Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

  They entered the Jarrett Biologicals campus and parked in the deep shade on the north side of the twelve-story lab building, where Ostheim’s limo awaited them. Ostheim pulled Idna out and cradled her in his arms as they stopped behind him. She was unconscious. She looked dead, but, hey, vampire, and she wasn’t dust and bones, so McFoucher guessed they still had hope.

  “Inside,” Jarrett said, and they trailed behind him like obedient ducklings.

  McFoucher let Ostheim go in front of her, because she didn’t really want to turn her back on him, although he hadn’t reacted to her presence with anything more than a lifted eyebrow.

  Jarrett led them through a labyrinth of hallways, stopping in one room for a dose of stem cells, and into a surgical suite. The few people they met took in his single-minded aspect and gave them a wide berth.

  Ostheim laid Idna tenderly on the bed, but Jarrett didn’t stand on ceremony. He tore her blouse open, scattering buttons, and placed heart monitor electrodes, while Ostheim stood back and stewed.

  “Have you been drinking, Jarrett?” her old boss rumbled.

  “When have I not?” her new one shot back.

  “Point. This will work?”

  “I already told you I’m not making any promises, Ostheim. Look, full disclosure, okay, so you know exactly what’s going on.” Jarrett ticked the points off on his fingers. “One, she’s farther gone than Ben was. Two, I had Ben’s own stem cells, and donor cells didn’t work well on my bunnies. Scratch that, they didn’t work at all. Three, she started as a vampire, and added the lycanthropy via nanotech after years of being one. Ben was exactly the opposite, and he didn’t have years, he had days, and he wasn’t sick nearly as long as she’s been. Four—”

  He glanced at the flat heart monitor. “She doesn’t have a heartbeat at all, and Ben had a couple per minute. More after I hit him with his own stem cells. Starting a heart that’s not going is way harder than jumping one that is.” He crossed his arms. “You sure you want to go through with this?”

  “She’ll die if you don’t.” Ostheim clenched his fist. “I don’t like coming to you like this, Jarrett.”

  “Not too fond of you myself, Ostheim. Yea or nay?”

  Ostheim closed his eyes and took a step back. “Do it.”

  Jarrett got the nanotech and stem cell combo shot ready, but paused. “She doesn’t have a needle phobia I need to know about, does she? I’ve already dealt with one de-vamped stressed-out werewolf today and don’t care for a repeat of the experience.”

  “She’s fine with needles.”

  “Had to ask.” He injected Idna with the cocktail and set the syringe down.

  “Now what?”

  “That needs about a half hour to start working.”

  McFoucher wasn’t sure they had a half hour; Idna looked worse than she’d ever seen her. “What happens if we don’t wait that long?” she asked.

  “The cells don’t have enough time to start regenerating and the process fails before it starts.”

  “Patience is not my strong suit, Jarrett.” Ostheim was obviously having a hard time standing still.

  “Mine either.” Jarrett crossed his arms. “But if you like I can hurry it up and she can die that much faster. Just say the word.”

  “No. No …”

  It was the longest thirty minutes McFoucher had ever endured. She’d gotten used to the easy back and forth banter in Jarrett’s basement, but by the time they were ready for the next step, the two men were snapping at each other so hard that she wondered if Jarrett himself might sprout hair and fangs, or draw the gun, which Ostheim had noticed and snarked about—and she was ready to smack them both.

  Jarrett readied the paddles, nodding at McFoucher to strip the paper off the adrenaline shot. He took a deep breath. “Stand back, Ostheim. Clear!”

  The machine whined, he pressed the paddles to Idna’s chest, then waited for the machine to charge. Her back arched as the voltage hit her.

  Nothing. The heart monitor stayed flat.

  Jarrett swore and did it again. Still nothing. Now Ostheim was swearing. Jarrett increased the voltage and tried once more. “Shit,” Jarrett said. “Hit her now, Dr. McFoucher.”

  She plunged the needle between Idna’s ribs and administered the shot. The heart monitor let out a few weak beeps and settled into a slow, unsteady rhythm. Too slow, too unsteady, and Jarrett shocked her again. The pace of Idna’s heartbeat picked up momentarily before settling back to the same slow rate, although it evened out and the monitor stopped screeching.

