by A. C. Arthur
“Man,” Bas stated about two seconds before the desk the thing had hefted over his shoulders came barreling at them.
The moment the furniture crashed into the floor across the room, just barely missing Jacques, the thing let its head fall back and roared so loudly the entire building shook.
“I don’t think so, boss,” Jacques yelled across the room.
Bas had just nodded his agreement when the thing lifted its head, its beady black eyes shifting to a bright yellow, the face that had already been misshapen twisting even more, so that it now resembled the muzzle of a … cat.
They both shifted simultaneously, falling to their haunches, ready to approach whatever the thing was about to turn into.
* * *
Ezra yanked the bars right off the hinges a second after the building rocked back and forth. The moment he’d heard the first roar of that monstrosity out front his instincts about how bad this night was going to go skyrocketed. This was no ordinary police station and what was going on here was not what should have been happening. Ezra sensed Jewel was at the center of it. His priority was to get her out safely. Bas and Jacques could hold their own or at least he’d thought so until the floor beneath him had moved.
Jewel stood in a corner of the cell where she’d been held, her hands behind her back, eyes wide as Ezra eased forward. Everything inside him tensed, his cat pressing insistently against his human body. It wanted out, now. It wanted to hunt whatever was looming over this building, to protect the female that stood a few feet from him, fear filling her body, spilling from her in heavily scented waves that had him gnashing his teeth.
“We don’t have time for another Q and A. We have to move now!” he told her and reached out his hand to her.
She didn’t move, her wide-eyed gaze not blinking. “He’s not going to stop looking for me.” She spoke in a barely there whisper that paled in comparison to all the other surround sound noise.
There were sirens in the distance, still far away so they had time. Then there was the persistent scent, the foul one that now had hairs on the back of Ezra’s neck rising. It was as if it was enticing him, wafting in front of his nose in a smoky haze meant to lead him away, to guide him somewhere or to something.
“He can come looking all he wants but he won’t put a hand on you. I promise you he won’t touch you. Now let’s go, I’ll deal with him when the time comes.” Ezra took her hand then pulled her up to his chest where he could lower his cheek to hers and inhale. Beyond the fear, beyond the foul stench that threatened to drive his cat insane was this. The very basic scent of this woman, sweet, but not soft, tinged with a musky sexuality that to Ezra reminded him of the wild edginess of the jungle. It spurred him and his cat to do something it had never considered before, never attempted, and he closed his eyes to the intensity.
They ran out of the cell at full speed. Well, she ran at full speed, Ezra suspected; he kept a pace that would keep her close and get them the hell out of there as soon as possible. But they stopped short when they were back to the room near the exit, face-to-face with what, Ezra couldn’t quite say.
But this was it. This was what that foul scent was leading him to. This was what Ezra’s cat had been hunting the moment it stepped foot into this building.
Jewel’s gasp was audible even through the persistent roaring of this … beast, for lack of a better word. With an arm moving behind him he pushed her so that she was completely blocked by his body. “Stay back,” he warned, his teeth gritting. “When I move, you move.”
He could feel her fingers gripping the material of his shirt, her body pressing against his back, her heartbeat thumping wildly in her chest. At his sides his fists clenched, his nostrils flaring as he looked across the room at what stood before him.
Its back was broad as it slumped over on all fours, its fur a mixture of black, gold, and a few spots of white. Claws scraped the floor, long, jagged, deadly. Its tail was short, nubbed, its head broad but slightly disfigured, its mouth wide, teeth elongated and sharp, saliva dripping in big splats onto the floor. To its left and right were two smaller cats, Bas and Jacques, poised and ready to strike. A standoff that Ezra and Jewel had interrupted—two Shadow Shifters and one, whatever the hell that was.
The next actions were quick and efficient as only a trained tactical team could carry out. They came in through the broken windows, kicking in the door. Two came from the same hallway that Ezra had just brought Jewel through, guns drawn, firing at will. Bas’s blue team was specifically trained for shit like this, taking down a threat in seconds, neutralizing situations and protecting their FL.
