by C. L. Bevill
Wheeler focused on Emma’s mouth. Her mouth was sinful. Then he said, “We’re…full of ourselves?”
“What happens if you get challenged by some asshat and he wins?” Emma said irately.
“Are you concerned about me, Emma?” Wheeler asked slowly.
Emma frowned. He wanted to take a sniff but he didn’t want to be obvious to her. Deep inside him, he knew that she had made a big step in the right direction. But she wasn’t ready yet. Not really. He knew that and he mourned the information. He also knew that he was prepared to wait for her. She was that special.
Killian brought Wheeler back to the present with a rushed, “…There’s a call patched through from the compound.”
Wheeler turned on him. Eagerness made him snap, “Is it Emma?”
Killian shook his head and handed Wheeler the satellite phone. “Wheeler,” he said.
“This is the Clan of Colorado?” the female voice asked tentatively. It was a sweet voice, but it wasn’t Emma’s and Wheeler’s heart sank.
“Who wants to know?” he demanded.
“Her name is Emma,” the woman said. “We were imprisoned together along with others of our kinds. You’ll know what I’m speaking about.”
“You escaped,” Wheeler said. The low muttering in the cabin immediately went quiet.
“We both escaped, but the vents were difficult for her other form to climb. We made too much noise. I managed to get out and found an empty cabin ten miles away. This is the phone I’m on. According to the address on an envelope I’ve found, it’s near a town called Valley, Wyoming. I’ll give you the address of the cabin.” She paused. “There are others waiting for us. They’ve holed up in the facility and are braced for a siege. Most are your kind, but there are others too.”
“What about Emma?” Wheeler insisted. “What happened to her?”
There was a pause. “I don’t know. She changed to use the phone we found. There were shots fired. I heard her cry out, but others are counting on me. I’m making a call to my Clan and then to the New York Clan.”
“Tell me the address,” Wheeler said. “We’re not far away. You’ll wait for us. You’ll be protected. My word as Alpha.”
The woman told Wheeler the address and then added, “They’re humans who want to hunt our kind. They’re monsters. They should be killed as they killed us.” She disconnected, presumably to call the others. Wheeler tried to not think about Emma trapped in a ventilation system, possibly hurt, pursued by those who would ruthlessly hunt her down.
“Call the other clans. The were calling said she would but make certain they know,” Wheeler said to Killian and handed the satellite phone back to him. Killian merely nodded and got to work.
Wheeler looked out the window and made himself wait for the moment that he could do something, do anything, about saving Emma’s pretty little butt.
•
Emma was dizzy. Silver infection set into weres quickly. Moreover, the bullets were designed to splatter upon impact. Silver was a soft metal and spread violently on contact. Her entire thigh was a throbbing mass of pain.
The humans pulled her out of the vent without regard to her injuries. It took some time to get all the material ripped away from the ceiling in order to extricate her. Whitfield stared down at her with a little bit of triumph in his frigid eyes when it was finally done. He motioned impatiently to another man standing nearby. “Fix her up.”
Helplessly, she lay on the floor of a concrete laden hallway. Emma didn’t want the humans to know that she was too weak to get up and fight them, but she suspected they were onto her.
The human to whom Whitfield had motioned visibly balked. Then he said, “Get her to the clinic. We’ll have to restrain her while I dig out the silver.”
Some kind of doctor, Emma thought. Then she almost laughed. He’s probably a zoo vet, specializing in large exotic animals. I’ll show him how we react to being kidnapped and abused.
Emma snarled savagely at the man as he crouched next to her. He was tall and dark headed and he immediately leaped backward.
Whitfield cursed at his back and three other humans with dart guns inched closer to her. The sharp ends of the darts pointed threateningly at her. Whitfield snapped, “She’s all bark, you dumb cracker. Anton, get her taken care of before she bleeds out. We have an order and I need her.”
The doctor squatted next to Emma and used a belt to make a tourniquet around her thigh above the wounds. Emma groaned but she didn’t fight him. She didn’t have the strength. Around the pain, she was thinking about Whitfield’s words. “Not going to save me for breeding?” she murmured.
