Hard As Steele (A BBW Paranormal Romance) (Timber Valley Pack) (17 page)

             
“We don’t serve your Elders!” one of the other men from the Gund family barked.

             
Suddenly most of the men and women in the room were growling, snarling, fur rippling over their bodies.

             
Roxanne slammed her hands down on the nightstand and let out a yell of pure rage, making everyone jump.

             
“Listen the hell up!” she shouted. They all turned to stare at her in amazement.

             
Her face was flushed and streaked with tears, but there was steely determination in her gaze.

“I know you all know me as nice, easygoing, eager to please Roxanne, but at the moment, my baby is being held by a bunch of sadistic mad scientists who have no more respect for him than they would a stray dog.
Your people are being held prisoner there and abused every day.  Quit bickering like a bunch of little bitches, and tell me how the hell we’re going to get my son back.”

              Something bad was going to go down today at the lab. Clara could sense it.

             
Clara lay strapped down to the examination table, and three other tables in the laboratory were filled as well.  There was a bear shifter, another wolf shifter, and a mountain lion shifter.  The soldiers had never brought in that many shifters to the lab at the same time; they were afraid to have so many of them in one place. Normally they were brought out of their cells one at a time, or two at a time if possible.

Dr. Jonas was rushing to take blood samples from the shifters. He dropped a vial and cursed but didn’t bother to clean it up, just rushed on to the next shifter.

             
Roxanne’s baby was there, in a cage with a blanket
. In a cage
.  That made Clara so angry that it was all she could do not to shift.  She could hear Flint crying.  Be strong, she told herself. Somehow, these men will be punished for this.

             
There were a dozen soldiers in the room. Clara had never been closer to true despair. What could she do against these odds?

             
In the hallway, she could hear soldiers rushing past, and it sounded as if they were pushing wheeled carts. They were moving out, taking their lab samples and reports with them, she was sure of it.  Why so suddenly? It seemed like something had spooked them, and they were shutting this operation down.

             
It was unlikely they’d want to leave behind any living survivors, and transporting her and the other prisoners would be too risky, she was sure.

             
“Sir, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have so many of them in here at once,”  Evan Petrowski whined.

             
“You don’t get paid to think.” Dr. Jonas was putting trails full of vials into some kind of container. “They’re all well secured. We’ll be out of here soon enough. I need these final samples.”

             
Final samples. She’d been right. Were the cold fluorescent lights overhead the last thing she’d ever see?

             
What could she do? There were straps on her wrists, ankles, and neck.  She couldn’t move.

             
“Let me check those straps,” Brice Ramsey said, as if reading her thoughts. He walked over and fumbled with her neck strap, then her wrist straps, then her ankle straps.

             
“The straps are fine. I strapped her down myself,” Evan said indignantly.

             
Brice ignored him, and went to check on the other shifters. “You got a problem with me?” Evan’s tone had turned belligerent.

             
“Donovan, check the other straps,” Evan said, ignoring him.

             
“Hey! I’m talking to you!” Evan’s face flushed with anger, and he reached for his weapon.

             
“Get your hands off your damned gun, or I’ll have you shot,” Dr. Jonas barked at him.  Sweat beaded on his forehead; his white hair was sticking up, and Clara could smell his fear.  “You need to keep watch over the subjects, not each other. We’ll take this up with the Colonel when we’ve moved on out.”

             
He was about to say something else, but an alarm began blaring in the room, and all the soldiers started, pulling out their weapons and looking around wildly.

             
“What the hell?” Dr. Jonas shouted “What’s going on?”

             
Two soldiers rushed through the door.  “There’s a large force in the west tunnel, making their way towards us! There seem to be hundreds of them!”

             
“What the hell? How is that possible?” Dr. Jonas’ eyes went wide with fear. “How did they get that far? There are supposed to be perimeter alarms!”

             
“They’re coming from an area that had been closed off! There shouldn’t even have been a tunnel there!” The soldier’s tone was aggrieved.

             
Hope flared up in Clara. She might die here, on this table, but maybe this was a rescue attempt. Maybe some of the shifters would get out.

             
Dr. Jonas glanced at Evan.

             
“Eliminate them, then follow us out of the south tunnel,” he said, and rushed out of the room with the two soldiers.

             
Her heart sank. This was it, then.  She’d really wanted to go down fighting.

Clara tense
d and jerked against her straps…and realized they were loose.

             
Brice had undone her straps.  As Evan raised his rifle to point it at her head, she shifted and launched herself through the air at him.

             
The other shifters quickly shifted and attacked the soldiers.  To her shock, Brice and Donovan put their bullets through the heads of several soldiers, and the shifters tackled the rest of them. There were shouts of rage, and howls, and the smell of gunpowder in the air.

             
Clara dashed over to Flint’s cage. She shifted just her hands, opened the cage door, and pulled him out.

             
Before she could stop him, he shifted into cub form and dashed into the fray, yipping with rage. He could shift! Roxanne really had given birth to a shifter baby!

             
Clara dashed after him; a soldier was pointing his gun at Patrick, the bear shifter, when Flint attached himself to the soldier’s calf, sinking his fangs in deep.

