Seeing Aubrey obey his commanding expression brought him more confidence and focus on the battle about to ensue, although at the time he was at his most vulnerable, having only just shifted from human to tiger. Fortunately the snarl he let out had been effective in causing the bear to doubt its advance.
It may have paused for a few seconds, but the bear refused to back down, and one of them would have to give way; any sign of weakness would only result in the confidence of a full-on attack. Jesse stood his ground and so did the bear, seeing that its opponent was mightier than it first expected but knowing that it was mightier still. The bear was large even as bears go; a male that was clearly not used to backing down from any creature, let alone this pussy cat. Affirming its own self-confidence, the bear leaped forward and made a lunge for Jesse, trying to bowl him over.
Many a battle-obsessed child has debated over questions like ‘who would win in a fight between a bear and a tiger?’ The answer should have been there for all to see if it was to the death; the bear was just too big for even a tiger to take down. Jesse was able to spring out of the way of the lunge and knew that in every department but power, he had an advantage. Whether speed, agility or cunning, the tiger had the better of the situation, but he was not about to get into a grapple with his opponent. Jesse knew that whatever damage he could inflict up close, no matter how much his claws might rake the bear’s skin or his teeth sink in to wound it, that the bear’s aim would be to put its great bulk to work, to hold him down before applying its jaws and crushing his skull.
Jesse was not about to become vain in trying to prove this scenario wrong, but there is more than one way to win a showdown—although in this, all his better attributes would need to pay off. Seeking to confound the bear with speed and volume, Jesse responded to their close proximity with short and varied onslaughts of swift claw attacks. Using his agility to circle and frustrate the bear, he let his claws swipe two or three times with each attack before leaping out of the way of his opponent’s counter-attacks. As they fought, both creatures roared at such an intensity that by the end of it there was not a bird in the forest that had not taken to the air in fright, nor any small mammal that remained out in the open.
It was a dangerous game to play. The bear could afford to lunge and miss, but Jesse couldn’t make one mistake. Neither was he supported by great reserves of energy, but the bear’s attempts calmed and the creature took a step back. The tactic had worked. Only when the world stopped spinning did Jesse see the damage he had inflicted and the blood that ran from his attacker’s nose, head and shoulders.
Whether through pain or fatigue, the bear had conceded defeat and turned to make a quick exit into whatever corner of the woods it chose to lick its wounds.
On watching it disappear, Jesse actually felt pity rather than hate for the creature. Bears and big cats were supposed to avoid each other, not fight. The only reason such a situation had transpired was because of the heartless actions of some idiot with a gun, who was really the one to deserve a mauling. The animal would survive its tiger lashes, but it was not the time to dwell on the fate of one savage beast. Aubrey would have been closing in on the reservoir now and, as eventful as the last two days had been, he didn’t want to leave her alone for too long.
***
If the savage cries of battle were unbearable to listen to as Aubrey made her way from the scene, the weighty silence that followed was even worse for the unanswered question of what had happened.
Had Jesse survived unhurt?
Aubrey wanted so much to turn back and find out sooner rather than later, but she knew Jesse wouldn’t want that, whatever the result. Even if something terrible had happened, there was no contribution she could make other than to disturb a victorious bear and probably end up being mauled herself. She had to go on, though being even a partial witness to such a conflict made her limbs feel so weak and helpless against the might of nature.
Her love of hiking suddenly had a few caveats.
Praying for Jesse to turn up unharmed, Aubrey had continued running until reaching the rocky section that required a more careful climb, with or without equipment. Her slower nature of progress from then on proved frustrating, but she could hear Jesse’s voice in her head warning her not to fall again like the clumsy fool she had proven herself to be beside the reservoir the day before, and so with patience and discipline, she made the climb over the rocky outcrop without any bruises or broken bones.
