize that she was touching his knuckles in a pattern, and even longer to realize that the long and short strokes were Morse code.
Or, rather, the bastardized variant he'd taught her. It wasn't much of a code, and would be easily cracked by anyone who had a decent-sized sample to work with, but he hadn't wanted to do anything too complicated since he needed to be able to decode it himself on the fly. He'd simply shifted the letters three places, so the code he taught her for "A" was actually "D" and so forth, and he'd added an extra short tap to the end of every other letter. He was hoping that, if they could keep their captors from being able to see too much of it, they could manage to preserve the code for a while.
It was still difficult for him to understand; he had to decode it mentally, letter by letter. ASHLEY HELP.
Because, of course, they had to operate under the assumption they were being overheard. Nicole's head was leaning against his now, through the bars, as if she was drifting to sleep, but her fingertip kept moving, spelling out another message. She had to repeat it three times before he got it: KEYCARD.
Carefully converting the letters in his head, he tapped out, U HAVE?
He'd forgotten to teach her the question sign, but she understood, and nodded. Her eyes flicked down to the pad she was resting on. Her fingers were moving again. HID.
LOCK? he asked, cutting his eyes sideways at the padlock holding her cage shut.
A small headshake. DOORS.
They still could not get out of the cages, but they could get through the doors. He would have grinned and kissed her, if he could have done it without giving the game away.
Actually ... no reason not to. If it kept their watchers from focusing on their hands, either by making them look away or giving them a nice distracting show, it would help. He turned his head and touched her cheek with his lips, drawing her into a long, slow, lip-nibbling kiss.
When they broke apart, she rested her forehead against his, through the bars. "They're watching, you know," she murmured.
"So what. All they'll see is two people who—"
He broke off, teetering on the edge of an admission he hadn't quite been willing to make even to himself yet.
"Who love each other." It was both statement and question, her eyes searching his.
"Yes," he said.
She smiled and he kissed that smile, sinking for the moment into the one good thing Evans and her goons hadn't managed to take away. Yet. But he wouldn't let himself think that far ahead. For now there was Nicole, her taste and her scent helping him push away the horror of their surroundings and the tide of unpleasant associations from his childhood that kept trying to creep in around the edges.
Mate, his instincts said, and he stopped trying to fight it, just as he'd stopped denying the way his sense of pack responded to Jack and Casey and Cho. He wasn't a lone wolf anymore.
And I won't ever be again. The conviction grew in him that he'd die before he let them take Nicole. He would fight with every last ounce of strength to protect her.
They might not give you a choice.
"We need a plan," he murmured.
"Hmm," she replied noncommittally.
Her fingers were still curled in his, and now they began to move again, tapping out WAIT. At the same time she murmured something under her breath, which he couldn't catch. Avery went obediently still, watching her. Had she heard something outside the door? She whispered something incomprehensible again, and he gave his head a minute shake, trying to indicate he couldn't quite hear her. She tapped WAIT again, and said it again.
He didn't understand until she began tapping a new word. This time she got as far as CHINE— before he caught onto what she was trying to tell him.
Smart Nicole. Clever Nicole. She was teaching him the word for "wait" in her own Chinese language.
Seeing the flash of understanding in his eyes, she smiled and whispered it again. He whispered it back as best he could. She corrected his pronunciation until he'd managed something that was, he supposed, comprehensible to her.
They worked together on a limited vocabulary, using Morse code to translate the words, and taking turns suggesting them. Between the two of them they came up with "wait", "now", "danger", "run", and a word she translated first as "transform" and then "shift". It was not quite the same as being able to have conversations without their captors overhearing, but it was more than they'd had before.
Conspirators now, they smiled at each other through the bars.
***
They were drowsing, half asleep on each other, when the door opened and Evans came in, followed by Mike and one of the other guards.
Evans was wound tight as a steel spring. She looked sharply between the two cages, then pointed to Nicole. "Her."
"Her what?" Avery demanded. "What do you want with her?"
None of their captors replied. As Mike unlocked Nicole's cage, she pressed against him and he put his arms around her through the bars. If they wanted her, they were going to have to drag her out of his arms.
"Stop being ridiculous," Evans snapped. "I only want to talk to her. If you want, we can trank you both—again—or beat you black and blue. The outcome would be the same either way. Is violence really the only thing you animals understand?"
"I'm not just going to let you take her!"
"Avery, it's all right." Nicole squirmed gently out of his grasp. "Let me find out what they want."
