by L. A. Banks
Hunter had purposely knocked her unconscious and the reason why broke over her in horrifying clarity.
Hunter was infected.
She felt a scream of rage and grief build in her throat over the thought that something like this was happening. But she swallowed it. There would be time to grieve later.
Survival was imperative and she needed to find her gun.
Chapter 3
Clarissa McGill pulled the unmarked military car to a stop before a dilapidated building in the ninth ward and looked around. The guys with her in the four-door Ford sedan just gaped for a moment, stunned. Even after the cleanup, evidence of Hurricane Katrina still pocked a devastated New Orleans. She dragged her stubby fingers through her short, blond bob, cringing that her hair was damp and oily again. But that was the Big Easy—constantly humid. At least it wasn’t summertime when the extra fifty pounds of heft she carried could give a person a heart attack in the shade.
In this environment, one could literally wring the air out and make a puddle from it. Polyester pants and a top were stifling, but jeans on a long drive would have felt like stomach surgery sans anesthesia. To her way of thinking, New Orleans had more things than thick humidity to give a grown man pause, anyway. That was the least of the bioteam’s concerns.
She scanned the house again to be sure they were at the right address. The region had primordial stamped all over it . . . she bet the beginning of a lot of species probably came up from the swamps here, the Mississippi Delta, and down into what was now the Everglades. She and Sasha had to stick together on this as the only females in the PCU, and not follow the guys’ lead. Clarissa squared her shoulders. Female intuition was still more accurate than Bradley’s satellites and Winters’s databases.
However, no matter what she said, she knew that being the team’s biologist and psychic wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans—she could tell by looking at the guys’ expressions that they trusted their own eyes more than her second sight right now. At forty-three years old, she’d had enough experience with frightened individuals on paranormal-monitoring missions to know that. She didn’t have to try to read their minds to know what they were thinking: The place they were supposed to hole up in and set up a base station in was a rodent-infested dump.
Mark Winters, their resident computer specialist and the feisty, youngest member of the team, gave her a glance of concern. Fear and uncertainty dueled in his hazel eyes and made his baby face seem even younger. His mousse-spiked hair now seemed wilder, given his expression, and she wondered if he’d make it through the night without jumping out of his skin.
“Okay, maybe it’s me,” Winters said, his voice hitching as he glanced around like a nervous rabbit, “but this looks like downtown Baghdad after Shock and Awe. There’s no sign of even NOPD down here—like, do the New Orleans cops even drive down these streets? Why can’t we just mosey on down to the French Quarter where it’s been rehabbed?”
Bradley sighed, his normal long tether of patience clearly wearing thin by the strain. He blotted perspiration from his forehead with the back of his forearm and then returned his horn-rimmed glasses to the bridge of his aristocratic nose with a precise shove. But as he leaned forward to address Winters from the backseat, he still looked over the tops of his glasses with steel-blue eyes as though he were an annoyed professor. A distant streetlight and the moonbeams danced across his prematurely graying salt-and-pepper hair. Clarissa stifled a smile and waited for the cool retort that she knew Bradley would deliver with perfect British diction.
“Sasha said to go off radar and undercover. This is undercover, and probably the best place to get word from the local warlock community about what’s shaking.” The shadow from Bradley’s athletic frame and the confident tone employed by his ten-year-age seniority loomed over Winters’s skittish, lanky build within the vehicle. “Besides,” Bradley continued, undaunted when Winters didn’t immediately challenge him, “I need a comm post where a maid won’t accidentally trip over my satellite gear or, worse, cross a divination circle I’ve laid.”
“Hey, you’re the dark arts specialist, not me and Rissa . . . so if you get a lead, we can just as easily low jack you and pick you up on a screen from a nice little bed and breakfast.” Mark’s voice faltered as he glanced around at the desolate scene beyond the car windows. His gaze stayed locked on the mud-stained, dilapidated, leaning structures and abandoned houses as feral dogs roamed the shadows with their noses to the ground on the perpetual hunt for garbage.
