Mate Claimed su-4

by Jennifer Ashley

  Both Iona and the tiger watched, mystified, as Eric hooked the camera to the sat phone the way Xavier had shown him and dialed the number.

  “Xav,” he said when the man answered. “Send these to Reid and tell him to get his dokk alfar ass out here.”

  “Xavier’s there?” Cassidy asked, leaping down from the table. “Where’s Diego?”

  Iona picked up one of the phones she must have stolen from the researchers, smiled when she got a signal, and handed it to her. Cassidy punched in a number with one thumb and eagerly lifted the phone to her ear.

  Eric heard Diego’s voice loud and clear. “Who is this?”

  “Diego?” Cassidy said.

  “Cassidy.” His voice flooded with relief. “Fuck.” He flowed into a long string of Spanish, while Cassidy laughed, tears in her eyes.

  Then air displaced with a little bang, and Stuart Reid stood in the room. Iona let out a startled scream, and the tiger snarled.

  Iona blew out her breath, hand on her heart. “I didn’t know he could do that. How did he do that?”

  “Diego?” Cassidy yelled into the phone. “I’m coming home. With Amanda. You’ll be there, right?”

  “I’m on my way, amorcita,” Diego said and clicked off.

  Reid studied the roomful of Shifters, all naked except Cassidy in her hospital gown. His dark Fae eyes narrowed at the sight of the tiger. “Is that a Shifter?”

  “Long story,” Eric said. “Time to go.”

  “I can’t take you all at once,” Reid said. “One at a time, maybe two with the kid.”

  “Start with Cassidy and Amanda, then. Make sure they’re okay and get back here.”

  Reid went to Cassidy and put his slender arms around her, touching Amanda as well. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  Eric grunted a laugh. “This from a man who can make iron bars turn to raining bullets.”

  “That’s natural. Area Fifty-one is just weird.”

  He flashed a look around, then light flared, and Reid, Cassidy, and Amanda were gone.

  “I hope he hurries,” Graham said, while Iona and the tiger stared at the empty space in amazement.

  “Before he does,” Eric said, “I want to find out everything I can about this place and exactly what they’re doing here. You.” Eric walked to the tiger, feeling his strength return, the pain nearly gone. “You are going to tell me everything you know, starting from the moment you first were aware of being here, and leaving nothing out.”

  Iona dressed herself while Tiger Man leaned against the table Cassidy had vacated and told his story.

  There wasn’t much to it, but Iona listened in dismay and sympathy. Tiger Man had lived in his cage most of his life, let out only when humans wanted to watch him shift or run around, or when they carried him off to other rooms to put needles and probes in him. They’d lock him into glass-windowed rooms sometimes to watch what he’d do.

  Tiger remembered only bits and pieces of his life, which, if Iona judged aright, was about forty years. He remembered his Transition, the pain of it, during which time they’d given him a female they’d made for him to mate with.

  He remembered only flashes of that, then they showed him the cub she’d brought forth, but the female had died having it, they’d said. The tiger had touched the cub only once before it was taken away from him. Later, when he’d asked, a human had told him that the cub had died.

  There had been more Shifters here, Tiger said. When he’d been young, the facility had been full of people working—the place had teemed with them. What they’d meant to accomplish, he didn’t know. He’d stopped wondering the why of things a long time ago.

  For the last about ten years, the place had been quiet. Most of the humans had gone away, the bodies of the dead Shifters gone, and the tiger had been left alone. Fed and watered, and that was it.

  Then, about six months ago, some humans had come back and started poking at him again. Tiger hadn’t seen any other Shifters, but he’d been taken from time to time to the top floor and put through different scanners, tranqed, scanned, and probed again.

  When Tiger finished his story, Iona folded her arms, shivering. Even Graham was quiet, his usual bluster replaced by angry sympathy. Eric watched Tiger with a stillness Iona had come to know masked deep rage.

  “If he’s about forty,” Iona said, “then that means humans were doing the experiments before the existence of Shifters was revealed. The Shifters were outed only a little over twenty years ago.”

