by L. A. Banks
Blood and gore splattered lab windows as he ate the man. A brilliant mind lost. Pandemonium. MPs firing ineffective rounds. The lab floor a wading pool of crimson. Glowing eyes meeting his, then a lunge and crashing glass. The beast racing forward, scientists screaming, diving beneath equipment. More death. And then one silver bullet fired from his Glock nine-millimeter that he had always kept nearby. Dead aim. Survival a matter of seconds, a matter of inches. The beast fell and he’d lived.
Doc Holland brought the cup up to his lips calmly and took a steadier sip. The general had not been in the lab that day. He took another even sip. The entire lab had almost been lost. Then what? Fingering the small amber and sterling piece he always wore beneath his shirt, Holland allowed his thoughts to stray.
There was so much he’d learned since those early days. But they had experienced the true horror of a demon-infected werewolf that day. Oh, yes, he had known about demon-infected werewolves. He had fatefully met a Blackfoot shaman named Silver Hawk, a few years before. Silver Hawk had opened his eyes to a great many things that he had not dared share with anyone else. The general, in his insanity, couldn’t know . . . he’d start a global war by sending in troops against a part of the species that had no culpability for those hit with the deadly virus. However, he knew in his heart the military made no such distinction. But from the very beginning, anyone who had known what to look for when studying Rod’s blood would have known that he had been demon-infected. And now Sasha and the others faced extermination, too. What he had managed to keep completely secret for all these years was that Sasha, Woods, and Fisher were very different from Rod.
Tears streamed down the doctor’s face. “God forgive me,” he whispered. “Rod, forgive me, son.” He clutched his fist to his side and looked up toward the ceiling, a sob choking him as tears glistened on his dark, weathered face. “What was I to do!”
Feeling quite old, Holland rubbed a weary palm over his thinning, kinky hair and let out a shuddering breath. His personal cell phone ringing in the distance snatched his attention away from the past. He set down his mug quickly and began running through the spacious Tudor to his second-floor bedroom. He’d gone to great lengths to hide this cell phone from all brass. Only Sasha and the team had the number.
Breathless, he picked up on the sixth ring before it went to voice mail. Not even looking at the number, he took the call as sweat broke out all over his body.
“Doc, oh shit, they fired on us! The whole squad was hit—by our own!”
“Easy. I’m listening.” Doc Holland’s eyes scanned the room, knowing that his home was probably bugged.
Snatching off his robe that could easily harbor a listening device, he headed back down the hallway like the house was on fire, down the steps toward the back deck, and flung open the doors. As Woods’s hysterical voice battered his senses, he frantically shed his leather slippers, then stripped naked, running, shivering, into the backyard with the phone that never left his possession. He pressed the cell phone to his face as a panicked voice continued to fill his ear.
“What the fuck is going on! We weren’t bitten again . . . Sherwin, Gonzalez, Johnson didn’t even have the virus, Doc . . . but they’re all dead—with . . . with Rod! The chopper fired on us—us.”
“Have you called Sasha?”
“No, I called you—”
“Don’t call her,” the doctor warned. “You could put her at risk. Make me your only contact.”
“Okay, okay,” Woods said in bursts. “I understand.”
“Are you safe?” Ice and snow sent stabs of freezing pain into the doctor’s feet. The bitter cold and wind made him double over in agony as he covered his genitals and hunched his body.
“Yeah, yeah, for now—but—”
“Listen to me, son,” Dr. Holland said, his voice a low, urgent hiss. “You have to disappear if you want to live. I’m so sorry, that’s all I can tell you right now. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.”
“Where are me and Fisher gonna go? We have no money, we’re Americans. We didn’t do anything wrong! We followed orders!”
“I know, I know . . . I need to talk to some people, find a way to safely bring you in. But right now they’ll shoot you on sight.” Thoughts of the general’s damage-control strategy carved at the doctor’s soul as he tried to talk Woods down. Young men had died to keep a secret; they had seen Rod Butler transform, knew what they could possibly become, and the general feared they’d go AWOL—their bodies living contraband on the open black market for anyone who learned what they were. “I’ll have to find a way to get assets to you—but right now you can’t call me. They could track the call. We’ve already been on the phone too long.” His mind was whirring as he spoke. He had to get to them, or they’d be hunted down and incinerated.