Bradley released a weary sigh. “Isn’t going to happen. The power of three, blah, blah, blah, and we were given express orders not to split up under any circumstances. So, where I go, you go. Now stop whining and get your skinny ass out of the car.”
“What happened to all the FEMA funds, huh?” Emboldened by fear, Mark crossed his arms over his narrow chest, challenging his older teammate. “I thought they said on the news they were rebuilding this entire area, but it still looks like the storms happened yesterday. Not to mention, we’ll probably all walk out of here with some kinda deadly bacterial infection or frickin’ cancer from the toxic sludge hanging around. You can’t shoot a virus! And what about those dogs? They could have rabies. You can even see their rib bones. Like, what if they’re werewolves too hungry to turn into anything more than mutts? They could still be deadly, ya know—if a bunch of ’em gang up on us.”
“Get out of the car, Winters,” Clarissa said, smiling. “That’s one of the reasons you got cholera shots and they sent a biologist along—moi. So, if you start feeling a little queasy . . .”
“Yeah, not to mention, if you start having the yen to howl at the moon, let McGill know, kid,” Bradley said, teasing Mark as he opened the back passenger-side door.
“I knew something was wrong when they gave us freaking cholera shots, mosquito nets, and a bunch of crap to ward off malaria. I thought we were going somewhere exotic, like the Amazon—not somewhere in the supposedly developed free world! This is the freakin’ U. S. of A., are you hearing me? Why does Trudeau get to gallivant off to the pristine wilderness, huh? This shit is for the birds—and need I remind you that the murder rate in New Orleans has jumped like ninety percent since Katrina?”
“Precisely why we’re here,” Clarissa said, running her fingers through her short, blond hair again and turning her stout frame around in her seat with effort. “So knock it off. We’re to feed Trudeau the ground intel she needs. We know that the spike in murders and lawlessness is fueled partially by economic issues, but also something else. The entire graveyard system here was compromised by the flood. Everything that should have been buried floated to new locations and/or was exposed to the sun. Great location to have conversations with the dead, undead, and a few species in between.”
“Correct,” Bradley said, leaning into the car with his arm draped over the hood. “This is one of the way stations for paranormal black market activities and is still the reigning capital. Between local voodoo priests, warlocks, resident seers, and swamp madams, not to mention the old Vampire aristocracy, and a few zombie kings, we ought to be able to begin to pick up some patterns. But the Big Easy is on the comeback. All statistics aside, it doesn’t all look like WWIII here, so relax.”
“Or get shot, or eaten, or turned into a zombie,” Mark muttered.
Bradley shrugged and rounded the car to open the trunk. “Yeah, one of the above, or you could look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll just get bitten by a cute female Vampire and live forever.”
A sleek black wolf, slight of build, dashed through the underbrush. He released a rallying howl that made Bear Shadow look up from the card game he’d been engaged in with Woods and Fisher. The massive warrior stood slowly, lifting his nearly three-hundred-pound, muscular frame out of the groaning wooden chair. Woods glanced at Fisher, cards frozen in their hands.
“What is it, dude?” Fisher asked, his voice tight and nervous.
Woods’s line of vision studied the way the huge Ute Indian’s ears mo
ved slightly. If something crazy was about to go down, then he and his partner, Fisher, needed ammo. In hand-to-hand, Fisher was good with a knife—tall, lanky, a Kentucky-bred blond who had seen his fair share of trailer park brawls. Add that to the Special Forces training they’d had, and it was all good. But, still, from what he’d seen of the Shadow Wolves, even he wasn’t sure he could take one down—and he had a height and weight advantage on Fisher.