  Jarrett lifted her lip, noted her fangs, and stood back and shook his head.

  “Well? Well?” Ostheim demanded.

  “I don’t know, Hans. I just … I don’t know.” Jarrett leaned on the wall, and McFoucher realized just how tired he was. “I think we’re lucky it’s this good. I’ve done what I can. Take her home, keep her warm, and watch her.” He heaved himself upright. “Let’s go, Dr. McFoucher. We have another patient waiting.”

  They let Ostheim pull the electrodes off Idna’s chest and twitch her blouse closed, and they trailed behind him as he carried her out to his limo. “Thank you, Jarrett,” Ostheim said awkwardly.

  “No promises.” Jarrett climbed into the Bentley and was asleep before his butt hit the seat.

  McFoucher wanted to ask him what he thought Idna’s chances were, but she was afraid she already knew. She sat across from him and brooded all the way back to the mansion, because even with Alex’s Full Disclosure Speech, she wasn’t sure that Ostheim would easily forgive a failure.

  O O O

  “Mr. Clarke, I know he’s cancelled the meeting four times now, but we really do have an emergency this week and—” Megan was attempting desperately to regain control of the conversation, and failing. The man on the other end of her phone line wouldn’t be swayed. Alex had pulled this shit too often before, and now it was biting him on the ass. Had it actually served him right this time, she wouldn’t have been so agitated.

  “Miss Graham, I realize it’s your job to protect him from the consequences of his mistakes, but we’ve been put off long enough, and I really must insist that we schedule a teleconference for tomorrow so he can get a handle on this thing. This morning was the last straw for a lot of people.” Clarke was angry, and he would have had a right to be if her boss hadn’t been dealing with all this stuff. But they’d managed to keep it out of the press, so from the board’s viewpoint, this was just Alex being Alex and slacking off his responsibilities again. “It would be even better if we could schedule a face-to-face meeting.”

  “I’m afraid that’s out of the question.” She stood firm on that. “He can’t possibly fly to the East Coast on such short notice. However, I think this latest crisis has just about been averted, and he told me to schedule something. So tomorrow is as good as any other day. I’ll find out when he actually wants to do it and call you back.”

  “All right.” Clarke’s tone turned gentle. “I know he’s a handful, Miss Graham, and I sympathize. But board meetings are important, too.”

  Not to him, she refrained from saying. “I know,” is what actually came out of her mouth. “But the situation here is very … fluid, right now. Just when we think the crisis is over, it actually gets worse.”

  “What is the crisis?”

  “I’m not really at liberty to discuss that without clearing it with Mr. Jarrett first.”

  “Just tell me he hasn’t gotten drunk and hurt himself doing something stupid again, please.”

  That was easy enough. “He hasn’t gotten drunk and hurt himself doing something stupid, Mr. Clarke. He’s been working, very hard, in fact. You have no idea.”

  “Something good, I hope? Something we can maybe turn a profit on?”

  She cringed. “Not so much, I don’t think. But it’s personally important to him and might have future applications.” She hoped that bone would be enough to halt that line of inquiry.

  “Tomorrow, Miss Graham. Don’t let him put us off again
.”

  She sighed. “I’ll see what I can do and let you know.” They said their goodbyes, and she ended the call. “Because pushing Alex to do something he thinks is a monumental waste of time always goes so well,” she said to the room at large.

  Her phone went off again, and she was surprised to see Harris’s number on her screen. She picked up. “What’s he done now?” she asked him resignedly.

  “Fallen dead asleep in the back of the car,” the driver said.

  “I’ll send Chambliss down. Hold tight.” She hung up and hit the intercom. “Chambliss, could you go to the garage and get Mr. Jarrett into bed, please?”

  “Passed out in the back of the limo again?”

  “Yep. Although this time it’s probably from overwork and undersleep rather than too much alcohol, although that may be a factor.” Knowing Alex, it was. “You know the routine.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Dr. McFoucher walked in and collapsed into an office chair. “That was fun.”

