Pack Dynamics (9 page)

He wouldn’t want her pity, she told herself. But her own hands trembled, rattling her fork against her plate, and her eyes stung with unshed tears, a mixture of sorrow and anger. “I hope, I hope the people who did that to you are all
dead
,” she said furiously.

He tilted his head, appraising her, and bared his teeth in a mirthless smile. “They are. It was … untidy.”

“
Good
.” She was surprised at how protective she felt of him.

The smile softened. “You … are adorable when you’re mad. Fierce Hermia.”

They’d read
Midsummer Night’s Dream
in junior year English class together and memorized some of the scenes for extra credit—and he remembered the nickname he’d given her all those years ago.

A couple of her tears splashed onto the table, and he squeezed her hand. “It’s okay,” he said. That was clearly a gigantic lie, because it certainly wasn’t okay and he might never be okay again. Shouldn’t she be the one consoling him?

“Come home with me.” She wasn’t usually this impulsive, but the notion of him going off by himself was intolerable.

“I don’t expect you to—” he started.

She put her fingers over his mouth. “Call it comfort from an old friend. You shouldn’t have to do this by yourself, Ben.” She was almost in physical pain, seeing him like this.

He closed his eyes and dropped his head and nodded. She wondered how many nights he’d spent alone, fighting his demons. Too many, no doubt; the gun on his passenger seat told her all she needed to know about that. She hid a shudder at the thought that he might have lost the battle tonight if she hadn’t knocked on his window.

When they got to her little apartment, he offered to take the couch. She blinked several times. “What? No. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re both grownups, and I don’t sleep naked as a rule.” She retreated into the bathroom to change into her favorite pair of flannel penguin pajamas. He grinned crookedly when she came out, and she blushed.

Ben was a boxers-and-T-shirt man. She loaned him a tee that she’d bought at a zoo, oversized on her, but it fit him, especially since he’d clearly lost a good twenty pounds that he couldn’t afford since she’d seen him last. He turned to put his glasses on the dresser and shucked his dress shirt.

She couldn’t hide her gasp. The scars on his
back
—the ones around his wrists were dismaying enough, but they were nothing compared to the horror that criss-crossed his shoulders and spine.

Ben flinched at the gasp and hurriedly pulled the tee on with a muttered curse. Turning to face her, he gathered her in his arms. “Sorry. I didn’t think—”

She buried her face in his shoulder and whispered, “I thought I knew, but
seeing
it like that, oh, Ben …”

He didn’t say anything more, just brushed a tear off her cheek with his thumb, and they stood there like that for a few minutes before she backed them toward the bed, not letting go of him. They fell in together, and he stuck his nose in her hair while she tucked her head under his chin.

“What did they
do
to you?” she asked.

“I don’t want to dump—”

“If I didn’t want to be dumped on, I wouldn’t ask. And if you don’t talk about it, the internal pressure will shatter you, Ben.” Shatter him more, she thought. “This is a safe place. I won’t judge. I’ll just listen. All right?”

He rolled to his back and took a shallow, unsteady breath. “What they did to me wasn’t the worst part. It was what they did to
her
.” A pause before he continued. “Most of my unit was killed in the convoy ambush. Five of us lived. Prissy …” He swallowed.

“Prissy?” That didn’t sound like someone in the Army. Janni got up on an elbow and watched his face.

“Corporal Priscilla Hanson.” One side of his mouth curled up. “We called her “Prissy” for the same reason you name a white dog ‘Blackie.’ She thought it was funny. Tiny little spitfire. Smoked giant cigars. Cussed like a sailor. Cleaned up in our poker games.” He shook his head. “I loved her. So much.”

“Did she love you?”

“Hell if I know. You can’t—” A sigh. “Stuff like that’ll tear a unit apart. You keep it platonic if you’re smart. So I never told her. And they—” The words stuck in his throat.

She caressed his chest. “Take your time.”

“Knife against her throat. ‘Don’t you tell them a thing, Sarge,’ she said to me. And then she
spat
full in that fu— bastard’s face. And he.”

The hell of it was, Ben wasn’t crying. Janni was, though, dreading what would surely come next, silent tears streaming down her cheeks.

