Perfect Mate

by Mina Carter

  A growl rumbled up from his soul, finding voice through the medium of his chest and throat.

  “No. We are not slaves to fear.”

  Opening his eyes, he looked at the hated object again. “It’s a box, just a box. Nothing that can hold us. Nothing can ever hold us anymore.”

  “This is the way out. I’m sorry, I should have warned you about that… I didn’t think.”

  Lillian’s voice was a welcome balm as she unlocked the last door and opened it. The scent of earth and rain filled the small room, the smell of the forest and freedom carried to them on a gentle breeze.

  “No, it’s not your fault. You had no way of knowing.”

  Shaking his head, Jack watched as Sanders, flanked by the other members of the pack, half-carried the shaking female through the door and into the darkness beyond.

  “There’s only one tunnel, with steps at the end,” Lillian explained, her lovely eyes filled with concern for the other woman. “Will she be okay?”

  “Yeah, once she scents freedom, she’ll shift and run. Fight or flight syndrome. She’s all front. Really, she’s the most fragile of all of us. Mentally, that is. Apart from this idiot.”

  Jack nodded as Darce joined them, still twirling the orbitoclast in his fingers. The rest of the wolves had followed Sanders and Nic to secure the other end of the tunnel.

  “He’s just impressed he can lick his own balls now.”

  Darce grinned. “Fucking too right. Every cloud’s got a silver lining!”

  The sound of someone banging on the door at the top of the stairs froze the three of them in their tracks. Lillian gasped, her eyes wide in the light cast by the flashlight and her knuckles wide around it.

  “Hey, there are tracks down here. Someone’s opened this door.” The voice was faint but audible. Suddenly, gunfire sounded.

  “Shit, he’s shooting the lock out.” Adrenalin hit Darce’s system at Mach 1, pumping him full of energy and waking the rarely slumbering beast inside. Before either could argue, he bundled Lillian into Jack’s arms and pushed them both toward the tunnel door.

  “Get her out of here, I’ll deal with this.”

  “You sure, man?”

  Jacks eyes mirrored his dilemma. The need to protect the tiny woman in his arms warred with his duty. The fact he didn’t like leaving one of his men behind was obvious, but Darce knew that anyway.

  Whenever they went on operational, the captain was always the first in and the last out. He took the kind of damage most of them could only dream of, and still came out kicking ass. Darce had no idea how he did it.

  “Totally. Now get out of here before I kick your ass and take your woman.”

  Jack snorted, amusement flooding his features as he stepped back to allow Lillian to enter the tunnel ahead of him. “When you’re big enough. Catch you on the flip side, man. Remember…” He tapped his temple. “Think human.”

  Darce grinned as Jack ducked into the tunnel and out of sight. The grin widened as he closed the door and the room plunged into darkness.

  “Fuck thinking human.”

  Even with the light gone, Darce could see easily in the pitch black, yet more proof that he wasn’t anything close to human anymore. He reached out to snag something he’d seen earlier, and headed for the door. Once there, he stopped stock-still and listened. Outside, booted feet clunked down the steps. He could tell the guy was trying to be stealthy. It made no difference. He could hear the human as clearly as if he had decided to tap-dance in size twenty clown shoes.

  Yet another plus for the furry side.

  Marshaling his breathing, he concentrated. The darkness around him filled with the soft sound of joints popping and flesh sliding. He wasn’t quite as adept at part-changing as Jack, but he could manage to shift his hands into grotesque almost-paws.

  Snick…snick…snick.

  Ignoring the pain, Darce felt a sense of satisfaction as his claws descended one by one. He’d never get tired of his ability to shift forms. Some of the guys had taken a while to get used to it, fearing the pain that always accompanied it. Not him. Sure, it hurt like a bitch, but it was an addictive hurt, like getting an armful of tattoos. No…better.

  “This is fucking shit. They can’t have come down here.”

