Pack Dynamics (16 page)

McFoucher’s hand rested in his hair. “Breathe, Lockwood,” she said, and his eyes snapped open and his fangs snapped shut a quarter-inch from the arm she snatched back barely in time.

“You don’t get to do that,” he snarled, and now he was breathing, breathing way too damn fast, the heart monitor was going insane and Ostheim was standing over him, the scent of infuriated alpha overwhelming and frightening not just Ben but his wolf as well. Ben froze, hyperventilating, for an instant, before trying desperately to get away again.

“This is very very nice—whoever thought of it should get a raise,” Ostheim said, sliding the silver chain off the cloth and up under Ben’s jaw. Panic clawed his throat closed without needing the chain, but Ostheim pulled it tight anyway, and the smell of both his and Ben’s burning flesh filled the room, while Ostheim growled in his ear with lips pulled back from naked fangs.

“Hans,” Idna said. “There is an easier way to do this.”

“What if I don’t want to do it the easy way?”

“Please, dear. For me.” Ostheim relented with ill grace, putting his teeth back where they belonged, and the chain too, and stepping away.

“Ben.” Idna’s quiet voice pulled his gaze toward her. “Ben, look at me.” Deep black pools, he was going to drown right there in her eyes. Her long red nails stroked gently up and down the inside of his forearm, and he couldn’t remember why he was afraid. He stilled, and his breathing evened out.

“You’ll feel a couple of pokes.” McFoucher’s voice came from far away. Two needles slipped between his ribs, into his heart. They hurt, distantly, and a brief flash of an Afghani insurgent sliding a heroin-filled hypodermic into his arm was sublimated by Idna’s gaze dragging him back to the present.

“I’m in,” Nick announced.

“Here too,” said someone on the other side of Idna’s bed.

All Ben could see were Idna’s dark, dark eyes. He could feel people doing things around him, smell the tension in the air, but he was powerless to look away from her face. Machinery hummed to life behind his head, and renewed panic made his breathing accelerate and his fingers clutch at the table, as his heart constricted and more blood he couldn’t afford to lose flowed through plastic lines from his body into hers.

“Shhh,” Idna said. Her soothing voice and hypnotic eyes combined with the light stroking of her nails to settle him, and he relaxed—almost, but not quite, against his will—because it was
good
to just relax for once. He felt … mushy. And warm, for the first time since they’d taken Janni.

They were pumping blood from her body into his as well, he realized. That probably wasn’t good; a vampire’s blood running through his veins was, in fact, all kinds of bad. But he couldn’t move, her eyes pinning him like a butterfly and the tranquility she radiated weighing him down.

Even when the heart monitor stuttered and his breath caught, all he felt was a warm lassitude. He knew he was dying, knew it to the marrow of his bones, knew he should be fighting this. But her nails still caressed his arm, and he was going down, down, deep, so deep he’d never come up again. And that was all right, because he was
calm
, for the first time since Afghanistan, and he hadn’t realized what a state of strain he’d lived in, for years, until it disappeared, leaving him floating and serene, even as his heart struggled to beat and his lungs fought for their next breath.

His eyes slid shut, and he exhaled softly. He didn’t inhale again.

O O O

Six more hours, three more cups of coffee, seven more places Ben wasn’t, and the sun was peeking over the horizon.

Megan had been to more shady parts of the city than she ever wanted to visit again, from abandoned strip malls to empty apartment buildings to vacant warehouses, and she wanted to cry.

Instead she drove back to her house to shower and start the day.

O O O

McFoucher shut the pump off and pulled the needles out of Lockwood’s chest and arm, trying to hide her shaking. Using the rabbits as living dialysis machines was one thing. Using a human being was quite another. Tight-lipped, she released the straps holding his body to the table, flipped the EKG leads off his chest, and pulled the blanket up over his face.

“He was very brave,” Idna said.

“Yes, ma’am.” McFoucher squared her shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m much better, thank you.” Idna smiled. How could she smile? “Time will tell if I’ve completely healed, but it feels … promising.”

