Omega Force 01- Storm Force (16 page)

Before Travis
hit the floor, Kell turned the gun on his companion — who’d
disappeared.
What the fuck?

At a
scrambling noise behind him, Kell rotated fast,
aiming at eye level, and saw nothing.

He scanned
the room as Nik’s voice sounded in the headset:
“Location?”

“Study.” Kell glanced at the
monitors, and his heart stopped at the sight of Mori curled on her side, her
blond hair barely visible over the top of the covers. He reached behind the
computer and jerked out all the wires, not worrying about which one led to
which camera. He wanted them all off.

At a hiss
from above him, Kell twisted, his gaze locking on
that of a jaguarundi atop a bookcase. He raised his
gun but never got off a shot. The Beretta hit the floor with a clatter as a
blur of sharp claws and gray fur rained hell on his upturned face.

There was a flurry of noise,
then silence. What surely had to be a series of gunshots sounded from outside
the hole where the window had been — guess the soundproofing couldn’t extend to
the outside. The cameras in the corners emitted long beeps and went dead in
unison, no red lights visible. And the eagle screeched loud enough to be heard
in Mexico, hopping from the windowsill onto the bedroom floor with a flutter of
broad reddish-brown wings.

Mori sat
up, the pain in her back momentarily forgotten as the eagle grew and blurred,
leaving in its place a kneeling waif of a girl with spiky auburn hair and huge
brown eyes. Well, that answered the question of whether or not the eagle was a
shifter. Which meant she’d been tailing Mori all the way back
to the night of her birthday.

“You’ve been following me. Who are you?”

“Name’s Robin. Yeah, yeah, I
know — stupid name for an eagle-shifter.” The girl rose from a crouch to her full
height of maybe five feet. Maybe. “What can I say? My
parents were hippies with a warped sense of humor.”

Mori stood too fast, causing the room to spin. Before she
could sink back to the bed, Robin placed a hand on each arm and twirled her
around with surprising strength.

“Drop the
bedspread and let me look at your back. The cameras are off.”

Mori hesitated, not because she was modest, but because
she was ashamed. Ashamed for another shifter to see the proof
that she’d allowed someone to brand her like a cow, to treat her like property.
That she’d walked into it with such naïveté.

She stepped
away and turned back to face the girl — no, woman. She just looked like a kid
because she barely reached Mori’s shoulder. The other person who’d been
watching her since her birthday was Jack Kellison.

“Are you
with Kell? Is he OK?”

Robin looked up at her with a grin. “You handcuffed him
to a nightstand, and wait until you hear what a freaking
mess he’d gotten himself into when we found him. I haven’t laughed that hard in
years. In fact, if we get out of this alive, I owe you a drink for making that
big, bossy jerk eat a little crow.” She frowned. “I’ve tasted crow. It’s
gamey.”

Mori
relaxed a little. If the eaglet was making fun of Kell,
things couldn’t be too bad. “Then he’s safe?”

“Nothing
bruised but his big fat ego.” Robin grasped Mori’s arms and turned her again.
“He and the other guys are taking out the security system, and then…” She
pulled down the bedspread that covered Mori’s back. “Holy
shit. I might have to kill the mofo who did
this. Did he not even clean the wound afterward?”

“Don’t
think so. Just dumped me on the bed and left.” Mori eased
away from Robin, shuffled back to the bed, and sat, letting the bedspread hang
off her back. To hell with modesty, although she could offer
Robin some coverage. “You want a sheet?”

Robin shook
her head. “I can do better than that.”

She walked
back to the window, reached outside, and retrieved a plastic grocery bag from
the rope. “Archer — he’s the guy who took the window out — slipped into your place
and brought out a few things. But that back needs a doctor, although what kind
of doctor…” Robin cocked her head, giving Mori an assessing look. “What are
you?”

Mori’s
first impulse was to lie, but what difference did secrecy make now, especially
with these people who were risking so much to rescue her? “Dire
Wolf.”

“Dire.” Robin
frowned a moment as if consulting some inner database, then whistled. “I
thought the Dires were, you know, long gone.” She
mimicked a knife slicing across her throat.

Mori had to
smile. She liked the eagle named Robin. “There are only about thirty Dire-shifters
left. None of our brothers in the wild exist anymore. They’ve been extinct a
long time, and the shifters aren’t far behind.”

“So is…”
Robin stopped. “Never mind. There’ll be time to talk
later.”

