Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  Great, now he's shooting at planes.

  Bassi was on her feet too. "What are you doing?"

  "Spies," Julius growled. "Bird spies."

  "Moreland is right, isn't she? You're hallucinating!"

  "Demon birds." Julius's voice was a hoarse rasp. "I can tell. I recognize them."

  Bassi clearly thought he'd lost it, but Peri wasn't so sure. Could some of the SCB's bird shifters have found them? As a shifter, Julius would be able to tell them apart from normal birds.

  She started working at her bonds again.

  ***

  Sick though he was, Noah couldn't sleep. All he could think of was Peri, out there in the desert in the hands of killers.

  She's tough and resourceful, he told himself, but it didn't really help. What it came down to was that she hadn't trained for this kind of thing, and he had. So here he was, stuck in a sickbed, unable to help ...

  "What are you doing?" Trish asked weakly, opening her eyes when he sat up.

  "Getting back in shape." The IV bag had emptied itself into his arm, so he carefully pulled out the needle and began detaching the various monitors stuck to his chest and clipped to his fingers. He needed to use the bathroom anyway; that would be a good test of how recovered he was.

  He swung his legs out of bed. Trying to stand up brought a head rush that made him sink back onto the edge of the bed. Noah rested his head in his hands, waiting it out.

  "You're not going to help Peri if you collapse on the floor and give yourself a concussion." When he managed to raise his head, Trish was sitting up too, looking at him reproachfully.

  "I have to try." His first inclination was to use the IV pole to support him across the floor, but it wasn't likely that the Arizona SCB would let him help with the rescue efforts if he had to wobble everywhere supported on an IV stand. His second thought was that it would be easier on four legs than two, but based on his earlier experiences, shifting wiped him out so badly that he didn't want to do it unless he had to.

  Operating on sheer determination, he lurched across the floor to the bathroom unaided. He had to sit down on the toilet, then lean on the sink while he washed his hands one at a time, but by the time he was done, he felt a lot steadier on his feet.

  He thought of stories he'd heard from other SCB agents of the feats that shifter healing was capable of. Just as weak or injured humans could push themselves to incredible heights in situations of dire peril, injured shifters could force their bodies to cope with wounds that should have flattened them. Jack Ross, a former mercenary at the Seattle SCB, had told Noah that it was possible for sheer adrenaline to push a shifter's body far beyond the point where a human would have collapsed and died.

  And he could feel it happening now. The longer he was up, the more his body's emergency measures began to kick in. Keeping his balance was easier; his hands were less shaky, his breathing not as labored.

  Of course, Ross had said, you'll pay for it later ...

  But he didn't care about later as long as Peri was safe.

  He opened the bathroom door and was confronted with an annoyed-looking Lafitte. "I thought we had an understanding, Easton."

  "Snitch," he muttered at Trish, flat on her back and watching the whole thing. Cat Delgado was sitting on her other side. Trish raised her open palms to the ceiling in an eloquent "who, me?" gesture.

  "Don't be dense, Noah," Lafitte said, taking his arm to help him back to bed. "Alarms went off as soon as you detached your monitors."

  "I'm just trying to get my strength back," he protested.

  "A few hours ago, you were at death's door. You don't have any strength to get back."

  "I'm feeling a lot better," he said hopefully as she lowered him to sit on the edge of his bed. Trish raised her head and gave him a look, mirrored by Delgado's incredulous glance. Still, Lafitte was a human, so maybe she wouldn't catch on to exactly how much better he wasn't.

  "You're feeling better because you're tapping into your body's last reserves of energy for a temporary high," Lafitte said tartly, slapping a blood pressure cuff on his arm.

  ... okay, so maybe that wouldn't work on a doctor who dealt with injured shifters all the time.

  "I don't care, as long as I can be there for Peri. Is there any news?"

  Delgado opened her mouth. Lafitte gave her a quelling look.

  "Guys!" Noah said.

  Lafitte pursed her lips as she read his blood pressure and then reached for an ear thermometer on the tray of instruments beside her. "Ah, nothing like a moral dilemma. I, however, keep my promises. Before you decided to stage a jailbreak—"

  "I wasn't escaping."