He clung to her hand, fingers knotted around hers. "I don't like this. It's not going to just be talking."
"
I know, but as much as I hate to agree with that she-Nazi on anything, she's right that we can't stop them, so we might as well make it easy on ourselves." She kissed him, long and slow, cupping her hand around the back of his head.
The kiss made Evans visibly uncomfortable. "Quit wasting time and come out of there."
"Keep your shirt on," Nicole said over her shoulder. She squeezed his hand one last time, and started to glance down at the pad where the keycard was hidden, then looked away. Naked, she couldn't carry it with her.
Instead she crawled through the door of the cage, while Avery glared daggers at the armed men waiting for her. "The only reason why I'm letting her go with you is because she asked me to. You hurt her and I'll tear your throats out, understand?"
"Yeah, because that went down so well earlier, buddy." Mike patted his gun, and took Nicole's arm.
All Avery's instincts screamed at him to fling himself after her, even if it meant nothing more than battering himself to death on the cage. Instead all he could do was watch as his mate was led away from him, with no way to know if he'd see her again.
Chapter Twenty-One
Outside the room of cages, Nicole no longer had to put on a brave face for Avery, but she refused to let the mask slip and give her captors the satisfaction of seeing her unsure and afraid. Instead she kept her head high and marched where they took her, planting each bare foot firmly as if it was her idea to go this way, and not theirs.
They took her down a white-painted corridor with cinderblock walls and through a door that opened when Evans swiped a keycard like the one hidden in Nicole's cage. On the other side was a stairwell with flights of stairs going both up and down. They went down one flight and exited into another corridor with doors along it.
How big is this place?
There were no windows. The air was stale and dankly chilly, with a new draft gusting over them every time they passed one of the vents recessed in the ceiling. Nicole was beginning to think they were underground. That might explain why rescue was taking so long to get to them. Did Jack and the others even know this part of the facility existed?
Evans opened a door and ushered them all into a cluttered and disarmingly normal-looking office. Aside from the lack of windows, it might have been any office anywhere; there were filing cabinets, computers, papers and books everywhere, and blandly scenic pictures on the walls.
"Sit down," Evans said, circling around to the other side of her cluttered desk.
Nicole obstinately remained standing. Mike wordlessly removed a pile of books from the chair in front of the desk and then gave her a hard push, forcing her to sit in it.
"Jeremy, you can go," Evans said. "Mike, at the door."
Jeremy left, not without a backward glance at Nicole. Mike took up a station in front of the door, relaxed but vigilant, one hand resting on the butt of his gun.
No tranquilizers this time, Nicole thought with a chill that had nothing to do with the cool air. As a supposed normal human, she was important only as leverage for Avery. If they had to, they could replace her.
Surely they aren't that far gone? But she reminded herself that these people had almost certainly killed Chester's pack, and created Ginger and her siblings as part of some kind of twisted breeding program. Yes, they really were that far gone.
"I don't suppose I could have something to wear," she said. "Unless you enjoy having naked ass-prints on your office furniture." Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Mike's grimace.
"If you behave well, we can discuss clothing, among other things."
Ah, Nicole thought, so we're on that chapter of the Stockholm Syndrome handbook, are we?
"I imagine you're wondering why I brought you here," Evans went on.
Actually, I'm wondering how many times I could hit you in the face with that desk stapler before your goon shoots me. "Sure," Nicole said. "Let's say I'm wondering that."
Evans laced her fingers together. "Life choices aside," she said, "you and I have one important thing in common."
Yeah, a certain percentage of DNA, and that's pretty much it. Of course, we also have common DNA with chimpanzees, lizards, and sea cucumbers. "We're both featherless bipeds," Nicole said. "Or did you mean something other than that?"
"We're human," Evans said. "Regardless of what you've convinced yourself, that creature in that cage is not."
Nicole folded her arms, in part to stop herself from shivering. The cage room, come to find out, was warmer than most of the facility, and they'd made her sit right under a draft from one of the vents. She had a hard time believing it wasn't intentional. She felt lousy enough already from drug withdrawal, and none of it helped make her brain-to-mouth filter any more effective. "Lady, between you and me, Avery is a hundred times the human being you are."
Evans' mouth twisted in a humorless smile. "We could sit here and trade insults all day, but that's not why I brought you here. I know I'll get a great deal farther with your cooperation than without it. Both of your cooperation, actually. Do you want to live in a cage? I can make things very comfortable for you. You can even keep your creature with you, if you like."
