Tiger Bound

by Tressie Lockwood

  “Please,” she pleaded, tugging at the bonds. “I want to go home. I won’t come back.” As he did each time he brought her to this room, Arlo readied an IV. Sometimes it went into her hand when the vein in her right arm refused to cooperate. The red dotted and bruised left arm was a reserve for drawing blood. More and more, her body seemed not to want to cooperate. None of that mattered compared to what they shot into the IV. Deja didn’t know what it was, but the medicine to dull pain stopped working days ago. Or had it been weeks?

  The door opened. “Are we ready, Arlo?” Dr. Gail Holmes inquired when she rushed in smelling of shampoo and body wash. Deja gritted her teeth and turned her head. Looking at the woman brought a level of violence to her mind so strong it gagged her. Better to stare at the wall and wait for it to happen.

  “Ready,” Arlo said.

  The poison—because that’s how she thought of it—slithered up her vein, burning a trail so bright all she could do was scream at the top of her lungs. When her voice gave out, she continued to yell, her body spasming in reaction and her brain on fire. Thought processes crossed, and her eye sockets dried out. When she fainted, an automatic life preservation, some cruel mechanism woke her to feel it all again.

  Just when Deja believed she would die, the pain eased, and she fell limp on the bed. Arlo and the doctor left the room, and she stared at the ceiling. The monitors beeped, and reports printed one behind another. Some time later, Gail returned. She lifted a sheet from the printer’s output bin and scanned. A curse dropped from her red lips. “Fail, fail, fail. Why, damn it?”

  Arlo pushed a cart into the room. He set up new vials on the counter and additional packages of needles for the drawer. Boxes of latex gloves were the last item, and it appeared he delayed completing his task. “Doc?”

  “What is it, Arlo?” Gail snapped. She didn’t raise her gaze from the sheet she studied. Her thumb clicked at the nozzle on her pen until the noise grated on Deja’s already raw nerves. She wished she could go to sleep or at least close her eyes.

  “I was wondering if I could have that ring she’s wearing?” Arlo asked.

  Deja stiffened. “Hm,” she mumbled. No, you can’t. Not my ring!

  Gail waved a hand. “I suppose so. What does it matter now anyway? She can’t change. She’s going to die eventually. All of the women die after their first change, but this one, she won’t turn. Maybe it’s her stubbornness, but it won’t do her any good. She will follow the rest before long.”

  Arlo’s gaze left the ring he pried from Deja’s limp fingers to meet her stare. “Another one? Why can’t the women make it? What’s so different?” Not an ounce of concern infused his question, just curiosity.

  “If I knew that, there would be no problem!”

  Chapter Nine

  Gail strolled into the room and couldn’t fight the smile that broke over her face. “Here is my favorite little kitty.” She ran fingers over the taut abs, luxuriating in their firmness, and then continued to his chest. She leaned close, rested her elbows on the edge of the table, and steepled her fingers together. “You are mine, you know that, darling?”

  “Fuck you. When I am free—”

  “Tsk, tsk, my pet. No need for threats, especially empty ones.” She moved a hand to his curls and ran her fingers through the silky locks. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”

  His blue eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “Never mind that, my dear. We have work to do.” She turned to the laptop computer on the counter and tapped a few keys. “Your blood work came back with some pleasing results. Imagine a sexy tiger like you just falling into my lap. I’m going to have so much fun with you. But tell me, where did you come from? Who are your people?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Gail sighed and spun to face him. “Is that all you’re going to give me? Can’t you be more imaginative?” She strolled over to him and traced a finger down his bare chest to the waistband of his pants. The bulge in his pants gave her ideas. They weren’t supposed to fraternize with the experiments, but everyone knew that happened frequently. She hadn’t been above it herself years ago. If only this one were a bit older, but then she didn’t mind being viewed as a cougar. She chuckled. Her thoughts always returned to the feline. “Don’t you want to play, little kitty?”