Ezra knew their game plan, he knew what would take place the moment they got that beast down on the floor, and he didn’t want Jewel to see any more than she already had. Turning, he wrapped his arms around her, lifting her until she was cradled in his arms, her head buried in his chest, and he moved against the hail of bullets. He jumped through a window, inhaling the night air quickly and running to the first SUV he saw. Yanking the back door open he pushed Jewel into the back. “Get down on the floor and stay there until I come get you!” he yelled to her. “Do it!” he reiterated when she sat on the seat, every part of her body shaking as he stared back at him, one green eye and one brown.
Ezra cursed those damned contacts she insisted on wearing, just as he cursed this entire situation and the fact that he had to leave her here alone. But whatever that thing was inside, he needed to find out. The Assembly Leader needed to know.
Chapter 9
“We’ve got more questions than answers and I’m about sick of this shit!” Ezra yelled the moment he walked into one of the rooms in Bas’s bunkers, beneath the main floors of Perryville.
They’d been back at the resort for about forty-five minutes, after finally getting that “thing” down with a shot to the neck of a potent tranquilizer. Ezra hadn’t wanted to leave Jewel unattended and at the same time he’d wanted to be inside to see what the hell was going on. The conflict for him was strange because he had no emotional or physical attachments to anyone, let alone a human. But it was real and weighed heavily on his shoulders in the seconds he’d stood outside the SUV door. He’d felt compelled to stay with her, even as that darkness loomed inside warning him to get as far away as he possibly could, to not get sucked in like he had before.
As if answered by some higher deity, another SUV pulled up with even more of Bas’s team inside. As the last two climbed out, Ezra waved them over, assigning them to guard the truck with Jewel in it with their lives. The toothy growl that followed his order assured him that the young guards had gotten the message of how serious this new assignment was.
He’d run back inside the police station to find the guards unloading rounds into the “thing,” having zero success as it kept right on coming at them, claws raised, teeth dripping with evidence of its hunger.
“We need to take him down!” Ezra had yelled. “You got a tranq gun?”
The closest guard to him, Paolo, was a younger man who fought like he’d seen plenty of battles in his time.
“Not a gun, but we’ve got some syringes full of stuff the local vet said we could use instead of killing rogues right off the bat,” Paolo offered.
“Get it now!” Ezra ordered, looking up in time to see the “thing” heading his way. This wasn’t a rogue. For one, it was too big, no shifter grew to be that size. It looked to weigh at least three hundred pounds and its coat was all wrong, like a combination of cats’ colors. Even its eyes were wrong, glazed with something evil and possibly …
He didn’t have another moment to consider as the “thing” charged at him. Instead of backing away or running—which had never even crossed Ezra’s mind—he spread his legs, hunching forward in a fighting stance, ready to take the beast on head-to-head. In a blur of movement two cats ran to his side, Jacques and Bas, he knew, as they’d been the only ones to shift. Both the smaller cats roared, attacking the beast from the side, but it kept its eyes on Ezra, his decision to
kill clear in the murky yellow depths of its eyes.
Its powerful jaws came closer and Ezra did what he knew, he wrapped an arm around its head—as best he could since it was so much larger than that of a normal jaguar, tiger, or any of the other shifters. Looping his other arm quickly he flipped over until he was behind the “thing,” latching his hands and pulling back with all his might.
With its head yanking back, its target out of reach, the “thing” went absolutely ballistic, coming up on its haunches.
“Inject him! Now!” Ezra yelled, his biceps straining to hold onto the “thing” as it reared back. “Inject it!”
There was a lot of movement, all the shifters in the room either watching or standing with guns poised, the two cats still standing guard on either side of the “thing.” Ezra jerked forward as it fell to its front paws, his entire body jolting with the movement. Its head reared back once more, a sickening roar beginning then ending quickly as the “thing” finally fell to the floor, all four legs spread out around it. Ezra didn’t waste a moment sliding off the beast, landing on his feet, and taking a couple of steps back to look down at what it was, or rather, what it wasn’t.