  The whisper came as the human soldier paused on the other side of the door. Darce flexed his fingers, feeling the claws on the ends and smiled. Just a few inches of metal separated him from his prey. His heart pounded with the thrill of the hunt, and his sense sharpened. He could hear the thunder of the soldier’s heartbeat, the scent of nervous sweat and barely controlled fear.

  Darce shook his head. Hadn’t this guy ever seen a horror film? There were three rules. The girl always got it first, never say “I’ll be right back” and never under any circumstances go anywhere on your own…even if it was just to take a piss.

  The door creaked. Darce held his breath as the human edged his way into the room. It felt like watching something out of Silence of the Lambs. He edged his way in farther, the thin line of his scope stabbing into the darkness. The dark swallowed it gleefully and just gave him glimpses of the nightmarish equipment hidden within it.

  “Fuck me, what is this? This place is a fucking museum.”

  Darce slid into place behind the door as the guy did a full circle, looking at all the weird and wonderful stuff the wolves had picked over. With a silent movement, he slid the bolt back into place, confident the human couldn’t hear anything over the racket of his own heart. Darce remembered the days, locked into a confining human body, with dull human senses. Things were much better now.

  As the light flitted ever closer, he lifted the mask he’d picked from the random piles around him, covering his mouth. The light reached his face, almost blinding him.

  “Hello, Clarice.”

  The soldier screamed like a girl and pulled the trigger. Darce yelped, dropped the mask and dove behind the metal bath in the corner. Bullets peppered the wall and floor until the magazine ran out.

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!”

  As the guy reloaded, Darce was on his feet and moving through the darkness.

  “Little pig, little pig, you shouldn’t have come in.”

  The new magazine slammed home with a click. Bullets slammed into the wall where Darce had been a moment before. Christ, even in the dark this guy was good. He’d only expect a seriously experienced soldier to aim sight-unseen. A soldier like him.

  “Screw you!” the human screamed. It was an impressive show of rage, if not for the scent of terror staging an all-out assault on Darce’s sensitive sense of smell. “I’ll blow your head off, you mother-fucker.”

  “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.”

  He ducked and rolled again as another burst of gunfire lit up the basement. The straightjackets behind him got some extra ventilation. Could be handy, he mused as he scuttled silently to the other side of the room. Summer model, maybe.

  Crouched in the darkness, he watched as his prey shone the scope wildly around the room, trying to location him. Fighting in enclosed spaces was always difficult. Without ear protection, any gunfire made your ears ring like fuck, but with them, you couldn’t hear for shit anyway. Fighting in an enclosed space, in the dark, with an enemy who had excellent night-sight? Uh, yeah. He’d take a pass on that one, thank you very much.

  “Where are you? Come out here and fight like a man, you fucking coward.”

  “That’s kinda the point, isn’t it? I’m not a man. I’m an animal. An animal you and your buddies came to put down.”

  Darce kept moving as the human took pot shots into the darkness. As he moved into the center, the strange shape of the basement walls echoed the sound of his voice and made it impossible to tell where he actually was.

  “How much ammo do you have?” He squinted a little and read the tape on the front of the uniform. Reaching out, he picked up a random manacle. “How long before you’re left down here in the dark unarmed, Kelwood?”

  As he
spoke, he threw the cuff. It landed behind Kelwood, making him jump and spin around. The scope light shuttered, blinking as its power drained. Darce shook his head. Rookie mistake. Always check the batteries.

  Padding up behind Kelwood, he stopped less than a foot away and waited. He knew the instant the human sensed his presence. He stiffened and turned his head slightly. Darce knew without a doubt that he wished he could see through the back of his own skull.

  He leaned forward, level with the guy’s ear.

  “Boo.”

  The word was a soft pop, but the guy jumped like Darce had yelled at the top of his lungs. He turned, lifted the rifle at the same time as he pulled the trigger. Darce knocked it from his hands. The rifle hit the deck and skittered out of reach, its scope light flickering over the glistening floor.

