Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

  “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.”

  Alex’s hand tightened on the phone so hard the plastic creaked. “That’s a human being, you unethical bastard.” Anger curdled his stomach.

  “And I’m sure that whatever it is he has running through his veins will save my wife’s life quite handily.” Ostheim tsked smugly. “It strikes me as quite hypocritical, Jarrett, that you’ve been
avoiding my calls for months, but now that I have something of value to you, you can’t wait to contact me. You might want to think on that.”

  Janni grabbed the phone. “Please, Mr. Ostheim. Please don’t hurt him. He hasn’t done anything to you.”

  The harsh bark of a wholly unamused laugh came over the line, and Ostheim shouted his next sentence loudly enough that they all heard. “He killed my nephew.”

  Janni stared, uncomprehending, at the instrument in her hand. “He hung up.”

  “We need to find him,” Megan said. “Now. Alex, where would they be?”

  Alex threw up his hands. “He’s a rich evil mastermind with offices all over the world. How should I know?”

  “He’s a desperate angry man with a sick wife that he’s loved for decades,” Megan countered. “Think.”

  Alex forced himself to sit still and shut up for a minute. “Well. If time’s a factor, they’re probably still in the area. So, one of his local labs, because he’d need the equipment. But, knowing Ostheim, he’s got a hidden lab or two or twelve squirreled away in the city, and I’m betting that’s where they’d take Ben.”

  Janni actually growled. “That doesn’t help us. Are you telling me that you don’t have anyone inside that company? Industrial espionage doesn’t cut both ways?”

  “I don’t have anyone so deep that they’d know about his secret underground lair.” She glared, and he relented. “Let me make a couple of calls. Although they probably won’t be returned until later.”

  “Better than sitting here doing nothing.”

  “Don’t you have any other cases you could be working on?” Alex paused in the middle of dialing. He should get her out of the line of fire, if at all possible, because this had gotten way too scary. Call him a chauvinist, but he didn’t like women getting hurt on his account. “Because we’ve solved mine, as least as far as what I hired you for.”

  Her eyes blazed. “If you think for a minute that I’m leaving here before we find Ben and fix the werewolf thing—”

  “No, no.” He raised his hands defensively. “Just, there’s not a whole lot you can do for now, and I’d hate for you to neglect your other clients because of me.”

  “It isn’t about you anymore, Alex.” She put her hand over her face. “And it hasn’t really been since Ben got taken the first time.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The low buzz of voices and the smell of rabbits brought Ben slowly awake. For a brief second, he had the same fight-or-flight response he’d had before, but a shining moment of clarity reminded him just how useless it had been last time, and he stopped, made a conscious effort to relax, and told himself to breathe. Slowly. In two, hold two, out two.

  He kept his eyes closed, because it was easier not to lose his shit if he couldn’t see—even though he could feel, with far too many nerve endings, how tied down he still was, and the fact that his arm had a needle in it. Sometime between the cage and the table his shirt had gone missing so they could affix heart monitor electrodes to his chest. But it would be worse, far worse, he knew, if he lost control again. That chain across his throat hadn’t been a joke. So. Slowly. In and out.

  The heart monitor gave him away, though. “Back with us, huh?” McFoucher’s voice. “Sorry about before.”

  Sure she was, and he was glad in a way that the cynical part of his brain still seemed functional. Her apology was belied by the fact that her tone was utterly clinical and her fingers not particularly gentle when she pulled down on his lower eyelid and shone a light on his face. “Open up.”

  He did, squinting, but closed back down when she let him go. Breathing as slowly as he could under the circumstances, though the rapidly-beeping heart monitor told anyone who cared just how stressed he was.

  “Good boy,” she said. Like she would to a dog.

  “Thirsty.” One-word sentences were about all he could manage right now.

  “I’ll bet.”

  He heard the sound of water running into a glass, and a straw hit the corner of his mouth. He sucked the liquid down his raw throat, feeling a little better.

  “Look, Lockwood,” she said with a hint of actual kindness he didn’t believe for a second. “I wasn’t kidding before when I said that you need to make this easy on yourself. We’ll get what we want regardless, and if you struggle, it’ll only piss us off.”

  He didn’t have anything left anyway. Mental and physical exhaustion weighed him down; he barely had the strength to drink the water she was holding for him. The wolf was howling about giving in, but the human smacked it down and told it to shut up. He wouldn’t make McFoucher any promises about cooperating, but right now? He wanted to lie here with his eyes closed and think about not much at all because he was just so damn tired.

