by Vivi Andrews
Perhaps not everyone she’d gotten out would heal. Perhaps they wouldn’t all be happy and healthy, but they had a chance. Tears pricked the backs of her eyes and she swallowed them back. Perhaps she had done more good than harm. Perhaps her father wouldn’t be so disappointed in the way she’d spent the last few years after all.
The pale winter light was fading into shadows by the time the four gathered up their things and clambered to their feet, saying their farewells. Rachel hugged May and Calliope, watching the pair dart off hand-in-hand into the forest before catching Hunter and forcing a hug on the not-as-unwilling-as-he-might-want-her-to-believe teen. He grunted, face flushing, and gave her shoulder a single reluctant pat before tugging away. He sniffed the air and muttered, “Going to snow tonight,” before following the two young women down the path.
Kathy hung back, fidgeting with her picnic hamper. The cold was sharp, so Rachel shut the door and leaned against the frame as she waited for Kathy to rearrange the hamper to her liking—or spit out whatever she’d hung back to say.
“Kathy?” she prompted gently.
The lynx looked up and grimaced ruefully. “I don’t pretend to understand everything that’s going on in this pride. I don’t know why all those Organization people they captured are being held in that old barn any more than I understand why you’re out here with a padlock on your door. Adrian made us promise we wouldn’t show you the way down to the main compound before he would give me the key and he wouldn’t let us come unless we brought Hunter as a bodyguard—figuring no one would tangle with a bear, even an immature one.” Kathy pulled a face. “I don’t know about any of that.”
Rachel shook her head, unclear what Kathy was driving at. “Neither do I.”
“What I do know is you’re a good person and a great doctor. You helped me when you didn’t have to. Back in that…place, you held my hand when I lost that baby and even though that pregnancy hadn’t been my choice, you understood that it was still a loss and you grieved with me. I’ll never forget that. No more than I’ll forget how you got me out of there.”
“Kathy, it was—”
“Don’t say it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing.”
“I wasn’t going to.” She’d been going to say it was her honor to help the shifters, but Kathy didn’t give her time to explain.
“I know what you did for the Organization,” she said. “Better than anyone, I know. You were their miracle doc. They couldn’t get any of us to catch with their in vitro crap until you came along.”
“I’m sorr—”
“No, I’m not blaming you. Crud, I’m saying this all wrong.” Kathy stood, gripping her hands at her waist. “I want to get pregnant.”
Rachel blinked. “What?”
“My mate, he’s a good man and he loves me, and we know it’s a crazy time to bring a shifter child into the world, but I’m not getting any younger and we both want kids so badly, but no matter how we try—and believe me, we’ve tried—I just can’t seem to get pregnant.”
“Kathy, I—”
As if fearing Rachel was about to refuse, Kathy plowed on. “The pride doc has tried to help us, but he doesn’t know much about lynx shifters or cross-species matings. My mate, he’s a bobcat, you see. And I know the old wives’ tales, that our kids won’t be able to shift at all, even if I can get pregnant, but we don’t care. We want this, Dr. Russell. And when I heard you were here I thought, it’s gotta be a sign. You were the one who helped me get pregnant the first time and, yes, I miscarried that baby, but with all the experiments they were running on me and the fetus I figure it was a miracle I made it to my second trimester.”
“Kathy—”
“Please, Dr. Russell. We want this so badly.”
Rachel didn’t know if she could help. Cross-species matings were complicated—some breeds were completely genetically incompatible. But if anyone could help Kathy conceive and carry to term, it was probably her. And after everything she’d done for the Organization, this seemed like a fitting way to even the karmic scales. She wasn’t sure she’d even be allowed to help, but she couldn’t say no.
“I’ll do whatever I can.”
Chapter Seventeen
The promise of snow hung in the air, blanketing the pride compound in an expectant hush. Or what would have been a hush without the constant roaring surrounding the building where the Organization prisoners were being held. The most recent evacuees had taken to taunting the prisoners in shifts, so the building walls echoed with roars and angry growls twenty-four-seven.
