Coyote's Mate (7 page)

Dash Sinclair had risen up the ranks of Breed hierarchy quickly since his revelation of Breed status. A Breed with recessed genetics, he had escaped his labs at ten. He had gone into the American foster care system, been educated and was in the military until a little girl’s letter drew him back to America and awoke the animal that had stayed suppressed within him.

His daughter, Cassandra, was still a sore point with Del-Rey, but he knew she had been wounded several months before during an operation that she should have never been in the middle of.

“How is Ms. Sinclair’s recovery?” he asked. He hated the woman’s logic, her ability to argue for everything he had rejected with every part of his soul, but he had seen the tender, compassionate woman she was in her concerned gaze the day she had argued for his mate’s freedom.

“She’s doing much better.” The guard nodded. “She’s here at Haven at present under the care of Dr. Armani. We still haven’t learned who broke into her hospital room that night.”

Cassandra Sinclair had had a visitor as she lay in a near coma state, surrounded by Wolf and Feline Breed guards. Someone had managed to cut a hole into a window more than twelve stories above the ground, slip into her room and send her into screams of hysteria.

The last Del-Rey had heard, she had no idea who or what had been there with her.

Del-Rey clenched his jaw as the Wolf Breed looked back at him expectantly then. Each time he had arrived at Haven, always secretly, always under the cover of night, the Wolf Breeds watched him with the same expression. As though waiting for him to ask the question he had no intention of asking: How was his mate?

“Here we are.” The elevator shuddered to a stop depositing them in another steel-and-cement corridor. Water, electrical and various other pipes ran along the walls. Monitors displayed general orders and Breeds—Wolf, Feline and Coyote—moved with an array of humans that had aligned with them.

Some with clipboards, some chatting with companions—they were all heavily armed and prepared.

Del-Rey, Brimstone and Cavalier followed behind their escort until they came to a door, the same gunmetal gray color as the rest of the operational base.

Stepping inside the entrance alone as it slid open, Del-Rey motioned for the other two to wait for him as he faced the Wolf Breed Cabinet that had come together.

There were six of them. Just as there were six in the Coyote Breed Cabinet, six to the Feline Breed Cabinet. Dash Sinclair; the Wolf Breed Alpha Wolfe Gunnar; Aiden, a class one enforcer; Jacob, Haven’s head of security; Faith, Jacob’s wife and liaison to the other packs; Hope Gunnar, Wolfe’s wife; and the lupina, second-in-command of Haven.

“Del-Rey, welcome back.” Wolfe and the others rose from the table, hands extended in greeting.

Once the preliminary meet-and-greet bullshit was over with, Del-Rey took his seat and slapped the file he carried with him in the center of the round table, in front of Wolfe.

The pack leader’s expression tensed as he opened it and read the report Del-Rey and his men had put together with the help of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, the Feline Cabinet, and the investigations he and his own men had done into the subject.

The file was passed around the table, each member going over it carefully, their expressions telling the same story. Disbelief and anger.

“Will it ever stop?” Jacob murmured, his low voice harsh as he finished the file while his wife read over his shoulder. He slid it on and waited.

Del-Rey watched as Faith laid her hand on her mate’s shoulder, her cheek against the top of his head. The connection, the bonding between them ignited a flare of rage in him that threatened to spark out of control. They were mated. The scent of their bond, their emotions and need for each other was an affront to his senses. An insult to everything that he had been forced to walk away from.

When the last cabinet member, Dash Sinclair, closed the file, Del-Rey felt the tension as it began to ratchet up through the room.

“We’ll need to convene the full cabinet together,” Wolfe said heavily. “This is a risk to all of us.”

The full cabinet was something even Del-Rey had never seen. Each species of Breed had their own cabinet. The twelve-member tribunal he had faced eight months before was a selected mix to deal with smaller issues that concerned the society as a whole. Such as when Anya Kobrin had demanded separation from her mate.

The full cabinet was another story. Six members of each species. The Wolf and Coyote packs as well as the Feline pride. Added to that was the six-member board selected from within the Bureau of Breed Affairs, comprised primarily of humans except for the director of the bureau, Jonas Wyatt.

