Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (2 page)

That discovery … unnerved
him.

Struggling to dismiss it, he cast his
mind back to the first moment he’d noticed a change. He realized he
could track the anomaly back to the precise instant the exploding
missile had ruptured the hull of their drop ship—or rather an
instant prior to that. There had been a roaring sound, like the
rush of air, almost as if he had anticipated the rupture of the
hull. Then he’d felt the prickling all over and the strange
sensation of something stirring inside, as if there was something
alive and separate from himself inside of him.

It was the animal DNA, he decided.
Somehow it should have been a part of him and it wasn’t. They’d
screwed up—fucked up his head big time with that shit!

And there could be no worse time to
make that discovery than in the midst of battle!

“
Bail out! Bail! Bail!
Bail!” the co-pilot, a human, abruptly roared over the
com-unit.

Damien, Basil and even Kane had thrown
off their safety harnesses and were on their feet before the human
had issued the order the second time. Brought abruptly from his
internal examination, Lucien was a few seconds behind them due to
his preoccupation.

Lindsey, he discovered, was still
trying to free herself from her safety harness—due, no doubt, to
the fact that she was struggling with rage that Kane had bounded
out of his seat when she’d ordered him to stay put and head back to
the med-bay with the drop ship.

Catching Kane’s eye, he jerked his
head significantly toward the bay doors that had just been shoved
open and then allowed the bumping and rocking of the ship to pitch
him toward Lindsey. He heard her grunt as he landed on top of her.
“Sorry, Cpl,” he growled, getting to his feet again with an effort.
Kane had already made it to the door, though, and he made sure
Lindsey didn’t manage to get around him before Kane had made the
drop. Lindsey shoved him aside and arrived at the bay just before
Lucien, staring down at the frozen surface below them.

“
What the
fuck?”

Lucien’s first thought was that that
was Lindsey’s reaction to having her orders ignored, but there was
something about the tone of her voice that made his heart skip a
couple of beats. He shoved her aside as he hooked onto the drop
line and leaned out the opening for a look.

“
Shit! What the hell is
that thing?”

Not surprisingly, nobody answered.
Lucien had never seen anything like it and he was fairly certain
none of the others had either. It looked more like a tornado than
anything else in his experience, except that he could see down
inside of it—as if it had tipped over, making it more of a tunnel
than a funnel.

And there was a strange, greenish
light emanating from it.

The damned thing was sucking the men
into it!

His men!

“
Fuck!” he snarled and
leapt over the side of the ship, allowing the line to reel out so
rapidly through his palms that it felt like they’d burst into
flames even through his gloves. “Kane! Don’t let go of the line!
I’m coming!”

He supposed if he’d been thinking
straight, he would’ve known that there was nothing he could do in
the face of so fierce a manifestation of nature, but he’d just
ordered a badly wounded man out—his man—and he couldn’t leave him
hanging—literally.

He actually thought they might have
resisted the pull of the vortex except that just as they reached
the mouth of the twister the ship they were tethered to exploded
and the lines they were holding went slack. Lucien’s head
instinctively jerked toward the horrendous sound. He was in time to
see the ship fly apart. He thought he spotted Lindsey twirling
madly at the end of a drop line still attached to what was left of
the ship as it went down, but he wasn’t certain and, in the next
instant something dark smacked into him and he blacked
out.

The sounds of battle were raging
around him when he came to—just in time to feel the impact of
hitting the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of him. He
was too stunned to move for several moments. Around him, he thought
he heard the familiar voices of his own men, but something
definitely wasn’t right. The sky was fading … to dusk, when, if it
was changing at all, it should have been growing light with
dawn—because they’d dropped on the night side of the
planet.

And the surface he was
laying on did
not
feel like ice or even hard packed snow, and it should have
because Xeno-12 was an ice world.

Galvanized by the ferocity of the
firefight to worry about what was right and what was weird later,
he rolled over to survey the situation as soon as he managed to
catch his breath.

Nothing looked as he’d
expected it to look, the way he knew it
should
have! There was no snow, no
alien landscape surrounding him, no alien sky above, no alien army
drawing down on them.

Very distinctly, he saw the ‘enemy’
bombarding them, throwing everything they had at them, were wearing
the uniforms and emblems of the U.S. military.

What the fuck?

Kane was lying close by,
writhing in pain. Damien and Basil had already reached him. Even as
Lucien struggled to reach the fallen man himself, he noticed that
there was something decidedly
off
about Kane. The shrapnel had penetrated his calf.
Why would he be writhing and bucking in such a strange way from a
calf wound? Particularly since he’d popped pain meds before they
dropped.

And why was his suit shredding, coming
apart?

And then Damien’s and
Basil’s?

The memory of the vortex
and the exploding drop ship flickered through his mind, but Lucien
couldn’t connect the two events with what he saw happening. He
struggled for several moments as he crawled across the ground
toward his men. Abruptly, that
thing
inside stirred again, the
something he’d almost forgotten in all that had happened since.
This time it felt a lot more like rage as he met the contorted
faces of his men and saw that they were no longer
recognizable.

Their scent was the same,
though.

It wasn’t them that was calling his
wolf. It was the others, the attackers. It was the need to protect
himself and he acknowledged that and didn’t try to stop the beast
as it took over.