  “I thought of that,” Eric said grimly. “The experiments they did on me weren’t here, but in a similar place. The humans that studied me knew nothing about us, were trying to figure out what Shifters could do.”

  “So a different set of scientists?” Graham asked. “Doing Goddess knows what?”

  “The people here were trying to make their own Shifters,” Iona said. “But they didn’t work. I bet when the Shifters started dying, not being viable, the program got its funding cut.”

  “And started back up again?” Eric looked around at the old room. “This doesn’t look like a refurbished facility.”

  Iona shrugged. “Maybe whoever started it again wasn’t forthcoming about exactly what he was doing in here. Told the government it was for weapons or something and then went back to trying to create Shifters.”

  “Kellerman,” Eric said.

  “I was just thinking that,” Graham said. “He’s up to something, that’s for certain. I’m betting even if he didn’t do this himself, he knows who did. He damn well knew my wolves had gone missing and why.”

  “How about if we ask him?” Eric said, rage making his eyes hard green. “We have phones.”

  Iona broke in. “If you tell him you’ve found this place, won’t he just call more guards out here to raid the building?”

  “Possibly,” Graham said. “I was thinking about using a sneakier method. Make him need to come out here and see for himself.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Iona asked in puzzlement.

  “Give me the sat phone, and I’ll show you.”

  Eric handed over the big phone. Graham took it and started punching in numbers. After a few seconds of ringing, Iona heard a sleepy human female voice on the other end say, “Hello?”

  “Misty. Sweetheart. This is Graham. I need you to do something for me. Call Kellerman—no, I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night—and tell him you heard me saying something about checking out his place in Area Fifty-one. Yep, I said Area Fifty-one. Tell him you’re not sure, but I seemed excited about something. Got it? Thank you, sweetie. Drinks are on me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Graham said good-bye and hung up to find Iona and Eric, and even the tiger, staring at him. “She’s a friend,” Graham said. He might actually be blushing.

  “So we wait,” Iona said.

  Reid interrupted by reappearing. Iona suppressed another startled scream and jammed her hand to her pounding heart.

  “Who’s next?” Reid asked.

  “Iona,” Eric said. “Then come back, but we’re going to look around here for a while. We might need you.”

  “No,” Iona said. “If you’re staying, I am.”

  “Iona, I want you safe.”

  “Not if you’re running around here in danger, especially with your pain attacks. I can’t pull you out of them if I’m not here.”

  “And you started to go feral downstairs,” Eric growled, green eyes hard. “You can’t risk that. I might lose you for good.”

  “I’ll more likely go feral if I’m forced to sit at home and worry about you. I’ll be tearing my way back here, not caring who gets in my way.” The wild need stirred as Iona spoke, the instinct to protect her mate, no matter what.

  “Reid,” Eric snapped.

  Reid lifted his hands and stepped away from Iona. “I’m not getting into an argument between Shifters. No transporting against her will.”

  Eric didn’t look happy, but at least he stopped arguing. Iona
went to him and put her hand in his, liking the warmth of him, his scent telling her he wanted her there despite the danger.

  She still saw the pain in his eyes, though, and it worried her. She knew right then that she’d rather risk going feral, or going insane from her mating heat, or being caught as a Shifter, than watch him go through that pain again.

  Eric sent Reid to the roof to keep an eye out for activity while they waited for Kellerman, having Reid report via the phones Iona had taken from the researchers. Reid’s first call said that no guards were rushing to the place, and the humans he did see ignored the building.

  His observations supported Eric’s idea that no one really knew what the researchers were doing in here, nor did they care. He suspected that no one took Kellerman’s research seriously, or else he’d offered to pay a lot of money to use the run-down facility.

  The two researchers on the top floor were just coming around when Eric knelt next to them. Iona had hit them hard in her half-feral state, to which their bruises attested. But they were recovering. The woman wore shorts and a T-shirt with a spangled neckline; the man was still in a clean suit. Both opened their eyes now to find a naked Eric grinning into their faces.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m a Shifter. I’m about to destroy this lab and everything in it, so you might want to leave.”

