by L. A. Banks
Until now, the technology they had could only track the anomalies once they’d happened, once it was too late, once something had been loosed. But those with a sixth sense— they could give a heads-up warning, and the best of the best worked on the project . . . Even people with other technical skills, such as Winters, McGill, and Bradley, also had to have a little extra something to get into the unit. They were going to be a problem.
Her nerves coiled and uncoiled as she waited for Doc to show up and give her her walking papers. She tried to focus on what Hunter had said: in his underground shadow wolf society they’d have blockers, shamans just as strong as Winters and Clarissa on the psychic front, and keepers of the magic just as adept as Bradley, so they could cross their wires and throw them off the trail. All of it made her head hurt, the double-dealing and subterfuge. Yet all of it was necessary to keep sick men from thinking they could weaponize a demon, or worse, could mine one from an open dimensional portal. What was the general’s sick plan? Hers and Hunter’s plan was simple: make sure none of the crazy bastards could use it.
The sound of footsteps jerked Sasha’s attention toward the door as she jumped to her feet. The doctor’s easy smile greeted her as he came through the door.
“I know you’re tired of waiting but your deployment orders were finally signed.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sasha said, beaming.
They both shared a look, and she knew he’d had to move mountains to make that happen quickly. They both also knew that in this environment, it would be foolish to say more.
“I want you to take care of yourself out there, Trudeau.” Doc looked at her with such gentleness, even though his voice was gruff for the monitors. “I have something for you,” he said, digging into the pocket of his white lab coat. “While I was up in Ute lands, an old shaman friend gave me this for you . . . he said it was his daughter’s and he wanted you to have it to wear always—given all you did for his . . . people.”
Dr. Holland tenderly grasped her palm when her mouth dropped open, and placed a small amber stone covered with etchings and framed in silver on a thick, handcrafted silver chain in the center of her hand. Immediately she knew whose it was and where it had come from. The honor was so great that the tight feeling returned to her chest.
There was nothing she could say in their present surroundings, so she let her eyes speak, and then went to her dear mentor and simply hugged him.
CHAPTER 13
IT HAD BEEN three very long days and even longer nights. On the second day, when he’d heard taps playing, it was all he could do to heed his grandfather’s advice not to hunt the general down and tear out his esophagus. The look on Sasha’s face alone tore at him. Then they’d escorted her back down into the labyrinth of tunnels that he couldn’t chance being caught in. Not when they might be testing her, holding her captive, doing things to her that his wolf simply would not stand for.
However, as long as the doctor had sent periodic word that Sasha was safe and just being tested, he’d agreed with his grandfather’s wait-and-see policy. Only blind faith had pried him away from his shadow post outside the base to go to Seattle and then make it to Vancouver before the storm. She’d only called his prepaid cell phone once from a prepaid one of her own, and then they’d ditched both phones. Only then could he get on a plane ahead of her and begin the hunt.
“DOCTOR, DID YOU see this?” Clarissa said, walking over to the station where Xavier Holland had been going through reports.
The doctor looked up, his brows knitted, as he peered over half-lens Ben Franklin reading glasses. “What is it?”
Clarissa McGill quickly handed him a slide that was swabbed with a blood sample. Carefully lifting it from her gloved fingers, he rushed to a nearby microscope and studied the movement of the cells. Unable to believe his eyes, he increased the magnification and watched the fiercely aggressive activity on the slide. White blood cells had grown to twice the normal size, it seemed, to attack dark, oddly shaped black blood cells. The white cells surrounded them and the few normal red blood cells on the slide were slowly merging with the white cells, growing larger, to surround and absorb the antlike black cells.
“The contagion,” Clarissa said, keeping her voice low so the others in the lab wouldn’t hear. “It must have been dormant in her system—we didn’t see it before.”
“But look at how her immune system is fighting it,” the doctor murmured, his eyes fixed on the slide. “It’s making her stronger, her cells are carrying more oxygen, are more elastic. Red blood cells are not normally attack cells, but now, somehow, they are taking on the properties of white blood cells to absorb and conquer the contagion.”