The pain was the most excruciating,
all encompassing agony he’d ever felt before in his life. It felt
like he was being torn apart. He screamed as it reached a crescendo
and he thought he couldn’t bear it anymore, growled, and then
howled as his vocal chords changed with the rest of his body. The
rage was still with him when the pain vanished and he leapt to his
feet, shaking the rags off that were still clinging to him and
hindering his movements. He called to his men to rally round him.
It issued through his throat as a series of yips and growls, but
they seemed to understand. They followed him as he raced across the
field toward the men trying to kill them. Around his pack, he saw
others charging toward their enemies, other packs like his, the
great cats, the dragons, the griffons. Above them, the Hawks,
Eagles, and Condors—the angel troops as their handlers called
them—circled and dipped, looking for weak points to
attack.

A conflicting mixture of
satisfaction and surprise and anger went through him when he saw
the enemy troops abruptly break and run. They followed and attacked
anyway, savaging the men who’d rained bullets and mortars down upon
them. In the midst of the carnage, though, a spark of sanity
finally returned. These were still fellow soldiers. He didn’t
understand why they’d turned on them and attacked them, but that
didn’t alter the fact that they were
supposed
to be on the same
side.

He released the man he’d been mauling
abruptly and called to his men. It took a few well placed bites and
kicks to convince them to break off the fight and retreat, but he
finally managed to get them headed back the way they’d come. He
discovered as they raced back across the battlefield that the other
groups had also begun to leave the field. Spying a fairly dense
forest in the distance, he headed for the cover it represented.
They could catch their breaths there and assess the
situation.

And maybe they could figure out how
the fuck they’d jumped off of a drop ship toward a frozen planet
half way across the universe from home and landed on
earth?

Chapter Two

Laurie had felt almost like she’d
stepped into an episode of Twilight Zone from the time she’d set
out that morning for Atlanta. Actually, before that—from the time
she’d witnessed the murder, her life had taken on the quality of a
nightmare, ceased to seem entirely real. That sense deepened when
she discovered that she’d been forced by the traffic flow into a
lane that was about to exit the freeway and she couldn’t get
over.

Telling herself she’d just get right
back up on the freeway and stay on it until she found the right
exit, she gripped the steering wheel more tightly, gritted her
teeth, and followed the off ramp since she didn’t have a choice.
Dismay and disbelief filled her when she reached the bottom,
however. The ramp ended at a one way street. She gazed forlornly at
the on ramp on the other side and looked up and down the street she
had to turn onto for any sign of a crossing, but, as luck would
have it, she’d ended up on the ‘bad’ side of town, dusk had already
given way to night, and it was poorly lit. She didn’t see a
crossing.

She jerked the car forward when the
bastard behind her blew his horn. It was like being goosed in the
ass and she’d jumped instinctively. It rattled her even more when
she narrowly missed side-swiping another car. By the time she’d
recovered her wits a little, she discovered she was on top of the
crossing she’d been hoping to find and still in the wrong
lane.

Anger flickered through her when she
missed it, but she tried to calm herself. There would be another
one soon. She’d just get over into the correct lane and be
ready.

She’d no sooner moved over than she
saw a turn coming. Hopefulness soared through her. Unfortunately,
the ‘must turn’ sign was followed by a ‘no u-turn’.

“
My god! It’s a
conspiracy!” Laurie muttered when she found herself following a
narrow two lane into no man’s land. The road connected, eventually,
with another wide thoroughfare but by the time she reached it
Laurie was so turned around she had no idea which way to turn to
reach the freeway. Naturally, she chose the wrong one. She’d driven
down several blocks before she realized there was no sign of the
freeway.

Two choices and she’d picked the wrong
one! Trying to beat back a rising sense of panic, she looked for a
place to turn around and head back in the other direction. She
began to feel better almost immediately. She hadn’t traveled more
than a couple of blocks before she could see the freeway ahead.
Relief seeped through her—until she got close enough to see that
there was no onramp onto the damned freeway!

Struggling with a growing sense of
panic, she pulled off at the next entrance to a business. It was
closed down, not just closed, which was a severe disappointment,
but she needed a moment to collect herself and assess her
situation, she told herself. It would’ve been nice to have someone
she could ask directions from, but a few minutes to calm herself
and think might do the trick anyway.

There was foot traffic along either
side of the road, she noticed, automatically checking her door
locks. It occurred to her, briefly, that they lived here and might
be able to help, but she decided it was just too risky to stop a
stranger on the street after dark.

Her gas was low, she noticed with a
fresh wave of dismay, trying to remember if she’d seen any place
since she got off the freeway that sold gas. She couldn’t, but then
she’d been focused on finding a way onto the freeway again. She
might have passed a gas station.

She needed to try to find her way back
to the off ramp where she got off, she decided. Hopefully, she’d
see a gas station along the way, but if she could get back on the
freeway, she didn’t think that would be an issue. She should have
plenty of gas to get to the hotel she’d planned to stay at and she
could get directions from the hotel to the DA’s office for her
deposition the next morning.

She’d chosen a hotel as close to that
area as she could so that she wouldn’t get lost the following
morning or have to spend a lot of time driving in the morning
traffic.

Good plan! She was almost sorry, now,
that she hadn’t simply turned off and gotten a room at one of the
hotels on the way into town.

Dismissing it, she pulled to the edge
of the road again and waited for a break in traffic so that she
could cross and head back in the direction she’d come from, trying
to think of some landmark that would help her identify the first
turn. She waited, and she waited. Any time there was a break in one
direction, there was traffic in the other. Finally, she made a
right and began looking for a break to cross and turn around. By
the time she’d found an opportunity, she’d driven so far she was
completely lost again.