“But what about our meds, man? Doc, you can’t leave us out here like this with no meds! We saw what happened to Butler without ’em in his system too long!”
Xavier Holland closed his eyes as a young man’s voice broke into a splintered plea.
“Oh, dear God, Doc—don’t leave us to turn into one of those things. It wasn’t our fault me and Fish were bitten when we were kids. I swear to God we’ll take the medicine, me and Fisher will . . . Jesus Christ, don’t leave us like this!”
The doctor swallowed hard. “Listen to me. You won’t Turn like Rod. You have to trust me on that. I’ll get medicine to you and money—I swear on my life, son. Just shut down the call and get away from wherever you called me. If they picked this up on satellite and triangulate . . . need I say more?”
He clicked off the call abruptly and stood in the darkness letting the wind lacerate him. But it was the hollow chill within his soul that caused him to shiver.
“DID YOU KILL him? Is that why he’s not here with you tonight?”
Sasha blinked twice at the mystery man who was now before her, not sure that she’d heard right. Her gaze narrowed. “What did you say?”
He leaned in and she jerked her head back. He straightened.
“I said, did you kill him? The werewolf you were always in here with—the big redhead.”
The question was asked in a low enough timbre that only one with superior hearing ability would have been able to make out what the man had said, but Sasha’s hands balled into fists in outrage.
“And what are you?” she asked, her eyes hard as she hurled her newly acquired information at the intruder. “Some kind of warlock on a vigilante trip?” She’d delivered her warning with a low growl through her teeth, also keeping her voice low enough that the average human wouldn’t have heard the comment over the din.
It annoyed her no end that he just cocked his head to the side and stared at her. It also deeply concerned her that one of her team had been made, in fact, possibly all of them, and now there was a hostile force asking very dangerous questions.
Sasha turned, paid for her meal, then set the bags down hard on the bar for a moment, and turned back around. She looked him in the eye. “I’ll tell you this much. You’re yanking with the U.S. military, pal, and if the big redhead goes missing, you’ll have an M-16 shoved so far up your ass you’ll choke on it. Believe that.”
“You do not understand—”
“No, correction—you don’t understand,” she said, pointing toward his massive chest. “You got a problem with one of my pack brothers, then you’ve got a problem with me. And trust me; you do not wanna have a problem with me.”
“You’ve picked the wrong pack to defend,” he said quietly. “Pity. Soon you will have to choose and step into your destiny. You are of our clan.”
Sasha turned briefly to collect her food and six-pack, fury making it almost impossible to speak. But when she whirled around with a hot comeback line, he was gone.
An eerie calm came over her. She knew her guys could handle any potential threat that came to their door, but there was no way she was going to allow her brothers to get ambushed by a nutcase. And it hadn’t escaped her notic
e that he hadn’t asked about the rest of the pack. Could that mean he had already gotten to Woods and Fisher and was now going after Rod? Her heart was pounding hard and fast. Maybe that was why she hadn’t heard from any of them. Well, now it was time to blow up cell phones, ask questions about the guys’ whereabouts, and use keys she swore she’d never use. If there was some huge psycho stalking Rod because he’d somehow picked up on the virus in him, then all privacy bets were off. Sasha stood still for a moment, her instinctive distrust of the general blossoming. What if they’d sent an exterminator from another branch of Special Forces? This guy knew too much about them for it to be strictly coincidence. If that was the case, then this was an emergency. A 911 in full effect.
As she dashed through the crowd, her heart was in her mouth. She had to get more info on this guy, zero in on his angle. The only way to beat a threat was to understand how it thought, follow its modus operandi. But she’d been so angry at the affront that she’d chased him away rather than luring critical intel out of his sick, twisted brain.
