Howl at the Moon

by Christine Warren

  Moving carefully forward, Sam sniffed the air and caught a faintly bitter aroma. She had to fight back a feral grin. Poor little soldier was taking painkillers for the boo-boo she'd given him. He was definitely down for the count, and by her estimate she had about three minutes left to signal Noah that everything was under control.

  No time to be delicate. Shifting to human form, she grabbed the lamp off the table beside the soldier and brought it down hard just above his temple. She saw him jerk, then settle back into unconsciousness. Now he wouldn't wake up accidentally.

  She sprinted for the front door and took a moment to examine it for alarms. She saw the sensors mounted in the top corner and swore. She had like ninety second left. Apparently, she should remove delicacy from her repertoire altogether. Reaching up, she pinched the sensors together and yanked, keeping them in perfect contact with each other but removing them from the door completely. Then she pulled open the door and stuck her head out.

  "Noah! Come in!"

  He was across the street and up the steps in two seconds flat, and when he pushed his way inside he looked down at her naked body and scowled.

  "Why are you naked?"

  She rolled her eyes. "Because I'm not wearing any clothes." He looked like a thundercloud, black and threatening. "I had to shift so I could knock him unconscious," she explained. "But don't worry. He already had his eyes closed. He didn't get a free show."

  "And neither will De Santos," Noah barked, shoving her back toward the kitchen. "Stay in there until Tess gets here with your clothes!"

  Sam thought he was being a little ridiculous, but she went anyway. She knew Rafe wouldn't have cared that she was naked, since he was way too wrapped up in his wife for any other woman's body to make an impression, but she understood that humans had hang-ups about that kind of thing. To her, skin was skin, but apparently to Noah, her skin was his.

  The door slicked shut behind the other couple and she heard voices for a second before Noah shoved her backpack into the room and braced his body against the door. She just shook her head and pulled on the clothes Tess had brought her before yanking the door open and rejoining them in the other room.

  She noticed that Noah looked her over, as if to assure himself that she hadn't forgotten and left a breast hanging out or something.

  Tess looked at her and grinned. "I counted forty-four seconds to spare. Nice work, girl."

  "Forty-one," Noah grumped.

  Sam shook her head, but she still reached out to squeeze his hand. "The key there is not the number, baby; it's the words 'to spare.'"

  Rafe ripped a piece of duct tape off a roll and placed it over the unconscious soldier's mouth. His hands and feet had already been taped together. "Either way, I say we get down to business," Rafe said, straightening. "Noah, why don't you tell us what exactly we're looking for?"

  "Anything and everything," he answered. "Annie's data, though I have a feeling that's not going to be here. It would be too valuable to leave with one guard. I think they've probably taken it to a rendezvous point to try to work out the code and prep for the handoff. But it can't hurt to look. I'll be looking for a logbook with the mission records, and I want Sam to sniff around to see what she can find out about how many are on the team. You can, Tess, just keep your eyes open for anything interesting."

  Tess pursed her lips. "Well, that's nicely specific." But she didn't protest; she just followed Rafe up the stairs to the second floor and prepared to be interested.

  Sam turned to look at Noah. "I'll do what I can, but if I shift back to Lupine now, I'll be naked again, so you'll have to make do with this nose."

  He grunted and headed for the back room. "That's fine. It's still better than mine, and we're not trying to track anyone. We're just looking for clues."

  He stalked out without even smiling at her, grumpy bastard. He really had no sense of humor about her being naked in front of other people. Sheesh.

  While he rooted around in what she figured was a back bedroom, she ignored the unconscious man in the armchair and put her nose to work. It took concentration to separate out the scents, to peel back the layers and uncover how many there were and where they were strongest, how long ago they had last been here, and which ones had distinctive markers, like Camel man's cigarettes or Mr. Anger Management's rage issues.