Whitfield glared down at her. “This is what I call serendipity,” he said to the doctor. “This is the one who caused the riot. I wanted her for our special program but we don’t have a choice right now.”
“They’re not exactly animals,” Anton muttered. He probed at one of the wounds and Emma suppressed a shriek.
“That’s exactly what they are,” Whitfield said. “They’re not human. They shouldn’t be treated as though they are.”
It took four men to carry Emma to the clinic where she was secured to a specialized table. She wasn’t happy about it but she didn’t have any strength to fight the movements.
“Silver certainly has an interesting effect on your kind,” the doctor said interestedly but his face was chalk white. Although he was on Whitfield’s payroll, he didn’t care for the scenery.
“You’ll need to dig it out,” Whitfield said imperiously. “Every bit of the silver and she’ll start to regenerate rapidly. Then she can be utilized.”
Emma should have been embarrassed. She was lying on the table, secured by some kind of high tech restraints, naked, and bleeding despite the tourniquet. She was dizzy and sick but knew that she had to bide her time. Whitfield wanted her healthy and alive. Besides the bird were had a possibility of getting out of the facility to call for help. Xandra could have left Emma a hundred times, but she stuck by her until it was too late for her.
“The door to the female enclosure is still holding firm,” another man said. He had come into the room and was reporting to Whitfield. “They’ve got it barricaded.”
Whitfield looked at Emma. She kept her face blank but winced when the doctor began to numb her leg with shots. “Did anyone else get out?” he asked her.
Emma’s lips flattened into a grim line.
The man’s suit was somewhat rumpled. He’d been pulling anxiously at his tie. His neatly formed, gray-flecked hair was messy. He’d been running uneasy fingers through it. He waited about ten seconds for her reply. She could tell that he was the kind of man who was typically cool and self-controlled. The present situation was testing him. The guess was proven when one of Whitfield’s well-formed hands shot out and grasped her thigh above the bullet wounds. He systematically squeezed.
There was a gurgling noise that Emma realized was coming from her own lips. The pain was worse than anything she’d ever felt. The shifter DNA was doing its best to compensate but there was a certain allergy to silver that caused it to fail.
The doctor made a protesting sound and then fell silent as Whitfield shot him a glare.
“Well,” Whitfield said consideringly as he looked at Emma’s taciturn face. “That would be a yes. The bird were. Have your men check all of the exterior vent openings. Find if one has been breached. Then start a grid search. She’s some kind of dove. There aren’t that many this time of year in the forest. Tell them to look for a large sized dove. Do I need to tell you it won’t act like a typical bird?”
Fly, Xandra, fly, Emma urged silently. Whitfield looked closely at Emma again and intentionally squeezed again.
The world went particularly gray and Emma stopped thinking about anything at all. When it started to clear again, there was the doctor bent over her thigh and three guards still pointing weapons at her. A sheet had been used to modestly cover her up. Emma would have raised an eyebrow but she didn’t want to expend the effort on the
tiny gesture.
There was a little tinkling noise and the doctor made a noise. He had just dropped a fragment of silver into a metal bowl. The tall dark haired man glanced up at Emma’s face. “Found another piece. Got as many out as I could while you were unconscious. Can you tell if there’s any more?”
His name is Anton, Emma thought. I’ll remember you, too, Anton. I’m making a list and I’ll be checking off names as I get to them.
Anton correctly perceived the look on Emma’s face and continued to probe into her wounds. Emma could feel a distant pressure on her thigh but knew that the group had found some method of local that worked on weres. He said very quietly, so that the guards couldn’t hear, “I’ll work on you for as long as possible.”
Okay, a man with a modicum of conscience. Maybe I’ll just cut off one of your legs or shoot some lead pellets into your thigh. See how you like having something foreign rattling around in your flesh.
“When I signed on as a team doctor,” he said just as quietly, “I didn’t know what would be happening in the…experiments.”