  "—Agent Delgado was on her way down here to tell you that they've located Peri."

  "What? Why are we standing here?" He slid off the bed, stood up, tilted sideways and would have fallen if Lafitte hadn't caught him.

  "That's why." She pushed him back down and reinserted the thermometer, holding his head steady with a gloved palm on his opposite temple.

  Delgado spoke up. "We've dispatched teams to the area, but it'll be awhile before anyone gets there. They're out in the boonies, in the mountains northeast of San Manuel."

  "And before you ask, Easton, you are not going with any of those teams," Lafitte said. The thermometer beeped and she withdrew it. "Especially not running a 104-degree fever. You'd be a liability and you know it."

  Unfortunately he did know it, which didn't make the bitter pill go down any easier. "How did you find them?"

  "We got lucky," Delgado said. "Though I hate to call it luck with a murder involved. They ditched their car, but we got a description of the second getaway vehicle after that Valeria assassin, Julius, shot a highway patrol officer. Right now we're coordinating with the Arizona state police, and between their contacts and ours, we found the car up some little canyon in the mountains."

  "Why? I'd expect them to head for an airport or hit the interstates."

  "No clue. A couple of eagle shifters in the area, not agents but local folks we sometimes work with, are keeping tabs on them for us. They don't seem to be running, more like they've holed up in one of the old mines out there."

  "Maybe waiting for the search to die down?" Trish suggested. She'd been listening to the conversation with interest.

  "Did anyone see Peri?" Noah asked anxiously. "Is she all right?"

  Delgado shook her head. "I'm sorry. I don't know that."

  "Doc, please," Noah appealed. "I have to be out there. Even if I can't be in on the takedown, I have to be in the ops room. You said I could."

  "I said I'd consider it if you were strong enough. Which," she said, replacing the thermometer on the instrument tray, "I am going to provisionally say that you are. However!" She pushed him back down when he tried to get up. "There are conditions. You wear a mask and gloves at all times, stay out of the way, touch nothing, and comply with all orders from medical staff, including orders to go back to bed. Got it?"

  "Got it," he promised, sagging in relief.

  Delgado went to fetch clothes from Noah's luggage, and he dressed under Lafitte's watchful eye, meekly donning the respirator mask and gloves she'd specified.

  "In all honesty, with everyone in the building on heavy doses of antivirals and both of you most likely past the highly contagious stage, I don't think there's that much risk of you infecting someone," Lafitte said, swiping her card to unlock the door for him. "I wouldn't let you out if I thought it was a huge danger. I still want you to avoid having too much contact with anyone else, though."

  "Deal."

  He didn't mention that he was cold; even in his heavy leather jacket, he was working hard not to shiver. And he had to work hard at making sure he didn't give away how much effort it took to stand upright and walk down the hall at something approaching a normal pace.

  But the feeling of being up and dressed and doing something more than made up for the discomfort.

  Hang on, Peri. Help will be there soon.

  ***


  "How did they find you?" Julius snarled, stalking back into the cave. "Did you send a message? What did you do?"

  He seized Peri by the arm and dragged her to her feet.

  "I didn't," she gasped. "You guys took my phone. I don't have anything on me that—ow!"

  He shook her hard, then dragged her toward the mouth of the cave, only to be brought up short by the rope tying her to the wall. It wrenched her bound wrists painfully, delivering such a hard yank to the crossbeam that the ancient wooden cribbing creaked and dust sifted down from the ceiling.

  "Julius, stop!" Bassi tried to grab his arm, only to be brushed off as effortlessly as a fly. "You'll bring the roof down on us."

  Julius casually backhanded her. She stumbled backward, and for an instant teetered on the brink of tipping over the edge and falling down the cliffside. She recovered in time, clutching at the nearest beams, white-faced.

  Peri could feel the unnatural heat in Julius's hand grasping her arm—and something else, too: the prickle of claws, pressing into her flesh as they slid out of his fingertips and then slid back in. His face was gray, his lips dry and cracked.

