Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed (25 page)

From the moment he’d spied her his
entire focus had shifted to her. A hunger he barely recognized rose
instantly and began gnawing at his gut, flooded his already drugged
mind with a drug far more potent. He’d thought she wasn’t real at
first, tried to shake the image, tried to convince himself he was
seeing things, and then he’d caught her scent and that had only
confused him more. The drugs, he wondered? She looked like a
she-beast, but she smelled human. Was she both, as he was? Or only
human?

He struggled to recall the scents of
his parents, to remember if they carried the smell of both man and
beast, but he couldn’t seem to remember. It seemed possible,
though, that she would have the scent of man-child when she was in
half-shift.

He didn’t know, but he discovered he
didn’t care. Hunger pervaded him as he stared at her. Need surged
through his body, setting it on fire. His man side wanted her with
a feverish need that had him fairly quivering with the restraint he
had to struggle to hold on to. His beast side decided he would have
her.

The lion-man, he realized fairly
quickly, wanted her, too. He could see the hunger in the other
beast-man’s eyes—smell it on him.

Savage possessiveness
moved through him. He wanted her and he
would
have her. If he had to tear
the lion-man’s throat out and crawl over his bloody carcass to get
her, he would!

She made it easy for him. After
teasing him until it was all he could do to remain perfectly still
and wait for his chance, driving him more mindless by the moment
with the promise of her undulating body, her scent, and tentative
touch, she made the mistake of moving within his reach.

He caught her, dragging her close
enough he could finally wallow in her scent, immerse himself in it,
the scent that had been driving him steadily closer and closer to
madness. He could feel the warmth and softness of her and the
instant he did, he lost his hold on his last tenuous thread of
reason.

Of Unknown Origins:

Wolf

By

Madelaine
Montague

Chapter One

Cole surveyed the jungle below them
through his night-vision glasses, searching the terrain for any
sign that they might have company. He wasn’t completely satisfied
when he saw nothing. His gut was telling him that it had been way
too easy and that was always a bad sign.

Particularly when he knew from their
first fly over that there was an encampment of guerrillas less than
ten clicks from the site where the spy sat had gone down. It had to
have sounded like a 747 coming down considering the amount of
jungle the damned thing had cleared. It bothered the shit out of
him that they hadn’t seen any sign that the racket had stirred up
the guerrillas.

Shaking his uneasiness, he patted the
pilot on the back and signaled for him to drop the stealth chopper
lower. They had a hell of a job ahead of them. The quicker they
could clean up and hump it to the coast with the debris, the
better.

Signaling his best men—Maurice ‘Beau’
Beauregard, Remy Cavanaugh, and Gabriel ‘Hawk’ Hawkins to take
point—he killed the light and checked his harness one last time as
they bailed from the chopper and repelled to the ground. The minute
they passed the halfway mark, the next wave bailed from the
chopper.

Sergeant Cole MacIntyre, Mac to his
men, surveyed the perimeter one last time before he hooked up and
leapt from the chopper, noting that the other chopper had already
dropped its load on the other side of the clearing and begun to
peel away.

“
See ya when ya get back
to base,” the co-pilot said.

Nodding, Mac gave him a thumbs up and
leapt out.

As many times as he’d repelled from a
chopper, it still gave him a rush. He welcomed it, scanning the
jungle with his heightened senses as he dropped. The men had
already begun laying out a grid when he hit the ground. Issuing a
low, warbling whistle, he signaled to the men designated to keep
watch to take their positions and then moved to the other men,
urging them to form small groups and begin scouring the broken
brush for pieces.

It wasn’t his job to question his
orders, but he sure as shit couldn’t figure out why the hell it
made any difference if they left a little debris as long as they
made sure they got everything important. That was the order,
though, and he had the men search each grid in pairs for the
tiniest scraps of what was left of the spy satellite that had
mysteriously dropped from orbit and crashed in the jungle. They
started at all four sides of the grid, worked their way to the
center and then crossed, working outward again.

Mac checked his watch when they
reached the halfway point, cursed under his breath, and surveyed
the jungle around them, listening intently.

He doubted there was a fucking piece
of the son-of-a-bitch more than an inch square. It had still been
smoldering when it hit the ground and churned up the jungle
floor.

Twenty minutes passed. The men finally
reached the outer edge across from where they’d begun. He strode to
check their discoveries. Garbage! Shit! He couldn’t tell from
looking at it whether it looked like it might’ve once been an
entire satellite or not. Just to be on the safe side, he had men
fan out and walk a line on either side of the grid that had been
laid out.

A half dozen of the men returned
carrying bits of the satellite that had been thrown from the main
impact site into the jungle. It didn’t make him feel any better,
but they’d already spent nearly an hour searching. If the
guerrillas weren’t dead, or stone deaf and blind besides, they
could be breathing down their necks any minute.

He uttered another warble, the signal
to recall the men, and checked his map and compass heading as they
formed up. Disgust settled in his gut when he saw the awkward
bundles that had been gathered up.

Trust command to overlook the fact
that they were going to be slogging through heavy jungle! He
hesitated, but they were going to have problems lugging such
awkward bundles at best. At worst, they were going to be sitting
ducks if they got into a firefight.

Striding to the two squads that had
formed up, he told the men to remove anything non-essential from
their packs and divide the debris between them. The men gaped at
him, no surprise since they hadn’t actually brought anything
non-essential with them, but they fell to emptying their packs when
he set his own down, tossed out his emergency supplies—everything
but his weapons and ammunition—and began stuffing as much of the
debris as he could into his pack.