Emma wanted to reach over and tear the man’s ears off just so he would stop making excuse-like noises. People always had choices. Sometimes they made poor ones, but they were still their choices. Their responsibility.
“I tried to back out,” he went on as he worked on her leg. He paused and retrieved a needle and specialized thread for her wound. “Going to stitch several of these up. I’m not sure how that will work when you change.”
Not sure either, Emma thought. But she didn’t say anything. The guards were keeping an eye on the pair but they weren’t close enough to hear what the doctor was saying. He simply sounded like he was dispensing sage medical advice.
“Whitfield threatened my family unless I played ball,” Anton said lowly. “But listen up, and remember, they’ll let you out north of the facility. They expect you to run north. They’ll drive you in that direction. There’s a valley they use as a death trap. It’s several miles from here. Don’t go there. Circle around and come back past the facility. It might give you an edge. And they use heat-seeking radar to detect animal movement.”
Maybe I’ll just break your nose, asshole, Emma decided. But only if you’re telling the truth.
“They’ve already injected you with a non-silver locator device when you came in unconscious. The hunters won’t use it, but Whitfield will if you escape them. It’s in your right shoulder.” Looking closely at the wounds, he bowed his head as he spoke and she thought, That explains the aching shoulder when I woke up in the cage. “You can feel it if you touch yourself there. Get rid of it first.” The doctor continued to work while he whispered his advice. Finally he stopped and sighed, as if the next part was something he truly disliked.
“There,” he said more loudly. “Let’s get these sutured.”
Whitfield entered the room and said, “Well?”
“Just about finished,” the doctor said. He worked efficiently. After a few minutes he cast Emma a regretful expression and said to Whitfield, “She needs to recuperate for a while. An hour perhaps. That will allow her special physiology time to correct the wounds. I can probably remove the stitches then.”
“She’s got ten minutes,” Whitfield said frigidly. “Then we’re releasing her for the hunters.”
Chapter Nine
Cats hide their claws. – English Proverb
There was a Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion waiting for the Cat Clan’s Warriors in Cody, Wyoming. It was manned with a military crew. Wheeler and his team were escorted to the heavy lift transport helicopter by local police officers. It was an indication of what kind of pull the Committee had. Killian whistled appreciatively at the Marine chaperones but Wheeler ignored everything. The sun was going down and he had a feeling that wherever Emma was, she was cold.
“The cabin, first,” the co-pilot said as he issued directives to the passengers. He was a US Marine captain. “We’ll pick up your ‘cargo’ there.” The Sea Stallion’s crew knew only the basics about their unusual passengers. The government had its subtle connections to the Committee and the less known the better.
Wheeler wanted to argue. They had a good idea of where the old military facility was located, but the Marine major pilot wanted all the intel he could get so that he had a better idea where to land. Wheeler was unsure how much the military crew knew about the strange group of people they’d been ordered to carry to a stranger destination. They probably thought of them as some type of special operations unit on a dedicated, secured mission. Wheeler wasn’t about to dissuade them, but he was distracted by his worries over Emma’s safety.
Ten minutes later and a woman dressed in an oversized t-shirt was waiting for them in a field just behind a well-tended cabin. The searchlights of the Sea Stallion lit her up as if she was standing on a stage. She had long silvery hair and seemed as though the rotors’ forces would make her fly away. But she held firm against the power of the winds generated by the immense engines.
Wheeler was out of the doors before the crew chief could finish the procedure of opening it. He didn’t protest when he saw the look on the were’s face. Killian followed closely.
The woman waited for them without expression. In spite of Wheeler’s fierce countenance, she didn’t back away either. “You called me,” Wheeler said succinctly.
She sniffed. “Cat,” she said. “I’m Xandra. My Clan lives in Louisiana.”
“We’ll take you to them,” Wheeler said. “Tell me where the facility is located.”