“Damn!” she muttered, as she scanned the parking lot, knowing before she looked that she’d never spot him that way. She couldn’t even smell him any longer; the only scent cloying at her was her burger.
She stalked over to her vehicle, depressed the alarm locks, and opened the door, checking the back seat both visually and with her nose. The moment she hopped in, she locked the doors, tossed the burger and the six-pack onto the passenger seat, opened the glove compartment, and withdrew a nine-millimeter. She placed the nine-millimeter on the passenger seat as well and extracted her cell phone from her bomber jacket and shoved it into the hands-free unit.
Adrenaline still pumping through her, she gunned the motor and tore out of the space, hitting Rod’s number on the contact speed dial first. Ripping into the packages, and driving with one hand, she balanced the burger, took a bite, listening to and counting rings with despair.
“Damn! Pick up, Rod,” she yelled at the phone in order to be heard. “Got a serious situation. Watch your six, got a lunatic looking for you. Call me.”
Repeating basically the same message for Woods and Fisher, she groaned in frustration, the sound coming out more more like a growl.
“Hate it, hate it, hate it! I hate voice mail,” she finally yelled, now crazy enough to be driving with her knee at eighty miles per hour on Colorado’s ice-slicked roads as she held her oversized burger with one hand and slapped the dashboard with each word with the other when her next call even rolled over to Doc Holland’s message center.
When the Nitro swerved, she grabbed the wheel, resigned to finish her burger later and go door to door with her quest.
CHAPTER 4
PANIC BECAME A monster of its own as Sasha skidded the Nitro to a stop in front of Fisher’s building and leaped out. Jim’s apartment was the closest along the way.
The only person’s keys she had were Rod’s—keys he’d oddly given her without explanation before they’d all left on their most recent assignments—and Jim’s fourth-floor apartment presented a challenge. Sasha tucked the nine-millimeter into the back waistband of her pants beneath her jacket and then leaned on the buzzer, feeling her heart slamming against her breastbone. The rational part of her brain kept asking the primal, irrational side of it what was wrong as she rang Jim’s bell like a lunatic. Common sense dictated that if they were on assignment, just like she had been, there’d be no answer. They did this all the time, so what was her problem?
That was the problem: the fact that she felt like something was wrong and her gut never failed her.
She shoved away from the building, disgusted. The other problem was that this time they had been separated without warning, had been told not to inform the others on the team of their whereabouts. A tight-knit group that was forced to keep secrets within it. Her gut was on fire, as though some unseen warning was making every hair follicle on her body stand and shout an alarm. And all that had happened after she’d met the big predator who seemed like he was on the hunt for her guys.
Screw it, she was going in.
Rounding the building to find the back alleyway, she scanned the possibilities. A huge Dumpster was twenty feet from the fire escape, but could give her a leg up to hit the iron ladder that was two stories up.
Without mentally debating the plan, she hurried over to the Dumpster, dragged it under the fire escape, scaled it, and reached up. An entire story still separated her from the last ladder rung. If she went into that apartment and found Jim murdered . . .
Her eyes focused on the single rung as she crouched low. Then she leaped. She grabbed the rung with sure hands and held on while her body swung awkwardly. She began to push her lower body back and forth until she got enough momentum to swing her body up into a handstand before hooking her feet into a higher rung. From there, it was a piece of cake.
She made fast work of getting to the fourth floor, but the steel door was locked. Damn! But what else had she expected? Windows for adjacent apartments were too far from the fire escape to reach, and she wasn’t big on scaring some innocent person half to death, or getting shot.
Sasha raked her fingers through her hair and judged the ledge to the windows. Too narrow to even think about walking it . . . but then again, she was sure she had enough upper body strength to make it to the first window. That still didn’t solve the issue of people being home. Alternative—she looked up. Go in from the roof.
Climbing fast and hard, she got to the top floor quickly, but still had another floor between where she stood and the roof, with no iron ladder to make it easy. Frustration cascaded through her muscles and she jumped as high as she could and grabbed the gutter rails, then half dragged, half pulled herself over the edge.