Aubrey was finally at the business end of her field research, and she wasted no time in heading straight for the small office building, keys in hand so she could find out which was the right one. It would be just her luck if she tried to put the wrong key in the lock and got it stuck, she couldn’t help thinking, but there would be something more of a puzzle when the act of turning the lock came.
There were something like a dozen keys on Simpson’s chain. Aubrey did not care what any of the others were for, but she found herself pausing upon one in particular before she had even tried any in the lock.
“What’s this?” she said out loud, because one of the keys had a badge that depicted the shape of a first aid sign upon a clock face. The reason for this emblem being of interest was that it was her very own institute’s logo; the same Lampack Research logo that was on her own key chain, on the left breast of her uniform and the door sign of every office and lab of her workplace.
Its presence on Simpson’s set of keys made no sense whatsoever. He was no colleague of hers. On the other hand, the coincidence was so absurd that she made it her first choice of key to try in the door.
It worked.
The lock turned and the door swung inwards while, at precisely the same time, the plot thickened.
Bursting as her thoughts were in that moment, she delayed any Sherlock Holmes impression in favor of the task she had come so far to complete. The office’s interior was available to her now, so she set about discovering exactly what was going on.
As interiors could often appear once a person was inside them, the office building seemed to have more to it than was obvious from the outside. Aubrey found she was in a long hallway that had very little of interest other than some coat stands and cupboards she supposed were for supplies. At the end of the hallway, however, was a door that inevitably drew her attention, and it was through that door where she would find her answers.
The results were disturbing, in more ways than one.
At first Aubrey could not be too sure what she was looking at. There were multiple screens with all kinds of dials and readings that would be baffling to most. Aubrey was an accomplished academic, though, and she was soon able to ascertain exactly what the screens had been set to ensure.
The screens were supposed to be there to ensure the neutrality of the water, so that anyone monitoring it would be able to tell that it was fit to drink and not a threat to the public. None of the dials had been set to neutral PH, however; instead they had been set to high alkaline output. Although it was still not clear what chemical was being applied, the first deduction to make was that the water had been made toxic on purpose. The disease was no accident; there was someone monitoring the supply…and they obviously wanted shifters to die.
The Cripple illness was someone’s pet project and, even more disturbing from Aubrey’s perspective, one of her fellow work colleagues was apparently behind it. This deduction was clear not just from the key’s logo, but by the same logo on a notepad and pen that had been left at the work station.
Deliberations could wait for later, however. Right then Aubrey just needed to shut the system down, and she was in the process of figuring out how to do so when a familiar voice interrupted her.
“Turn around, Aubrey.”
Chapter 11
The voice had been Jesse’s. Thank god he was fine, but even before she looked at him she knew that something must be wrong. It was too dry a greeting for the tiger shifter with whom she’d already become quite close with. Turn around, Aubrey.
What she saw was a picture even more confusing than that of a tiger swimming to save her life the day before.
Jesse was standing there all right, alive and well—but he was not alone. Behind him stood none other than her superior Marshall Collins, from whom she had been hoping to hear all day. Now that he was present, however, there would be no smiling and catching up on work news.
This was all because of the gun he held pointed at Jesse’s head.
“Marshall!” Aubrey exclaimed. “What the hell are you doing?”
Of course it was obvious what he was doing, but his actions were so unforeseen that she had to ask the question anyway. Among his chief priorities had been the same objectives that she had pursued on a daily basis; the research and cure of rare shifter diseases.
“Bad news, Aubrey,” he replied, a different tone to his voice than she had heard before. “I’m afraid your career is coming to an end. You’re getting to be far too much of a liability.”
“You’re actually behind this?” she cried, astounded. “Marshall, your job is to help shifters, not kill them. What extremist nonsense have you been infected by?”