Even from halfway across the pride compound, it was enough to give a man a headache. Adrian could only imagine what kind of fresh hell it felt like inside those prison walls.
He silently cursed his sharp hearing, trying to focus on what Kye was saying at his side as they walked toward Mateo’s office.
“We’ll leave at dawn, day after tomorrow. Are you sure you won’t come? We’re down two without you since we can’t trust Dominec to keep his shit together, not after last time.”
Adrian vividly remembered the blood-splattered walls. The gun aimed at Rachel’s head. It was about time they benched the psycho. But if Dominec was staying at the pride, that was all the more reason for Adrian to stay behind as well. “Sorry. I need to stay here for now.”
Kye pinned him with a steady look, but said nothing. It wasn’t his style.
In the distance, the timbre of the roars shifted—the angry, threatening snarls turning fiercely triumphant. Adrian froze, lifting his ear toward the sound. “Did you hear that?”
“No. What—” Kye broke off as another, louder roar—unmistakable in its victory—echoed through the compound, followed by shrill human shrieks of terror. “Fuck. The prisoners.”
Adrian bolted toward the prisoner building, but the snow leopard quickly outpaced him. He silently cursed his inability to shift and fly to the site. He’d lose the tranq gun on his hip, but a hawk swooping on rogue shifters from above could do substantial damage even without the human weapon.
He pressed on another burst of speed, but by the time he rounded a building and the old barn that had been retrofitted into a prison came into view, all-out chaos had broken loose. The doors were wide open and the shifters were inside the building—foxes in the fucking hen house.
Kye was nowhere in sight, doubtless already inside. Adrian palmed his tranq gun and waded in. The melee inside was more of a free-for-all than any sort of coordinated strike. A knot of prisoners—the smart ones—had barricaded themselves in a stall in the back and were fighting to keep the shifters out. Those who had tried to make a run for it littered the ground—as did a few of the rioting shifters. Kye was putting them down with a fluidity and ease that was impressive, but nothing compared to the half-shifted lethality of Grace.
She tore through the rioters on two legs, but with fangs and claws flashing and a light dusting of golden fur covering her partially feline face. Her dominance was a force that seemed to hum in the air around her, causing some of the smarter shifters to tuck tail and cower rather than engaging her.
Adrian didn’t waste time admiring her skill—the rioters may not be trained fighters, but there were too many of them and they were too angry to give up easily. He pushed into the fray, tranqing everyone who wasn’t actively trying to stop the battle. When he ran out of darts, he holstered the gun and continued with his fists. As an avian, he didn’t have the strength of many of the larger predatory breeds, but what he lacked in brute force, he made up for in training. There was never any doubt in his mind that they would put down the uprising—the only question was how long it would take and how many prisoner casualties there would be before they did.
A heavyset man with more bulk than brains charged Adrian and he snapped out his fist in a jab meant to catch him in the nose and put his lights out, but the bastard turned his head with shifter speed and Adrian’s knuckles plowed into the
hard bone of his skull rather than the nicely crunchable cartilage of his nose. Adrian hissed, feeling something crack in his hand, but didn’t slow, spinning away from the massive man’s haymaker and striking his throat with the knife-edge of his hand, sending the big man crashing to his knees as he gasped for breath.
He sensed another smaller shifter at his back and spun, sweeping the legs. He slapped a hand on the woman’s shoulder, pinning her to the floor. He fucking hated fighting women. “Stay down,” he snapped.
Claws swiped at him, lightning fast, and he barely avoided slicing open his face. A quick thwack of her head against the concrete floor knocked her out—and left him feeling sick to his stomach. Why did they never listen?
Another figure rushed him and Adrian leapt to his feet, engaging again.