Sweating, breathing hard, she rested for a second before scrambling to her feet, and then rushed toward the roof door only to be disappointed. Just like the fire escape, it was steel, opening from the inside only, and was locked. Steam vents were too small, there was no skylight, just an endless square of blacktop that made her pace, kept a growl rumbling in her throat. And then something completely insane tore through her. Rage.
Running full throttle toward the door, she let out an attack sound, and slammed against it. She collided hard enough to make her see stars and to bounce her body off the structure and onto her side. “Ow . . .”
She got up with care, checked her weapon, and then studied the door while rubbing her shoulder. To her complete surprise a part of the frame had given way—at least enough to expose the tiny blue emergency light inside. Her hands suddenly became tools, pulling at the metal, digging at the weakened brick, until the compromised barrier pulled away from its anchors enough to allow her to squeeze through it.
Inside. Yes!
Again, running, this time with direction, following, following, knowing Jim’s scent, corridors a blur, his door no true barrier. The heel of her hand at the knob and a hard shoulder where the dead bolt would be was an easy way to take out the frame. She just hoped his partying neighbors weren’t home, and that a dear old lady like Mrs. Baker wasn’t the local Town Watch committee chairman.
She was in Jim Fisher’s apartment in a flash and gently closed the door behind her. Sasha’s eyes tore around his place. General male clutter. Sneakers in a corner, things definitely rotting in the fridge. She lifted her nose. God, the bathroom needed a good swabbing down. But there was nothing registering alarm.
Still wary, she moved through Jim’s place with calm stealth, listening, looking, searching. But on the whole it just appeared like the man had rolled out as per usual and would be back. Feeling foolish now as she stared at his broken door, her shoulders sagged as she let out a hard breath and blew her hair up off her forehead.
Raking her fingers through it, she nosed around his place, checking out his bulletin board in search of the super’s number. That was the least she could do—alert the late-night maintenance dude that someone had tried the door and it needed to be fixed. Jim was gonna be sooo
o pissed.
Business cards, porn Web site postcards, old party flyers, and a couple of numbers on napkins, as well as several group shots of the team were stuck under thumbtacks on the wall corkboard behind his computer chair. Even though she knew it was a violation of Fisher’s privacy, she couldn’t help smiling and reaching out to touch the photos that held such fond memories. And then panic washed through her again.
Either she was crazy, or something was definitely wrong.
She sat down, moving with purpose, and clicked on Jim’s computer. Screw it, she had her reasons.
Her eyes narrowed at his desktop wallpaper while she waited for all the icons to settle down. It was a blonde in the most open doggie-style position she could imagine with a pair of the biggest breasts she’d ever seen on a woman that tiny. It was definitely TMI about Jim’s preferences.
Feeling no guilt or regret, she made an Internet connection, got the secure NORAD screens, and then began playing with combinations of Jim’s birthday, favorite color, zodiac sign, and favorite sports team numbers until she got into his official e-mail. She had to shake her head at herself as Shogun’s words again pierced her brain: what if there really were such things as computer gremlins? “A little assist,” she muttered, still working password combinations. Then bingo.
“Afghanistan . . . they went right from the deployment to Nicaragua to Afghanistan? No wonder,” she said, now truly feeling foolish as she booted down the system and stood. But her prayers had been answered. At least Fisher’s file said “still active,” which meant he and the other guys were not only alive, but that they also weren’t home to deal with a lunatic yet.
Without many options left, she went to the kitchen wall phone to call 911, when she spotted the super’s number written on the wall in pen. Such a guy thing. She released her breath hard, got into her best airhead persona, and calmly dialed the super.
“Well, I know this is all illegal,” she said, walking back and forth as she spoke. “But like, he and I were going out for like a week and he had my toothbrush and my CD, so he wouldn’t call me back—but, like—I don’t want the guy to get robbed or anything . . . and I’ll know you were the one who took anything if you do, ’cause I’m also calling the police, so if you don’t fix it—”