He drew away from the microscope. He’d only seen this once before, in a child, an infant that had been attacked. Not the blood, but the results—he’d been denied seeing any evidence of this under a microscope before. But they’d relentlessly tested Sasha while she was detained, and her blood had obviously remained normal for a three-day incubation before all hell broke loose under the surface of her skin. Amazing.
At first he’d thought it was a fluke, something that had happened after he’d given the child, Max Hunter, an injection to stop the convulsions. Now he knew better. He began running to the high security area of the lab that required retina and fingerprint scans to open the vault. He had to know.
Clarissa was on his heels, and he wanted another doctor to witness, along with him, what could possibly be a vaccine breakthrough. It was a key that he and Lou Zang Chen had always hoped for. This wasn’t a suppressant they had found; something in the shadow wolf blood actually built immunity. Silver Hawk would never allow him that much testing freedom, with good cause. But if something had changed in Sasha’s blood, if something had been a catalyst to a dormant capacity for her body to heal itself . . .
His mind was on fire, his breaths short as he rushed into the vault. Loving Sasha the way he did, he wouldn’t have dared introduce the virus in her just to see what might happen. That would have been reckless. But somehow, she had the virus in her system now. Silver Hawk had never allowed him to study Hunter . . . but they had Sasha’s blood in the lab. Something about it was different. Never before had she had the werewolf cells tainting her blood . . .
Heart beating erratically, he walked through the cold room, Dr. McGill almost running to keep up with his long strides. This was impossible. Sasha had just been tested when she came back from North Korea. She had been with Rod prior to that, yet her blood was as it had always been . . . containing a slight anomaly, her shadow wolf secret buried deeply within her DNA chain.
He went to the section where blood samples from Rod Butler were housed and opened the flat panel.
“Doctor, get me a slide and put a fresh sample of Sasha Trudeau’s blood on it,” Xavier Holland commanded as he donned a pair of hazmat gloves, a mask, and goggles to extract a hypodermic sample of Rod Butler’s blood from the tray marked INFECTED SAMPLES.
Rushing over to the microscope in the vault, he waited until Clarissa McGill stepped back and he was peering through the square, high-powered lenses before he added a drop of Rod Butler’s tainted blood to Sasha’s. But something was very, very wrong. Frantic now, he went to another microscope and quickly found a clean slide. He placed a drop of Rod’s blood on it and peered into the microscope in horror, then tore away from it, pulling out sample after sample, repeating the process.
“Doctor, what’s wrong?” she asked, alarmed.
Xavier Holland looked up from the microscope, sweat beading on his brow. “Get the general on the telephone. All the werewolf samples are gone. This is normal, untainted human blood.”
SHE HATED WAITING, but waiting in airports really sucked, especially once all the food concessions closed. What sucked worse was waiting in an airport knowing a storm was coming, knowing that a delayed flight was possible but a canceled flight was probable . . . knowing she had somewhere to really, seriously be.
DOROTHY WILKERSON LET out a small grunt of
disgust as she hoisted herself up from the living room sofa to get the telephone. Rarely did she have a chance to just sit and watch her favorite evening game shows and tonight, Deal or No Deal was on. Couldn’t they just allow her poor husband to rest? Donald had worked nonstop for them for over forty years; at least they could occasionally let him have dinner with his wife. His career had stolen their dream of having children of their own; what more did they want from him?
She looked at the caller ID, which was blank, and knew that it had to be the base. She picked up the telephone, and set her prim mouth hard. If the general didn’t pick up on his private office phone, then obviously he didn’t want to be bothered.
“Hello,” she said curtly, prepared to shield her husband from any intrusion.
“Dot, this is Xavier. There’s been an emergency in the lab. I need to speak to the general.”
Her attitude immediately shifted from disdain to panic. She never knew the types of projects her husband had aegis over, but she knew Dr. Holland was revered and that he never called. There was something in the tone of his voice that made her begin to run through the house.
“Yes, yes, right away,” she said after the second it took for her to recover her breath. Huffing through the house, she called out to her husband in a long, strident yell. “Donald!”
