by Alisa Woods
“Still working late?” he asked with a small smile as he strode up to her. He had the dark-haired, blue-eyed gene that ran strong in the Wilding family, but he wasn’t a white wolf like her. His wolf was big and black and shaggy-furred… and like every other shifter. He didn’t know about her white wolf… and if he did, he would probably be ashamed of his daughter. As far as he knew, she had never shifted. Of course, that was far from the truth.
“Yeah, just catching up on some stuff,” she said, taking a peek at her screen to make sure nothing incriminating was up there.
Her father scowled, but it didn’t have much heat behind it. “You work too hard, Zoe. I can’t help thinking I went wrong somewhere to have this be the result.” He gestured to her, perched on her stool, clad in a bulky lab coat stained with coffee as if it was a pathetic state to be in. Which, if she was honest, was probably true. But he didn’t mean any harm by it. Billy Wilding was a gentle man, unlike the white wolf who was his father, Bobby Wilding. Of course, her father didn’t know that part either—he thought he was the progeny of Gary Wilding, the alpha that Bobby killed after sleeping with his mate.
“I love my work, Dad.” She gave him a teasing look. “Besides, you’re the last person to talk.” Her father was brilliant and had built this gene therapy lab from the ground up, developing all kinds of innovative technologies to help people. And because her mother had died in childbirth, Zoe and the lab were everything to him. Always had been.
Her dad scratched the back of his neck, gave her an awkward look, then grinned. “Isn’t this where I say, do as I say, not as I do?”
“Too late!” She smiled. “All opportunities to influence me have been null and void since my sixteenth birthday when I went off to Harvard and discovered all the things you never wanted me to know.”
Her dad threw up his hands. “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!”
She laughed. She truly loved her father—he had such a good heart—but if he ever knew what she really was, and why her mother truly died in childbirth, she was convinced that the light in his eyes would go permanently dim. Her cousin Terra had told her the Wolf Hunter’s story about killing his own mother in childbirth… and it hit way too damn close to the bone. Terra, of course, knew Zoe’s mother had died the same way—but she didn’t know Grace was a white wolf like the Wolf Hunter. No one did, except Grace, who Zoe had confided in only after Grace had taken the leap of bringing Agent Smith’s data to her for analysis.
Zoe was convinced, just like the Wolf Hunter, that the magic inside her was what had killed her mother. That knowledge hadn’t turned Zoe into a psychopath like him, but she understood the pull of that darkness. And the desire to get rid of this thing inside her was only stronger knowing she might have gone down that dark path.
Her father leaned forward to kiss her gently on the cheek. “Zo-bug,” he said softly as he pulled back. “You’re a beautiful young wolf. You should be out having fun. Or maybe even finding a mate. You’re twenty-five already—”
Zoe scrunched up her face. “Oh my God, Dad, please… You’re acting like an old bitty grandmother. Just stop. I’m begging you.”
He chuckled but then turned serious. “I shouldn’t have drawn you into my business, Zo. I’m afraid I’ve passed on my obsession for genetics. All I can do is apologize for my DNA, I guess.” He smiled, but the words made her cringe inside.
Zoe struggled to keep that off her face. “You’re doing good work, Dad. Important work. I’m proud to be part of it.” And that much was true, as far as it went.
He accepted that with a small nod and turned to leave. Before he got far, he twisted back and shook a finger at her. “Don’t work too late, young lady.”
She raised her voice to call after his retreating form. “You’re the only dad I know who would be happier if I was out clubbing than doing my homework. Don’t be so weird!”
She heard him chuckling all the way into the long hallway outside the lab. Once he was gone, she pulled up her gene sequencing software and dove back in. If only she could figure out how to isolate the white wolf gene or find the trigger that caused it to express its powers, then she could reverse engineer it. She had all of Agent Smith’s data and had re-created his serums, but it was like re-engineering the space shuttle. Too many interconnected parts. She just had to keep whacking away at it… eventually, she would have some kind of breakthrough.
She didn’t get her Ph.D. at twenty-one by being a slacker. And she knew a thing or two on the subject. If someone could figure this out, she knew she was that someone.
As the evening wore on, the lab settled into an after-hours quiet—her synthesis machine had gone through its paces and shut down. The night janitors had finished bustling around and cleaning up and faded away. The only sounds that broke the quiet were the hum of her computer and the occasional click of her keyboard.
Somewhere in the distance, she heard a faint beeping.
Her first thought was that some equipment had triggered an alarm or had a default setting that was giving off this intermittent complaint. She ignored it for several minutes, hoping it would die a slow death on its own, but the thing just didn’t quit. It sounded like a far-away smoke alarm whose battery had gone low. Eventually, and because the beeping was slowly driving her insane, she pushed away from her desk and crept around the lab in her sneakers, pausing every few feet to listen. She had circled around her lab twice before she decided that she must be going crazy—the thing was coming from everywhere at once. Eventually, she had the idea of shutting off all the lights and all the monitors to see if maybe there was some flashing light indicator that might give her a clue.