“So much blood. On them. On me. She died cursing them. Roundly.” His breath hitched, but his eyes were still dry. “I wish they’d killed me instead.”

“I’m so sorry, Ben.” It came out in a pitifully inadequate choked whisper, but it was what she had.

His arms tightened around her, even as the rest of him went slack, and he kissed her hair. “Thank you.” The words slurred, and a second later his breathing told her he’d fallen into an exhausted slumber.

He woke them both up later, screaming about needles and thrashing in the grip of a nightmare. She wrapped around him and kissed his temple and told him to breathe, that he was safe with her. He believed it, because he didn’t take long at all to drop back into a sleep that was dreamless, this time.

And, lying in the darkness beside him, rubbing his arm with the backs of her fingers and staring at the ceiling, she knew she’d made the right decision.

O O O

“Holy crap,” Megan said, for more than one reason. Janni had really thrown herself face-first into the situation. “He wasn’t going to kill himself in front of you.”

“He wouldn’t do that to me. Or anyone. It just happened to be me, there, at that particular moment. And he wasn’t going to chase me off with vague reassurances, because he knew if he did I’d blame myself for not stopping him. He told me that later.”

Janni’s arms tightened around her head. “That was almost two years ago. I moved in with him six months later, and we’ve been together ever since. And he was making so much progress, the nightmares have been getting less and less, like, one or two a month, except just lately he’s been having a tough time because it’s close to the anniversary of the date when the insurgents took him. Shit.” Her nails raked her scalp. “Not only that, but when he disappeared? I wondered—I wondered if it had gotten too much for him. And now I feel bad about thinking that, because he wouldn’t take off without a word that way, or at least a damn note. He just wouldn’t.”

She forced back a sob. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to go through it with him again, Megan. He’s had one hell of a setback here.”

“He seems to be taking it okay,” Megan said carefully.

“For now. He holds a lot inside. Sometimes he drinks when he can’t sleep. And he won’t take anti-depressants because—well, because.”

“Because why, Janni?” Megan asked gently. “It might be important, later.” Something was still off, and she wanted as much information as she could get.

Janni took a shaking breath. “I shouldn’t—” She stopped and scrubbed her face. “He doesn’t talk about it, and I’m not sure anyone knows but me and a couple of military psych types. I haven’t even told Mom. But … you know how there’s a huge heroin industry in Afghanistan? The insurgents that captured him—” She shook her head, and tears tracked down her cheeks. “Anyway. It’s given him mad needle fear and a terror of being addicted to anything that’d be pathological if he didn’t have a damn good reason for it.”

Megan filled in the blanks and filed away that piece of data. It explained a lot, actually, because if Ben was on something, he should have been a lot more stable. “He’s been through too much.”

“Yeah.” Janni ground her teeth. “If he hadn’t shot those people, I’d want to do it for him. Seriously. He’s the sweetest, gentlest guy I’ve ever known, and the fact that they did that to him, and then he felt like he had to kill them? Just
frosts
me. He never wanted to do that ever again …”

Megan’s wolf sympathized; she wanted to kill those men all over again for Ben, too. Somehow, when Megan wasn’t looking, “pack” had been expanded to include Ben and Janni. “What is it they say? A day at a time?”

“Yeah.” Janni sighed, hugged her knees for a second, staring at the wall, and then stood up and wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’d better get back there and make sure he hasn’t woken up and hacked into the mainframe at NASA or something just for fun.”

“Janni? Thanks for telling me.”

“Thanks for asking. Most people don’t; they just make assumptions.”

Megan bumped her shoulder companionably. “I work for Alex Jarrett. Making assumptions is dangerous.”

They exchanged rueful looks.

“Why do women go to the bathroom in groups?” Alex asked as they came back into the lab.

“So we can talk about men,” Megan said with an evil grin.

“Yeah?” He was unabashed. “What’d you say about me?”

“That you have an ego big enough to fill six houses this size and still spill out the doors.”

“Only six? I’m disappointed. Clearly, I’ll have to work on that.”

“Don’t hurt yourself. Where’d Chambliss go?”

“Upstairs to do butler … stuff. I guess.”

O O O

Janni let their banter wash over her as she climbed onto the bed next to Ben. He was still sleeping, although somewhat restlessly, and she slid her arm under his head with the ease of long practice and pillowed it on her shoulder. He curled into her body, throwing an arm and a leg across her and relaxing. She combed her fingers through his hair and frowned.