The full cabinet was twenty-four members in all, and Del-Rey had a feeling its meetings wouldn’t be as social and well conducted as the few pack meetings he’d been called to.

The risk in not calling together the full cabinet was growing by the day.

“There’s not enough evidence to prosecute the pharmaceutical company or the research and development arm that’s conducting the experiments,” Del-Rey stated. “No evidence that they’ve used Breeds in that research, either willingly or involuntarily.”

Wolfe ran his hand wearily over his face as he pulled the file back to him and reopened it. Del-Rey knew what he would find there. In the past four weeks the Feline Breed scientist Elyiana Morrey had nearly died from the drugs that had been used to attempt to force her to destroy a Lion Breed known to have an anomaly in his blood suspected to induce a primal strength and rage known as feral fever.

Mercury Warrant had developed feral fever in the labs where he had been created and trained. At the time of his rescue the scientists there had developed a drug therapy which, in essence, controlled him, locked the animalistic power inside him and forced him to obey the commands given to him by his trainers and creators.

A variation of that drug had been used on the scientist. The lack of the feral hormone for the drug to attach to in her blood had created far greater, nearly fatal results. It had almost destroyed her mind. Now there was evidence that Breeds unknown to the Breed community were being captured or somehow convinced to participate in the experiments with this drug.

Three Breeds had been found just within the past week, their brains fragmented by the pressure that had built within them. One had nearly killed a human, and keeping that one covered up hadn’t been easy.

“This drug could become our personal nightmare,” Del-Rey told them. “It doesn’t just have the power to steal our will; it also has the power to make us killers and nothing more. The Bureau is working to get more information but their contact within the companies has disappeared. They suspect that person won’t show up alive.”

“They’ve found a way to create the killers they always wanted.” Hope’s horrified whisper filled the room.

“Not entirely,” Del-Rey stated. “There are symptoms when the drugs are being slipped into the victim. Our concern is the rumor that the research company has managed to find volunteers.

Breeds who were led to believe that this would recess their Breed genetics.” He leaned forward slowly. “The Breed that nearly killed the police officer was younger, unknown and unlisted with the Bureau of Breed Affairs. We know there are still facilities holding many Breeds captive, moving them often. He could be one of those, or a volunteer. Whichever, we have a problem on our hands.”

Faith spoke up. “Dr. Morrey was given the drug by Breed assistants in her lab. Breeds that showed no signs of being under the drug themselves. Greed.”

“Greed,” Del-Rey agreed. “The past eight months that I and my team have been chasing down rumors and leads on this, the company managed to actually get the drug into Sanctuary. We need to stop this now.”

“And stopping it would require . . . ?” Wolfe asked.

“One of the teams need to be granted full sanction,” Del-Rey stated, staring back at them coolly.

“Leashing your enforcers and forcing them to hold back in this investigation won’t get the answers you need.”

Dash sat back in his chair and regarded him silently.

“Full sanction?” he asked. “Very few of our teams are allowed that status, Pack Leader Delgado, and none are available now.”

“Then you better make one available,” Del-Rey stated coldly. “Do you think keeping a leash on your enforcers is going to work in this situation?”

“Your team has been investigating this since the first,” Wolfe said then. “You should still have time to finish it.”

His jaw bunched. “I’ve brought you enough to put a sanctioned team on it,” he told them as he rose from his chair. “Go over the file. I should also point out something you’ve obviously overlooked.”

Wolfe frowned back at him. “And that is?”

“One of the first trials of this drug was on a human in Haven, eight months ago. The drug was slipped into her food and drink during visits to her parents in the neighboring town. It was considered a failure because she didn’t follow her final order.”

They were all sitting forward now, expressions dark, savage.

“Jessica,” Wolfe growled.

The young military communications officer was still in confinement, nearly a year after she had betrayed the pack. She was alive only because the Wolf Breed suspected to be her mate refused to allow her to be turned over to Breed Law.