She was walking and talking to her husband out loud as she barged into his office. “Donald, there’s some sort of—”
Her eyes couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. The phone fell away from her hand. His chest was gone. His face was gone. His throat was gone. But he was still sitting upright in his chair. Something had literally scooped the front of him out like he was an overripe melon and the red and white tangle of flesh and bones had been left as a gruesome pile on his desk. She backed away slowly, the scream struggling in her throat before it finally tore free.
SASHA SAID A little prayer of thanks. Hers was probably the last flight that would make it out before things really got nasty. The heaviest barrage of weather was still up above the Canadian border, but ice and rough headwinds were sweeping down from Seattle and they had to fly directly into it.
THE BASE WAS on full military lockdown. Everyone who worked with the project was a suspect. Xavier Holland sat before the investigators with Dr. McGill beside him.
“No. It couldn’t have been Lieutenant Sasha Trudeau. She left earlier today headed toward Denver to catch a flight to go on a mission that would put her up near Seattle,” Xavier Holland said emphatically.
The investigating agents looked at him, unmoved.
“You say you can’t raise her by telephone,” the older of the two agents said.
“There’s a storm, she’s either in flight or in an airport en route to her target,” Holland argued.
“Mighty convenient,” the other agent said.
“I want to speak to the colonel,” Holland snapped. “This is bullshit. We can take this all the way to the Oval Office if you want to. The Secretary of the Army needs to be informed. This is a cabinet-level issue. What’s more, you are not going to come in here and jeopardize decades of research and have inexperienced agents handling biohazardous materials that, yes, gentlemen, can kill you.”
“One of your experiments get out of the cage, Doc? Were you all working on making another one like Butler?” The older of the two CIA agents looked at Holland hard, his semibalding scalp gleaming between combed-over brunette strands under the bright war room lights. He looked uncomfortable in his suit and adjusted himself repeatedly in it.
“You need Pentagon clearance for that kind of information,” Holland said evenly. “But no. I would never make another one like Butler.”
“This is a Pentagon-level emergency when a four-star general of U.S. Special Ops Command gets eaten to death in his own home by something very similar to what you weapons boys have been cooking up in your labs—no offense, ma’am,” the younger blond agent said, glimpsing Clarissa McGill. He looked like he was fresh out of the academy, but clearly had to have skills and rank, or he wouldn’t have been in charge of such a sensitive case. “We’re all integrated under the same Homeland Security umbrella, so cut the elitist, jurisdictional crap. A man died here, word is you guys make or research the sort of thing that may have killed him, so if you guys—and ladies,” he added as an afterthought, “know anything, tell us.”
“Doctor,” Clarissa McGill corrected, her gaze narrowed on both agents. “And I know for a fact that Sasha Trudeau wasn’t a part of this. She is headed toward her mission destination—on the general’s orders.”
“Specifically, how do you know?” the lead agent scoffed. “What are you? Psychic, Doc?”
Clarissa McGill offered them a blank expression. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I am.”
THE ROADS WERE getting bad. He’d been hanging out in the gym for hours waiting for Sasha to show. This was the only place that made sense to him. A bar would have too many humans. This old boxing dive was on the wrong side of town, only a few serious fitness buffs and athletes came here—guys tough as nails. Everybody else went to the more chichi gyms that served double lattes and fitness smoothies. If something were to get crazy, they needed to be in the warehouse district where there were plenty of shadows and few potential witnesses. Damn . . . Sasha, baby, where are you?
He’d been battling an uneasy feeling all day. Dexter, a shadow from the Canadian side, had told him things were heating up. There was a lot of activity rumbling behind the demon doors. Dexter didn’t need to tell him that, he could feel it in his gut. His amulet was practically humming. But he hadn’t seen Dexter yet. In fact, his contact for the gym hadn’t shown, either. Where was Guillaume?
The thick scent of aging sweat hung in the air like a mildewed curtain. Hunter kept his peripheral vision sharp as he pumped iron, doing slow bicep curls with a short, fifty-pound dumbbell. Missing nothing, not even the mouse that hunted for protein-bar crumbs in the corner, he watched a few remaining stragglers spar with each other or work out solo against heavy bags.