“Extremist nonsense? Well that depends on your perspective, young lady. Some people who grew up in better times might consider werewolves running about the streets and doing as they please to be an extremist vision of society, but governments get soft don’t they? One poor shifter with a heart of gold gets shot and all of a sudden we have to be sorry about all the others that go around howling at the moon; one high-up family or group of incestuous celebrities bring in the shapeshift gene and all of a sudden there are campaigns about accepting the bastard things as normal people. You see that wild out there, Aubrey? That’s where your kindred shifters belong, not running round the streets or sitting next to my kids in the café when we’re trying to have a nice family meal.”
“I bet you also believe that women belong in the kitchen,” Jesse sarcastically added for him, unable to do anything with Marshall’s gun being pointed at such close range. If he started shifting again, the process would be too slow to avoid a fatal gunshot wound, and he would be no use to Aubrey if he was stone cold dead.
“Yeah, nice try, tiger boy. I’m really not that touchy though,” Marshall replied.
“But Marshall, you part own the company! I mean, why help found the thing and then do this?” Aubrey asked, unable to comprehend that he was this kind of man.
“Oh, I see. You think that I’ve suddenly gone maverick. No, Aubrey, I saw a chance long ago to impact on shifter research in the best way I saw possible. Money tends to be held in high esteem above ethics when you wave it in people’s faces.”
“Then why appoint me? You know my father was a shifter, and I’d never be okay with this crap!”
“Because the damn Board kept insisting on it, but now you know why I’ve been keeping such close tabs on you. I guess you thought I was just being supportive.”
“I respected you,” she said through gritted teeth.
“It’s gone too far,” he shouted back, showing anger she never knew he possessed. “If you’d been content to stick to the work I gave you, things would have been fine, but you had to get ambitious. You’re threatening to undo all our work and it’s going to stop here.”
“Jesse has the Cripple,” she said. “Don’t shoot him. Please.”
“I don’t think you understand, kiddo,” Marshall replied. “He’s just an added bonus—I’m here for you. I fooled you into coming here so I could make it look like an accident. I knew you’d offer to come; even pay your own way. Such a good-hearted girl.”
“Aubrey isn’t a shifter,” Jesse urged him. “You’re breaking your moral code and killing one of your own if you harm her.”
“She’s a shifter lover and collateral damage,” Marshall replied. “Not her fault her father was one, but many people overcome family shame and live a normal life. Not her—she had to go swimming in it. Well, she can fucking drown.”
“Your pet disease isn’t going to work,” Aubrey cried back, desperate for some kind of small victory over him. “I’ve found signs of immunity growing already, plus a certain food that helps alleviate the symptoms—it will phase out in time. Your disease won’t last long enough to kill off even half the shifters in the world.”
“I think you credit me with little imagination, Aubrey,” he replied. “No one has the perfect disease; there’s always someone who’s immune. Projects like the Cripple are just designed to thin shifter numbers out and keep them down. Those that just get sick—along with every other paranoid cretin—will help us make a pretty penny through buying medicine they don’t really need. And those who die…well, good riddance.”
“This is going too far, Marshall,” she pleaded. “Even racists can just turn a blind eye to people they don’t like, they don’t all have to go all the way like you and become the next warped version of Hitler.”
“Thanks for the moral lesson, but I’m in fine company. Look at the news any day of the week and you see governments making people feel paranoid so they can achieve their own ends. A little paranoia goes a long way…oh, I’m sorry, you can’t look at the news—there’s hardly any Internet service down here in this little backwater hellhole.”
He gloated for a moment before continuing. “Oh, and while we’re on the subject, what was that disease that killed your father?”
Jesse couldn’t see the sick grin on Marshall’s face, but he knew by the look on Aubrey’s exactly what it was suggesting. The murderous scientist had been doing this for years and no doubt there were many other forms of Cripple-like bugs he had been responsible for. How many hundreds and thousands of shifter deaths? The numbers did not bear thinking about.
“My father was ten times the man you’ll ever be,” Aubrey bit back. Good for you, Jesse thought—not that it would do much good.
“Your father was vermin and deserved to be eradicated, just like this one here.”
“NO!”
