Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

  “All part of our friendly service,” he answered, shutting the door and squiring her toward the elevator. His hand was inside his jacket, though, and he was vigilant, scanning the area for threats and giving the lie to his easy words. She clutched her purse a little tighter and looked around too, but the threats were hiding behind pillars and cars—

  A red spot bloomed on Phelps’s white shirt, barely to the left of his tie, at the same time a shot echoed through the garage. Realization dawned, and Janni screamed as Phelps dropped to his knees and then braced himself on his hands, gazing up at her.

  “Run,” he rasped, and collapsed.

  Heart pounding, she sprinted for the street, and witnesses, but didn’t get far. She’d jammed her hand inside her purse and her finger was on the trigger of her .380 before she’d even thought about what she was doing.

  Three men caught her from behind, spinning her around, and she screamed again, flailing and kicking, struggling fruitlessly to escape. Her finger convulsed and the gun went off inside her bag, blowing a hole in the bottom of it and sending a bullet into the leg of one of her assailants before the purse went flying to land under the limo.

  The other two weren’t fazed, however, and the last thing she saw was a fist heading toward her face.

  O O O

  Ben eyed the clock in the lower corner of his computer screen with concern. Janni was supposed to call him when she got done with the audition, but his phone had remained silent for far too long, and now he was worried. Especially since she had to be at work by one, but one had come and gone with no word. His chest was tight, and his thumbs worked at the handcuff scars. Back and forth, back and forth.

  He’d been relegated to the upstairs living room again, since Alex had deemed it necessary to kill another scary rabbit, and the basement was full of normal rabbits anyway. His wolf was itchy enough just knowing about the bunnies without being in the same room with them. Megan wandered in and out, checking his state of mind, noticing him getting more and more restive with each passing quarter hour.

  At one thirty, too nervous to wait any longer, he picked up his phone and dialed Janni’s number. It went straight to voicemail, so he called her boss at the catering company.

  “I was just about to call you,” Renee said. “Where’s Janni? It’s not like her to be late without letting me know.”

  “She’s not there?” A cold snake of worry curled up in his stomach and commenced rattling its tail.

  “No. Is she sick or something?”

  “Um, something.” Ben made some excuse or other that he couldn’t remember five minutes later, hung up, and clattered downstairs. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Alex was doing who-knew-what to one of the rabbits, but his head snapped up. “What?”

  “Have you heard from Phelps?”

  Alex looked at his watch and swore. “Megan?”

  She pulled her phone out and dialed. “No answer.”

  “GPS?”

  Megan pushed some buttons. “The car’s at Ben and Janni’s place.”

  Hair sprouted on Ben’s back and claws tipped his fingers. “They should have left there hours ago …”

  “Megan, get Jeremy over there, please,” Alex said.

  She made the call. “He’s on his way, with a team.”

  Ben’s phone rang, making them all jump. He looked at the screen before answering with mingled relief and apprehension. “Janni? Where are you?”

  “Shut up and listen.” Male voice, not Phelps, damn, damn, damn, and Ben turned the speaker on so everyone could hear. “We have something you want, and you have something we want.”

  “Ben?” Janni’s voice. “Don’t—!” The sound of someone getting smacked resounded over the line.

  “Motherfucker,” Ben growled through fangs. “Touch her again and I don’t care what it takes, I’ll hunt you down and kill you so dead they won’t even find all the parts.”

  The man ignored the threat and read off an address in the warehouse district. “Bring Mike Reed’s research with you, and we’ll work a trade. Your girl for the data. I’m feeling generous, so you’ve got two hours. Call the police and she dies.”

  The connection cut off, and Ben stared at the instrument in his hand before, very carefully, placing it on the desk rather than flinging it across the room like he wanted to. His breath came in short sharp gasps between bared and clenched teeth, a mixture of rage and panic turning his vision black around the edges, and the wolf was close, too close, to coming out. When had his knees hit the floor?

  Megan appeared beside him, her nails pricking his shoulder through his T-shirt. “Stop, Ben. We’ll get her back. Control it.”

  Easy for her to say; she’d been doing this a lot longer than he had. But she’d knocked him on his ass as easily as if he’d been a toy poodle before, and, in the back recesses of his mind, he had no doubt she could and would do it again. He swallowed, closed his eyes, put his lips and his teeth and the hair on his back down. “If they do anything to her …”

  “I’ll help you get even,” Megan assured him, pitched too low for the others to hear. He could smell how pissed off her wolf was. “But for now we just have to get her back.”

  “We can’t, we can’t give them the research, who knows what they really want it for—” Ben started.

  “I have a pretty good idea,” Alex said. “And I’m not sure I have much of an issue with giving it to them for that reason. The problem is what they’re going to do with it after, if they’ve even gotten that far.”

  “Do we have to give them everything we have?” Ben asked.

  “I think they’re fishing and have no idea how far along Reed was.” Alex bared his teeth. “We can doctor it appropriately. Let’s get to work; we don’t have much time.”

  O O O

  As they got the laptop and notes ready, Ben had to argue long and hard to persuade Alex to stay at the mansion instead of coming along as extra firepower.