             
The soldier screamed, raised his rifle butt, and was about to bring it down on Flint’s little head when Clara leaped up and ripped his throat open. At the same time, Patrick tore open the soldier’s stomach and his intestines spilled out.

             
Clara, still in wolf form, grabbed Flint by the nape of his neck, carrying him out of the way in her jaws as he yelped and waved his paws indignantly.

             
When it was over, Donavan and several of the shifters were bleeding from several gunshot wounds, and the soldiers lay dead on the floor. The shifters turned human again, all except for Flint, who stayed a cub and looked around the room with interest, his pointy little ears perked up as he sniffed the air.

             
Brice, who was bandaging Donovan’s wounds, gestured at a duffel bag in the corner. “There are extra uniforms in there,” he told the shifters, who were standing there naked.  “Put them on, and grab the weapons from their bodies,” he added, indicating the fallen soldiers with a jerk of his head.

             
He looked at Clara. “There are some scrubs in that cabinet. Put them on quickly. We’re going to pretend that these men are with me, and that they’re taking you and Flint out of here at gunpoint.”

             
“Why should we trust you?” Clara demanded, as she rushed to pull on the scrubs. Flint was still in wolf form. She set Flint down on the floor while she hurriedly dressed, then picked him up again.

             
“Why? Because we set you all free and shot these men,” Brice said. “We’ve got to get going now. Do you know how to handle a weapon? Good,” he added, as the three shifters, now wearing camo, snatched the rifles from the dead soldiers’ bodies.

             
“Who are you? Why are you helping us?” Clara asked. 

             
“We don’t have time to explain.  Follow me, and keep your heads down,” he said to them. “Everyone’s in a hurry, the guards haven’t seen you in camo and they won’t expect it, and you’ve got your caps on to help conceal your identity.  If we’re lucky, we can make it to the tunnels and get out of here. We’ve got to go now; the mines are rigged with explosives, and once the last soldiers are out of here, the whole tunnel system’s going to collapse.”

             
Clara glanced at the other shifters, and they nodded at her. “You’re bleeding, Patrick,” she said to the bear shifter. In human form, he was a middle aged man with brown hair shot through with gray.  He had a wife and three children, she knew. He had a gunshot wound to the leg.

             
He shrugged. “Flesh wound.”

             
She didn’t have time to heal him.  They rushed out into the hallway, with Brice and Donovan in front.  The mountain lion shifter and the other wolf shifter, in their soldier disguises, pointed rifles at them. They ran down several empty hallways,  and then came to an abrupt halt. A group of soldiers were coming their way.

             
“Coming through, we’ve got a prisoner, coming through!” Brice shouted.

             
“There’s incoming! We’re trapped!” one of the soldiers yelled. His voice was tinged with panic. “There’s fucking hundreds of them! They’ve already taken out the Delta and Bravo squads!”

             
Clara allowed herself a fierce grin of joy. She’d been waiting for this moment for so long.

             
Then, coming from a tunnel ahead of them and to their left, she heard shouts and growls and roars.

             
Patrick quickly moved her to the side of the tunnel, and shifted to bear form, covering her and Flint with his body.

             
Suddenly, Flint darted out from behind Patrick and Clara, right into the middle of the battle. He threw back his little head and let out a high pitched yowl of rage.

             
“Flint! Get back here!” Clara screamed, crawling after him.

             
Flint ignored her, and leaped through the air, attaching himself to the arm of a human soldier, who frantically tried to pull him off.

             
Suddenly, Clara heard a howl. There was an enormous wolf crouched low, fur bristling.  The wolf launched himself at the soldier, and as he proceeded to take the soldier apart, Clara grabbed Flint firmly and ran down a side tunnel. She crouched there, covering Flint with her body and keeping a tight grip on him as he squirmed and yelped.  The cub was clearly desperate to get back into the middle of the fight.

             
“Jeez, you are going to be one kickass Alpha when you grow up,” she muttered to herself. If only Roxanne had lived to see this.

             
The roaring and screaming and gunshots seemed to go on forever. Finally it stopped, and the air stank of blood and bodily waste and spilled intestines. She could hear agonized moans coming from the humans, and angry growls from the shifters.

             
She looked up, cautiously, at the sound of thudding footsteps heading her way.

             
The enormous wolf was loping towards her, with several other wolves and a lynx shifter behind. He paused and turned human, and so did the rest of them. They stood there, panting, naked and covered with blood. The lynx shifter was female, with multi colored streaks in her dark hair.

             
The big wolf shifter stared at Clara and the cub. “Is that my son?” he asked. “Is that Roxanne’s baby?”

             
Oh, thank God, Clara thought.  This was his father. He wasn’t an orphan.

“
It is her baby.  Roxanne died trying to escape. I’m sorry,” Clara blinked back tears. “She was going to get help for us, but she died in a tunnel collapse.”

             
“No, she didn’t. She got out. That’s how we found you,” the wolf said. “I’m Steele Battle, of the Timber Valley Pack. You’re Clara, aren’t you? Roxanne drew a picture of you.”

             
He knelt down next to her, and she placed the cub in his arms. Steele cradled him in his muscular arms, with infinite tenderness.

The cub shifted back to human form. Now he was a chubby
baby boy with thick, curly blond hair and angelic blue eyes. Steele stared at him in wonder, and Flint stared back.