She dug in
the plastic bag and brought out a small tube. “This is for burns, but now that
I see it up close, I’m afraid to touch it. Better let Nik
or Kell take a look first — they know more about
injuries. Poor old humans have to deal with that kind of shit all the time, you
know?”

Mori took
the jeans and chambray shirt Robin handed her, and shook her head, smiling.
“You guys couldn’t have picked a better shirt. Michael says I look like a Texas
ranch hand in it.” Which had made it one of her favorites.

“Hope you don’t mind my saying it, but from what I’ve
seen, Michael’s a total asshole.” Robin had slipped into a pair of jeans and
slid a T-shirt over her head. She stopped at the sound of Mori’s laughter.
“What?”

“Nothing.” Mori smiled. “You’re
right. He is a total asshole.”

“Is he your
alpha?”

Cautiously,
Mori nodded. Again, why not tell the truth? Her own family had deserted her,
and here, finally, was someone who seemed to be on her side. “Unfortunately, he
is our alpha. I’ve known him my whole life and always thought he was a bully. But
he’s so much worse than that.”

“Hmmmm.” Robin sat on the floor
with her legs crossed. “What’s the Achilles heel of the Dire Wolves? We have to
find a way to take your alpha down.” Robin’s eyes narrowed. “That
going to be a problem for you?”

“God, no.” She wanted Michael out of her life, whatever it
took. But she had no hope that this fierce little woman and a few Army Rangers
could make a difference. “You don’t realize how strong he is, and how
ruthless.”

Robin
paused at the sound of a crash from somewhere downstairs, then
shrugged. “Look, Mori, you’ve gotta get past this submissive-little-woman
mentality. Strength is more this” — she tapped her temple — “than it is muscle and
brute force. Let me ask again: what’s the mortal weakness of the Dire Wolves?
All shifters have something. For the eagles, it’s lead. See, I told you. Now,
you tell me. Is it silver, like the legends say?”

Mori shook her head. “Only for the
smaller wolves. It doesn’t feel good, but it doesn’t kill us, because
we’re so much bigger.” She hesitated. Other than traumatic damage to the heart,
which would kill anything, human or shifter, the only substance guaranteed to
kill a Dire was mercury. But could she hand over that knowledge to another
species? That was a mortal crime among her people.

“Never mind for now.” Robin got up and began to pace. “Think
about this, though. Without revealing what you are to the public, it’s going to
be hard to get Michael Benedict arrested or convicted, or whatever the humans
call it. I hate to sound like a bad movie, but a jail’s not going to hold him
even if we had any evidence against him. Which, by the way,
we don’t.”

“The governor.” Mori couldn’t
believe her best hope for surviving this would come down to Carl Felderman. “If we can get him to tell us—”

Robin cut her off with a quick hand gesture. “He’s dead. Felderman told Kell and Nik what happened to him and admitted you had nothing to do
with it. Those jaguarundi-shifters turned him into a
hybrid, with the plan of controlling him in the governor’s office. He made a
run for it after his press conference, and they ended up killing him. At least,
someone killed him. Again, no proof.”

Mori let out a frustrated breath, grabbing the edge of
the mattress as another wave of dizziness shot through her. When was this all
going to end? She and Felderman had come down on
opposite sides of every environmental issue faced by the state, but on some
level, she understood where he was coming from and certainly never wanted him
dead. And to turn him into a hybrid so he would do Michael’s bidding?

“Why would
the jaguarundis let Michael use them this way?”

Robin started to answer, but a loud crash of splintering
wood echoed through the room, followed by the appearance of a black cat so big
he took Mori’s breath away. So big he’d been able to knock the steel door out
of its wooden frame. Now, he used the door carnage as a ladder instead of going
up the stairs.

“Is he supposed to be here?” Mori watched in awe as he
gracefully prowled into the room on paws the size of salad plates.

“Yeah, this is Archer, but you can call him Kitten. He
likes it.” Robin chucked the big cat under its chin, and the damn thing purred.
“He’s the one who took out the window.”

Ah, Mori should
have recognized the green eyes. He was too big to be a cougar. Black jaguars
were extinct except for a few hundred left in South America. Apparently, as
with the Dires, a shifter population remained.
Obviously, Mori had underestimated the variety of Kell’s
counterterrorist team
— greatly
underestimated it.

Robin scratched behind the cat’s ear, but pulled her hand
away with a frown.

“You’re bloody. Are you injured?”
preceded another man into the room, a guy with a deep tan, an armful of
clothing (which he tossed toward the cat), and an angry expression on his face.
“Shift, Archer. The blood is Kell’s, and we’ve gotta get out of here — now.”