Woods raked his fingers through his dark brown hair, which was almost shoulder length now, and a far cry from his once clean-cut, military appearance. Ragged stubble bordered his jawline. It had been a little over a month and a half since the brass thought they’d died in action, and now something was about to pop off that could indeed end their lives. He could tell Fisher was thinking the same thing; it was in the way Fisher had smoothed his palm over his reddish-blond beard. Bear Shadow hadn’t answered Fisher’s question, but kept tilting his head like a huge hunting dog listening to the forest beyond the cabin window. Something was wrong; it was a killing season—he could feel it.
“Is it your clan contact? Is the lieutenant with him?” Woods pressed, panic bubbling within him.
“Wait here,” Bear Shadow commanded in a low rumble. “Trouble. Our lookout picked up Werewolf scent in the territory.”
Within an instant he’d opened the cabin door, slid out of his clothes to transform into a massive brown wolf, and then was gone.
Woods and Fisher simply stared at each other for a moment.
“Even though it’s more elegant than what we saw Rod go through, it’s gonna take a long time for me to get used to seeing them do that,” Fisher admitted quietly.
Woods nodded and got up to lock the door. “I just hope I don’t have a gun in my hand if I see it at night. Hard to tell who’s on our side or not.”
Xavier Holland’s private cell phone vibrated on his hip. As project header and head geneticist for the PCU, his study subjects had to have twenty-four-hour access to him. But they were more than lab rats to be studied and watched. They were friends . . . family, young people who had been terribly abused by the hand of fate.
As soon as he saw the non-number in the display he walked outside to his backyard. He could never be sure if his Colorado home just outside of the NORAD complex had been bugged again, even though he’d been given the strictest assurances that it hadn’t. Supposedly this was a brand-new day, new era of brass after General Donald Wilkerson’s death. Sasha Trudeau had proven herself, no less than he’d proven how bad the genetics experiments had gone under Wilkerson’s mania.
But he’d been a Special Ops military man too long to believe the hype. Eyes were still everywhere. Old blood samples treated with demon-infected Werewolf toxin that could potentially cause a pandemic outbreak were still missing. On the third ring, he picked up the cell phone that had been procured by underground means. He knew the caller’s voice, and this person wasn’t generally given to communication by technology or panic. However the strain was clear in his voice the moment he said hello.
“What’s wrong?”
“He’s had a spike again. Fourth one in many, many years. You were there for the first three. . . . This may be the last one before we must do what breaks my heart.”
“Are you sure?”
Silence.
“Yes. It came in a vision.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t know, but my sense is bad.”
“Have you been in communication with him?”
“No.”
This time Xavier Holland was quiet. Sasha was with Hunter. The bond between the elderly men on the phone went all the way back to the beginning of both young warriors’ lives. They would have to speak quickly without disclosing names. If Silver Hawk had called him, with his voice tight and rough, his Shadow voice, then his old friend was on the move.
“Do you have some of the antidote left?” Holland waited, worrying, not sure how to do a handoff under the severe scrutiny that followed the general’s assassination.
“It is old, possibly expired . . . could do more harm than good,” Silver Hawk finally said.
“Perhaps a Silver Shadow could line this cloud of worry?” Xavier said cryptically, inviting the old Ute to come to him in Shadow Wolf form, hopefully undetected.
“Perhaps . . . but where is there no worry, my friend?”
Xavier glanced around his backyard. “I meditate daily out in the yard while gardening . . . to reduce stress, especially by my roses.”
“That is a good method—man, nature, and the Great Spirit.”
The call connection went dead and Xavier Holland kept his eyes on the horizon. The call had lasted just long enough not to be traced. Now all he had to do was figure out how to get a few filled hypodermic needles out of the labs at NORAD and secreted away beneath his roses.
Sasha looked up quickly, bowie knife in hand. Hunter had returned but hadn’t taken any precautions for stealth. Unlike his normal, nearly silent footfalls, he’d simply trudged back through the snow and passed her almost without looking at her to enter the tent. Moments later he emerged with a toothbrush in his mouth and one of the canteens in his grip, and then went to stand before the dying fire to brush his teeth.
