Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  Avery stayed flat for a moment, gasping with reaction. His neck stung viciously. He raised a shaking hand and touched a sticky trail of blood. He'd been winged just above his collarbone. An inch to the left and it would have ripped through his jugular.

  Ray sprawled facedown on the floor, bleeding freely from the scalp, but seemed to be breathing. His buddy's bullets had ripped off part of his earlobe and gashed the side of his skull, but didn't seem to have done anything worse; Avery had done more damage bashing his face into the cage bars.

  Avery sat up and reached through the bars to retrieve Ray's keys. He had a bad moment when he wasn't sure if Ray carried keys to fit the padlocks on his cage door, but then he found the right one and the door was finally, blessedly open, and he wasted not a second in clambering out. Rather than going back in to get the keycard Ashley had left for Nicole, he took Ray's, along with both the dart gun and pistol. Slinging the MP5 over his shoulder made him feel ridiculous, considering he was still naked, but at least he was armed.

  The practical part of him said he should shoot Ray while the other man was out, rather than leave an enemy at his back. Then he looked down at the waxy face of the second man, the man he'd killed, and shuddered. His hands were still shaky from the aftereffects of the violence. You're in Seattle, USA, not in a war zone, and you're not a fucking monster, Avery Hollen, no matter what they think; you're a human being. Act like it.

  His second thought was to lock Ray in the cage, but rather than waste the time, he took the other keycard from the dead guard's belt; the door wouldn't open without it. Ray was just as trapped either way. Cautiously, Avery let himself out into the hallway.

  There was no sign of anyone and no sound of alarms. The instant he met anyone, the game would be up; it wasn't as if he could pretend he belonged while sneaking around naked and armed to the teeth.

  Where would they have taken Nicole?

  Indecision caught him in its teeth. He didn't dare leave without checking everywhere, but if he took too long, they'd catch him. If the cage room was monitored, there would certainly be cameras elsewhere in the facility as well.

  The lack of immediate alarm, though, made him think the two men who'd come to check out his fake seizure might have been the sole complement of staff on camera duty today. After all, private security guys like these cost money. There was no point in paying a bunch of guards to sit around eating pizza and keeping an eye on a mostly empty facility—actually, considering that Avery and Nicole were the only test subjects he'd seen any sign of, and Evans herself appeared to be the only researcher, just these few guys were massive overkill on the security end of things. Paranoia'll do that to you, Avery thought, peeking through the door at the end of the hallway into a stairwell. Of course, in her case, the paranoia might be justified ...

  He had his choice of stairs going up or down. He couldn't tell whether up or down was more likely to get him out; instinct said he was probably underground, but he couldn't put his finger on why he thought that, and if he was wrong, the upward stairs would only trap him on the roof.

  However, whether it led to the roof or ground floor, up was the direction that would give him the best chance of being able to look around and orient himself, as opposed to the more likely option of getting lost in a maze of corridors if he went down. He climbed silently, with a certain amount of effort as his bad leg tried to lock up on him. Climbing stairs, though, was something that wouldn't be easier as a wolf, and shifting would have meant leaving the weapons and keycard behind.

  The stairs ended at another locked door. Avery pressed his ear to it but could hear nothing beyond. He swiped the card and cracked the door open just far enough to peek out.

  Parking garage. Or, rather, a small concrete-walled underground parking dock, big enough for about a dozen cars. Right now it contained no fewer than five different vehicles: two black SUVs, an unmarked white van, and two generic commuter vehicles. A ramp led up, and presumably out.

  Avery's breath caught. The way out was right there. And no one seemed to be around.

  Instinct said to go back for Nicole, but his rational mind won. The best thing he could do for Nicole was to get out and come back with proper backup and an arrest warrant for every single one of those bastards down there.

  He hated to leave anything behind, but he could move much faster as a wolf. He ejected the half-spent clip from Ray's gun, used the empty gun to prop open the door, and dropped the bullets and keycard into an inconspicuous dark spot behind a concrete bumper next to the door. Keeping the MP5 slung over his shoulder and hoping it'd stay there, he shifted.