His pack was heavy as a son-of-bitch
when he slung on his back again, but he still felt better for
having divided the load. He signaled for the men to move out,
designating Rider, Mullins, and Mercer to take point and ordering
Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh to guard their rear.

They hadn’t been humping it to the
coast more than ten or fifteen minutes where their pick up awaited
them, he hoped, when the men guarding the rear passed the word up
that they had company moving in from the east. He didn’t have to
encourage the men to move faster. Nobody wanted to tangle with
guerrillas in such an indefensible position.

Waiting until most of the two squads
had passed, he tapped the last three on the shoulder. They dropped
back, joining him, Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh.

“
Want me to get around
them and get a head count, Sarg?” Hawk volunteered.

Mac considered it and dismissed it.
“The orders are to get this shit out of here—no matter what—and
that means every scrap of it. We stick together. No shooting unless
they get too close. We’re still a good ten clicks from the
pickup.”

Nodding, the men paced themselves,
trailing the rest of the two squads.

Sweat, from the humidity, the rough
terrain, and nerves began to trickle between Mac’s shoulder blades,
from his brow and into his eyes, and down his belly and into his
crotch, adding to the misery of biting insects. The itch and sting
was maddening. He felt as if fire ants were crawling over him, but
he was so tense with expectation of a barrage of bullets that it
wasn’t nearly as hard keeping his focus, despite the irritants, as
it would have been otherwise. By his reckoning, they were still
five clicks from the pickup when a shot cracked through the jungle
like thunder.

He hit the dirt and scrambled on his
belly across the ground and over a fallen tree.

The other men with him rolled over it
in a tide, searching the jungle around them.

“
Anybody catch the
direction that came from?”

Beau pointed. “I caught a flash just
to the left of that palm.”

There was another flash and bark
splintered from the tree beside the group. They raised their
rifles, peppering the site and directly to either side of it. A cry
pinpointed at least one hit even as a barrage of bullets zinged
back in their direction. It was no part of Mac’s plan to get
surrounded or pinned down and left.

They traded gunfire with the
guerrillas for a few more minutes and then he signaled half the men
to fall back and take a new position. They rotated. When the first
group found positions and began returning fire, he and the
remaining men fell back, passing the first group and finding
positions to their rear.

Mac lost track of the time and that
worried him. Their pickup could wait just so long without
endangering the entire mission. As valuable as what they carrying
was, they were still liable to arrive at the beach and discover
their ride was gone and they were trapped.

They began moving a little faster,
picking off as many of the enemy as they could before dropping back
each time but, with the best will in the world, Mac couldn’t
convince himself that the numbers were dwindling as fast as
reinforcements were coming from the rear.

He finally ordered a full retreat when
he thought they must be within a click of their pickup point. He
could hear the crash of the surf on the shoreline. Reloading, they
switched from sporadic fire to fully automatic, cutting a swath
through the jungle growth and then ducking and running at a half
crouch before the guerrillas had a chance to return
fire.

They burst from the jungle and onto
the beach, whipped a quick look around for the boat and charged
toward it. Bullets kicked up sand all over them before they’d
covered half the distance and he, Beau, Hawk, and Cavanaugh hit the
beach while the others made a run for it, laying down a heavy fire
to hold the guerrillas back.

Mac felt as if he’d taken cover in an
ant bed. Something was sure as fuck crawling all over him and
stinging the shit out of him! The moment he heard friendly fire
behind him, he rolled and began crawling frantically for the boat,
which had already been shoved from the beach.

The gunfire from both directions was
nearly deafening when he and the other men scrambled into the water
to swim for it and the night air was filled with unholy screams of
pain and fear—and roars of fury that had lost any semblance of
humanity. Rage surged through him. The weariness that had been
dragging at him vanished. He had to fight the urge to turn and
attack.

Struggling against it, he plowed
through the water toward the boat, almost surprised when he
actually managed to catch up with it and grab a handhold on the
side. Instead of the helping hand he’d expected, a hand clamped
onto his arm, nearly wrenching it out of the socket as he was
jerked from the water like a ragdoll. The breath was punched from
him as he hit the deck. Before he could recover, something slammed
into him bodily.

The rage that had gripped
him before exploded. He heaved the man off of him, tearing at him
with teeth and nails. In some distant corner of his mind, he was
aware of horror at his own actions, but he had no control. It was
as if someone else, or some
thing
, had invaded his body and
taken control.

The pickup craft had become a seething
mass of heaving, struggling bodies. Animalistic growls, grunts, and
roars filled the air in a cacophony of deafening sound that made
his blood surge in his veins.

“
Mayday! Mayday! We’re
under attack! The men! Oh my god! Things! Things!
Mayday!”

The voice of the man screaming for
help over the radio cut off abruptly. Mac flared his nostrils as
the smell of fresh blood filled his lungs. Sucking in a deep
breath, he launched a final blow at his opponent and looked around
for another.

His ears pricked at the sound of a
chopper overhead, swooping low, and he tipped his head back,
uttering a bellowed challenge at the men he could smell on it, the
fear he could smell.

Crouching low, maddened by the smells,
he sprang upward, launching himself into the air. He managed to
catch a hold on a runner and lifted his head to glare at the white
faced man staring down at him. Even as he heaved his body up to
launch himself inside, however, the man shook his paralysis and
fired. He grunted as the slugs slammed into his chest and shoulder,
trying to ignore the fire running through him and grasp the runner
with his other hand.