Killian produced a map and they spread it on the ground while Wheeler pointed to the position of the cabin. Xandra ascertained their estimate. It was an old military testing ground. Underground work had been done to the base. The military had extensively used previously formed lava tubes and expanded their sizes to suit their needs. It had been abandoned when they had realized that the locale was vastly unstable. It wasn’t the San Andreas Fault but it wasn’t far away from being that.
The pilot of the Sea Stallion joined them and Xandra pointed out the best area for landing the vast helicopter. “This area has enough room for your machine,” she said, using her finger to indicate what she meant. The Marine Major was openly skeptical.
Wheeler had guessed what Xandra was by using his nose. “She knows exactly what she’s talking about,” he said shortly.
The major was confused. “Is she a pilot?”
Killian laughed brusquely. “Only the best kind.”
Xandra joined them in the massive helicopter as they went to the once abandoned base. “There isn’t much else there,” she said, using the Sea Stallion’s intercom system over a headset provided by the crew chief. She said, “Their security is based on cameras. Their electrical system is generator-based. If you hit that, you’ll take out most of their security foundation.”
Killian bent over the map and had Xandra point out what she was talking about. The frail appearing woman looked odd sitting in the helicopter with the other weres dressed in flak gear, but she didn’t show her discomfort. She simply continued to calmly discuss the flaws in the facility’s security. Then she borrowed a map and sketched on the back of the map her own idea of how the interior was laid out. “There are dozens of tunnels, but they’re color labeled. It won’t do you any good in this case. The ranges are red, orange, and brown. But you’ll have to compensate with your night vision.”
The crew chief asked with bewilderment, “Why are the colors not any help?”
“We’re all color blind in that range,” Wheeler said roughly. He was beginning to feel something he wasn’t used to feeling. He didn’t even like putting a name to it. Fear had an acrid taste in his mouth, like ashes that couldn’t be swallowed.
Typically, it was a feeling that Wheeler didn’t have. He clearly remembered when he’d had it last. It happened weeks after Emma had tested his abilities in the forest. She had found Britt abusing a turned were. And, as he’d come to discover, Emma didn’t back down at the drop of a hat. Or the d
rop of a claw.
The turned were was one of the weaker females. Her name was Rissa and she had been bitten only the year before in a purely accidental fashion. She’d come to the Colorado Clan for a period of adjustment. She’d blundered into a cougar fight in the Canadian Rockies and had been bitten in the course of trying to get out of the way. The were had protected her from the natural cougar but he’d also brought her into the fold because she’d been infected with the DNA gene. Rissa hadn’t accepted the change positively, not that she could be blamed. Emma had tried to help Rissa but Rissa wasn’t easy to get along with. She was whiny and didn’t care for the new lifestyle that had been forced upon her. Constantly questioning everything, Rissa inadvertently delivered her words in a challenging approach. Britt hadn’t liked it.
Emma came into the gym one day to set up for one of the classes that continued for self-defense courses. She found Rissa cornered by Britt. Britt was a broad man with vindictive tendencies and didn’t like questions from those who he considered his inferiors. Rissa had pushed his buttons one too many times. Both weres were in cougar form and Emma instantly surmised what had happened.
Rissa was attempting to show her submission, having seen the light, but Britt intended on making her hurt for her churlish demands. He snarled at Rissa as he mercilessly cornered her in the gym. Emma watched for a moment and temper overcame sensibility. She saw a bully. Or Wheeler thought that perhaps she had seen a fourteen year old girl hunted by a bigger, venomous male.
Wheeler had a good idea of how it had happened because he knew Emma. Rissa had briefly talked about it before she had fled across the country to another Clan. Without any regard to her personal safety, Emma charged in human form and jumped on Britt’s back. But this time she didn’t have the claws and the ocelot temperament. She wrapped her shape around Britt’s back and threw her arms around his neck.
Rissa escaped the corner and bolted from the grand room. Several other weres flooded into the room and watched with horror. Emma held on for dear life and then locked her forearm around Britt’s feline neck. The cougar roared heatedly as it struggled to get Emma off his back. He bounded back and forth trying to break her hold.