  "You're sick," she said, trying to keep her voice calm. "You're very sick. The SCB can help you."

  "She's right." Bassi skirted him nervously, her back against the wall of the cave. "Listen to me. I've helped develop a regimen of antivirals that can combat this. It was too late for Felici, but it's not too late for you, not yet."

  "Traitor," Julius spat. "I should've shot you back at the SCB. And you—" He shook Peri again; her teeth snapped together. "What did you do? How many agents are here?"

  "I don't know!" Peri cried, her teeth snapping together as he shook her. Noah, help!

  ***

  The ops room for the rescue effort was a conference room on the second floor. Noah entered quietly and took a position along the wall, staying out of the way as ordered. Everyone was too busy to notice him anyway.

  He'd rarely had a chance to observe the coordination of a field operation, since it wasn't his usual area. There were about a dozen people in the room, including Chief Costa, with more coming and going all the time. High-detail relief maps of the desert were spread out on the conference table, and a large computer monitor had been set up at one end of the room, showing jerky camera footage that flashed dizzyingly between yellow rocks and sunset-tinted sky. The computer techs were working hastily to set up more computers on desks along the walls; Noah recognized Vir among them, distinctive with his purple hair and tinted glasses.

  "That's an eagle with a GoPro," Cat Delgado murmured, edging into the room next to him with a stack of files. "Eagle shifter, I mean. Miniaturized cameras and streaming video are the best."

  "I wonder if they've tried that at the Seattle office?" Now that he knew what he was looking at, he recognized that the erratic flashes between rocks and sky were caused by the eagle banking to stay in the air as it swooped through mountain canyons. "If not, we gotta start."

  "Delgado, are those the mining claim records for the Galiuros, or did you come in here just to gossip?" Costa snapped, looking up from the map he was marking up with colored highlighters. "Easton, what are you doing out of quarantine?"

  "Cleared by Doc Lafitte, sir," Noah said, hedging the truth very slightly.

  "Whatever. Just stay out of our way." Costa turned his attention to the files Delgado was rushing to spread out between the maps.

  "Wasn't expecting to see you up."

  Caine's voice. Noah hadn't seen him come in; his ability to come and go quietly, even for a shifter, bordered on the uncanny. He reflected on Peri's suspicions that Caine was something other than an ordinary shifter. Caine felt like a regular shifter to Noah's extra-normal senses, though; there wasn't even the slight hint of something-is-not-right that he got from the Valeria shifters.

  Thinking of Peri kept him on task. "I'm not going to lounge around in bed when Peri's in danger."

  Caine grunted and turned his attention to the monitor, where something was happening. In the sunset-tinted light, with the angle of the image changing crazily, Noah couldn't at first recognize what he was looking at. Then he realized that he was catching glimpses of the mouth of a cave or an old mine tunnel, and inside—

  "Peri." The word emerged as if it had been punched out of him.

  Julius had her by the arm. There was no sound, but Noah didn't need a soundtrack to know that she was in desperate peril.

  "You have to get someone out there!" He couldn't keep it inside. "She's in danger—"

  "She's hours away from here and none of the teams are there yet," was Costa's harsh reply. "Easton, shut up or leave the room."

  "He's right. Shut up." Caine's low voice rasped like rocks rubbing together. "You won't help her by freaking out and getting yourself kicked out."

  "So I get to watch her being murdered on camera?" Noah snarled, but he managed to keep his voice low.

  "Calm down." Caine took a long look at the monitor showing the eagle's footage, then leaned past Noah and took an even longer look at the maps spread out on the table. Then he murmured "Come with me," and left the room.

  Noah followed him into the hall. As soon as the conference room door closed behind them, Caine said abruptly, "You want to save your girl?"

  "Well, yeah, of course I do."

  Caine nodded, jerked his head in a "this way" gesture, and began walking briskly down the corridor. In his present condition, Noah had to struggle to keep up; he was breathing hard by the time Caine let them into a small equipment storage room.