When the dust finally settled—quite literally since Grace had thrown a partially shifted jaguar into a wall hard enough to pulverize the drywall—Adrian stood with Grace, Kye and a handful of pride security personnel over the prostrate forms of a couple dozen shifters as the surviving prisoners whimpered pitifully in their barricaded cell.
One jaguar—possibly the same idiot who’d made friends with the wall—feinted at rising and Grace snarled, forcing him back down so his belly scraped the floor in submission.
“Fucking mess,” she growled, the words slightly distorted by the fangs still filling her mouth. “Kye,” she called, command in her voice—the snow leopard might call the shots on their excursions into Organization territory, but here at the pride Grace outranked him by a mile. “Get Brandt and Roman down here. Gather up the uninjured idiots and put them somewhere—I don’t care where as long as it’s far away from here.” She raised her voice so the power in it echoed off the walls. “If you don’t require immediate medical assistance, go with Kye and be good little shifters. Don’t try to sneak off. We have surveillance, you dumbasses, and I have personally memorized each and every one of your stupid faces. Anyone tries to sneak off gets punished twice. Once by the Alpha—because you all fucking deserve it—and once by me, because I’m pissed. And anyone who even looks at the prisoners on their way out gets an express pass to the infirmary, courtesy of yours truly. Got it?”
There were rumblings that sounded vaguely agreeable and Grace nodded as if there had been a chorus of “Yes, ma’ams”. She waved one clawed hand at Adrian. “Come here. Help me triage this shit. You have any medical training?”
He picked his way through the unconscious and wounded shifters—and handful of desiccated prisoner corpses—to her side. “Battlefield minimum.”
She nodded, seemingly satisfied with that. “Look for anyone who’s bleeding to death. Try to stop the bleeding. Brandt’ll be here soon. Then just do whatever the hell he tells you.”
She began moving through the bodies—just as terrifyingly efficient as a medic treating the injuries as she had been causing them. There weren’t many in desperate need of medical attention—the prisoners who hadn’t barricaded themselves in the back were shredded to the point of raw meat. There was no helping them. Most of the shifters were merely unconscious—tranquilized or knocked that way without life-threatening injuries, in a testament to the skill of Grace and her security forces. It seemed the few direly injured were rioters who had gotten in the way of one another in their frenzy to tear apart the Organization prisoners. A gash from claws here, a snapped bone there. Adrian did what he could until the real medics arrived and then he became a litter bearer, relocating the unconscious shifters out of the building.
Adrian crouched next to one shifter who had managed to fight his way all the way to the stall where the prisoners had barricaded themselves before being knocked out. One of the shifter’s arms reached through a hole punched in the wood. Adrian withdrew the arm, taking shallow breaths through his mouth. The stench was worse back here. Not just the smell of carnage, he realized, but the scents of accumulated filth. Inside the stall were buckets filled with days old urine and feces. The surviving prisoners had barricaded themselves in their fucking toilet.
“Please.”
Adrian focused on his task, ignoring the word whispered through the wood. It came again, and a third time, but he kept to his work, lifting the senseless shifter body and carrying it away. When he returned to move another body—this one the bloody remains of a prisoner—the voice was closer to the other side of the wall.
“Please.” Quavering. Feminine.
It could be Rachel. If anyone but him had found her at that raid, it would have been.
Adrian turned his head, meeting a pair of pale blue eyes through the hole in the wood. Stringy brown hair framed a quietly desperate face. The woman from the van. “Please,” she whispered again. “I don’t know why I’m here. I’m just an administrative assistant. I do data entry.” Tears welled in her eyes. She lifted a hand to shove a hank of mangy hair away from her eyes, a tattoo on her wrist catching his eye.
No one was caring for this lot. No one was bringing them lotion and shampoo and three square meals a day. They might all deserve it. But then again, they might not.
Grace called his name and he returned to his task, turning away from the brunette who could have been Rachel.
The first snowflakes were beginning to fall a half hour later, when Grace—now fully human again—grabbed the other end of the stretcher he was lifting and helped him carry the last tranq-victim out into the night.