  She tugged at his pants and unbuttoned them. Her prisoner struggled so violently she thought he’d break the straps, and she jumped out of reach of his claws. Heart beating a wild tattoo, she placed a hand over her chest until she could get her breathing under control. His blue eyes had brightened, and the pupils grew long and thin like a cat’s. His skin paled with dark stripes shimmering beneath the surface, as if in preparation for hair to spring forth.

  Gail examined his hands where his fingernails had grown into claws that could rip a person apart. She’d seen it herself as her assistant Arlo had a permanent scar in the shape of three slashes down his chest. Any deeper and the cuts would have pierced his heart. Gail had seen the intent in the shifter’s scowl. He’d meant to kill. She laughed and joked, even flirted for the fun of it, but she was not a fool. One did not forget that Spiderweb fused a white tiger’s DNA with human subjects, making them deadly.

  “You’re not one we made, so who are you, my pet? I don’t want to hurt you, so why don’t you cooperate with me?” she suggested.

  He cut angry eyes at her, and his nostrils flared, but he didn’t attempt to speak again.

  “I can make you tell me, but it would be simpler for the both of us if you just give me the information I seek.” She reached over to the phone and punched in a couple of numbers. “Arlo, when you’re done with her, get over here. I need your help. No, wait. When you come, bring formula three-two-nine.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She hung up the phone. “So where were we, blue eyes?” She cast a suggestive look to his goods and watched the big man flush. Oh how big he was. Broad shoulders, tall, from what she could see, and muscles for miles. He had that rugged country boy feel to him and the twang in his dialect told her he was from down south. Since she waited for Arlo, she could spend a few more minutes teasing him. “Aw, what’s wrong, cowboy, you have a girlfriend waiting for you back home? You want to be faithful to her?”

  The start from her words said she hit the nail on the head, not hard to guess given his looks. She tried remembering the last time she left the lab in search of a bed partner and couldn’t recall. The problem was she’d been silly enough to fall in love years ago. Love screwed with a woman’s head. She was lucky the higher-ups hadn’t found out, or maybe they had and didn’t care since she never let it interfere with work. Not more than once anyway.

  Arlo walked into the room a short while later, and Gail moved aside while he washed his hands and prepared the patient for the procedure. She removed her notebook from the drawer and flipped to the section she had begun on the sexy shifter. She noted the date and a few other details she picked up about him, like the fact that he was a southern boy. Soon she would know everything she needed to, including his name and the name of his girlfriend.

  She scratched a few more notes and then put her notebook aside. After washing her hands, she leaned over the subject. All characteristics of the tiger had receded, and the man lay calm. Gail removed her pen light from her lab coat pocket and examined each eye for pupil dilation.

  “That stuff really works, doesn’t it, doc?” Arlo asked.

  She sighed. “Don’t ask pointless questions, Arlo. Go over there and press the record button.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She slid a stool close to the bedside and sat down, then brushed the man’s hair from his forehead. Temptation came over her to tangle her fingers in it as she’d done earlier, but she resisted since Arlo watched. Sometimes she suspected he had been planted to track her every move. She couldn’t put such a tactic past Spiderweb, but it didn’t matter. Her scientific breakthroughs put this company on the path to a government contract, so they wouldn’t soon get
rid of her. She and she alone would discover why some of the men were failures and all of the women were.

  “Okay, my darling, we’re going to relax. No stress, nothing worrying us. Just listen to my voice. It’s the only thing that exists for you. Feel every muscle in your body go limp. That’s right. You feel at perfect peace.” She continued to speak to her subject in a soothing tone, guiding him to the mental state where she could extract information. The tiger shifter’s system metabolized almost anything they gave them, and their minds were especially resistant to suggestion, so she had developed formula three-two-nine to combat that to allow her to hypnotize her subject. “Okay, darling, you’re ready for me, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

  “Heath.”

  Mm, yummy. “And your last name?”

  “Hunter.”

  “Good boy.” She wrote the information in her notebook. Without glancing up, she asked her next question. “Tell me your father and mother’s names.”