  She thought she counted seven in all, five more in addition to those two, but it was hard to tell. One she thought might belong to the third man at the lab, but here, too, his scent kept blipping in and out. It was as if he was here one minute and gone the next with no fading trail to indicate either how he'd entered or how he'd left. She wanted to be certain she was smelling the same man, but she detected two other scents that were distinctly separate from his and yet shared that elusive ephemeral quality.

  If she focused too hard on those three it would drive her crazy. Better to pay attention to the odors that made sense and find out what she could about the others along the way.

  That philosophy carried her into the back bedroom where Noah had the beds pushed back against the walls and the drawers out of the dressers. If there was anything interesting in there, he would find it.

  Sniffing again, she followed her nose up the stairs to the landing flanked by doors on either side. Both stood open, and she could hear Tess and Rafe moving around in opposite rooms. Sam looked in on Rafe and saw him conducting a search nearly as thorough as Noah's, so she crossed the hall and joined Tess.

  The witch sat on the end of one of the three beds in the room, the one that wasn't part of a bunk set, and she looked up when Sam entered.

  "You have an unusual searching technique," Sam said, sitting next to her.

  "There's nothing interesting in here." Tess shrugged, turning her sharp blue eyes on her friend. "At least, there wasn't until you came in."

  Sam glanced at her, then looked away. "You've known me for years. You know I'm not really all that interesting."

  "You weren't before, but Noah makes you absolutely fascinating. Trust me. Are you going to tell me why you're pretending he hasn't hurt you?"

  "I'm not pretending that. He did hurt me, and he knows he hurt me. He apologized for it. I think my friends need to work on remembering that I'm the one who decides whether or not to accept that apology."

  Tess nodded, but her eyes were bright and shrewd. "Oh, I know it is, honey. I just want to make sure you've accepted it for the right reasons. And at the right time. It never hurts to make them sweat a little."

  Stifling a laugh, Sam smiled at her. "Trust me, he sweated."

  "All right, then." Tess nodded decisively and pushed herself off the bed. "Now that's settled, let's go see how my own walking, talking headache is doing."

  Rafe looked up with a frown when they entered. "You've finished already?"

  "Efficiency, thy name is woman," Tess quipped, sweeping a glance around the room that looked a lot like the one across the hall, only this one had just two single beds, no bunks. "There was nothing interesting in there anyway. Now, in here, I'd love to see what you find." Her head shot around and she stared hard at the head of one of the beds, the one farthest from the door. "There. Right there. Behind the bed."

  Sam looked at her, surprised. "Behind the bed? Tess, the headboard pushes right up against the wall. What do you think they could have back there?"

  "Right there," she repeated forcefully.

  Rafe was already pushing the piece of furniture aside, "It does not do to argue with my wife."

  Folding her arms over her chest, Sam tried not to snort an "I told you so" as soon as the blank white wall was revealed. Tess wasn't listening to her anyway.

  Stepping forward, the blonde tucked a couple of stray curls behind her ears and slipped into the space where the head of the bed had been. She laid her hands on the dingy, cracked wall and closed her eyes.

  A minute later they popped open and she grinned at her husband. "Go get Noah, and when you come back bring me a lead pencil and a key that doesn't fit anything."r />
  Again, Rafe didn't ask questions, just nodded and headed for the stairs. Tess nodded in satisfaction. "I've trained him well."

  "I still don't see anything back there, Tess," Sam said, trying not to sound skeptical.

  "You will."

  The men returned in under two minutes. Noah had an unfriendly look on his face as he dropped a slim black notebook onto the end of the bed. Rafe didn't say anything; he just handed the requested items to his wife. "The key is one of the ones on my ring I cannot identify. It probably opens something, but I haven't used it in so long that I can't remember what it is for."

  "That will do."

  "What did you find?" Noah demanded, looking around. "I don't see anything."

  "Sheesh, would you people have a little patience, please?" Tess turned back to the wall and frowned. "Crap, I should have asked for a piece of string, too."

  Rafe looked around and his gaze settled on the blinds at the window. Sam saw him reach out and his hand flash, a claw slicing through the drawstrings like butter. He handed his wife the string a moment later held in a perfectly human hand. "Will this work?"