“That’s good.” McFoucher guessed. What time was it? She stared at her watch, wondered if it meant AM or PM, and decided that if she didn’t know, she should probably go home and go to bed.

“You’ve done good work, Dr. McFoucher,” Ostheim said. “You can expect a fat bonus in your next paycheck. Thank you.” He gripped her hand, and she only stopped herself from pulling away and wiping it off on her lab coat with an act of titanic will. “Thank you for giving me my Idna back.”

Idna hopped off the bed, and her husband squired her out the door without a backward glance for the still figure under the blanket. For someone who couldn’t walk just a few hours before, she was remarkably spry now. Vampire constitution coupled with werewolf nanotech, McFoucher supposed. Cure for what ailed you. All hail.

Shit, she was tired. But she definitely hadn’t signed up for this. She told the techs to clean up and stumbled to her office to decompress.

Before heading home, she typed up her resignation and emailed it to Ostheim.

Tossing and turning in her bed later on, she knew there was one more email to send. With a sigh, she heaved herself up and turned the computer on. She set up an anonymous account through one of the free services, filtered the message through three or four other anonymizers, and fired it off.

Her conscience quelled for the moment, she was able to sleep. Badly.

O O O

Alex rubbed his eyes and peered through the microscope yet again. He hadn’t slept at all; instead he’d stayed up looking for answers that remained stubbornly elusive. Janni lay on the battered couch with a laptop and a thousand-yard stare, hunting down more Ostheim properties.

Megan sat at the desk doing email triage. Some board members were making noise again, and Alex told her to tell them that he was involved in a special project and couldn’t make a teleconference for at least a few more days. She opened the next one, and—

Inhaled sharply. “No. Oh, no.”

“What?” Alex asked. He looked up and caught her with her knuckle in her mouth, eyes wide in shock as she stared at her computer screen. “Megan?”

“It’s …” Megan glanced at Janni and dropped her voice “probably nothing. Just startled me, is all. I mean, I don’t have any reason to believe this …”

He walked to her desk and read the email over her shoulder. “Shit. Other than, well, that.” He tapped the screen.

Whoever Janni is, he wanted her to know he loved her.

“But they don’t say where he is.” Megan raked her fingers through her hair. She’d left it loose this morning, although her business suit was properly severe and she could probably kill a vampire with those stilettos.

“Maybe they think it doesn’t matter, if—” Alex couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Megan’s eyes flicked to Janni again. “We can’t tell her yet. Not without some kind of confirmation.”

“We may never get confirmation.” Alex didn’t want to think of what Ostheim’s people would do with Ben’s body, but chances were they wouldn’t leave it anywhere it would ever be found.

She crossed her arms in front of the keyboard and hid her face in the crook of her elbow. “I know.”

He debated putting a hand on her shoulder. Screw it, he thought—she could shrug him off if she was offended by him crossing the employer/employee boundaries that he crossed on a regular basis anyway. She leaned into him, briefly, before leaping to her feet, sitting on the edge of the desk, and scrubbing at her cheeks with the heel of her hand. She kept her voice low. “I just … I was responsible for him, you know? And this happened to him on my watch and I messed up somehow.”

Alex tilted his head and frowned, because her sense of obligation for this whole massive screw-up seemed inflated. Yeah, she’d gone after Ben when he’d turned into a wolf, but that didn’t make it her deal. “If it’s anyone’s fault in this room, it’s mine. I’m the one who hired them to look into this industrial espionage thing. If I’d known it was Ostheim, I would never have gotten them involved.” He felt haunted. “It was monumentally stupid.”

He’d had Harris, his spare driver, pick Phelps’s widow up the previous day and bring her over so he could talk to her in person. He hadn’t fortified himself with his scotch beforehand, and it had been … really, really difficult. Mrs. Phelps hadn’t screamed at him—had, in fact, been nice, which made it that much harder. He’d sat on the living room couch with his head in his hands, after, to give himself time to recover before slipping his mask back on so he could be the person everyone expected him to be Out There.