  "You up for this?" Caine demanded. "You gonna pass out on me?"

  "I'm up for it."

  "You better be." He retrieved a semiautomatic pistol from a gun safe, scribbled illegibly on the attached register, and gave it to Noah along with a hip holster. "I could do this alone, but it'll work better with backup. And of everyone here today, you're not from this office and you'll be gone soon. After today, I never have to talk to you again."

  "Why does that matter?" Noah asked, baffled, as he buckled the weapon belt.

  Caine clasped Noah's upper arm in an iron-fingered grip. "You aren't going to mention a word about how you got to your girl. Not a damn word, you hear me? Tell them you were too out of it to remember, I don't care, but you tell them nothing." He gave Noah's arm a rough shake. "Promise or we're going nowhere."

  "Okay. Yeah. Promise." He was still entirely confused about what was going on, but if it involved Peri's safety, he was willing to promise anything.

  Caine flicked off the lights.

  There were no windows in the storage room. It was almost completely dark, but as Noah's slightly-sharper-than-human eyes adjusted to the light coming in from the gap under the door, he began to pick out details again. In the semidarkness, Caine had his eyes closed, and the hand not holding Noah's arm was pressed to the wall.

  It had to be nothing but an illusion of the poor lighting, and yet, despite Caine's pale skin tone, Noah couldn't tell where the edges of his hand ended and the shadows began.

  "What are you—" he began, but just then Caine's eyes snapped open, and Noah shut up with whiplash suddenness. Caine's eyes were flat black to the rims, as if his pupils had bled ink into the irises and whites.

  Staring straight ahead, Caine took a step forward, pulling Noah with him in an implacable, powerful grip. Noah stumbled forward, all his senses telling him he was about to slam into the wall. Except ... he couldn't see it anymore. Everything was dark and cold, and in that instant of complete and utter darkness, he had the sense of something huge arching over him, around him. There was a dry dusty smell, a rustle like scales or wings—

  His foot came down on sand.

  Heat slapped him in the face, and along with it came a woman's voice, shouting in pain and anger.

  Peri!

  Noah staggered forward. He was in the dark—no—he was in the shadows in the mine cave he'd seen on the monitor. His head spun—a minute ago he'd been in the SCB, and now he was—

/>   But the important thing was Peri.

  Caine was a little faster, because Caine had been prepared: bringing up his weapon, he fired at Julius. Noah didn't dare; Julius and Peri were too close together.

  Julius's shock was gratifying. He spun around with a yell, dropping Peri to the cave floor, and brought his rifle to bear on them.

  Caine took a step back and seemed to vanish, fading into the darkness of the cave.

  Noah had no such escape. Instead, he shifted.

  ***

  One minute Peri was dangling in Julius's grip, being shaken like a rag doll. The next thing she knew, he dropped her and someone was shooting at him.

  Someone inside the cave.

  It's a mine, she thought dazedly; they must have come up from another entrance somewhere—

  As Julius swung his rifle toward his newly arrived assailants, there was movement deep in the cave, and a full-grown tiger leaped over Peri and piled into him.

  Noah!

  It couldn't be. How could he be here? But he was.

  "You hurt?" a voice demanded right in her ear, and Peri let out a little shriek. It was Caine, materializing as if he'd come directly from the shadows themselves

  "Not—not really." She held up her hands so Caine could untie her. He took one look at her bonds and flicked open a pocketknife rather than dealing with the knots.

  Julius let out a deep-throated roar as he shifted. The cave was suddenly much too full of bear and snarling tiger, slamming into the walls, completely blocking the entrance as they snarled and tore at each other. Timbers snapped; rocks pattered down on them.

  "Ceiling's gonna collapse," Peri gasped as Caine pulled her roughly to her feet. "We gotta get out of here."

  "Not a problem."

  How is it not a problem? she wanted to ask. They couldn't leave the cave without fighting their way past a roaring, thrashing bear and an infuriated tiger! But Caine started to draw her deeper into the cave, and she remembered: they'd come in somehow. There was another exit back here.