Aubrey had just screamed out against Marshall pulling the trigger, and Jesse had his eyes closed braced for the bullet about to shatter his skull, but instead he felt himself pushed forward and out of the way of the door which then slammed shut, leaving the two of them locked in the small building. Both of them had been familiar with the voice of prejudice that looked upon shifters as vermin, but in the end Marshall had preferred a more prolonged death for him as well.
“Don’t worry, Aubrey!” he then shouted through to them from the outside. “That thing will probably eat you rather than let you die of thirst. It’ll be quicker! And it’ll look like an unfortunate accident, which is very convenient for me.”
After that, they heard nothing more from him. Just like the exterior door, which would probably be locked too, the one that held them in was thick and solid. They did not even hear Marshall’s footsteps leaving the building, but they knew he had gone. Jesse made some attempts at kicking the door in, but even if he was in his best condition he knew it would be hopeless, and Aubrey soon stopped him in favor of preserving his energy. They had limited supplies, but mostly she was worried about when the Cripple would begin to make more of an impact upon him—as she believed it would, even though he had done so well to fight it off for this long.
Jesse then caught his breath—in truth he’d still been recovering from his fight with the bear when he had felt a gun pointed at his head—and took Aubrey’s advice to take a moment to calm himself. As he did so, Aubrey refused to believe their situation was hopeless and occupied herself by trying for cell reception in all corners of the office. Even the faintest of receptions might have been enough to send an SOS… but there was nothing. Not even any sign that her phone was attempting to get a signal.
“What are these walls made for? Surviving nuclear blasts?” she asked, giving in to frustration. “Maybe there’s a way of configuring these measuring devices to seek help instead, like sending Morse code or something?”
By then Jesse knew this attempt would also prove hopeless, bu
t didn’t have the heart to tell her. He knew she was smart as a cookie, but also that Marshall had chosen his lure well. They were far from help and there was no way out.
“I’m sorry, Jesse.”
Aubrey’s apology caused him to look up and then he regretted not having interrupted her attempts to contact help sooner, as he could see she was now failing to hold back tears.
“What are you sorry for?” he replied. “This isn’t your fault, it’s his. We’re the victims of criminality… and we’re in fine company.”
“I’ve been working with him for almost three years and I never suspected a thing. All the time I’ve had my head in a microscope when I should have just looked up and paid attention to what was going on around me.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. How could you have known?”
“But even worse, I had to go and get you involved and now you’re stuck here too.”
The tears that had been trickling over steadily then began to flow unimpeded, as Jesse knelt beside her to offer comfort. With Aubrey’s head on his shoulder and the shuddering of her shaking body as she wept, Jesse forgot any concern he might have had about his own predicament. Although it was likely he would die first as soon as his broccoli ran out, causing his illness to progress faster, he made a wish that for whatever reason, someone else would be compelled to check on the reservoir and find Aubrey before it was too late. She was too beautiful to die, and his shifter kin needed good people like her to survive if there were more like Marshall Collins about—and he knew there were. Maybe he’d made a mistake in life when choosing to be separate from all of that conflict. All the time an unseen war had been going on and he had contributed nothing.
Even his one intervention in saving Aubrey’s life yesterday now seemed to have made no difference.
As miserable as their situation was, it felt good to be in an embrace once more. There was something about comforting a distraught woman; something primal, and it made Jesse instantly want to make love to her. Or rather his body just knew that he wanted to and so compelled him even though his brain might have been thinking ‘dammit, man, this is hardly the time’. Aubrey was upset and needed comfort, rather than being taken advantage of, but in spite of this, when Jesse finally moved to draw his embrace even slightly away, the heat of her body followed. The warmth of her right cheek gently brushed against his, a touch that he reciprocated by moving the fingers of his right hand from her back and up to caress the other cheek. As he did so, her eyes flicked up and held his in a gaze there was only one way to break…and that way was to fall right into it.
Roar For More (Online Shifter Dating Agency Romance) Page 9
