Bad Cat Baby Blues (Shifter Squad Six 3) (18 page)

They
were
killers. The only problem was, so was she. So who was she to judge?

Biting down on her lower lip, Ari watched the screens, her attention flipping from one to another as the men and women in the squads piled into the compound. She hated missions like this one, where the endgame was fuzzy and the options were both painfully limited and open to interpretation at the same time.

Communication was kept low, silence being their best friend as the troops moved in. Ari didn’t notice but it wasn’t long until her hands were balling into fists on the controls, a slow shudder running through her body. Something felt off. She simply didn’t know what it was.

Her eyes kept glancing over to Dutch’s feed more often than not, reading his heart rate and body temperature as he slipped in through an opening sawed into the fence, creeping along the length of it with his heavy sniper rifle tucked in a case on his back and an assault rifle in his hands. All of Squad Six seemed rather attached to their big guns, but they were effective with them, so Ari took no issue with it.

When Dutch clambered up steps of a tower on the outskirts of the compound, one that seemed completely devoid of life and looked to be a perfect nest for a sniper during the mission, things started unraveling. She heard it moments after Dutch must have, the heave of breath, the fall of a boot above, but it was too late for him to stop.

Ari watched as Dutch flung himself over the edge, the steel rungs clinking beneath his feet as he threw down his rifle and grabbed for the knife on his hip. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone there, but the moment that the steel blade crashed into the darkly clad man’s neck, sending crimson blood splattering as Dutch attacked him from behind, it became painfully evident that this assumption had been wrong.

The man’s finger twitched on the trigger of his automatic weapon, sending a spray of bullets flying in every direction. It was a short burst but enough to draw attention.

“Shit,” Ari mouthed, voicing the feelings Dutch must have had.

“Cat Four has been made,” Dutch growled into his headset, the sound tinny in her ears as Ari watched him drag the big and beefy lifeless body of the guard into the cover of the tower’s central post.

He stepped out just as quickly, grabbing his rifle from the ground, and when he looked down Ari could see several forms running toward him in the darkness. Her knuckles went white as he took aim with the assault rifle, not having time to take out the sniper rifle, and killed one of them a few feet from the tower. The second man fell from the rungs of the ladder with one deadly shot to the face and she could
feel
Dutch cursing as he moved to unpack his sniper rifle.

It was a shitty position to be in, but he couldn’t move either. It was the only place where he had any kind of a view of the sparse buildings of the compound and until someone called for them to fall back, Dutch would be stuck.

Ari took a quick breath, willing herself to be calmer, but the next thing she saw on the screen left her anything but.
 

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ariadne

For a moment, Ari didn’t believe what she was seeing. It was a moment that lasted too fucking long.

It was Squad Nine that was making its way through the darkened corridors of Haygrove, the first team in. Squad Six was moving in from the southern entrance and a few of the smaller teams were covering the exits in case anyone tried to break loose or grab a truck and plow through any of their people outside. Everything seemed quiet, too quiet, until the shaky voice of the comms guy in Squad Nine, Jarley, came over the line.

That alone made Ari frown. He was not the kind of guy to get frazzled, especially in a situation that seemed dull at best.

“There’s something down here. I can smell it,” he said, his voice low.

“What do you mean you can smell it? Shifters?”

“Yes… no. I’m not sure,” he spoke, getting a few confirmative nods from his squad.

They’d split into two, one moving ahead in the corridor and the others keeping back. By now, Ari would have expected a violent firefight to break out considering the commotion Dutch had caused outside, but there was nothing of the sort. Glancing at the feeds of other teams, she found the same kind of eerie quiet everywhere else, with only Dutch’s feed showing the littering of dead bodies around the tower, the same people he’d mowed down before he’d unpacked.

“Stay sharp,” Ari said, but her words might as well have not been spoken.

Squad Nine was moving down a stairwell toward the cellars, the area which had shown most promise in regard to finding whatever the Silk Slayers were hiding, other than the expansive warehouses Squad Six were to check out. They never made it to the bottom of the staircase though.

It went from complete silence to heartwrenching screams and a hail of gunfire in a second flat as several shadows appeared on the feeds of the men in front. They were shooting blindly and several of the comm units were blown, the screams permeating Ari’s brain as she watched Jarley’s screen turn crimson as sharp teeth ripped into him.

“What’s going on?” Ari called, but there was no answer.

Within a few moments, the entirety of Squad Nine was limp on the ground, only the occasional groan marking a survivor somewhere. The feed of the medic of the team, Dalen, was still broadcasting while the others had gone black. It was then that Ari got her first look at the beasts.

Two massive beings, twice the size of any grizzlies she had ever seen, stood on their hind legs, their maws painted with blood. They were distinctly lupine, like wolves brought to their hind legs, but exaggerated to ridiculous proportions of strength and power. Wide, gruesome shoulders, the ripple of taut muscles under skin and fur that was tight against them, slim hips and claws that looked like they could rip through solid metal—they were real nightmare fodder. Both were almost completely black, their golden eyes tinted with red, and they looked more like something out of a horror movie than reality.

Ari stared in slack-jawed horror. She reached out to Kaylen but he was already looking at the feed, the same kind of disbelief muddling his expression. And then the beasts took off at a dead run, going so fast they were no more than a blur as they sped up the stairs, caring little who or what they stepped on as they dove into action. They were going straight for the warehouses and the exits.