Dim lights, long, looming shadows coming through the warehouse windows from the wharf; an icy blast of winter slicing through the humid gym funk each time someone entered or left kept him on guard. More people were leaving now. He was slowly beginning to regret picking this place. He’d wanted Sasha to be able to slip in somewhere remote, shadow littered, where no questions would be asked. Down here, nobody ever saw anything—even if a man got shot and dropped at one’s feet. People either didn’t give a shit or didn’t give a shit. It was a good place to launch getting lost from, a good LKL, last known location. From here, one disappeared. But the fact that both his contacts, Dexter and Guillaume, had seemingly disappeared, and Sasha hadn’t showed, made him wonder.
Max switched the dumbbell to his left hand and began the slow, burning curls. The shadows were long in the gym, but not long enough for him to have missed a flash, a split-second glimpse of something moving quickly toward him. He stood, spun out of the way, and the only reason he didn’t immediately attack was that he had to be sure it wasn’t a friend.
After two more attempts at an ambush, Dexter and Guillaume stepped out of the shadows wearing combat boots and long, black leather coats to conceal their heavy artillery. The few stragglers in the gym smiled sinister smiles and locked the doors, slowly revealing Uzis that had been hidden in gym bags. Max’s grip tightened on the dumbbell. Dexter’s dark brown hair was matted to his skull with sweat, his skin was pale, pupils dilated, and he looked twice the size he’d been when they’d last seen each other. Guillaume’s long, platinum-blond ponytail was practically dreads and his pallor was so ashen he seemed closer to dead than alive—but his previously slight body was built as though he’d been competing in professional lifting competitions. And just like Dexter’s eyes, Guillaume’s normally crystal-blue eyes were bloodshot and dilated.
“What’s going on, brothers? You don’t look well.” Max centered his weight, holding the dumbbell tighter, and now praying Sasha didn’t fi
nd him tonight.
“We’re fine. Good to see you, too, mon frère. Glad you came,” Guillaume said, blotting the sweat from his face with his massive forearm. “Got a proposition for you.”
“It’s very, very cool,” Dexter said, baring fangs as he spoke. “This shit is out of control. It feels so good, Max, like . . . I can’t explain it.”
“What did you do?” Max said carefully, watching the Uzi carriers in his peripheral vision as his shadow contacts, Dexter and Guillaume, began to circle. The armed men behind him had taken a stance, safeties off their weapons. Several Goth females he hadn’t seen before entered the open room from the shadowed back office area of the warehouse, wearing pure leather and lace and carrying pump shotguns filled with silver shells. He could smell it. Max snarled.
“You’ve had this going for you all your life . . . this extra kick to the shadows, man,” Guillaume said. “Why didn’t you tell us it felt like this?”
“When did you get bitten?” Max asked, panicking. “How many attacked you?”
Dexter laughed and couldn’t seem to stop. His voice was shrill and then kept getting deeper and rougher until his nose began to elongate and his fangs became curled and yellowed. “Don’t be stupid!” he finally said. “You shoot up with it, man. It’s like being on meth or crystal. You get the strength, the sex kick. It’s just coming down that’s a true bitch.”
“Nasty side effect is it makes you crave human flesh but . . . that’s in plentiful supply,” Guillaume added with a shrug. “What’s hard to get is clean shadow to bring you down before you can’t control your shifts. The blood can’t have any werewolf taint in it, or it’ll just get you higher. You, my friend, are a pollutant, so don’t worry. We don’t need you to open up a vein. But the rest of the pack, their blood does what Mother Nature intended. Clean shadow blood goes in, heals you in a day or two like a stabilizer. Like taking a lude or a V after you’ve been high too long. That’s where you come in. The pack trusts you, so you can get them to give up clean blood. Tell them whatever, and if it’s coming from you, man, they’ll believe you. Can’t use another user, though. Once this shit is in your system, it’s in it till you croak. We could make a mint with this product. It’s brand-new, man. Who knew?”
