Pack Dynamics (14 page)

Darkness.

O O O

Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, Chambliss sat in the driver’s seat of Master Alex’s SUV with the engine running, waiting for Ben and Janni to emerge. He had a gun holstered under his jacket, and hoped fervently he wouldn’t have to utilize it. He stayed in practice, but his military days were long behind him and he was a step slower than he used to be.

Janni ran out alone and flung herself into the backseat, slamming the door behind her with chilling finality.

Chambliss blinked. “Where’s Master Ben?”

Janni babbled, “They took him. Oh, Chambliss, they took him! But we have to go, there’s too many of them and not enough of us and one of them is a werewolf and his teeth were like an inch from my throat—” She broke off with a strangled sob.

Chambliss, feeling terribly guilty for leaving Master Ben, floored the accelerator and peeled away from the warehouse. “We’ll get him back, Miss Janni,” he said, with more assurance than he felt.

Janni’s crying was his only answer. Chambliss gritted his teeth and broke several traffic laws on the way back to Master Alex’s.

O O O

Ben woke up with an aching head, on the floor of a cage barely big enough for him to move in, let alone stand in. He accidentally touched one of the bars with the back of his hand and jerked away, sucking a breath in between clenched teeth, when it seared a blister there.

Silver. Fantastic. No wonder every hair on his body was standing on end and he felt as if a heavy mass of air was oppressing him. He swore tiredly. At least he still had his clothes on. He supposed he should be grateful for small mercies.

He could sit up, and did, squinting around the room as his vision cleared. The odor of rabbits, some normal, some not, assailed his nose. He was in a laboratory, that much he recognized.

A moan behind him made him jerk his head around to find a half-wolfed guy strapped to a table, shirtless and semi-conscious. The tattooed thug from the warehouse who’d hit Janni was now wearing a white lab coat. He injected something into a catheter in the guy’s hand, while Ben recoiled at the advent of the needle. A second later, the other wolf strained against his bonds, muscles and tendons corded, fangs bared in a rictus of agony—

Then collapsed, died, and resumed fully-human form right in front of Ben’s horrified eyes.

Ben couldn’t help the noise he made, and a woman in her mid-forties wearing a white lab coat looked up when she heard it. Her dark hair was shot through with silver and pulled back into a no-nonsense bun. She set a clipboard down and came over, shucking the paper off an empty syringe.

“Good, you’re awake,” she said peremptorily. “Give me your arm.”

“Um. No?” Ben wrapped around himself, scooting as far from her as he could get. Which wasn’t far, considering he couldn’t even touch the cage without the damned thing burning him. He’d take what he could get, though.

She gave him an exasperated stare. “Do it voluntarily, or we’ll make you, and you’ll like that even less.”

“You know what? Fuck off. Why should I make it easy on you? Be a good little lab rat and you’ll let me go eventually? Somehow I don’t believe that.” Taking refuge in snark and bravado had never done him any good yet, but he didn’t have it in him to just give them what they wanted.

She shook her head. “You’d be making it easy on
yourself
. We’re getting a clean sample either way, and we don’t care how.”

The back of his neck went cold, but he bulled on regardless. “Oh, well, when you put it like that … Wait, no, what I meant was, ‘fuck off,’ again.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Nick? A little help, please?”

The tattooed werewolf-thug came over. “What’s up, Dr. McFoucher?”

“I was hoping he’d cooperate, but he’s stubborn. Plan B?”

He crossed his arms. “Boss won’t like us taking more time for the stuff to wear off—”

“I think it’ll take less time in the long run, honestly, if we don’t have to fight the subject every inch of the way.” Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “I don’t like the extra time factor, either, but he’s making it necessary.”

“You’re in charge. Pole hypo?”

McFoucher nodded, and Nick walked over to a utility closet and pulled out a long metal rod. Favoring Ben with a nasty grin, he opened a drawer, grabbed a plastic syringe, and filled it from a bottle of clear liquid from the refrigerator. He screwed it into the pole, and as he attached a needle to the end, Ben’s teeth involuntarily elongated as his mouth went dry. It went dryer when Nick pushed a control in the handle and some of the liquid sprayed toward the ceiling—somehow the fact that he was making sure there were no air bubbles in it didn’t make him feel any better.