  He wasn’t even aware of it when he fell asleep again.

  O O O

  “You poor bastard,” McFoucher murmured. She turned and set the glass on the counter. Noting with a tiny frown that Lockwood was shivering violently on the cold metal table, she grabbed a blanket from a linen cabinet and put it over him—not from any compassion on her part, she told herself—but because the subject going into shock and disrupting his physiology any more would adversely affect the experiment. “Do we have sick vampire rabbits yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nick said.

  “Good. Try the nanotech alone in one batch and the tech with his blood in another. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  An hour later, the rabbits they’d dosed with the subject’s blood were dead.

  “That’s not promising.” She made some slides and had a look through the microscope. “Oh. Huh.” She had assumed that the vampire rabbits could only be killed via the standard stakes through the heart, sunlight, or decapitation—but apparently she was wrong, because the mixture of rabbit and human blood had been lethal. Interesting. “Give some healthy rabbits the nanotech and then inject some sick vamp ones with their blood once they start showing signs of lycanthropy.”

  The vampire rabbits who’d been dosed with the nanotech alone hadn’t gotten any sicker, but neither had their condition improved. They’d stabilized at a level of “ill” that McFoucher was sure the boss would find unacceptable.

  They’d be working through the night on this. The bonus that Ostheim had promised made the time worth it. She wasn’t sure, however, that it was equally worth the toll on her professional ethics, and her conscience smote her again as she arranged the blanket over …

  The subject. She needed to keep thinking of him that way. It was easier.

  O O O

  Megan tapped on her datapad, hunting around LA County property records for places that Ostheim owned. She’d stumbled across three or four dummy corporations already, and she wondered how many she’d missed, cursing the lack of Ben to do this for her.

  Of course, if Ben were here, she wouldn’t be looking for Ostheim properties so she could find him.

  So far she’d eliminated several places for various reasons. That still left her with a dozen or so to check—and the dilemma of how to gracefully exit, since the only way she could think of to investigate the locations with any degree of accuracy and stealth was with her nose.

  Well. If she couldn’t exit gracefully, maybe ungracefully would be the ticket. She bent over and moaned, clutching at her abdomen.

  Alex looked over from his microscope with a lifted eyebrow. “A day early, Miss Graham?” And wasn’t it just like him to keep track of when she had her “period”? Board meetings were beyond him, but her body clock wasn’t. She wanted to smack him at times like this.

  “The last day or so has been rather stressful,” she pointed out, wheezing a little.

  “Do you need to go home and lie down?”

  “Might be best if I do.” She gathered her things.

  “Be careful?” His brown eyes regarded her worriedly. “Ostheim has what he wants, but I wouldn’t put it past him to get something extra out of my hide if he can.”

  “He’s probably busy—
” Using Ben as a guinea pig, she stopped herself from saying. “—but I can call you when I get home if you want.”

  “That would set my mind at ease, Miss Graham.” He went back to the microscope as if concerns about her safety were an everyday item on their agenda, but his back radiated tension.

  “Very well, Mr. Jarrett. If you haven’t heard from me within the hour, you may call the cavalry.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  She didn’t walk over to him and plant a kiss on top of his head for being so cutely protective, even though she wanted to. Instead, she left without another word.

  O O O

  McFoucher stared glumly at her test rabbits. She finally had a result that would be acceptable to Ostheim. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she should tell him. Even more unfortunately, she wasn’t sure she had a choice. Crossing her rich and powerful werewolf employer seemed like an unwise career move, not to mention an unwise life move. She’d seen the man’s manic obsessiveness when it came to finding a cure for his wife, and …

  She smoothed the dead blood donor rabbit’s fur, while the now-healthy vampire bunny snarled in the cage next door. A little thing like the death of a research subject wouldn’t even be a blip on Ostheim’s radar.

  Looking at Lockwood’s file again and the highlighted words killed Deiter in big bold letters, she gathered that the death of this particular research subject might be something that the boss would want anyway. If Lockwood died so that Idna would live, so much the better from Ostheim’s perspective.

  McFoucher wasn’t sure she’d signed up for this.

  O O O

  The next time Ben woke up, the room was spinning gently around him and his heart was pattering against his ribs fast enough that he noticed it. His limbs felt heavy and his head felt muzzy and he was incredibly thirsty. When had he rated a blanket? Not that it was helping; he was still freezing, aching from the cold metal table.