“Dumbasses, all of them,” she muttered darkly.
“What happened?” he asked. “How did they get inside?”
Grace rolled her eyes, disgust coming off her in waves. “Some idiot woman inside snapped from all the roaring and started screaming through the walls at the shifters outside, goading them, challenging them. Some of the guards hadn’t exactly been happy with this detail and apparently the two on the front door decided to take a smoke break around that time.”
Adrian’s eyebrows arched skeptically. Shifters never smoked. It fucked with their sense of smell and tasted positively vile to them. “Are you going to have a word with them?”
“They’re being dealt with,” Grace said darkly. They set the stretcher case down with the others in the Pride Hall—the pride didn’t have another building big enough to hold all the unconscious rioters that wasn’t already being used as a prison. Too many prisoners, in a place not equipped for it.
Adrian and Grace nodded to the guards—hand-picked by Grace herself from the security ranks—and strode out into the gently falling snow. It was idyllic, a lovely snowy evening in the Montana wilderness. And they both had dried blood under their fingernails. Adrian flexed his fingers, his knuckles already beginning to swell beyond usefulness.
“We’ll have to screen the guards more carefully. And find someplace else to keep the survivors.” Grace grumbled as they walked away from the building, footsteps crunching softly. “The barn was never supposed to be a long-term solution anyway. Just the only place we could think of on short notice that would fit them all that didn’t have windows the bastards could crawl out of. What a fucking mess.”
“What’ll happen to that lot?” Adrian asked, jerking his head back toward the mass of unconscious rioters in the Pride Hall.
“Roman’ll come up with a fitting punishment. The hell of it is, I don’t even blame them.” She shoved her hands into her pockets, long legs eating up the ground. “I wish I could, but most of the rioters are from the most recent batch of shifters released in our Organization raids. They’re the ones who still wake up screaming every night. Who are we to tell them they can’t kill their persecutors? Even if they weren’t persecuted by these particular Organization doctors. All the same breed, right?” Grace shot him a sideways look. “Except yours. She’s a different kind entirely, isn’t she?”
Adrian didn’t answer, not sure what she was hinting at and not sure he wanted to know.
Grace stopped abruptly. She turned her head sharply, watching the
shadows, her nostrils flaring. Adrian held himself still, waiting for a command, but a moment later her ready stance eased. “Fucking Dominec.”
Adrian frowned, searching the shadows, but whatever Grace had sensed, he didn’t see or hear it. “I’m surprised he wasn’t right in the thick of it, goading the shifters on.”
“If he had been, I would have taken great pleasure in kicking his ass into next week. That’s a lesson long overdue.”
Adrian would have paid good money to see that fight—if he hadn’t been a little unsure which of the two would come out on top when push came to shove. Grace was fierce, but Dominec was insane. In those cases, sometimes insanity won.
“I expect the Alpha will bring your doc in to sort the goodies from the baddies now,” Grace commented, continuing down the path.
“Is that wise?” He may recognize the need, but Adrian didn’t want Rachel anywhere near that charnel house.
“What? You trust her to knock up our kitty-cats, but not to tell us which of the Organization prisoners we need to be most wary of?”
Adrian scowled. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know? Kathy-cat came running to the infirmary earlier, bragging about her big news, right before I got the call that the shit was hitting all sorts of fans over here.”
“What news?”
“Your doc is gonna help her have kittens. Little lynxy babies. Or bobcat babies. I don’t know how that stuff works when you’re mixing.”
He stiffened. “She wouldn’t.”
“If you say so. Kathy seemed pretty sure.”
He gritted his back teeth. Wouldn’t that be just like Rachel, to volunteer to help without a single thought to her own safety. There were shifters in the pride—even those who hadn’t been involved in today’s riot, who wouldn’t take kindly to an Organization doc tinkering around in the infirmary, no matter what she’d done for them in the past.
