He grinned.
If you only knew.
“I feel like I should howl or something,” he said, wishing he actually still could. He missed his wolf.
He’d not been able to shift since he’d been captured. The samples that were currently stumping him were his own. He couldn’t figure out what the Corporation had done to him. Whatever it was, it changed his genetic make-up, altering him to the point he didn’t have a clue what to expect.
“Are you wearing a lab coat?” she asked, a teasing, sexy note in her voice. Her question pulled him from his thoughts.
“Ah, we’re going to take the conversation there, are we?” he asked, hopeful. He’d gladly permit the conversation to enter bedroom territory. Hell, it would make his week.
She laughed softly, the sound filling him to the brim with happiness, something he’d sorely lacked for nearly a year. “Hey, I’ll admit to finding it sexy when a guy wears a lab coat. I’m a total kink that way.”
“Oh yeah. Nothing says hard-core kinkster than a doctor fetish,” he mused, making her laugh more.
“Found me out,” she said, and then huffed. “Honestly, I’m not what anyone would label kinky.” She was quiet for a bit. “I don’t have a lot of experience when it comes to men.”
James paused. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? “You have been with a man before, right?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer. The idea of her being touched by another did what nothing else seemed to be able to do, tempt his inner beast. As a natural-born werewolf, he should have been a force to be reckoned with. Of late, he was about as useful as a human.
He shuddered at the thought. Humans were pretty worthless when it came to anything of importance.
“Um, does our chat room teasing banter count?” she asked.
James palmed the counter before him, pleased with her response. She had not been touched by other men. “No.”
“Then no.”
He smiled wide. The news of her saving herself moved him in a strange way—he shouldn’t have cared about her sexual life choices. They were her choices after all, and he’d seen too many men think they knew what was best for a woman and her body to dare do the same. Yet, he found great pleasure in hearing she’d not let just any ole man touch her. “Good.”
“I gotta jet,” she said with a tiny moan that turned him on even more. “I just wanted to talk to you quick. Will you be on later?”
“I will,” he said, wanting her to remain on the line. Her voice soothed him and helped chase away his overthinking.
“Take care of you, Doc Wolf.”
“You too, GothGirl.”
She ended the chat and James suddenly felt very empty without her voice in his ear. He craved every moment he could get with her, even though they were virtual moments. Her voice always seemed to wrap around him, making his body tingle with need and his cock ache for release. He’d not wanted another like this ever. Hell, he hadn’t even come close to this level of desire before, and he’d been around a long time.
Get a fucking grip, Jimmy, he said to himself.
Chapter Two
Doctor Bertrand paced before the window of the rather unimpressive apartment he’d been calling home for the past week. How could anyone live this way? At least the smell of the rotting corpse was gone. Had the previous resident of the apartment simply listened and obeyed when Bertrand and his men had ordered him to be silent, he might still be alive.
Bertrand laughed. Who was he kidding? He’d have killed the man regardless. His lip curled as he looked around the apartment, noting the distinct lack of high-end furnishing he was accustomed to. He’d been living the good life, but all that changed. When he’d tried to reach out to the Corporation for help after the raid in France, his calls had gone unanswered. It was days before he had been able to get a response, and it wasn’t the one he was expecting. They blamed him for it all. Claimed he had lost sight of the vision and the mission.
That animal had reduced him to this. Had left Bertrand living just shy of the gutters.
“He shall know no mercy,” he said with brutal detachment.
Test Subject 87P.
Though, the test subject had a name now to go with the face. He was no longer a number.
Dr. James Hagen.
Bertrand went to the broken mirror, hanging tilted from the wall. Peeling wallpaper that had yellowed with age lay partially over one corner of the mirror’s edge. How any could live this way—permitting their surroundings to be as such—was a mystery to him.
Bertrand’s lips curved upwards, revealing his now-jagged teeth. They had changed when his anger had overtaken him just over two weeks ago. Prior to that, the injections he’d been giving himself—a mixture of varying strands of supernatural DNA and other ingredients known only to him—had been working, increasing his strength, his stamina, his vision, his hearing. But that had all changed when he found himself enraged. He had become what looked back at him in the mirror now. Some sort of disfigured monster. Worse even than the hybrids he and the others like him had been working so hard on creating.
An abomination.
But a powerful one.
He stared at his reflection, no longer recognizing himself as the man he had been. His skin was gray, his face drawn. A ring of red surrounded his irises. Sores had started to form on his skin, pus-filled and swollen. His hair had been falling out in clumps, leaving it patchy at best. He was something to be feared now, as it should be. He was no longer weak. No longer something less than those he studied and experimented on.
He was a force unto himself.
One they would all learn to respect, as they had not done before. Even his higher-ups had laughed at him, mocking his drive to find ways to turn ordinary humans—those lacking any traces of supernatural in their bloodlines—into something more.
But Bertrand had done it. He was living proof.