  She stretched up to kiss his cheek. "Perfect."

  Sam felt Noah step up to her shoulder, and they both watched, impatient and fascinated, as Tess tied one end of the string to the key and the other end around the pencil. Then she found the center point and let both objects dangle from the ends. Pressing the string to the wall with the tip of one perfectly manicured finger, she muttered a few words that Sam didn't quite catch, and the key and the pencil began to move.

  Sam felt the crackling energy of magic fill the air. She watched the key move down the wall until it stopped with its top lodged in the seam between the baseboard and the drywall. When it stopped, the pencil spun in seven perfect circles, scribbled something on the paint, and then went limp on the end of its string.

  Tess hummed with satisfaction. "There you go. Pull the baseboard back, love, and let's see what we have."

  Rafe hunkered down and did as she instructed, carefully prying the baseboard away to reveal an opening into the wall.

  "What's inside?" Sam asked, leaning forward in fascination.

  Peering into the hole, Rafe shook his head. "It looks empty. It's not very deep."

  "Oh, there's something there, all right," Tess assured him. "You just haven't found it yet."

  The Felix reached down and felt inside the opening, shaking his head. Then he turned his hand and felt the inside of the wall just above the top of the entrance and he froze. "I feel some kind of button," he muttered.

  They all heard the click when he pressed it and a mechanical whir as the wall seemed to shift, the cracks that ran down it now looking less like the work of some bad construction workers and more like deliberate camouflage. A section of drywall, irregularly shaped and about two feet across and three feet high, popped out a half an inch as if on springs. Carefully Rafe grasped the edges and lifted it away. There, tucked into the wall behind it, was a small brown refrigerator, like the kind kept in dorm rooms around the world.

  Sam blinked. "A fridge? What? Were they midnight snackers?"

  "I doubt it." Noah urged her aside and stepped forward to open the small insulated door. Inside there was no light, but they didn't need one to see the neatly stacked medical vials and the sterilely wrapped syringes. Noah picked up a small, clear vial about the size of his thumb and examined the contents. The glass was unlabeled. There was no telling what was inside.

  "Okay, somehow I doubt that these guys are either insulin-dependent diabetics or hide-the-stash-in-the-wall junkies."

  Noah shook his head. "They're not. This is something else."

  Sam saw the grim lines of his face and frowned. He clearly didn't like this latest discovery, but what was he thinking about that she couldn't see? She wracked her brain and a terrifying thought occurred to her.

  "Oh, my goddess," she breathed, her eyes widening. "You don't think the military is already giving the members of this team Lupine DNA, do you? How would that be possible? If their research isn't as far along as Annie's, it should be impossible."

  "I don't know," he said, sounding about as happy as he looked. "Yeah, it should be impossible, but who knows what Hammond neglected to tell me? Maybe he lied and the military program is further along than we thought."

  "I doubt it," Rafe said. "If that were true, the general would not need Annie or her research enough to risk so much with the break-in at her laboratory."

  "Doubts are great, but I want to be sure." Noah grabbed a second vial and handed them both to Tess. "Take one of these with you and head back to the club. If the others have found Annie, maybe she can identify what's inside. And if not, give the other vial to Fiona. If science can't do it, Fae magic might."

  Tess nodded. "Right. I'm proud of myself just for finding the damned things, but magicking out their chemical composition is slightly beyond me."

  "Call me as soon as you find anything out." Sam had given him her cell phone earlier.

  "Where will you be?" Rafe asked.

  Noah picked up the notebook from where he'd laid it on entering the room. "We'll be down at the Chelsea piers," he said. "I found their logbook, not quite as well hidden as their stash. They have a warehouse down there, apparently, that they use for rendezvous and for moving things in and out. At first I thought it was supplies, but now I think it's more of that stuff." He jerked his chin to indicate the vials in Tess's hand.