“Guns are downwind from the tent by the moose carcass. Just wanted a fighting chance to explain before you opened up a clip of silver shells on me.”
His tone was weary, his delivery flat before he spit out foaming toothpaste on the ground. The residue in his mouth made him look rabid and she glanced away to shake the terrible thought.
Sasha sheathed the knife in her back jeans pocket but didn’t move toward the weapons stashed by the carcass fifty yards away. “What happened?” she asked more quietly than intended.
Hunter didn’t turn around or immediately answer, just kept brushing his teeth, every so often spitting against the embers, which responded with angry hisses. His eyes finally met hers, and the expression in them was a mixture of sadness and defiance.
He lifted the canteen. “I take it you won’t be needing this?”
She didn’t answer, just stared at him.
“Yeah, thought not,” he said in a disgusted tone, then opened it up and doused his hair, face, and shoulders with its crystal-clear contents.
She watched the pure mountain water cascade through his long, jet-black hair, wetting his dark skin till it glistened. Sadness so profound made her lungs feel like they were about to burst within her chest. It just wasn’t fair! She couldn’t go through this a second time. After having to put down Rod, how did one take out a lover, a friend, someone who’d been her partner, her most trusted companion in life, only six weeks later? Sasha blinked back the tears as she watched the water spill over Hunter’s abraded neck, trying to shake the memory of her hands caressing that part of him to travel over his bulk of muscles along his shoulders and down his back.
When she’d had to shoot Rod during his transformation, her heart had shattered. If she’d have to put a bullet in Hunter’s skull, she knew she might as well have to put one in her own. As it was right now, she could barely breathe from the grief. She couldn’t even get her body to function as a soldier’s. Her mind told her to go get the stashed weapons, but she couldn’t move. Soon her arms were around her waist and her voice repeated her previous question on a very shaky murmur that sounded like a plea.
“What happened?”
“I got infected,” he said, flinging the spent canteen away from him. “Didn’t know it at the time, but shit happens.”
Paralyzed, she watched him angrily stride away toward the carcass, kick it over, and extract a sack from beneath it. She didn’t move as he neared her, flung the weapons in her direction to catch, and began breaking down the campsite.
“When we went after Guilliaume and Dexter . . . through the demon doors in the other realms?” She held the satchel of guns and ammo clips loosely at her side.
“This shit began before I was even born,” he said through his teeth with a snarl. “You
know how my mother died—you know how Doc saved me with Pop.”
“But it’s been dormant for all those years!” she suddenly shouted as though arguing with God. Bottled up emotions were making her entire body tremble as she began to talk with her hands and then suddenly cast away the weapons bag. “You’re a Shadow Wolf, born naturally, not made in a fucking petri dish like me! We can’t get the demon-infected Werewolf virus, and that’s why we’re the only ones best suited to hunt them. I don’t care what happened when you were a baby! Your immune system threw it off. You’ve lived with it, beat it, the infected Werewolf virus was—”
“Always dormant in my system, Sasha! That’s why I was a goddamned outcast to the clan, even though I was strong enough to take alpha status!”
She rounded on him, preventing his retreat toward the equipment. “No. This was an aberration. Something had to screw with your metabolism, and we’ve gotta find out what it was.”
He released a hollow laugh. “I already know what it was. I’m staring at the catalyst.”
“That is complete bullshit,” she said, moving with him to shadow his attempts to get away from her. “We’ve been together for over a month.”
Hunter stopped trying to evade her and stared at her head on, counting off the charges with his fingers. “Do the math, Sasha. My mother was savaged while I was in her womb and I got the virus directly into my bloodstream before my grandfather could cut me out and sever the umbilical cord. Contagion hits an infant’s system. The only reason I lived through the convulsions or even survived without brain damage is because Doc was there with meds. I spiked in puberty, then again at twenty-five when all wolves spike for dominance battling. Now—”
“But you weren’t re-infected for over thirty years,” she argued, ignoring his logic.