Sometimes he hated being Alex Jarrett.

Megan’s jaw firmed. “Well, then, let’s put the blame squarely where it belongs, which is on Ostheim. So what are we going to do about it?”

“Hah! Gotcha, you bastard,” Janni said triumphantly.

Alex gave a guilty start. “What? What’d I do now?”

“Not you, Alex. Ostheim.” She jabbed a finger at her computer. “I bet this is the place, right here.”

“Why do you say that?” Megan asked.

“He hid it under about seven layers of dummy accounts, but it’s in that warehouse district he seems to be so fond of, and the city’s got cams set up there. Look at all that activity, in the middle of the night when every other place is shut down.” Jerking her chin, she said, “And there’s the man himself, going in last night, and coming out right before sunrise this morning with his lovely wife.”

“That’s pretty slick work, Janni,” Alex said.

“Ben taught me some things. Let’s go rescue him so he can teach me some more.” She stood up and checked her gun, racking the slide back and making sure she had a round in the chamber. “You wanted to show me how good you are with weaponry, Alex? Let’s go.”

“But—”

“Most of them are gone right now, just a few cars in the lot. They won’t be expecting us. We’ll go in, do some recon, and get Ben out if he’s there.”

“Okay, yes. But I think you should see this first.” He gestured at Megan’s laptop.

“What?” Janni scanned the email, and her expression crumpled for a moment. “Oh.” She swallowed hard, blinking. Then her chin came up. “You know what? It doesn’t matter if it’s a rescue or a recovery. It needs to be done.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Alex picked up his Beretta from his desk, where he’d placed it after killing the last lycan-bunny, and slipped it into his waistband.

“Alex?” Megan put her hand on his arm, and he stared at it, startled. “Be careful.”

He gave her a jaunty grin he didn’t feel. “I’m always careful, Miss Graham.”

O O O

Megan sat at her computer with her eyes closed for a few minutes after they left. Alex hadn’t known the reason she’d hidden her face in her arm was because her wolf was too close to the surface for comfort, and she needed to hide from him. She’d taken several seconds to get her eyes back to the right color. Again.

This week sucked.

She wondered if she’d let too much slip, with all that “responsibility” talk she couldn’t stop herself from spouting. Fortunately, the pack dynamic had gone right over Alex’s head, and he’d instead blamed himself. Maddening as he was about being accountable for his own safety, he was serious when it came to his employees—which was one reason that people, including herself, were fanatically loyal to him.

She’d caught him in the living room the previous day, while Ben and Chambliss had gone to get Janni, talking personally and earnestly to Phelps’s widow—telling her if she needed anything at all to call his private line and he’d arrange it, and Megan had slipped away before he saw her. Ben’s abduction on top of Phelps’s death couldn’t be good for his state of mind.

Megan still somehow thought this was her fault. Her wolf didn’t contradict her. And now she had to worry about Alex, too.

She hated to admit it, but she honestly thought that if Janni and Alex brought anything back … it would be a body.

Chapter Twelve

Ben’s eyes blinked open.

Breathe
.

Or … not.

Shit, he was dead. Apparently other people thought so too, because a blanket rested over his face and he wasn’t strapped to the table anymore.

His brow creased. If he was dead, he shouldn’t be feeling, well … anything. Right? And the blanket was soft and the table was cold and he was incredibly hungry and he had really sharp fangs—

Um. What?

He ran his tongue over his teeth. Fangs, upper and lower. He tried to get rid of them, told the wolf to go away and lie down, but it just panted at him in an amused fashion and sat there with its tail wrapped around its feet.

He cast backwards into his memory.

Vampire. Blood. Tubes and machines and McFoucher’s expression, which hadn’t been sad, exactly, but she hadn’t looked too happy either. And he recalled thinking that vampire blood in his own veins probably wasn’t the best idea ever.

Right before he died.