"In exchange for being kept prisoner and forcibly impregnated? Yeah, that sounds great. Sign me up. Also, referring to my boyfriend as a creature is not going to score you any points with me."
Evans sighed. It was a mother's sigh, an I'm so disappointed in you sigh. "The work we do here—"
"Benefits humanity, blah blah, because the end justifies the means. You know who else used to say things like that? Let me give you a hint: Germany, circa 1940."
"How can you say things like that when you've spoke to my daughter face to face?" Evans demanded. For once her icy demeanor cracked, and something that wasn't anger showed through, an emotion that Nicole had a reluctant sympathy for. "If it were up to me, I wouldn't have had Ashley tell her your story, I wouldn't have presumed to use my daughter to play on your sympathies, but now that you know—how can you sit there, smug in your complacency, and condemn children like my daughter to death when the power to save them is contained in the blood of that thing you chose to lie with?"
"You know, you might've had a case, right up until 'thing'," Nicole said grimly. "And that's why I'm not helping you, and will in fact do everything in my power to stop you. Because, yes, the healing factor in shifter blood could help a lot of people. And there are already researchers working on it. Researchers who are—" Shifters themselves, she started to say, then backed off, still unwilling to give Evans that much information on the rest of her kind. "—not kidnapping innocent people or force-breeding them; seriously, do you even listen to the words coming out of your mouth, because I think this train pulled out of Sanity Junction a long time ago."
"Mike," Evans said in a conversational tone, "see if Ashley is in the facility, please. I want her to come to my office."
"Leave you alone with her, boss?"
For answer, Evans reached into her desk drawer and took out a small gun. She laid it in front of her, the muzzle pointing at Nicole, and placed a hand lightly on top of it. Her smile was more feral than anything Nicole had ever seen on Avery's face. "Oh, yes. We'll be fine."
As Mike stepped out, Nicole thought, Now's my chance. To do what, was the question. Especially with that gun pointed at her. Oh, Avery, if only I had you here with me. You'd know what to do.
"Not going to use your daughter that way, huh?" she said, trying to keep her voice calm and look at Evans's face rather than the unblinking eye of the pistol's muzzle.
"Ashley got herself involved. She may as well play out the role she chose."
"Seems like you chose it for her. And now you expect me to be sympathetic for your daughter, when you can't muster a shred of empathy for my boyfriend or me?"
"It's your own poor choices that got you here in the first place."
"Yeah? Well, here's what I think," Nicole said. "Even if you're right that shif—that werewolves are a different species—" And if they are, then I'm one of them
too, except you don't know it. "—that doesn't give you the right to mistreat, hurt, and kill them. One of the things that makes us human is our ability to feel compassion, for our own species or another. There are people who've risked their lives jumping into flooding rivers to save drowning stray cats, or trying to get beached dolphins back into the water—"
"You can't possibly—"
"I think you've convinced yourself that what you're doing is for the good of humanity. Actually, I'm sure you believe that very strongly. And I don't want your daughter to die. I understand you're scared for her. I love my family as much as you love yours. But what you're doing here is still wrong."
Evans pushed her chair back with a loud scraping sound and stood up in a single quick motion. "Listen, you sanctimonious fool—"
She was interrupted by the door opening. Ashley came in, followed by Jeremy and Mike. Nicole's heart sank. Her brief window of opportunity had closed, and she'd done nothing with it.
But what could she have done? Evans had a gun. There was nowhere to go. Nicole's eyes returned, as they occasionally had throughout the conversation, to the air vent that was blowing the draft across her, rustling the papers on top of the bank of filing cabinets below it. No human could fit through it.
But could a koala ...?
Ashley drew a soft breath, bringing Nicole's attention back to her. "Hi," Ashley said.
"Hi, Ashley," Nicole replied. "I guess they didn't tell you why they wanted you here."
Ashley shook her head. She didn't have the rifle this time, and without it, the impression of fragility and youth was even stronger. Nicole was pretty sure the girl was in her late teens at least, or more likely her early twenties, but right now she could have passed easily for fourteen. "No, just that Mom wanted to see me." To her mother, Ashley appealed, "Did you find Dad?"
"Not yet, sweetheart." Evans tucked the gun back into the desk drawer. Nicole followed it with her eyes, briefly entertaining the thought of lunging across the desk and trying to grab it—