That left confinement until the full cabinet could make a decision on whether or not her actions warranted death. The matter hadn’t been brought before the cabinet because the Wolf Breed Cabinet had yet to decide if that was the action they would take.

“She was tested for drugs,” Faith protested. “None were found.”

“The drug has a masking agent.” Dash’s voice was savage now. “It’s not easy to detect.”

“I’ll be returning to my pack,” Del-Rey informed them. “There are issues I need to take care of there. I’ll no longer be handling the conclusion of this assignment.”

He turned and moved for the door.

“Del-Rey, you promised your mate a year.” Faith spoke up then. “Its only been eight months.”

He stopped, looked over his shoulder slowly, his eyes narrowed on the woman as his lip curled.

“You must have neglected to put that provision in the agreement I signed. There’s no time stated there, and I have duties to my packs, just as the rest of you do. You can inform my coya I’m back. I may have neglected to do that as well.”

He stepped from the meeting room and nodded to his men before making his way from the secured underground rooms. He kept at bay the hard smile that would have curled his lips.

Over the months, he had taken the time to learn about mating heat. He’d made certain he received all Dr. Armani’s reports on his mate and he’d studied them carefully. He hadn’t hesitated to ask questions.

Getting reports on Base or personal details from Sharone wasn’t hard, simply because she was always eager to talk about her coya. Hell, every damned man and woman on base thought the sun rose and set on their coya’s ass.

It was the details he had begun to learn that Sharone was leaving out that made his decision for him. Particularly the month before when Anya, coya of the Coyote packs, had convinced her security detail to take her to a bar, in the small town of Advert, nearly an hour from the Haven base. Once there they had proceded to become involved in a barroom brawl that cost his base nearly a thousand dollars in damages.

A drop in the bucket compared to the price his teams commandeered for their private and government security work, but still, his mate had been there. In a barroom brawl where she had been fighting like a man and taking out her excessive adrenaline surges on the unwary, rather than him.

Damn her. What the hell did she think she was going to get away with next? A lover perhaps? He had nightmares about that one. Full, vivid, blood-splashed nightmares where he ripped off the head of any man that dared to touch her, while she stared on in horror.

It was time to return to his place as alpha. Time to show his wayward little coya her place in his life. And it wasn’t merely taking over his base while he was gone, not that she didn’t do a damned fine job of keeping things together in his absence. It was a job that would be done more effectively if he was working with her. She couldn’t train his soldiers. She couldn’t make military decisions, and she couldn’t aid his pack leaders in choosing the men to be assigned to the Bureau rotation. Every six months teams of Wolf, Feline and Coyote Breeds shifted and moved among the command bases. At present, he had twelve Felines and twelve Wolves on base.

Sanctuary had just as many Coyotes and Wolves, and Haven commandeered the same number of Felines and Coyotes.

Two of those Coyotes assigned to Sanctuary were the two younger twin females that had come out of the compound with Anya. They were teenagers now and needed a firmer hand than Del-Rey was comfortable applying. What the hell did he know about female teenagers?

He knew the reports on the older three, and those made him sweat. The price of their clothing, makeup and shoes alone was enough to make a man flinch. Not that Anya spent nearly as much.

No, he had to have his gifts sent to Haven and then forced on her by the lupina there, Hope Gunnar.

Stubborn damned woman. She was making him insane.

“Coya is still on base,” Brim reported as they stepped into the all-terrain that would transport them along the steep road that had been curved through the mountain to the base entrance.

“Sharone says she requests a few additional days as you didn’t inform her of your impending return and she considers that grossly unfair.” Brim’s lips twitched as he gave Del-Rey the message.

Del-Rey grunted. “Tell her that’s too damned bad. I’ll be there within the hour.” Then he grinned.

“Tell her to please apprise my pack leaders that I’ll need them in Command when I arrive.”

Brim grinned and relayed the message before disconnecting the link to Base that he now wore at his ear. The cylindrical earpiece extended just past the ear. The built-in receiver and mic made communication between Base and Haven much more effective. Separate channels had been built into the interface, and reception was as clear as the satellite phones they used.