  Running on four legs with the gun slung across his back turned out to be as much of a pain as he'd been afraid it would be, but he could manage a lurching lope, with an occasional stop to shift back and adjust it when it slipped off. He trotted up the concrete ramp—and found himself confronting a rolled-down garage door at the top. There was no sign of a pedestrian exit here, and no sign of any way to open the door from the inside, either, in the absence of some sort of garage-door opener.

  Damn. He should have expected that. He loped back down to the parking dock, aware of time ticking away like too-rapid heartbeats. A regular parking garage would have some kind of stairs or elevator to the surface level, but this one didn't seem to. The stairs back down to the underground facility and the garage door were the only apparent ways in or out.

  Or ... were they? In his wolf body, Avery's sense of smell was acute enough to detect the distinctive scent that he now knew was Alan Lopez—that werewolf-human hybrid smell, tainted with sickness and wrongness. Lopez had been all over in the parking garage, which made sense as the guy used to work here. But a moment later he realized that Lopez's smell was especially concentrated around the door and off to one side. Following what seemed to be the strongest concentration of it, Avery's nose led him to a metal drainage grate at the very lowest point of the parking garage, where the mildly sloped concrete floor met the walls. It stank here of more than just Lopez's wolf-human taint.

  Lopez was getting into the sewers from the facility itself.

  Avery shifted back to human and hooked his fingers into the crusted iron slats. With effort, he was able to lift the corner. It wouldn't be easy to move, but it clearly could be done—had been done quite a lot, he thought, looking at the scraped concrete around the sides.

  He could get out this way. No, he and Nicole could get out this way. He had to take her with him, because this wouldn't be a simple matter of taking a few minutes to find a phone and call for help. It might take hours to find a way out, and there was no way he was leaving her alone for that long, at the mercy of that sadist Evans and her gang of tame killers.

  He let the grate drop back into place, and was reaching for the discarded bullets and keycard when the door opened and someone shot at him.

  Werewolf reflexes saved him. He threw himself to the side, shifting as he rolled. He lost the MP5 in the fall, and rather than trying to recover it, he leaped for the door in a long low black streak. Whoever was on the other side tried to slam it, but Avery was on him, struggling through the gap, snarling and snapping. It was Mike, and Avery's memory of his torture at Evans and Mike's hands was far too recent for him to feel especially merciful.

  Overbalanced by over a hundred pounds of furious werewolf, Mike went over backwards, and they tumbled down the stairs together. Mike was yelling wordlessly, trying to hold Avery off while still protecting his head from the hard edges of the steps, and doing neither very well. Avery savaged his forearms and tore at his shoulders, which Mike hunched up to protect his neck. Avery's own savagery astonished him. He was so furious that he'd gone straight through anger into a cold, vicious calm.

  Although Mike was heavier, Avery had a slight advantage as they rolled from step to step, using his smaller size and wolf muscles to twist lithely out of the way and let Mike take the brunt of the fall. They hit the bottom in an awkward tangle of arms and legs. Avery shifted before Mike could regain the advan
tage, and punched him in the face. It was like hitting a brick wall.

  With Avery on top of him trying to pin him down, Mike couldn't get a hand to his shoulder holster, but he could reach his belt, and drew a long, wicked combat knife. Avery ducked inside Mike's reach and felt the knife ignite a stripe of fire along his spine. He headbutted Mike in the nose, making his opponent reel, and tried to block Mike's arm, pushing the knife hand away from him. Mike retaliated by punching him in the ribs with his now-freed left hand.

  He's bigger. He's stronger. He's armed. He's dressed, for God's sake. It was dawning on Avery that this wasn't a fight he was likely to win, unless he could turn the tide quickly.

  The only real advantage he had was his unpredictability. Mike wouldn't be used to fighting an opponent who could reshape his bones and muscles from moment to moment, and so Avery shifted again. It meant letting go of the knife hand, but he went for Mike's face with slashing jaws. Mike had to throw his arms over his face to protect himself, and Avery sank his teeth into the wrist of the knife hand, grinding down. Mike screamed and thrashed, punching Avery over and over in the head.