Except—he ran his tongue across his teeth again—he wasn’t dead,
per se
. And he’d grown a set of fangs, which had implications he wasn’t entirely comfortable with, but he was apparently going to have to deal. Because life wasn’t tired of flinging curveballs at his head yet.

Okay, so, vampire fangs. Fine. He hadn’t noticed Idna having them, so there was a way of making them disappear somehow. Frowning with concentration, he flexed something in his mouth and twitched when they snicked back to lie flush against his gums, inside grooves apparently made for them. Another flex, and they snapped forward. Awesome.

He was taking this a lot more calmly, he thought, than he ought to be. Where was the panic that always bubbled under the surface, waiting for the most inopportune moments to erupt?

It had been replaced by an uncanny quietude. For the first time in … forever, he was on an even keel. And that was almost as disturbing as waking up from the dead with quadruple fangs, along with a severe hunger that he intuitively knew wouldn’t be satisfied by anything less than hot human blood flowing down his throat in deep gulps fresh from a vein or, preferably, an artery.

Okay, that was just wrong. He closed his eyes for a minute and gripped the sides of the table, and his autonomic nervous system decided that breathing could commence again, even if he didn’t actually have to do so to keep from passing out.

And that made him aware of certain scents. The big bald tattooed werewolf—Nick, that was his name—was still in the room, along with a couple of other people, who were plain old everyday humans. McFoucher was gone, as were Ostheim and his wife.

Before waking up as a vampire, Ben would have hesitated. His wolf was smaller and not nearly as strong as a wolf created by whatever passed for “normal” among lycanthropes.

Now? He flexed his hands and bared his teeth. The steel of the table bent under his fingers. Nick had hit Janni.

And Ben was starving.

O O O

Alex pulled his ‘68 Mustang Fastback into the parking lot just as two other cars were heading out. Peeling out, more like, with squealing tires, revving engines, and panicked expressions on the drivers’ faces. He lifted a brow at Janni and parked, noting that only one other vehicle was left there. “This might be easier than we thought,” he said.

“Either that or it’ll be real bad news” was her gloomy rejoinder.

Leaving the car door unlocked in case they needed to make a quick escape, he pushed the door to the building open and looked around before motioning her inside behind him.

Janni shoved past him and poked a finger at his chest. “Look, Alex, I know you’re the
man
and all,” she whispered furiously, “but I’m the one with experience here. So I take point, got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, ducking his head. That was what he got for letting his instincts get the better of his common sense—even if she was ten inches shorter than he was.

They didn’t find anything in a thorough search of the ground floor, so they climbed the fire stairs to the next level. A deep growling sounded faintly down a corridor to their left, and they headed that way by mutual agreement. Janni stopped outside the doorway the noise came from and peeked in through the window, before spinning away and crashing back against the wall with a gasp. “
Whoa
.”

“What?” Alex’s eyes felt as big as dinner plates.

“Okay, I’ve seen my fair share of blood in this line of work.” She closed her eyes. “But I’ve never seen something where there should be a whole lot of blood but there isn’t
any
.”

“I—huh?”

“There’s body parts in there, Alex,” she hissed. “And they look torn off and fresh. But no damn blood.”

The growling hadn’t stopped, and it was accompanied by chomping and slurping. Alex steeled himself and had a look. His eyes slammed shut after two horrified seconds. A body lay on the floor, missing its throat, both arms at the shoulder, and one leg at the knee. One of the arms had been flung atop a lab table, pale and bloodless, covered with tattoos.

“At least that body isn’t Ben?” he managed, fighting to keep his stomach contents where they belonged.

“There’s that.” She sneaked another peek, cringing. “Oh. There’s a wolf.”

“Makes sense.” Alex frowned and squinted at the tableau. “Wait, the wolf’s Ben.”

“No way, Ben wouldn’t—” Janni stopped. “How do you figure?”

“The scars on his back made his fur grow in white streaks. Very distinctive, I noticed it when he wolfed the first time.”