Lights flashed through the broken windows, and the sirens grew closer.
“We should go,” Syfon, one of the team leaders said, looking to Ezra for an answer since the FL and his Lead Enforcer were in cat form. That made Ezra the next highest-ranking official able to speak.
“Yeah,” he said, chest heaving with the effort he’d exerted trying to tame this “thing.” “Can we get this in the truck?”
“We’ll get it.” Paolo came to stand beside him.
Ezra nodded. “I’ll get them out of here,” he said, looking down at Bas and Jacques. With a nod of his head he ran toward the hallway where he knew the cells were. There’d been an exit door back there, one Ezra was betting would let them out the back side of this building, the opposite side of where those sirens would be headed. The two cats followed and they didn’t shift until they were on the driver’s side of the first vehicle they’d arrived in.
In seconds Bas was pulling open the back door to his SUV, retrieving a duffle bag and reaching inside for the extra clothes he had stored there.
“I want everybody in the bunker, including whatever the hell that thing in there is. We’re meeting in half an hour. In the meantime, somebody better come up with something because I’m not calling the Assembly Leader with a half-assed report of what just went down here.”
He’d talked while pushing each leg into sweatpants and then pulling on boots. He’d paused as the shirt went over his head; all the while Ezra looked to the SUV about twenty feet away, the one that was flanked by the two shifters he’d put on guard there.
“Get her back and in her room safely, then get your ass to that meeting and don’t make me have to come and get you,” Bas said, pushing past Ezra and yanking open the driver’s side door.
In seconds Jacques was slipping into the passenger side and then the SUV was pulling off. Gritting his teeth, Ezra looked back at the police station, reaching a hand back to rub his shoulders and remember.
That was no shifter inside, he thought. And it definitely wasn’t a man.
Cursing was the best answer he could come up with at the time. He drove back to the resort without a word from Jewel. In fact, the only reason he knew she was still in the back of the SUV was that her scent was thick, lingering throughout the interior of the car, hanging around him like a warm shawl, making his jaw twitch with questions he desperately needed answers to.
She was in no mood to answer questions, he knew that. Hell, he wasn’t so sure he was up to an interrogation either. But ignoring Bas’s direct command after all the push-back he’d been giving him tonight probably wasn’t a good idea. Especially since the FL was sure to be on the phone with Rome in the next few hours. They had a serious situation on their hands, one that just might take precedence over everything else going on in their world.
So he’d left Jewel upstairs, with four guards at her door, only after he’d checked every lock on every window in her room. “Nobody in or out,” he’d told them. “Somebody tries, contact me immediately.”
They’d nodded obediently and Ezra had trudged down to the bunkers, walking into an already full room with tension so thick they’d need a chainsaw to cut through it.
“That’s why I only want to hear what we do know,” Bas was saying with a nod toward one of the chairs on the left side of the stainless steel table that stretched the entire fifteen feet of the room. The walls were painted the same muted gray as the hallway, the only color being the large projection screen on the wall behind the seat at the head of the table that the FL occupied.
Ezra didn’t want to sit down; adrenaline buzzed through his system like some type of bug, while rage squeezed every muscle in his body to the point of pain. His temples throbbed with the scent that had followed him like a cloak.
Dyson, the computer geek shifter that Ezra had been in contact with earlier today about the flash drive he’d found, stood from the table, using a remote and pointing it toward the screen behind Bas.
The images appeared at Dyson’s command. They weren’t flat against the screen as Ezra had expected them to be, but more of a three-dimensional image that Bas immediately recognized.
“This is a dimensional diagram of the Comastaz Labs. I used the blueprints and plugged them into a system I designed to reenact sequences,” Dyson said, turning sideways so he partially faced the shifters looking questioningly at him, and so that he could still look to his diagram.