“He’s … wow, he’s burning up. Should he be this hot?”

Alex’s head swiveled around. “The nanotech makes you run hotter than normal, but how hot is he?” He wheeled the office chair over and felt Ben’s forehead. “Yeah … let me give Reed a call.”

He picked up the phone and punched a button. “Mike? We’ve got some concerns about Ben … What? No, he’s not acting weird or anything, why would he do that? … O-kay. Anyway, I know the nanotech can put you in, like, a sort of fever state? … Yeah, I’ve been through it often enough myself. But this seems, I don’t know, kind of over the top. I’d like it if you could come down sooner rather than later and check him out.… That’d be great. Thanks.” He hung up. “He’s on his way.”

Janni’s arms tightened around Ben. “Acting weird?”

“Well, it can make you run a fever while it revs up your metabolism. And sometimes some pretty wild hallucinations come along with it.”

She closed her eyes. “You gave the ex-Army Ranger with PTSD something that’ll make him hallucinate—when he has flashbacks enough as it is, and this is nearly the anniversary of when he got captured by insurgents? Seriously?”

“Wait, what? You’re kidding. Anniversary? Shit.” Alex scrubbed his face with his hand. “He had a flashback, I think, when he woke up from his surgery, but I didn’t tie it to the date on the Silver Star citation. Hell, I don’t even know what today’s date is; I have Megan for that stuff. But it’s not like we had a choice. Dammit.”

“What can we do?” Janni asked.

“Mike’ll be here in less than an hour. Anniversary? Really?”

“Really,” Janni confirmed. “He’s been a little erratic the last month or so, which is why my mom wrapped most of the cases and went to Australia. She wanted to give him a break.” She snorted. “We thought this one would be
easy
.”

“Could the timing of this suck worse?” Alex squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead, swearing under his breath. “I am so sorry. If you guys want to cut and run, I wouldn’t blame you at
all
.”

“That’d be a neat trick if we weren’t already hip-deep in it,” Janni said. “We’ll see it through.”

O O O

Megan’s nose twitched. Something about Ben was definitely off, and getting worse. She racked her brain for something she could say without outing herself. “I’ll be right back,” she mumbled, grabbing the phone on her way out and dialing Mike’s office at the lab rather than his cell.

As she’d hoped, the line was picked up by Mike’s assistant, Brandon Kincaid. “Brandon, Megan Graham. Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, Miss Graham. What’s up?”

“Has Mike been acting, I don’t know, strange, or anything, lately? What’s he been working on?”

“Just normal stuff. Why? Is something wrong?”

She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. It might be nothing.” It wasn’t nothing. “I guess I’ll ask him when he gets here. I just wanted a heads-up if it was something weird.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Graham, I don’t know of anything out of the ordinary.” She could almost hear him shrug over the line.

“All right. Thanks anyway.” She ended the call. “Dammit.” Whatever she smelled on Ben had the tang of the vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was.…

And then it hit her. “
Shit
.”

O O O

Brandon hung up the phone with shaking hands. Yeah, it was high time he bugged out, because he really didn’t want to be around when the whole thing went to hell. He debated calling Ostheim, decided he couldn’t be bothered, and started cleaning out his desk. With any luck, everyone would be too busy dealing with the fallout of this little uncontrolled experiment to wonder where he’d gone.

O O O

Mike stood on the porch, switching his medical bag back and forth from hand to hand, until Chambliss answered the bell.

“They’re down in the lab, sir,” the butler said.

“Thanks, I know the way,” he answered with a confidence he didn’t feel.

And when he saw Ben, any remaining confidence he had evaporated. This had gone beyond the realm of bad right into disastrous. Ben lay asleep or possibly unconscious on the bed, shivering and sweating, while Janni mopped his brow with a wet cloth. Nothing overt had manifested yet, but time wasn’t on his side.

“I need to get Ben sedated and back to my own lab as soon as possible,” Mike said. “He’s having a reaction to the nanotech. Maybe allergic.”

“He’s gotten much worse just since we called you,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. What’s going on, Mike?”

“No time to explain.” If he could just get Ben out of here—