  “How’d it go?” Megan asked.

  “It … went. We left her with a heartbeat. Whether that’ll cure what ails her or she’ll be able to sustain it is anyone’s guess.”

  “Well, here’s hoping. If she gets better, then Ostheim will leave us alone, right?”

  “I’d think so. But if she doesn’t …” Dr. McFoucher left the thought unfinished, and Megan winced, finishing the sentence in various ways to herself, none of them good.

  O O O

  Ostheim laid Idna gently on their bed, covered her with three or four blankets, and sat on top of them beside her.

  As he smoothed her hair away from her face, her eyes blinked open, and she smiled up at him. “Oh, Hans.”

  “How are you feeling, my dear?” Strong, he had to be strong for her.

  “Tired, and cold.” A tiny line appeared between her eyebrows. “How did I obtain a heartbeat?”

  “I took you to see Jarrett. The other procedure transmitted what you had to the Lockwood boy. Jarrett apparently found a way to cure it.”

  “I don’t … feel very cured.” She squeezed his hand, and her grip was weak, so weak. “Are you sure he didn’t just make me sicker to get you out of his hair for a while?”

  Fear clawed his windpipe closed, and Ostheim choked a couple of times before he got the words out. “Jarrett considers himself to be one of the ‘good guys.’ I don’t think he’d do that, at least not on purpose.”

  “I hope your faith in his nature is justified.” Idna closed her eyes. “I love you. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I love you, too.”

  But she’d fallen asleep before he’d said it, and he hoped he wasn’t too late. He slid under the covers and pulled her to him, trying to transmit his own heat and strength to her failing body.

  Her words haunted him. Would Jarrett have done that? Really? Why, why had he trusted the man? Because he had nowhere else to go. His own people had failed, and turning to an enemy had been preferable to just helplessly watching Idna die. But what if that enemy had acted as enemies invariably did? Jarrett’s body language and scent had radiated nervous strain, which Hans had interpreted as fear that the procedure wouldn’t work.

  Maybe he’d actually been afraid that Ostheim would find out that he’d been sabotaged.

  Idna’s breathing became more and more labored as time passed. Her heartbeat slowed and became fainter, faltering.

  “Idna?” he whispered. He didn’t want to wake her up, but he was afraid if she didn’t that she never would. “You must fight this. You must.”

  But she’d been fighting it for so long already, and her body could only take so much. Before he knew precisely what was happening, Idna exhaled and crumbled to dust and bones in his arms.

  In all the months she’d been ill, Ostheim had raged, threatened, smashed things, and even killed a couple of people. He’d never cried.

  Until now.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alex woke up in his own bed with a headache from the seventh circle of hell and eyes that felt as if someone had taken sixty-grit sandpaper to them. He wondered briefly how he’d gotten there, and then remembered that he’d gone to the lab to help Ostheim and …

  Fallen asleep in the limo on the way home, instead of making a pass at Dr. McFoucher the way he’d intended to. “Smooth, Jarrett,” he mumbled.

  The sunset and his clock told him that his people had let him sleep a solid six hours, which was enough for anybody, and he needed to find out how Ben was doing and see if Ostheim had called. Someone, probably Chambliss, had left a glass of water and four ibuprofen on his nightstand, so he swallowed the pills and decided to shower first and then see what the others were up to.

  Feeling halfway human again in a clean pair of jeans and a fresh T-shirt, he wandered downstairs to find Ben eating a huge sandwich and banging away on a keyboard.

  “You look better,” Alex commented.

  “Way better,” Ben answered. “Although that thing where you’re alternately starving and exhausted is back. But at least I’m not starving for blood, so I’ll take it.”

  “There was a lot of damage at the cellular level. Might be awhile before you’re a hundred percent. Anything else?”

  Ben’s gaze stayed fixed to the laptop screen. “Not to speak of.”

  Which told Alex that there was something, and Ben didn’t want to talk about it. Fair enough, but— “It gets bad, let me know. Might be important.”

  “Yeah.” Ben’s voice was noncommittal, and he picked up the sandwich and gestured at the laptop with it. “You’ve got some major sabotage going on in your board of directors, man. Like, if this is the stuff they’re doing on the company servers, I shudder to think what they’re conspiring about in private. I sent it to your inbox.”