Running his tongue out and over his teeth, his eyes lit with excitement as he thought of the look upon his immediate supervisor’s face when Bertrand had revealed himself and his accomplishments. He’d done so after finally being responded to following the PSI raid on his labs. Right after his favorite test subject managed to get away.
It all came back to Hagen. After all, it had been Hagen’s DNA that had made Bertrand’s tests upon himself a success after so many failures.
Sharp talon-like claws extended from the ends of his fingers, bringing with them biting pain and torn flesh. Bertrand hissed, spittle dripping from his mouth as he stared down at the ripped ends of his fingers and the twisted claws now there.
He had seen hundreds of shifters do something similar and their changes had been effortless—without blood, without twisted claws.
He would find Hagen, and he would force the man to fix him. Force him to figure what had gone wrong and make it right. Make him a superior being.
Mother Nature was a bitch who wasn’t fit to decide who among those brought into this world should and should not be granted special abilities. Bertrand had beat her—he’d beat the grand system of order.
He was now powerful too.
And soon enough, he would have his answers and his cure to make him just as the others he’d spent so long studying. Hagen would do as Bertrand bid. He’d been so close to breaking Hagen’s spirit before, that he knew he could do it. And now he had the perfect way to get the man to fold.
A woman.
Bertrand had found a weakness in the good doctor and he would exploit it. He would make Hagen watch as the Corporation’s strike teams tore apart the woman Hagen had been so drawn to since his escape.
The hacker.
Bertrand spat and then looked at himself again in the mirror, pleased with the plan he had underway. Gisbert would have to listen to reason once Bertrand showed him that he’d fixed what had gone wrong.
He stiffened, remembering his mentor’s harsh words.
“You are a hideous monstrosity,” the man had said. “What have you done to yourself?
You were not compatible, not pre-selected. You were merely human.”
Merely human.
The words still stung.
Bertrand would fix the problems with his change. He would show the man he had spent years trying to impress with his brilliance that he was a genius. That he too was a leader in the field of genetic manipulation. That he was more than merely human.
He and the men still loyal to him would show them all. They would be welcomed back into the Corporation’s fold with open arms and hailed as heroes for not only unlocking the secrets of making humans into supernaturals, but for bringing down the very same PSI team that had laid siege to one of their facilities.
Oh yes.
Bertrand would earn their respect and they would have no choice but to take him back—to stop shunning him as an embarrassment to their master plan.
Rage settled over him as he thought about the Corporation’s mission. They wanted a master race of supernaturals to rule the world. They had spent centuries trying to build their dream and see their vision to fruition. They had experimented on natural-born supernaturals, men and women with small traces of supernatural in their bloodlines, and even fetuses still within their mothers’ wombs, gaining great success on all fronts, but they had never, as of yet, been able to make an already established human—with no traces of supernatural DNA in their line—into anything more than they started as.
Until now.
Until Bertrand.
He had done the unthinkable. He had managed to make himself more than human. Yes, there were certain issues that needed addressed, but he would fix them soon enough. As soon as he broke Hagen’s will to live. Then the man would aid him. He would do as he was told. He would make Bertrand right.
A supernatural so powerful that all others bowed to him.
A knock sounded on his door and he turned, watching as one of his loyal guards entered. The man cast his gaze downward and Bertrand knew it was because of how he looked—how disfigured he was since he’d begun the change.
“What is it?” he demanded acidly as his gaze narrowed with contempt.
The man shuffled his feet back and forth. “The computer guy says he has a lock on another conversation happening between the target and the girl.”
Bertrand laughed.
The girl was the very same hacker who had drawn the attention of the Corporation months ago when she began prying into them. How ironic that she was the woman Hagen had become so obsessed with. When Bertrand ended her he would be doing the Corporation a favor.
He’d be ridding them of the tiny buzzing fly they had been swatting at.
The hacker.
And in doing so, Bertrand would bring down Hagen. It was the perfect plan. One PSI would never see coming. They were arrogant, thinking themselves above reproach. Thinking they were safe on their home soil.
They had no idea the strides the Corporation had been making in recent years. Of how figureheads who normally could not be in a room together had set aside their differences and started focusing on the same goals—ridding themselves of Paranormal Security and Intelligence and the Immortal Ops all while building a master race of super soldiers that when ready, would take over the world and put humans in their place.
The bottom of the food chain.
He looked to the guard. “Report what you find. Be ready to strike. And remind the others, they are to kill the woman and bring me her body. I want to make sure to gift wrap it for a friend of mine.”
Chapter Three
James touched the top of his microscope, but didn’t look at the sample again. He’d been staring at it for days and still couldn’t wrap his mind around what he was seeing. He’d been a healer of some sort or another for the majority of his immortal life. He’d seen a lot come and go and had been around for endless technological advances. Hell, he’d even been consulted during the creation of the Immortal Ops, his expertise used to help sort out problems in the program. But what he had before him managed to confound him.
Worse yet.
The sample was from himself. It was one of many he’d taken and that had been taken from him since his return to PSI.