She hunted down each instrument and powered them down, one by one, until she eventually discovered a softly-glowing red light leaking from underneath one of the cabinets in the lab bench next to hers. It was an empty station—some undergraduates occasionally used it, but for the most part, it was unused space. She knelt down to open the cabinet door…
Something clicked much louder than it should have.
She had felt it before she heard the explosion—the concussive force threw her halfway across the lab, the sound of the blast finally pounding her ears as her body smashed against a lab bench, crashed through racks of glassware, and tumbled to the floor. Pain flashed across her entire body. Her awareness zoomed to black. She didn’t know how long she was out, but the pain kept screaming and, at some point, wrenched her back into consciousness.
She barely could open her eyes—every part of her hurt. As she struggled to peel them open, she gagged on the acrid smoke that had filled her lungs. Her paws were a horrible mess—she had shifted during the explosion, but most of her white fur had been burned away, leaving raw, pink skin behind. She gasped with the fresh waves of pain that seemed to touch every part of her body, but when she tried to move, the pain localized straight down into her broken hind paw. She yelped slumped back to the floor.
You’re a white wolf, she reassured herself. You’ll heal. But terror gripped her heart—would she be scarred for life? Could she really recover from these massive burns covering her body?
She couldn’t help the moan that wrenched out of her, but she tried to drag herself across the floor of the lab, even with the sharp pain that kept stinging through her raw flesh. The floor was littered with glass, shards of broken beakers and glassware, but her much bigger problem was the inferno the lab had become. The walls, the benches, even the ceiling tiles were all going up in flames. The whole thing look like it would collapse any second—and even as she coughed and sputtered and desperately crawled across the glass, she knew the carbon dioxide would get her, even if the heat and flames didn’t.
She had to get out.
Only she could barely move. There was no way she would make it.
She stopped moving and tried to pull in some oxygen to scream for help, but all that came out was a mewling, coughing sound. Black dots swam in front of her eyes, but when she looked up, she saw something even worse�
��a wall of flames crawling toward the rack of gas canisters they used for the mass spec.
Holy shit. Those were bombs waiting to be detonated.
She renewed her struggle to crawl out of the inferno, but then an angel appeared—dressed in a full-protection fire suit, mask, and oxygen tank. The firefighter stomped through the shattered lab doorway and shone a light through the smoke. She waved to him and tried to call out, but only more coughing sputtered out of her lungs. He must’ve heard her, though, because he came running. Just as he reached her and knelt down, another heart-stopping explosion ripped through the air, picking them both up like rag dolls and throwing them across the wreckage of the lab.
Blackness slammed down on her like a coffin.
Troy awoke inside a shimmering blue bubble with a wolf in his arms.
He must’ve been knocked out temporarily. It wasn’t easy to see through his already-charred facemask, but there was no mistaking the horrible burn marks all over the delicate white wolf lying next to him. Some kind of blast had thrown them across the room, and Troy’s gear had protected him from the heat, but the wolf he had been trying to rescue was limp and horribly injured. Fear rumbled through his chest—he needed to get her out of the lab and fast.
But what the hell was this blue energy thing pulsing around them?
He struggled up to sitting, but as his helmet reached the shimmering energy field, flying sparks from the contact made him cringe away. It seemed to be keeping out the worst of the heat, but the smoke was still filtering through—and that would kill this wolf next to him if she weren’t already dead.
His inner beast was howling with concern in a way that it normally didn’t during a rescue. Maybe because the wolf was female? That usually triggered his wolf’s protective instinct. Either way, Troy would do everything possible to save her, but the urgency he felt for this rescue was definitely not normal.
He didn’t have an extra air mask, so he pulled off his and held it up to the wolf’s muzzle. The small trickle of oxygen should help cut down the smoke-filled air for her. He held his breath, but the acrid sting of it was already blurring his eyes. The wolf shook her head and pawed at the mask to get it away from her face. Then she stirred and opened her beautiful blue eyes.
The instant she saw him… she shifted.
Troy jerked back, taking the mask with him. She was fully human now, thin and gorgeous and naked, but covered with frightening burn wounds. She had long black hair, but half of it was missing, burned straight off below her shoulder and leaving her hair lop-sided. Half of her face was beautiful and pristine, but the other half had been charred and blackened. His heart wrenched, and he couldn’t even imagine the pain she must be in, but she was just blinking at him with a confused sort of look.
She struggled to sit up, and Troy reached out with a gloved hand to support her. She looked at him in horror and then stared at the blue shimmering field around them.
She reached a hand toward it. “I made this.” There was awe in her voice—Troy was definitely in awe of her in many ways, but that didn’t mean they could hang out here indefinitely.
“You made this?” He coughed on the air he had to suck in to say those words. “Can you keep it going but let us stand up? I need to get you out of here.”
She looked back at him, still confused but recognition dawning.
Then a charred part of the skin on her face sloughed off and revealed fresh pale skin underneath. What the fuck? Troy was a shifter and a healer—he knew very well the fantastic power of healing magic—but this was like nothing he’d ever seen. He gawked until she started to cough on the smoke that was going to quickly overwhelm both of them.
He shoved the mask toward her face. “Breathe,” he commanded.