  “I’ll have a look at it.” Alex realized something. “Where’s Janni?”

  “She’s—” Ben paused. “—in the kitchen. Getting used to her new and improved werewolf nose. I still can’t believe you let her feed herself to me.”

  Alex winced. “She didn’t exactly ask permission.”

  “At least she’s not getting smacked in the face with a full moon. I guess it worked slower on her than me because she got less of whatever caused it in the first place. Ostheim tore me up pretty good.” Ben put the sandwich back on the plate without taking a bite. “I wouldn’t have asked her to do that, you know.”

  “I know. We all saw your reaction.” Ben had been utterly horrified, and Alex sympathized. He could only imagine how he himself would’ve reacted had Megan done something like that. Less calmly than Ben.

  Ben put his face in his hand and peered up at Alex through his fingers. “McFoucher says they’ve never found a cure for lycanthropy. They’ve been looking for decades.”

  “What, she stopped running away the second you walk into the room? That’s something.”

  “I think she’s growing as a person. So am I, since the wolf seemed content to just bare his teeth at her slightly instead of gnawing her leg off,” Ben said. “No, actually, I cornered her and asked her outright what the chances were. ‘Slim’ and ‘none’ seem to be the choices.”

  “We thought the same thing about a cure for vampirism.” Alex put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “We’ll fix this. I’ll fix this.”

  Ben jerked his head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Alex. I know you’ll do your best.” He massaged his temples. “If it’s irreversible … I’ll deal.” He barked out a humorless laugh. “I’ve dealt with worse.”

  Shit. Ben’s efforts to make him feel better were having the exact opposite effect. Alex gathered up the laptop and headed toward the basement, but stopped at the top of the stairs and turned around. “Need anything?”

  Ben had laid back on the sofa with his head resting on his bent arm. “Sleep. It’s fine, Alex. It’s … fine.”

  It was far from fine. Alex swore under his breath and sallied forth to do battle the only way he knew how.

&n
bsp; O O O

  Janni paused in her perusal of the larder, almost feeling her ears swivel toward the living room. She’d heard something, faintly, right at the edge of what should have been possible—had been possible, only a couple of days before.

  Ben.

  She hurried into the other room to find him twitching in his sleep on the couch, a frown marring his forehead. Muttering words that sounded like “no” and “I don’t know” and “don’t hurt her” and his name, rank, and social security number, and that wouldn’t do.

  She knelt on the floor next to the sofa and threaded her fingers through his hair. “Shh,” she murmured. “You’re not there anymore, you’re here, safe with me.”

  The back of his open hand thumped, once, against the leather cushion before he rolled to his side and wrapped the other arm around her and stilled, breathing heavily. “So that was fun,” he whispered, eyes still closed.

  “’Nother nightmare?”

  “They’re baaa-ack,” he said in a half-hearted singsong. “With the new and lovely element of it being you they’re torturing this time.”

  “Aw, sweetie.” She caressed his cheek. This whole thing had set him back several months, and she mentally cursed Ostheim’s willingness to do anything and hurt anyone in his quest for a cure for his wife. She was nearly ready to kill someone herself, preferably Ostheim, and the wolf growling in the back of her mind was an uncomfortable reminder that she probably could.

  “How are you doing?” he asked after a few moments.

  “Hanging in there. It’s weird having a wolf in here, filtering everything, but nothing awful’s happened yet.” Of course, she wasn’t prone to nightmares, so the chances of her waking up and accidentally ripping someone’s throat out before she knew what was what were pretty close to zero.

  He grasped her hand. “Well, I’m here for you, honey.”

  “I know.” Her lips quirked. “I bet I can talk to Megan, too.”

  “Caught that, did you?”

  “Kind of hard not to, now that I have a nose. Is that why she followed you out the first time?”

  “Yeah. If she hadn’t—” He stopped, and swallowed. “I don’t know what would have happened. Alex has no idea, though, and she’s really leery of him finding out, or anyone for that matter, so …”