“All squads, notice. Large force coming your way. Extremely dangerous, destroy at will,” she called into the comms, finding her voice entirely shaken.

“What the hell are those things?” Kaylen queried, his face pale.

“I don’t know,” Ari admitted dully. “But I don’t think we wanted to find them.”

She was about to take Dalen’s feed off the main screen to make room for members of the force that was still functional when movement caught her eye. Her heart stuttered and her throat constricted as she recognized the face staring straight into the eye of the camera, a pleased smile on his lips.

Soyo…

He raised his gun and took aim at the camera, shooting it and Dalen right in the chest. His heart rate flatlined.

“Call command, tell them we’re calling this off,” Ari growled at Kaylen, who burst into action as if stung by a needle, shaken from his unwelcome horror.

“All teams, be advised, Birds are down, I repeat, all Birds are down,” Ari spoke into the comms, watching Squad Six’s feeds with an ever-increasing sense of dread.

It was at that very moment that she caught sight of the two large beasts coming into view on Grant’s camera that the feeds suddenly went dead, static buzzing in both the video and the audio feed.

“Teams, report in!” Ari barked into the headset, dread twisting her guts. “Kaylen, anything?” she asked, the young man tossing the phone to the side, the loud bit of static buzzing through the speaker telling her that it wasn’t only their equipment on the teams that was being tampered with.

“Nothing. I think they’re jamming all frequencies,” Kaylen hissed, his cheeks growing red where they had before been pasty and colorless.

“Shit,” she repeated, the word becoming far too comfortable on her lips lately. “We need to get them out. They don’t know what was coming for them,” she said hurriedly, glancing at the readouts of the vitals that luckily enough were still transmitting.

In Squad Nine, she could see that there were a few men alive, barely, but their heart rates were still ticking in laboriously enough. That meant that there was still a chance. Her mind raced and she checked the armaments in the car, trying to figure out if they’d be of any help. But those damn things had walked through bullets like it was nothing. The teams would be thoroughly fucked when they met them. The best option was to get everyone out as soon as possible.

“We need to get them out,” Ari voiced, already getting up from the chair and heading toward the door. “Kaylen, you need to get the lookout teams out, our people. I’ll go for Squad Six. Maybe we can drag Squad Nine out too before those fuckers hit us.”

“But they were already in the warehouse, those… things. What the fuck were they?” Kaylen asked, but he was up on his feet too now, shaky but still.

He was a tall man, gangly even, but his narrow chin and wide cheekbones betrayed a shifter beneath who could be most useful. Ari bit her lip, trying to force down the bubble of dread that wanted to come up and grip her in its icy grip, keeping her safe and in one place. She couldn’t listen to it now. Not when Dutch was in danger.

You can’t leave Roman without his father,
she thought, cringing at all the implications it offered.

She’d been a fool to let this go so far, to allow Dutch to put himself in danger again without even knowing his son. Whatever he had done in his past, she knew that he would never hurt his son. He was a ferocious beast of a man, but all of that would be used to protect his young. It was only her foolishness and fretting that had kept father and son apart, and maybe her and him as well.

I love him.

The thought was sobering.

She jumped down from the back of the van, Kaylen hot on her heels.

“We need to shift, we’ll move faster that way. You know everyone’s movement patterns, tell them to get out as fast as possible. We rendezvous at the station. No heroics. I’ll get Squad Six.”

He nodded but the last words were already falling on the fluffy, alert ears of a graceful, long-legged cheetah. He was tall even for the big cat’s standards, with stick-thin legs that looked fragile, but were of course powerful as they were fast. He loped into action as Ari shifted as well, the first steps almost leisurely until he kicked into gear, whizzing down the street like a yellow and black bullet, faster than anything else.

Ari felt a sense of relief as the jaguar was given control, the human pushed into the recesses of her mind. The strong, sure paws of the large feline tested the shifted body with a few prowling steps, making sure no one was around to witness the change, though at this point it scarcely mattered. Then, she too broke into a run, nowhere near as fast as Kaylen, but dizzying still.

Haygrove came into sight the moment she rounded the corner and she hid her dappled coat in the shadows of the buildings around it, stalking slower than she would have liked, but with Kaylen going so fast, there was a chance that someone would follow them. She was about to cross the street to head for the same hole Dutch and the rest of Squad Six had used when she saw what she’d feared.

Two men running toward the same hole, one with a gun drawn, the other brandishing a knife. They were both tall and under their hoods, Ari could see distinct locks of blond hair that made her think of villains The Firm had happily not heard from in a while.

The Arctics…

It couldn’t be good news if they were around. The Arctics had a history of being involved in chemical and genetics research in conjunction with werewolves. They were the biggest and most dangerous werewolf terrorism group on the planet. Not to mention best funded. She’d heard rumors about them wishing to create some sort of werewolf super troopers, but so far, to The Firm’s knowledge, all of their attempts had been foiled.

But if Ari had to comment, she’d certainly say that the two beasts she’d witnessed had looked a lot like ‘roided up, deformed werewolves.

Her steps were quiet as the night around her and she could hear the men’s breaths in her ears, so keen was her hearing. She skulked behind them, watching them head straight for Dutch’s nest. He was keeping an eye on the building, his sights probably aimed at the warehouse through the top windows, and he was unaware of what was going on behind him.