She sucked in a big gulp of air, and then another.
“We’ll take turns,” he said choking on the air that he was forced to breathe.
She nodded quickly. He took the mask from her and held it up to his own face, breathing rapidly to exhale the smoke out of his lungs and to get fresh oxygen in. Then he inhaled one more time and gave it back to her.
As soon as she had it pressed to her face, he scooped down and picked her up in his arms, cradling her naked body to his chest, which was covered with all kinds of gear, not least the air hose that was pressed between them. She kept pulling in breaths, but as he lifted her from the ground, the force field rose with them, shielding them from the heat.
She took a deep breath, then lifted the mask to his face. He sucked in several more breaths in rapid succession, then gave a nod for her to take it back. She held it to her face again.
The room was a fucking inferno—flames were everywhere. The floor. The ceiling. The blast that had thrown them to the far side of the lab had also knocked down a bunch of the equipment, which had then started all new fires dotting along the floor. It was a nightmarish obstacle course, and the place was probably ready to fall down around them.
Holding her tight, Troy tromped his way out of the room as fast as he could.
This was Billy Wilding’s lab—he was a well-known genetics researcher with several labs in this wing of the university’s genetics research building. When the call came in about the fire, Troy made sure his ambulance was the first vehicle rolling out of the station. He’d been watching all the threats against the Wilding pack come down and play out in the media and online, and for months, he’d been advocating for a special protective detail for the Wilding research lab just down the street. But one firefighter’s advocacy, especially when he was a shifter himself, apparently didn’t hold much weight with the brass. He was just sure something would happen eventually.
But the last thing he wanted was to be right.
As he hauled the girl out of the lab, the room creaked around him, the telltale sounds of structural weakness. He kept on going, down the hallway, putting at least two structural supports between them and the on-fire laboratory. His crew must have pulled back after the explosion—there was no one in the empty hallway. He turned a corner and figured they were far enough.
“You can drop your magical shield now,” he said, coughing halfway through his words. He had no idea how she managed to conjure that thing, and he guessed she didn’t, either, given how she had reacted, but he figured she’d want that kept secret.
She nodded, sucked in a breath, and then held the oxygen mask out to him. He coughed, but just shook his head—the air was cleaner here, and she needed it more than he did. He kneeled down to set her on the cold tile flooring, and as he did, the shield winked out of existence. Then he pulled off his gloves in preparation to check her out, make sure she was stable before he moved her farther. His human EMT training was kicking in, but there wasn’t much for him to do—her body was continuing to heal itself at an insane rate. Half her hair was still missing, but almost all the burn wounds on her face and body healed as he watched. The last charred pieces sloughed off, and the skin left behind was as pink and beautiful as a newborn baby’s.
He was watching the impossible.
She was beautiful and naked and shivering on the floor—in any normal situation, he would be gawking. As it was, his heart was twisting, hoping this was real—that she was actually healing right out of the burns, as hard as that was to believe.
Then she moaned and reached for her leg. It was bent at a horrible angle—a clean break halfway between the knee and the ankle.
“You have to set it,” she ground out between her teeth.
“Set it?” he asked, startled.
They both heard boots tromping up the stairwell nearby.
“Yes!” she hissed at him. “You have to set it before they get here. Or it will heal in that position!”
Of course—she was healing so fast… if he didn’t do it quick…
He ran his bare hands down along the injury, feeling out the break. He only had a few seconds, and he wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing, but he had no time. He didn’t know if she was more afraid of it healing in the wrong posit
ion or that someone, namely the firefighters who were about to crest the top of the stairs, would see it.
He took hold of both sides of the break and snapped it back into alignment.
She shrieked, and the sound tore through him. His hands ran quickly along the break to make sure he got it right—but it healed so quickly, it was hard to even tell that it had been broken a moment before.
He gave her a wide-eyed look. “Did it work?”
She was still gritting her teeth, but she nodded quickly. “Thank you.” Then she coughed a little bit more and stared up at him as his fellow firefighters arrived behind her. Don’t tell, she mouthed silently.
He nodded once, sharply, to assure her that he wouldn’t tell anyone. About any of it.
She was struggling to cover her private parts by folding up her body and wrapping her arms around it.
“Dammit, Troy, how the hell did you make it out of there?” That was Russell, his voice muffled by his facemask. He was gawking alternately at the naked girl on the floor and at Troy kneeling next to her.
“Shifters are tough, okay?” Troy snarled. “How about you get the girl a blanket? There are probably some clothes in the truck, too.” He waved a hand at the other two—Simpson and Hobart—to get them to back up and stop staring as well. “How about if you guys give us some room? We’ll move her as soon as someone gets the damn blanket.” The smoke in the hallway was starting to get worse—he might not be able to wait.
Troy shuffled around to block their view and give her some privacy. And also so he could duck his head to speak quietly to her. “I’m going to check you out, all right?” It was his standard protocol for human victims.
She frowned a little, then gave a nod. He dropped his hand to her wrist to take her pulse, even though he knew she was fine at this point, then kept his eyes locked with hers—partially so she would know that he was on her side, and partially to keep from gawking at her nakedness.