She grabbed his arm. “But he’s eating that guy! What the hell did they do to him?”

Alex wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. The wolf’s head lifted, and he saw them through the glass. His ears flattened, and he backed out of sight behind a table. About a minute later, Ben stood up, human, bare-chested, wearing the jeans he’d disappeared in, and gave them a tight-lipped smile with half his mouth. Alex frowned at the bruises ringing his wrists, biceps, chest, and waist, and swallowed hard when he noticed the burn mark around Ben’s throat.

Ben pushed the door open. “Hey—oof.”

Because Janni had tackle-hugged him after stuffing her gun back into her jeans pocket. She buried her face in his chest and let out a sob. “I thought you were dead. What were you
doing
in there?”

“Taking care of some unfinished business. That guy hit you.” Ben wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her riot of curly hair, closing his eyes. “He won’t do it again.”

Alex repressed a shudder and swallowed some bile, remembering Ben’s threat that they wouldn’t find all the guy’s parts. “No, I guess he won’t.”

Ben was a whole lot calmer than Alex had expected him to be, and he wondered if their pet hacker was in shock. Alex himself would have been curled up in a corner with his arms over his head, and the fact that Ben wasn’t even breathing hard was … disquieting.

“Can we go?” Ben asked. “I’m sick of this place.”

“Yeah, sure.” Alex headed down the hall and noticed that Ben and Janni didn’t let go of each other as they followed. “You can tell us all about it on the way home.”

Ben made a noncommittal noise, and Alex remembered how he didn’t like to talk about things like this. They clattered down the stairs and out the door into the bright sunshine, and then Ben retreated abruptly back inside, skin smoking, hissing in pain, swearing inventively and at great length.

Janni stared in horror. “What—what did they do to you, Ben?”

Alex just squeezed his eyes shut and put his face in his hand as he added two and two. Bloodless corpse plus sun allergy meant— “Vampire.” His voice was muffled, and he’d never wanted to kill anyone as much as he wanted to kill Ostheim at this moment. “Shit. Did they do it on purpose?”

Ben rubbed his arms, which were already healing from the sun damage. “I don’t think so. It didn’t work the same way on the rabbits. I think I was supposed to die.” He smiled, only it wasn’t a smile, exactly, baring his teeth for the first time and showing, yes, fangs, top and bottom. Terrific. “Can’t say I’m sorry I disappointed them.”

Janni inhaled and stepped out into the sun. “Vampire? Ben?” Her eyes were wide. “Will you go all grr and try to eat us? Because the vampire bunnies are vicious, and what you did to that guy …” She tightened her lips. “Do you still have your soul?”

“Been watching Buffy reruns again?” Now Ben just looked tired. “It’s not like that, okay? I haven’t lost my moral compass; I ate that dude because he was one of the bad guys and he
hit you
. And, not to put too fine a point on things, they took three pints of my blood
before
they decided that using me as a live dialysis machine for a vampire would be an excellent idea, so I was strung out and damned hungry when I woke up
from being dead
. I can’t heal without food.”

He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Also, I’m not on the verge of a panic attack for the first time in, like, ever, and I’d like to stop and smell the roses before you break out the stakes and garlic. If that’s all right.”

“Janni.” Alex put his hand up, trying to salvage something out of this catastrophe. “He’s not going to eat us. I’ve met Idna at parties, okay? She’s perfectly civilized and doesn’t go around eating people just to eat them. I’m sure Ben has enough self-control to do the same.”

“
Thank
you,” Ben said, holding his hand out to Janni. “Honey, please …”

Janni took another step back. “I’m sorry. I just— I need some time to process this, Ben. Okay?”

He slid down the building until he was sitting and covered his face with the hand Janni had rejected. “I don’t blame you. This is crazy. Crazier.”

Janni walked over to the Mustang without another word, her posture stiff. She climbed into the passenger seat while Ben watched from between his fingers, his mouth pulled down at the corners.

Alex knelt beside him. “I’m sorry, man.”