Unable to breathe, Ben scrambled back, pressing against the bars of the cage, when the hypodermic came at him, so focused on the needle that he barely registered the silver burning his arms and hair. Fur sprouted, claws extended, and his shirt ripped across the shoulders as the wolf fought to get out. At this point he was less rattled about the wolf than he was about the syringe. He managed to knock the pole aside once, twice, before the needle plunged to the hilt into his thigh and delivered its dose.

Nick gave the pole an extra dig and twist before yanking it out, and Ben collapsed onto his side, hyperventilating and dizzy and half-Changed. He was even dizzier in a matter of minutes.

At least this time no one was smacking his head on the floor …

O O O

“They did what?” Alex still couldn’t wrap his head around it. How in the hell had things gone so disastrously wrong in such a short span? This was the third time he’d asked, and the answer wasn’t any clearer than before.

“They shot Master Ben with a tranquilizer dart,” Chambliss said, patiently, and this was the third time he’d answered. He’d apparently gotten the story out of Janni, who was in no shape to tell anyone anything right now. “Something about a werewolf, and Ostheim wanting him.”

Alex had been too stunned to process the fact that they’d come back without Ben, but his synapses had decided that the situation wasn’t going to go away just because he ignored it. The short circuit in his brain stopped fizzing as he wrenched his train of thought back onto the tracks. “They must have somehow figured out what he was,” he said.

“They’ll kill him this time,” Janni said quietly. She sat curled up sideways on the leather sofa, her face turned away from the room, shoulders hunched.

“No.” Alex was firm. “Enough people have died. I’ll call Ostheim right now, and we’ll straighten this out.” He snatched up his phone and realized he had no idea what number to call. Growling, he looked up the local business pages online and called the main switchboard of Ostheim Industries, counting on his name to get him through to the top man.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jarrett, but he’s not in,” Ostheim’s assistant said. He didn’t sound sorry at all. “May I take a message?”

“Where can I reach him?” Alex tried very hard not to let his irritation leak through his tone, but didn’t quite succeed, pacing across his lab floor with short, choppy strides.

“He left word that he was not to be disturbed. Some special project or other.”

Special project. Shit. “I’m … pretty sure he wants to talk to me.” Alex got a shaky grip on his temper. “Really, there has to be a way to reach him.”

“I’m sorry.” Again, he didn’t sound sorry. “Mr. Ostheim told me nothing to that effect. I can let him know you’re trying to reach him if he calls or comes in for his messages.”

“Yeah.” He clenched his fist and gave the man his cell number. “It’s very urgent that I speak with him right away.”

“Yes, sir. Will that be all?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” He thumbed the End button, and finished the sentence. “For nothing, you officious bastard.” He took a deep, trembling breath and looked longingly at his scotch before firmly pushing that notion into the background. For now.

O O O

Ben jerked awake with a gasped curse. On his back, hard surface, monitors beeping, strapped down—

Ohholyshit, strapped down. To the same table he’d watched the other werewolf die on.

Wrists, biceps, chest, waist, hips, thighs, and ankles. They didn’t want him moving at all, and terror coiled around his ribcage and squeezed the air from his lungs. No slack in the bindings, nothing for him to get leverage against, and every pore in his body opened and drenched him with freezing sweat. The monitor sped up and stuttered along with his heart rate, bones shifted, hair sprouted, fangs emerged—

That woman, Dr. McFoucher, appeared at the edge of his vision. Holding a syringe.

Ben’s throat closed, and Janni wasn’t there to remind him to breathe with a gentle hand in his hair and a warm kiss on his forehead, and he wasn’t sure, in the tiny portion of his hindbrain that wasn’t screaming terrified gibberish, if it would have helped, because he was
tied down
and the woman had a
syringe
.

McFoucher huffed out an impatient sigh and set the needle aside. “Stop it,” she said. “Hold still, or be held still. And do not Change.”

The only sound he was capable of at this point was something inarticulate and animal, the wolf coming to the fore because the Change was pretty much unavoidable no matter what McFoucher wanted. Holding still wasn’t an option, his reflexes were on utter autopilot, and he thought it couldn’t get any worse.

Until, of course,
of course
, his mind laughed hysterically, it did.