  The man blinked at him. “What?”

  “I said…”

  Iona leaned down next to him, her lovely face bearing a sweet smile. “You kidnapped me, my sister-in-law, and a newborn baby. You took my niece from her mother and stuck needles into her and wires all over her. I’d say you need to leave.”

  “We weren’t hurting her,” the woman said quickly. “Just trying to figure out her gene sequence.”

  “So you could clone her?” Iona’s voice continued to be deceptively pleasant.

  “We only want to know how Shifters work. They could be the best weapons—”

  “Shut up,” the man said quickly.

  Eric said, “Is this how you got the government to fund you? Said you were creating secret weapons? You see him?” He pointed to the tiger, who was standing next to Graham, his yellow eyes pinning the researchers. “That Shifter was the only one who survived. The ‘experiments’ were a failure.”

  “But we have new—” The woman broke off again when the man elbowed her.

  “Shut up.”

  “New DNA samples from the Lupine Shifters you abducted,” Eric supplied. “You thought you could revive the experiments, succeed where the previous ones failed. I have news. It can’t be done.”

  Both researchers, the woman with her pale, lined face, and the man, younger and angry looking, said nothing.

  “But we’re nice Shifters,” Eric said. “At least I am. My mate here wants to disembowel you for touching our niece. The tiger over there wants to gut you for what humans have done to him over the last forty years. The wolf just wants to shoot you because he can.”

  Graham’s laughter rumbled. “And it would be fun.”

  The woman flinched, but the man looked more angry.

  “But I’m going to let Reid take you out of here before we get destructive,” Eric said. “Because I’ve learned how to be kind to stupid creatures.”

  Eric unfolded himself and summoned Reid from the roof. The man and woman looked more perplexed than afraid as Reid approached. Lanky Reid in jeans, shirt, and jacket against the winter cold looked innocuous and obviously not Shifter.

  “He’ll have to take you one at a time,” Eric said. “The male first, I think.”

  “Where do you want me to leave them?” Reid asked, expression neutral.

  “I’ll let you decide.”

  Reid thought a moment, then he grinned. A dokk alfar was a frightening thing when he smiled, especially when his midnight eyes began to gleam. “I have just the place.”

  Reid put his hands on the man’s shoulders, then both he and the man vanished.

  The woman screamed. She tried to scramble away from them, but Iona put a strong foot on the woman’s leg and stopped her.

  Reid slammed back in a few seconds later and reached for the woman.

  “Where did you take him?” Iona asked.

  “Las Vegas Police Department,” Reid said. “Processing cell.” He closed his hands on the woman’s shoulders, and then they were gone.

  “Huh,” Graham said. “Good sense of humor, for a Fae.” He looked around the room. “So they brought the blood and tissue samples from my wolves here?”

  “Maybe egg and sperm samples too,” Iona said. “If they’re trying to breed Shifters.”

  “Shit.”

  Graham strode to the cooling cabinets, ripped one open, and started throwing the test tubes to the floor. They shattered, whatever agar preserved the samples oozing out and mixing with the broken glass.

  The tiger Shifter watched Graham a moment, then he walked to the next glass cabinet and tipped it over, without bothering to open it. The resounding crash was satisfying, and Graham gave triumphant cheer.

  “You all right?” Iona came back to Eric, her hands warm on his arms, her blue eyes soft with worry.

  “Much better. The mate bond is helping.”

  “The mate bond,” she said. “Cassidy told me about that. She said it was magic.”

  Eric cradled Iona’s face in his hands, thumbs brushing her cheekbones. “Whatever it comes from, it’s filling me. It’s making me know I love you.”

  He saw the hunger in her eyes. “I love you.” She touched his face. “I never knew—I never thought I could love like this.”

  “The Goddess must have known. I’m glad she did.”

  Around them, crashes sounded, along with the satisfied growls of two Shifters enjoying themselves. Eric slid his arms around Iona. “I love you. I’m going to keep saying that because I like hearing it. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

  Iona smiled as she leaned into the warm curve of his body. “I wish we were home.”