“What a clusterfuck. I won’t blame her if she leaves. PTSD is one kettle of fish. A vamp-wolf-thing who can’t even go out in the sun is a whole other level of awful.”

“True.” Alex felt terrible. The weight of responsibility for this whole disaster weighed his shoulders. “Meanwhile, there’s the matter of getting you home without setting you on fire.” He pondered. “The panel truck is our best bet, I guess. Let me call Megan.”

“The panel truck with the rabbits in it?” Ben shook his head. “Even if it’s empty, just, no. Smells …”

“Hrmph.” Alex flipped through his mental catalogue of the many vehicles he owned. “I’ve got a little utility van with no windows except the ones in front. That work?”

“Better.” Ben put his hand on Alex’s arm. It was cold. “Alex? Thanks for not giving up.”

“Well, you know. None of us did.” He squeezed Ben’s shoulder. “I’ll call Megan and get it out here.”

O O O

Megan drove up in a little white utility van, and Ben wondered how many traffic laws she’d broken getting there so quickly.

With a slight frown, she took in the fact that Janni sat by herself in the Mustang. “What happened?”

Ben decided not to beat around the bush. “They accidentally vamped me. Janni’s not taking it super well.”

Megan opened her mouth, closed it, and then just sighed. “So that’s why you need the utility van. Sun allergy?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“All right. Hop in. Alex, we’ll meet you and Janni back at the house.”

Alex’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “Wait, what? I’ll drive Ben, you drive Janni.”

“I never learned how to drive a car with a stick shift, Alex. I can take Ben, it’s fine.” Megan crossed her arms and gave Alex a why-are-you-being-such-an-idiot look. Ben had been the victim of looks like that from Janni, and he cringed inwardly.

“What? That’s something everyone should know. We’ll have to teach you,” Alex said. “Not today, clearly, but soon.” And then he visibly switched gears back to the topic at hand. “But, Megan, he killed and ate a guy that had six inches and seventy pounds on him.”

“Then he’ll be full. Go, Alex.”

Ben squatted on his heels at the side opening of the van. His vision had gone sharper, and he wondered if his eyes had turned amber. Not angry, but … determined. “I wouldn’t hurt Megan, Alex. Or any of you. Under any circumstances.”

“Why not? Also, the eye color isn’t helping your case.”

Whoops. “Sorry.” Ben closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them his vision was back to what passed for normal these days. “You’re pack. And pack looks out for each other. Simple as that. Also, Megan’s alpha around here, and I’d never try to challenge that in a million years.”

“Megan’s alpha?” Alex looked offended. “What about me?”

Ben scoffed. “She runs your life, man. You couldn’t function without her telling you when to actually eat.”

“I sign her paychecks!”

“A machine signs my paychecks,” Megan pointed out.

“Well … I signed the machine that signs your paychecks.”

“You just go on thinking that,” Ben said as Megan climbed behind the wheel of the van and started it up. “See? Alpha.”

Defeated, Alex mumbled something incoherent and stomped over to his Mustang.

Ben pulled the side door shut with a certain amount of finality. He settled cross-legged on the floor, leaning his head back against the side. “Janni’s afraid of me,” he said with a weary sigh.

“It’s a lot for her to take in.” Megan pulled them out into the street.

“Hell, I don’t blame her. I’m half-afraid of myself.” Ben shivered a little, even though he wasn’t cold. “I didn’t even
hesitate
. Nick had hit Janni, I was hungry, and it was the most logical thing in the world to just …” He shook his head. “I don’t want to be That Guy, Megan, the guy who hurts people just because they make him mad. You know? But there’s a beast in here, and I’m not sure I can control it all the time.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “You learn to. Mostly. But the last few days have been tough on all of us.”

He remembered her kicking over the sniper in the kitchen and gave her a wry look. “Has it really been less than a week?” He stretched one leg out in front of him and rested his elbow on the other bent knee. No wonder he was exhausted. “Private detective work was supposed to be boring.”