  Heath ticked off the names. Gail recognized neither as shifter subjects, but then most of their patients were known by numbers to keep them straight in their computer. Besides, Spiderweb erased anything that tied the subject to the outside world. They liked to grab those who were not only healthy, but also had no family or no one to raise a stink if they disappeared.

  On a hunch, Gail slid her stool over to the laptop and brought up the database search tool. She typed in Tate Hunter and just suppressed a gasp before turning to Arlo. “Pause the recording, Arlo. I need lunch, and I’m thirsty. Bring me my favorite.”

  She knew her assistant would have to drive all the way to town to get her the tuna and coleslaw on rye that she loved. That would give her enough time.

  “But what about him, doc? Can he wait under until I get back?”

  She glared at him. Did he think he was so important that she needed him in the room? Arlo flipped the switch to stop the recording. She forced a casual tone to her voice. “I think we’ve made excellent progress, and the formula doesn’t stay in their systems long. We can pick this up later, or tomorrow. The food, Arlo.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He left the room, and she spun back to the computer screen to read the entry again. Tate Hunter was a scientist like her, an employee of Spiderweb, and he’d left the facility thirty-five years ago to conduct an offsite observation. She typed in a few commands to bring up the file on Hunter. An alert popped up.

  “Damn it, no access. What does that mean?” She frowned, tapping her lips. “Heath, is your father still alive?”

  “No, my dad was murdered recently by Spiderweb.” He seemed to grow agitated, and Gail patted his hand, calming him anew with soothing words. He laid still.

  “And your mom? What was her name?”

  “Elizabeth. She died when I was five.”

  Gail heard the sorrow in his voice. She had willingly walked away from the family she had, and she’d never had children. At this late juncture, she never would. Was Heath’s mother also an operative of the company? She typed in Elizabeth Hunter, but there were no matches. Two Elizabeths existed in the system, both subjects. She clicked on the first and noted the word Deceased next to her name. That was not surprising given the issues they had with creating female shifters. She backtracked and clicked on the other Elizabeth. She too had been listed as deceased. Gail cursed and stood to pace. Somehow, she’d missed a pertinent clue.

  “Wait, of course. Why didn’t I think of that?” She compared the pictures of the two women, their ages, and other known medical data. Both were blond, but that might mean nothing, both similar ages. “Ideal for birthing.”

  Excitement bubbled in her stomach. She grinned as her fingers flew over the keys. Notes here, a few screens over there, and then she found it. At the time of her death, the first subject was pregnant. Then Gail remembered during that time, they’d hoped to reproduce shifters naturally before the female subjects died. The problem was they never lived long enough to get pregnant, let alone carry to term. This woman had managed to get pregnant, but she was listed as dead five months into her term. Five months was a long time.

  “Too long,” Gail whispered. She followed one more hunch. Who was the father? Uncharacteristic tears sprang to her eyes when the picture came up on the screen. Hadn’t she just been thinking how cruel love could be, how inconvenient? He of all people was the father, and she should have known that. He was the strongest of the shifters at that time and the most appealing. They mated him with several women. Few took, all died—except her, she now knew. This was another bit of data kept from her, but then that’s how Spiderweb worked, to allow no one person to have all the information. Well, there was one thing even they didn’t know, she thought angrily. Her former lover was not dead, and unless she missed her guess, his son lay in her lab.

  She backtracked through a few screens of data on the shifter and brought up his blood test results. In a split screen, she compared them to those collected from Heath. Rather than type in the code to have the computer do the DNA matching sequence, she went through line by line for herself. They were a close match, so much so there wasn’t a doubt in her mind now as to who Heath was.

  Under usual circumstances, she wrote down her notes and then entered them at her leisure into the computer. This time, she shredded the pages in the notebook and deleted what she had already added to the database. An IT person could come behind and retrieve the data, but she hoped they wouldn’t think to look.

  “What did you do to me?”