  "Does it say what the stuff is?"

  "It might, but if it does, I can't read it. It looks like math to me, which means it might as well be Greek."

  "If Annie's back, she can tackle that, too," Tess suggested.

  Sam frowned. "I hope that logbook has an address, because I'm not sure I can trace them by scent. At least three of them are doing that on-again, off-again thing the one at the lab did the other night. I can't track something I can't smell."

  "Shit. Three of them?"

  She nodded. "I think so. It's hard to tell when the scent keeps blipping in and out. Why?"

  He paused, then shook his head. "The book. I got the impression that whatever the stuff in the vials is, it's being given to three of the seven men on the team."

  Sam felt her stomach clench in a very unpleasant way. "You mean that whatever is in the vials might be what's disguising their scents? Holy crap."

  Rafe put it more succinctly. "We will rush these samples back to Annie and Fiona. As soon as one of them has news, we will call."

  "Good."

  All four of them started at the sound of a cell phone beeping. Rafe frowned and looked down at his pocket. "I think that is mine." He flipped open the handset. "Yes?"

  He had turned away slightly, the instinctive reaction of a private man who had large demands on his time, but Sam still noticed the second his expression went taut and forbidding.

  "What?" she demanded. "What is it?"

  "Annie left a voice message for Missy. She called the house instead of the club, so Missy didn't pick up and she didn't answer right away."

  "Is she okay?"

  He nodded reluctantly. "She was when she left the message. Missy says it was time-stamped at three thirty-one P.M."

  Sam looked at the alarm clock next to the untouched bed. "That's only a little over an hour ago," she said, wishing she felt more relieved, but Rafe's face hadn't softened. "She should still be fine."

  "So we can all hope," the Felix said.

  "Rafael." Tess spoke softly, her pretty face frowning as she laid a hand on his sleeve and looked up at him. "What's wrong? What did Annie's voice mail say?"

  He sighed and placed his hand over his wife's, but his eyes, bright and worried, were on Sam. "She wanted to warn the rest of us to be careful," he said slowly. "She has a theory about what the military has really been up to and she thinks it might tie into these soldiers with the lack of scent."

  Noah froze and laid a hand on Sam's shoulder. "What?"

  "She thinks they have been engineering
DNA, but not Lupine DNA. They have been using vampires."

  The perfect sense of it came crashing down on Sam's head and rendered her momentarily speechless. They had been injecting human soldiers with vampire DNA. How and where they got it would be something they looked into later, but for now it explained why their scent sometimes seemed to disappear and then reappear again later. If the injections had a temporary effect, like a drug that wore off once the human immune system recognized and began attacking the foreign material, their scents would naturally seem to flicker in and out, just like she and Annie had sensed.

  Tess was the first to speak. "But if they have been conducting their own experiments with vampire DNA and done it successfully, why did they come after Annie? Her research is on Lupines."

  "Graham and Missy have been working on that, and they have two different theories. The first is that military thinks Annie's research has gone even further than theirs and that if they apply her techniques to what they've already managed, they can give themselves a huge leg forward."

  "And the other reason?"

  "That's the one where they don't care how far Annie got. They just want to destroy her data, but more than that, they want to use it to lure her into a trap. If they just destroy the data, they still have to worry that she'll re-create what she's already done. With her mind I doubt it would take long."

  "It wouldn't," Sam agreed over the pitching and roiling in her stomach.

  "Which is why we're pretty sure they're going to try to kill her."

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sam watched the room spin crazily around her and shook her head to clear it. "What did you say?" she demanded hoarsely.

  Rafe shook his head. "I'm sorry, Samantha, but it makes the most sense. Noah himself said he suspected that the military had their own scientists working on the same type of research Annie was pursuing. It doesn't make any sense for them to steal her data unless their intent was not to use it themselves but to make sure no one else could."

  Sam understood and it made sense, but she couldn't stifle the instinctive urge to deny it, to stuff it in the closet with the skeletons and pretend it didn't exist.