  Kelwood bellowed and went after it, but Darce moved too quickly. Lunging forward he batted the guy’s trailing heel and took him off balance. He hit the deck with over two hundred pounds of lean, mean werewolf wrapped around him.

  The scuffle on the floor was short and sweet. Even if Darce didn’t outweigh and outreach him, Kelwood was human and he wasn’t. Easily, he pinned the human down, a massive clawed paw around his throat, and leaned in so Kelwood could see him in the little light available.

  “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll tear your fucking th—”

  He paused. This close to the guy, myriad new scents wafted up to him from the open neck of his combat uniform. Terror over-rode everything like an overweight back seat driver, but underneath there were other scents. Shower gel, the meatloaf he’d had a couple of nights ago, a woman’s perfume perhaps rubbed off this morning when he’d kissed his significant other goodbye…and another scent. Warm, sweet and chillingly unmistakable.

  “Fuck me. You got kids?”

  Kelwood looked at him blankly, terror the sole expression on his face. “Huh?”

  “Have. You. Got. Kids?”

  That got his attention. The human’s gaze latched onto his, barely flinching at the inhuman golden color. For a second, happiness filtered through the terror, and the werewolf knew Kelwood wasn’t seeing him.

  “Yeah. A little girl. She’s four months old. Please…don’t hurt them.”

  Darce shook his head and pulled back, hauling the smaller man to his feet. “And just how the fuck do you think I’m gonna manage that? In case it escaped your notice, we’re in a basement in the middle of who-the-fuck-knows-where.”

  As he spoke, he walked across the basement, dragging the human in his wake.

  “B-but, can’t you read minds. Hypnotize us? You could’ve lifted my address from my head while talking to me.” Kelwood moaned a noise of sheer panic. “Oh my God, you did, didn’t you? Please don’t hurt Alice, she’s just a baby.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. We can’t read minds or any other crap like that.” Darce rolled his eyes, yanked open the lid of the wooden bed-cage, and stuffed the soldier into it. “And I’ve got better things to do that track down your family. Besides, babies scare the crap out of me.”

  He slammed the cage shut and bolted it. Looking back at Kelwood, he waited until the human looked him in the eye.

  “I got a message for your boss. The Blood you got with you. Tell her that she’s mine.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Whatever else Antonia had expected when she’d led her men into the shadowed hospital, it had not been to find a distinct lack of Lycans, remains or otherwise. Nor had she expected find the RAs torn limb from limb and spread over most of the corridor.

  “Oh my God,” Fletcher whispered. The squad stood in the middle of a massacre. Black blood pooled on the floor, extended up the walls.

  “Fuck me…it’s on the damn ceiling. How’d they get it up there?”

  Antonia held her hand up for silence. Without a word, she studied the scene and breathed through her mouth so she could forget she even had a nose. The RAs smelled bad enough when they were in one piece. Broken up and tossed about like doggie chew toys…it turned even her stomach.

  “They caught them in a cross-fire…”

  They’d heard gunfire from outside but hadn’t thought anything of it. The Lycans had been soldiers once upon a time. They knew the Project would send a clean-up team, so it stood to reason they’d arm themselves…presumably from the guards they’d killed.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. It was expected that they’d manage to take a few RAs out, but not all of them. Instinct would force them into a change, and any teamwork would disappear under feral instinct.

  Her eyes narrowed as she counted the prints and tracks in the carnage. This was something else.

  “Only three of them turned.”

  Surprise caught her blind-side as she walked through the battle scene. She paused in the middle of the blackened gore. A section of ribcage lay next to her foot, a line of intestine trailing toward what looked like half a pelvis. The rest of the body was lost in the chaos.

  She didn’t look too hard for it. At the moment the scene around her was abstract, like a set from a film, or a butcher’s offal pile. If she looked too closely, her mind started to organize the mess, reminding her that these had once been people. People who had been slaughtered brutally.

  Good thing they’d already been dead.