  “We can’t afford to have them grabbing you, Alex,” Ben said with exasperation. “And how much experience do you really have with guns anyway?”

  “I have a range right here in the basement,” Alex pointed out. “I can hit what I aim at.”

  “That’s not good enough.” Ben crossed his arms. “Have you ever pointed a gun at a human and pulled the trigger?”

  “Well. No.” Alex’s cell phone rang. “Tell me something good, Jeremy.” He listened, deflating, and put his face in his hand. “Shit … Yeah. All right, thanks.” He put the receiver down and sat there, uncharacteristically silent.

  “Phelps is dead,” he finally said. “Shot in the chest.”

  Megan sank into a chair with her hand over her mouth. Speechless.

  “That’s it,” Ben said. “You’re staying, Alex, if I have to tie you down.”

  “Yeah.” Alex’s voice was hoarse, his eyes haunted. “Fine. I have to talk to Phelps’s wife anyway.”

  Ben gathered the notes and the laptop that they’d ginned up into a messenger bag. He’d partitioned the drive of the computer, which wasn’t actually Reed’s, and added all sorts of security measures to it, and he’d tell whoever was at the handoff that they’d had no success breaking into it. By the time the bad guys figured out they’d been snookered, he’d be long gone with Janni.

  At least, that was the plan. He stared at his shaking hands and realized he was in no shape to drive. Chambliss, who was apparently an expert at doing exactly what people needed, volunteered. When Ben protested, he said equably, “I’m ex-military as well, Master Ben, and I’m not decrepit yet despite my apparent age.”

  As they pulled up in front of the warehouse, Ben’s phone rang. “Come in alone and unarmed,” said the person on the other end. “Any funny stuff, and you can watch your girlfriend die.” The call ended with a click.

  He would have felt better going in with a gun, but he was a fully loaded werewolf, so he guessed he didn’t really need a weapon. He gathered his sc
attered wits and tried to calm himself, falling back on battle training. This was really no different than walking into an enemy neighborhood in Afghanistan.

  “Be careful, Master Ben,” Chambliss said, exhibiting a calm Ben had no idea how he accomplished.

  “No worries, Chambliss,” he answered, more jauntily than he felt. “We’ll be out in no time.”

  “I’ll have the car ready to go. You and Janni just jump into the back seat.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ben pushed the door to the warehouse open, walking into the echoing, empty space with his hands spread at his sides, his thumb hooked through the strap of the messenger bag. His eyes took in the room, the catwalks two stories overhead, an exit at the far end, the broken windows up high, looking for outs in case the front door became blocked somehow.

  It wasn’t promising. Two men stood up on the catwalks, one at his ten o’clock, the other at his two, both aiming rifles at him. Thirty feet away at his twelve, two more men, with Janni, arms bound behind her, gagged and blindfolded, between them. One, who was bald and covered with tattoos, held a semi-auto handgun to her head.

  Even this far across the room, Ben could smell her terror, see the bruise that marred her face, hear her gasps of fear. Breathe, he reminded himself yet again. Letting the wolf off the chain was so, so tempting, but wouldn’t do any good right now. “I’ve brought Reed’s laptop and his notes. Let her go.”

  “Walk halfway here, set the computer in the middle of the floor, and step away from it,” the one with the gun said. It was the same voice he’d heard on the phone, and Ben’s wolf swiveled its ears that way and bared its teeth. “Once we’re sure it’s what we want, you can have her.”

  Ben did as he was told, trying to look small and harmless. “I hope you guys have better luck with it than we did,” he said as he stood back. “We weren’t able to break his encryption. I barely got it to boot up.”

  The thug not holding the gun came forward and removed the computer from the bag, opened the lid, and pushed the power button. A few minutes later, after pounding ineffectually on the keys, he grunted. “Yeah, it’s like he said. It’s going to take a while to crack.” He shuffled through the papers inside the bag. “Good notes, though. We should be able to do something with this while the techies poke the laptop.” The notes were utter nonsense, but this guy apparently didn’t know enough to know that.

  “There. You’ve got what you want,” Ben said. So close. “Let her go.”

  The thug with Janni yanked on the rope binding her wrists, freeing them, and pulled the blindfold off, pushing her in the back at the same time. She ran forward and stumbled into Ben’s arms.

  He pulled the gag off, kissed her forehead, and spun her around. “Door, now, go. I’m right behind you.”

  “Quick, Ben,” she whispered. “That one’s a—”

  The tattooed guy had followed her, and Ben went cold when he caught his scent. “Run, Janni. Don’t look back.”

  “Yeah, I think the boss will want you,” the man, who wasn’t a man, said. Werewolf, and he’d figured out what Ben was. Ben turned to follow Janni out, and made it three steps before one of the rifles on the catwalk hissed. A yellow-feathered dart imbedded itself in his shoulder.

  “Ben!” Janni cried, looking back, he’d told her not to do that, dammit.

  “Go.” He managed to yank the dart out and toss it away as she dashed out the door. But he only made it two more steps before his legs turned to rubber and the tattooed guy tackled him anyway. Tried to Change, failed. A hand fisted in his hair and smacked his head against the concrete.

  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.