Lifting an arm, he pointed toward a room on the third floor, toward the back of the building.
“That’s the lab,” Ezra offered. “What the fuck does this have to do with what happened tonight?” he asked, his impatience clear in the edginess of his voice.
Dyson’s lips thinned, and the kid seemed to look impatient but Ezra didn’t give a damn. He wanted answers to all his questions and he wanted blood—from the man that was obviously hunting Jewel, who had her arrested and that damned beast that he’d almost torn both his arms out of his sockets trying to restrain.
“The USB you gave me earlier, the one you found today at Comastaz, it was loaded in this lab,” Dyson stated matter-of-factly.
The image magnified even more, the golden lines that outlined the walls and doors of each room in the diagram moving so that they were even closer, almost as if Ezra could reach out his hand and touch them. A red dot illuminating from the control Dyson held appeared, pinpointing a location in the diagram.
“Right here in this room. The lab. On it there are references to a number of prototypes, one hundred, to be exact. As far as I can tell, each prototype ended after some sort of biological testing. All of them except prototype number one hundred. That one went on to a stage called ADAM,” he told them.
Then Dyson clicked another button on his remote and the diagram changed to a white background with a small black dot that grew instantaneously, morphing into a body. The “thing.”
“This was the last file in the ADAM folder,” Dyson advised.
A series of cursing was followed by a low growl that grew louder and louder until the FL turned in his chair, his cool gray gaze resting on Ezra.
“Stand down,” Bas told him.
But Ezra wasn’t hearing him. He was seeing that “thing,” that ADAM, and he was seeing death, destruction, devastation. He was also feeling the heavy waves of anguish, the sharp pang of suffering, and eventually had to close his eyes to the assault. It was real, it was serious, and it was here, right here in the United States. His entire body quaked as he remembered the teachings of the old shaman, remembered the stories—or what he and Eli had thought at the time were just stories. Now, however, they seemed more like foreshadowing and unfortunately Ezra had a hotline directly into the mind of the beast. He knew the plan, knew the annihilation that would come at its hand, and in an instant he was back in the jungle, ready to fight for his life and t
he lives of those he cared most about. Jewel’s face immediately appeared in his mind and he closed his eyes to the instant assault of emotions that followed.
“What the hell is going on?” came an angry female voice just as Ezra was trying to get ahold of his emotions, his senses that had seemingly gone haywire.
Priya came through the door—the big steel one that probably should have been bolted—in a flash of fury mixed with fear, that when combined with the mojo Ezra already had going on inside, made him nauseous.
Bas was immediately on his feet, his gaze holding his mate’s, in what might have been construed as a soft look, for as much as the FL could look soft. Only a mate could solicit that type of look at a time like this. Ezra turned away from the higher ranking couple, leaning forward to grip his hands tightly on the back of the chair.
“We have a situation,” was Bas’s response.
“You’re damned right we do. There’s been some type of ambush on the police department. Sixty officers are missing so the governor’s called in the National Guard,” Priya announced. “Where’s Jewel?”
Ezra’s head lifted at the name, only to find Priya staring at him in question. Before he could answer, Bas went to stand beside his mate, a hand going to her elbow. Priya looked up to him as if she was going to say something else, but when Bas discreetly shook his head, she remained quiet.
“Clear out,” the FL ordered. “Dyson, I want a complete report in writing by sunrise. Syfon, I want your team on top of that bunker holding it … ADAM,” he corrected. “Whatever it is, I want that bastard bolted to the goddamned floor. If it so much as blinks, shoot it with that tranq again. Jacques and Ezra, don’t move.”
The guards cleared out of the room, Dyson using his remote to close down his display, the young shifter’s face grim as he most likely thought about the report he now had to prepare. When the door was closed, Bas nodded to Jacques who stood immediately, crossing the room to make sure the lock on the door was in place.