Something long and thin lay low across his throat, held off his bare skin by some sort of cloth. McFoucher flipped it away from the cloth, right up under his jaw, and pulled down on it from under the table, and it
burned
, and now he really couldn’t breathe because it was a chain made of silver and she was closing off his windpipe with it.

“Hold. Still,” she said in his ear while the smell of charred flesh filled the air and the monitor sounded like a machine gun as his heart tried to erupt through his chest.

But he was in full-blown panic mode, and couldn’t have held still had God Himself commanded it. Black stars exploded behind his vision, and his mouth filled with coppery wetness from a bitten tongue. At long fucking last, his oxygen-deprived brain gave up the ghost and he tumbled down into merciful darkness.

O O O

“Jesus,” McFoucher said. “What the hell was that?” She arranged the chain back onto the cloth over the subject’s throat, and wondered briefly who the diabolical genius was who’d come up with that idea. Deciding that a catheter would be better than sticking him numerous times, she grabbed one. “Nick, do we have a file on him?”

“Here you go,” he answered, handing it over.

She perused it while waiting for the subject to go back to fully human, groaning with frustration as she finally understood. “Oh, no wonder,” she said to the room at large. “It might be nice if someone would inform me that a subject has PTSD that severe before he has an episode like that.”

“An episode like what?” Hans Ostheim asked as he strode into the lab. Everyone was already busy, but they immediately got busier.

“Lockwood here just had a major meltdown.” She found a vein in the subject’s left arm, inserted the catheter, and started getting samples. She kept her own demeanor cool, knowing that if she showed any weakness to her ruthless alpha wolf boss, he’d destroy her with it. One reason she was the best in the business at this was because she didn’t let lycanthropes rattle her—at least outwardly. “He’s under control right now, but it was iffy for a minute.”

“Under control, in this case, apparently meaning unconscious,” Ostheim said, his nostrils flaring, taking in the scent of the subject under question.

“Do we need him conscious?” She finished with the samples, handed them off to Nick, and hooked up a blood collection bag. “I wasn’t aware that was a requirement. But I’ve got the wolfsbane netting to stop him from Changing if you don’t want me to choke him down again.”

“Mmm.” Ostheim grasped Lockwood’s jaw and moved his head from side to side, noting the burn mark across his throat with narrowed eyes. “That probably won’t be necessary, especially since we don’t know how the toxins he would absorb from it would affect Idna. However, time is of the essence.”

“I have an experimental protocol with rabbits already set up. If I had access to Mike Reed’s notes, it would go faster.”

“People are working on that. The laptop this young man supplied us with is being … difficult.” He slapped Lockwood’s cheek, not gently. “And the notes he gave us are a complete fabrication. Useless.”

“Chances are that the computer will be equally useless.” She grimaced.

Ostheim clenched his fist. “If this delay harms Idna—”

“Dr. McFoucher?” a lab assistant said. “I think you’ll want a look at this.”

He had an image of the subject’s DNA sequence up on his computer screen alongside another image of the nanobots.

For the first time since this fiasco had begun, McFoucher allowed herself a smile. Triple helix.
Interesting
. “Oh, yes. Mr. Ostheim, I think we can work with this. Let me see what it does to the vamped rabbits, but I think we’re on the right track.”

“Very good.” Ostheim bared his fangs in a small, tight smile of his own. “I’ll have Idna moved here, and I need to make a few other calls. Let me know when you have sufficient evidence that this will actually work, and we’ll start treatment right away.”

Her eyes never left the computer screen, and she started scribbling notes on a yellow pad. “Yes, sir.”

O O O

Alex’s cell phone rang, causing him to jump like a scalded cat and then fumble to answer it. “Hello?”

“Hello, Jarrett.” The smooth voice with the slight German accent was both welcome and not. “My secretary informs me that you were quite … insistent that I speak with you.”

“Hey, Ostheim.” Alex tried to keep his voice casual, knew that he failed. “Look, why don’t we stop dicking around and just cut to the chase. You have something we want, and we have something you want.”

“Actually, Jarrett, you have nothing I want,” Ostheim said, radiating vicious satisfaction even through the phone. “Perhaps, if you’d given me Reed’s real notes and computer, you might have a leg to stand on, and we’d be negotiating in good faith. As it stands, I think I’ll let my own scientists go to work on the living biofactory that you so helpfully supplied us with instead.”