  “Three turned, the others—”

  She cut off her sentence right there. Something was wrong. Three of the Lycans had turned, and all research into the creatures said that once one shifted, the rest did as well. It was a chain reaction they couldn’t control.

  A frown creased her brow as she looked at the scene in front of her. The scientists had theorized that would be the next step in their evolution. First had been the ability to control their shifts, followed by the formation of loose packs. After that, they were supposed to mimic their counterparts in the wild and hunt together in animal form.

  Fuck that. They were working as a team, but not on an animal level. Eyes wide, she spun around, putting the clues together. Once she knew what she was looking at, it was easy to see where the majority had cut down the RAs with automatic fire, leaving what was left to stumble into three fully shifted Lycans who tore them apart limb from limb.

  Admiration mingled with her instinctive hatred. How had they managed it? How had they kept their ability to work as a team secret under the very noses of the Project?

  “Torch it.”

  Stepping back she watched dispassionately as Fletcher and Perkins lit up. Within seconds, the corridor resembled a charnel house.

  The two soldiers bathed the walls, floor and ceiling with gouts of flame, reducing blackened flesh and blood alike to a bubbling mass. Re-animate flesh burned easily and quickly, as though nature itself wanted to wipe it from existence. Acrid smoke rose from the remains, making the men behind Antonia gag and pull up their undershirts to cover their mouths and noses.

  She stood unmoving.

  The smell of the smoke didn’t bother her. It was sharp and foul, but it was cleansing. The purity of the fire burned the desecration away within minutes and left just the shattered bones to be collected.

  The roar of the throwers stopped, and the two men looked around to see if there was anything they’d missed. It didn’t make much difference. They’d torch the entire wing before leaving anyway.

  “Wilson, Fredericks…” she called out, already starting down the corridor her inhuman instincts told her was the way they’d gone. “Set the charges ready for us to leave, don’t set the timers. We got some mutts to find first.”

  Leaving the two men to complete their assigned task, she motioned for the rest to follow her.

  “Spread out, search the entire wing. There’s no way out so they have to be in here somewhere. Work in twos and do not spilt up,” she ordered, stopping by the doorway that had the highest concentration of Lycan scent.

  “These things are stealth predators, so they’ll try and pick you off one by one. Line of sight with your buddy at all times. You screw up, you’ve got me
to deal with. Even if I have to RA your ass just so I can kick it from here to kingdom come. Move out.”

  The team scattered like the good little company men they were. Antonia managed to restrain the curl of her lip as she stepped through the door into the room she’d isolated.

  Although her sense of smell wasn’t as good as that of a Lycan, it was still sharper than it had been when she was human. She couldn’t track a single trail with any accuracy, unless she’d taken blood from her prey, of course, but when the scents were piled one on top of each other, then even the most nasally challenged Blood could pick them up.

  Standing by the door, she closed her eyes and breathed in. Lots of scents, all different. All with the heavy musky overtone she’d learned to expect from wolves. A minute passed, then another and still she stood there, learning the scents, separating them from one another. Eight…no, nine people. Her brow creased. They weren’t all wolves. Hidden under the heavy musk was the clean, sharp copper scent of a human.

  Her eyes snapped open, and she looked at the opposite wall blankly. Why did they have a human with them? Unless…no, it had to be a member of staff who’d been in the room just before the Lycans took it over. Strange, though, that there was no body. Perhaps they’d eaten it. It had been known before. A guard or scientist who let his guard down and ended up on the menu…

  Animals.

  She shook her head in disgust and prowled farther into the room, noting from the marks on the floor that the table had been dragged into the center. They’d crowded around it, further evidence of planning. What was on there? She moved closer and looked down at it. An architect’s blueprint of the building looked back up at her.

  “Clever little dogs.”

  There was something written on it. Putting a hand on the table to steady herself, she went to lean forward. As soon as her hand contacted the wood, heat and feral hunger slammed into her. An image of the Lycan she’d seen in the doorway earlier filled her mind.