  Through the ringing in his ears, Avery heard the door into the stairwell open. He released Mike and lunged for the new opponent who'd entered the fray, knocking him flat and then shifting on the fly to grab the gun that had gone spilling from the other man's hand. Avery backed away down the corridor, as the door to the stairwell clunked shut, cutting off the sight of Mike curled around his savaged wrist and moaning. Mike was effectively out of the fight at this point, and Avery could tell he'd done serious damage that time. Wolf jaws were meant for cracking open deer bones. He'd felt bones break, and might have even torn open an artery.

  "Hands where I can see 'em!" Avery barked when the guy on the floor made a twitch for what was probably another weapon on him somewhere. The gun Avery had got hold of was a small Glock semiauto. He regretted the loss of the MP5. "I'm a federal agent and a combat veteran. You do not want to fuck with me right now. Where's Nicole?"

  When an answer was not immediately forthcoming, Avery fired into the floor, sending chips of cheap linoleum flying. "Stand up! You think I won't shoot you? You saw the dead man, right? How about what I did to his wrist?"

  Floor Guy straightened up slowly. He was the thick-necked guard from earlier, and he was, Avery now realized, quite young—early to mid twenties. At that age, a lot of young guys thought they were invulnerable, and this one perhaps more than most, since he'd chosen to sign up with some kind of semi-legal private security firm that didn't have too many qualms about what they provided security on. However, his only loyalty to Evans came from whatever she was paying him, which meant he wouldn't be inclined to risk his life on pointless heroics. At least, Avery was gambling that he wouldn't.

  "Weapons on the floor." Avery risked a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was sneaking up on him from behind. No one seemed to be, at least not yet. How many people did Evans have in the building? How fast could she get more here?

  Floor Guy spent a few seconds thinking about his options, then threw down a knife and another gun from a holster at the base of his spine.

  "Good thinking. My fight isn't with you, it's with your boss. Now take me to Nicole." When he didn't answer, Avery clarified impatiently, "The woman who was in the cage next to mine."

  "I'd love to," Floor Guy said. He flicked a look behind him at the closed door to the stairwell. Mike could still be heard moaning as he clutched the ruins of his wrist. "You two monsters are made for each other. Trouble is, I have no idea where she is."

  "So find me someone who does."

  "No, you don't get it. She's gone."

  Avery's righteous anger was temporarily derailed. "She got away?"

  "Turned into some kind of raccoon thing and crawled into the vents. Which," Floor Guy added with a wry twist of his mouth, "would sound completely crazy if I said it to anybody other than you."

  Raccoon thing. Avery choked on an inappropriate laugh. Good thing Nicole wasn't around to hear that.

  Then his luck ran out. The only thing that saved him was a small tell of Floor Guy's—a quick flick of the eyes past Avery, looking down the corridor. Avery flung himself to the side and a dart sailed through the air where he'd been a split second before.

  Evans was at the far end of the hallway, with a trank gun in her hands, a rifle this time. There was no cover, and every door along the corridor needed a keycard to open, which he no longer had and couldn't have taken the time to use even if he did. He pressed against the wall while Evans grimly lined up another shot.

  "Don't!" he snapped, with all the authority he could muster while naked and outnumbered. "I've got your guy at gunpoint here, and I'm planning on walking out. As far as I'm concerned, we all can as long as you let me go."

  "Where's Ashley?" Floor Guy asked Evans.

  "Locked up for her own good," Evans said. "Now do your fucking job, Jeremy, and stop him from getting around you."

  Jeremy thought about this for a minute; then he quietly and calmly stepped out of the way. "I don't have a dog in this fight, and I saw what this freak did to Mike. Like hell I want to be next."

  "You are so fucking fired!" Evans yelled at him.

  Avery had time to take exactly one step toward the now unguarded stairwell door, when Ray burst through it with an MP5.