  “Soon, love. And then, we won’t come out for days.”

  Graham looked around at them. “Will you two take it out of here? Your pheromones are making me crazy.”

  He’d strapped the tranq rifle across his back while he found and broke things. The tiger ignored them all while he swept his arms over the lab benches and punched the glass out of the hoods. He finally looked happy.

  “Watch him,” Eric said to Graham.

  “Don’t worry. I’m on it.”

  Eric craved Iona with his entire body, but he knew that would have to wait. “We need to search the rest of the floors.”

  “Yes,” Iona said. “Unfortunately.”

  But later, when he had her home…

  Eric fixed what they needed into a pack around his waist, then they walked together, hand in hand, to the stairwell, where Eric had the pleasure of watching Iona remove her clothes again. Then they shifted to their wildcats and descended to see what they could find.

  An hour later, Reid, back on the roof, alerted Eric that Kellerman had arrived.

  Eric and Iona had found little downstairs—the rooms hadn’t been used for years. Fortunately they found no more victims of the researchers’ experiments, no more captive Shifters. The researchers had used the top floor, the lowest basement, and Cassidy’s room, and that was it.

  Reid’s message was to the point. “He’s here.”

  “Go down and tell Graham.” Eric flipped the phone closed, his heart beating in rage and anticipation. He looked at Iona, who returned the look with the same anger in her eyes. “Let’s go meet him.”

  Kellerman headed up, not down when he walked into the building. He took the one working elevator to the top floor and emerged, a semiautomatic in his hand.

  Eric’s half-leopard beast twisted the pistol away.

  Kellerman’s eyes widened, and he tried to leap back into the elevator, but Eric grabbed him by the collar and jerked him forward as the elevator doors closed. Iona stepped behind Kellerman and checked his pockets for
more weapons, relieving him of his phone and a magazine of bullets.

  Iona had resumed her clothes upon arriving on the top floor, but Eric and Graham had left theirs far away in the desert. Kellerman gave them a contemptuous look.

  “I have backup coming,” he said. He tried to sound unworried, but he couldn’t conceal the tremor in his voice as he took in the ruined lab, the floor a river of broken glass.

  “We’ll be long gone before they get here,” Eric said.

  Graham aimed the tranq rifle at Kellerman. “I have backup too. Except I don’t know his name.” He whistled, and Tiger Man stepped from behind the pile of wreckage that used to be a lab table.

  Kellerman’s face drained of color. “You let him out?”

  “He looked unhappy,” Iona said. “So I opened the cage.”

  “But he’s dangerous. He could kill us all.”

  “Why?” Iona asked. “He’s only a Shifter.”

  “No, he isn’t.” Kellerman wet his lips. “He’s a programmed Shifter. He’s been coded to kill. To fight the enemy and not stop until that enemy is destroyed.”

  “Oh.” Iona looked ill. “So you didn’t only breed him, you also messed with his DNA?”

  “I didn’t,” Kellerman said. “The people who ran this facility before me did. They were brilliant. They blended genetics from animals, humans, and other Shifters to create the perfect Shifters, but ones obedient to human wills. The perfect fighting machines. Military weapons. They imagined whole armies of them.”

  “So, what happened?” Eric asked. “I don’t see any armies of Shifters.”

  Kellerman shook his head. “The prototypes didn’t last. Too unstable. The project got cut because they didn’t produce results fast enough.” Derision entered his voice. “The government was too shortsighted.”

  “How do you know about what went on here?” Iona asked. “You were wandering through Area Fifty-one and stumbled across it?”

  “No, I stumbled across it researching Shifters,” Kellerman said with a touch of his usual arrogance. “When I was put in charge of the Shifter council a few years ago, I did my homework on them. I found a file on this project, parts of it declassified because it was forty years old. I looked into it. I had ideas for how to make the project actually work, so I put together a team and got permission to research what people had done here. They had good ideas back then, but not the technology to implement them.”