Kell was injured? Mori jumped
to her feet too fast and swayed as the newcomer stepped over and grabbed her
arm to keep her upright. He was about Kell’s height,
a little over six feet, with black hair and liquid eyes so dark they barely
qualified as brown.

He pulled
his hands away from her like he’d been scalded. “Shit.” He took a step back and
shook his head as if trying to rid it of bad thoughts.

“What? Who
are you? Where’s Kell?” Panic rose in Mori’s chest.
If he’d been killed trying to save her—

“He’s
downstairs. Let’s go.” The man gave her a probing look before he turned and ran
back down the makeshift ramp and out the door.

The big cat
had shifted back into the guy Mori had seen through the window. He pulled on
the black clothing he’d worn earlier, but not before Mori saw the blood on his
shoulder and chest — a lot of it.

He motioned for Mori to come with
him. “Robin, stay and do wipe-downs, then meet us all
at Nik’s.”

Robin had
been quiet and serious since finding the blood. She touched Archer’s arm and
spoke softly. “Is it bad?”

Archer ruffled
her hair and smiled. “Nah. He just tangled with a jaguarundi or two. He’s tough.” He turned to Mori. “You
ready? Can you walk, or you need me to carry you?”

Mori
blinked. She was almost six feet tall. No man had ever carried her. No man had
ever
offered
to carry her. And it wasn’t
going to happen now. “Just let me go at my own pace, but thanks.”

“Here, wear these.” He reached in a pocket of his cargo pants and
pulled out a pair of gloves. “If you need to hold onto the banister or the wall,
you won’t leave prints.”

God,
fingerprints
. She looked around her at
the bed, the walls, the bathroom sink. She’d touched everything in this room.

“Hey, you
heard the man. Wipe-downs are my job.” Robin said. “Go find Kell.
Seeing you safe will make him feel better. It had to bruise that big ego again
to not be the one bashing down the door to rescue you.”

Mori nodded
and gave Robin a small smile on her way past. In another life, they could’ve
been friends. She didn’t dare hope for such a thing now. She might be getting
out of Michael’s house, but she was probably now a suspect in Carl Felderman’s death as well as the bombing and kidnapping.
She’d have to disappear someplace remote and obscure. And with her
disappearance, the Dires would gradually die off.
Despite everything Michael and her parents had done, that was not what she
wanted.

The most
important thing now was making sure Kell was going to
survive whatever the jags had done to him. She followed Archer down the stairs,
glad she had the gloves because she needed one hand on the banister and the
other on the wall to avoid tumbling down them headfirst. Every step caused the
shirt fabric to brush across her back so that by the time they reached the
foyer, her every nerve ending sizzled.

She froze
on the bottom stair. A smear of blood stretched from the living room door on
the right — the scene of her branding — to the door on the foyer’s left, which led
to the dining room, kitchen, and garage.

“Which of
Michael’s guys are still in the house?” She knew the jags were here if they had
fought Kell. Michael also had an estate manager who
stayed at the house most of the time.

Archer
grasped her elbow, urging her down the last step and toward the dining room.
“Let’s just say he’ll need some new employees. Don’t step in the blood.”

Mori was
sick of death, sick of feeling guilty and afraid and overwhelmed. But all she
could focus on now was putting one foot in front of the other. By the time they
crossed the dining room and the long, pristine kitchen, Mori was leaning on
Archer more than she would have liked.

The garage
door was open, and the hot wind hit Mori’s back like a slap when they exited
the cavernous space and crossed the drive to a lawn-service van in the ugliest
shade of green she’d ever seen.

The wind
was steady, dry, and tropical, which had to mean the hurricane was on the move
again. When they reached the van, the side panel opened, and the serious,
dark-eyed man jumped out. Was it Mori’s imagination, or did he seem afraid to
be near her? This had to be Kell’s Greek friend, Nik. Maybe he was just pissed off that she’d gotten his buddy
in such a mess. She couldn’t blame him.

“Up you
go.” Archer jumped in the back of the van and reached an arm out for Mori to
grasp. He pulled her up effortlessly, slammed the panel shut, and headed for
the front. Nik, if that’s who he was, had already climbed
in and cranked the engine.

Mori turned
and her breath caught in her throat. Kell lay on his
back, stretched across the van’s floor, watching her. Even in the dim interior
light, his blue-green eyes were vivid. Deep scratches scoured his right cheek,
and his right shoulder looked like raw steak marinated in blood. He was still
the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and her chest ached to see him hurt.