  God damn it, I forgot about him. They'd outflanked Avery, circling around to box in him from both sides. Ray looked furious, his face mottled with bruises from the bashing he'd taken against the cage bars. The one thing in Avery's favor was that Ray and Evans were on opposite ends of the corridor and therefore in each other's line of fire.

  "Don't kill him!" Evans shouted. "I want him alive!"

  "Oh, don't worry," Ray snarled through blood-stained teeth. "I want him alive, too."

  Avery shot him, or tried to. The gunshot was deafening in the corridor, and Ray staggered a step without slowing down. Avery realized he was wearing body armor this time and switched to a head shot, but Ray had already closed with him and knocked the gun aside with a powerful fist; Avery's attempted second shot went wide, chipping the paint on the wall.

  Ray was bigger, stronger, and a whole lot angrier, and Avery had been in too many fights to get into one he probably wasn't going to win. He dropped to the floor, shifting as he went, but this time Ray anticipated that move. The butt of the MP5 smashed into Avery's skull. He snarled, adrenaline helping him power through the pain, and slashed at Ray's leg with his teeth. If he could only get a grip—

  Another tranquilizer dart skittered past him on the floor; he and Ray were moving too fast for Evans to line up her shot. Mainly Avery just wanted to get past him to the door, if he could. Not that he knew how he'd get it open when he got there, since he'd lost the keycard. One thing at a time.

  Being a wolf wasn't helping as much as it normally did; it was only making him aware of the shortcomings of this form in a fight. His only weapons as a wolf were speed and teeth. He could outrun any human opponent, but that wouldn't help him here, because there was nowhere to go. Speed and the element of surprise were largely what he relied on, and neither of those seemed to be useful here.

  And his physical condition wasn't the best. He was tired, recently drugged, and hadn't eaten properly in days, and he'd run around on his bad leg to the point where it now threatened to collapse whenever he tried to put weight on it.

  Ray kicked him viciously. Avery took it on the shoulder and got his teeth into Ray's boot, pulling him off his feet. Ray went down, but twisted to divert most of the force of the fall into a pile-driving punch at Avery's ribs. Avery felt his bones crack.

  Ray followed up his advantage by pummeling Avery in the head with the butt of his assault rifle. Dazed, Avery tried to get up and fell back down. Ray scrambled to his feet, breathing hard, and swung the muzzle of the gun to point at Avery's head. He planted a boot on Avery's furry, heaving side, grinding into the broken ribs.

  "Just give me a reason, you
son of a bitch," Ray panted.

  "I want him alive!" Evans's voice came from further down the hall.

  "You saw what he did to Harlowe, right? What he did to Mike?" Ray stamped on what would be, in human form, Avery's right wrist. Avery writhed, clenching his jaws on a yelp of pain.

  "I want him alive, Ray."

  Through blurred vision, Avery stared up at the man looking down at him along the black line of the gun, face twisted with hate. She's not in charge right now. Or, at least, she had no control over the one thing that mattered: Ray's finger on the trigger of the gun. And that control seemed to be slipping—

  With a sudden loud crack, a ceiling tile came loose and dropped directly onto Ray's head, bearing a furious koala on top of it.

  The gun went off and missed Avery's face by inches, spraying his muzzle with stinging bits of linoleum. Nicole had blood on her mind, and she tore at Ray's face and shoulders with all four sets of claws. Ray yelled and went down on his ass, dropping the gun in his desperate attempt to get the koala off him before she gouged out his eyes.

  Avery shifted and scrambled painfully to his feet. He grabbed Nicole's koala body with both hands—the bones ground agonizingly in his wrist—and spun toward the stairwell door.

  It opened for him before he got to it. Jeremy held it for him and then let it slam behind him, and tossed him a keycard.

  "Thanks," Avery gasped. Beside him, Nicole shifted human again, and went down hard on one knee on the stairs as her body transitioned between its koala and human sense of balance.

  "Raccoon, huh?" she said. "Do I look like a raccoon to you?"

  "C'mon!" Avery snapped, hauling her up with one hand. The others, Evans and Ray, would be right behind them. "You too," he flung over his shoulder at Jeremy.