  She jumped at the sound of Heath’s voice. The formula had worn off, and therefore he came out of the trance. She regretted not instructing him to forget, but she never said out loud what she learned. Better for him not to know until she took care of a few things for herself.

  They both faced the door when it opened, and Gail sighed in relief when she discovered it to be Arlo. He held out the bag along with a cup of coffee. “Thank you, Arlo. I need you to give him something to help him rest. I have to run an errand. Then you take the afternoon off.”

  Her assistant stared at her. She never thanked him. “Are you sure, doc? I thought you said—”

  “Are you questioning me again, Arlo?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Good.”

  She left the lab and headed straight to the underground parking spot. A camera followed her as she walked across the cement to her car, and she hoped she appeared casual.

  * * * *

  Gail unlocked the door to her apartment and walked inside. She paused in the entry, scanning the luxurious interior with a critical eye. She had everything money could buy, or rather that anyone could want in their home when money wasn’t an issue. The large screen TV had been powered up only twice, and both times it watched her as she perused notes on her patients and racked her brain for solutions to problems that refused to come. She knew if he had stayed with the program, the answers would have presented themselves by now, and if she kept his son, the same might be true. How could she, though, when a twist of fate could have made Heath hers?

  She tossed her keys on the table and headed toward her bedroom. After stripping and turning on the tap, she stepped under the cold spray, a punishment she welcomed. What would it have been like, she wondered? To have Heath growing inside her, to give birth to him and have his father looking down on them both with doting, loving eyes? Gail allowed the water to run over her head, and the rivulets mingled with her tears. When she did this—she didn’t have to think too hard on whether she would—that would mean the end of years of research. Her dream of the program one day going public and her getting the credit for countless breakthroughs in shifter development would end with a phone call. Sure, she might hope Spiderweb remained ignorant of her doings, but if she fell into that fantasy, she’d commit a greater crime than falling in love.

  She stepped from the shower, dried off, and slipped into a simple blouse and a skirt. Inside her purse, her cell phone rang, and she fished it out. Her boss’s name flashed on the screen
, and she chuckled, a mirthless sound. Just as she thought. If she didn’t go now, the knock on her door would occur sooner rather than later.

  People teemed the streets. She counted on it, and checked over her shoulder as she walked. Attempting a casual air was beyond her at this point, so she didn’t try. Perhaps the man on the corner in the dark business suit and sunglasses wasn’t admiring her figure. He might be Spiderweb. Not like they wore signs. Sometimes they didn’t even wear suits. They were often a next-door neighbor with a smile and a baby on the hip. A baby. Why did it have to hit her this hard now?

  At first, she’d gone to the apartment to put things together, knowing she wouldn’t be coming back. Now, she realized her place was a shell that looked nice, but no one lived there. She camped out in her lab more often than not. The place she called home didn’t exist, and she’d designed it that way on purpose because after he left, there was nothing.

  She hadn’t locked the door on the way out and didn’t take her cell phone or her purse. Cash to buy the disposable rested in her pocket. If they caught up to her before she made contact, everything was for naught. Another glimpse of the man in the suit confirmed he worked for Spiderweb. Gail ducked into a shop with odds and ends hanging on pegboard walls, from screws to adapters. Behind the counter was what she needed.

  “The black one,” she instructed the cashier, indicating the phone she wanted. After a complicated procedure that took longer than she preferred, she was on her way. In the store’s alcove, she paused and scanned the street. The contents of her other skirt pocket now lay in her palm as she stepped out. From nowhere, the suit stood before her.

  “Where are you going, Gail?” The glasses kept her from seeing his eyes, which of course sent her heart into overdrive. Gail pursed her lips and then smiled, taking hold of his arm.

  “Darling, don’t be silly. A woman has to get out sometimes and get her needs met, if you know what I mean.” She allowed her breast to rub his arm and was gratified at the way he stiffened. “Unless you want to volunteer? I’m only ten years older, I bet. I can teach you a thing or two in the bedroom.”