“Sick fucks,” he mumbled.
Whatever the hell the Corporation had done to him during his time in captivity there defied all logic. And certainly made little sense to him. Which was scary because he’d completed medical school four times in his lifetime and had also gone to school for science. He’d reinvented himself numerous times throughout his long life—as immortals had to do in order to avoid raising suspicions of humans—and each time he almost always fell back into the role of healer.
Though, once, to his fellow PSI-Ops’ dismay, he did attempt to be a hot-dog-stand owner. He’d wanted a change of pace, a less stressful job and to simply stop and enjoy life. Turns out, he wasn’t very good at it. Striker had even asked if he was actually cooking honest-to-the-gods dogs as the end quality was greatly lacking.
So, James had returned to what he was an expert at. Medicine.
And if someone with his skillset couldn’t make heads or tails of the samples before him, there was a serious problem. From the information he’d gathered, they’d enhanced his natural-born abilities, yet James suffered the opposite effects. His healing ability was stilted. He couldn’t shift forms any longer and his senses seemed dulled.
Something was very wrong.
He just wasn’t sure how or why.
In need of assistance, James had reached out to the Immortal Ops lead doctor, Thaddeus Green, sending him samples as well. In return, Green had requested his assistance on samples taken from a crime scene in Seattle. The two had been working to try to make sense of the data before them. The I-Ops had a mess on their hands.
Not that PSI didn’t.
The Corporation was public enemy number one now at all PSI branches around the world. His team had shifted their focus to find other locations owned and operated by Donavon Dynamics and find out what they were doing there. If it was the same torture and testing as the facility in France, PSI would shut them down.
That is, if they could find them all.
From everything coming to light, the Corporation was huge and far-reaching, hiding under many different names and governments. They more than likely had a hand in the shit in Seattle with a group of bad guys banding together to bring in something that could wipe out hundreds of people—a supernatural the likes of which they’d never seen before. Something capable of leaving nothing but carnage in its wake. The I-Ops and PSI-Ops were overwhelmed but working hard to try to get ahead of the situation.
“Easier said than done,” he said softly. Talking to himself in the lab was old habit.
Despite the amount of samples and information coming back, there were still more questions than answers as to what had gone down on the pier in Seattle. James had read the reports and even gotten first-hand accounts from his fellow teammate, Duke. Not to mention Eadan Daly, a PSI Operative who was now an I-Ops team member, had also given his side of it all.
None of it added up.
Whatever the I-Ops were dealing with was powerful and a hodgepodge of supernatural mixes. It wasn’t just one, or a hybrid of two different types of supernaturals. The tests were inconclusive, but what they did show said there was a whole heap of shit thrown into whatever had slaughtered all the bad guys who had remained.
Sure, that was no great loss to mankind. Walter Helmuth was a slimeball who ran the Seattle paranormal underground, and he could stand to lose a hell of a lot more of his thugs, but the sheer carnage left at the scene spoke to the trouble this could bring should it happen upon humans.
That was something both the I-Ops and PSI were trying to prevent.
James hadn’t been on the docks in Seattle to help, or even working at PSI again when the attack occurred. No. He’d been locked up in a cell, in the Corporation’s French location, undergoing test after test and endless torture at the hands of madmen. His body was still trying to heal the after-effects of it all.
James focused on the samples before him. He didn’t want to think about his time in captivity. Duke and Eadan had certainly killed their fair share of bad guys, but they’d then left the dock area and headed to safety. The number of dead found the next morning by the cleanup teams didn’t line up with what had gone down. The I-Ops had requested that only select PSI operatives be given the data they’d retrieved. James could understand why. PSI had at least one traitor in its midst.
Possibly more.
The I-Ops had one as well. Somewhere, in the chain of command, someone was double dealing.
One of the monitors nearest James flickered on from sleep mode and was accompanied by a chiming noise, indicating he had a video call coming through. He stepped to the side of his current work area and touched the screen, accepting the call, though he didn’t feel much like conversing. He’d been successfully hiding in his labs since his return to PSI.
Green’s face came into view. James and Green hadn’t known one another long but he’d heard good things about the guy and trusted him because Eadan trusted him. That was good enough for James. Green’s auburn hair was clipped nicely as if he wasn’t the type of guy who liked anything out of place. James could relate. He too leaned more on the side of clean-cut. That had been one thing he’d missed most during his days on the streets, trying to assimilate and look as though he belonged.
“PSI Freaks and Geeks Central Office. We aim to please and if we don’t please, we still keep aiming—usually with a sniper rifle,” said James with a wink. “Sometimes, we’re even known to hit our target. Depends on how much partying we did the night before, though. What can we do you for?”
Green smiled. “We have a similar motto. Though ours is normally prefaced with, beware or Roi will pee on you to mark his territory since he’s not really housebroken yet.”
James had run-ins with Roi Majors years ago and didn’t doubt for a second he was still a handful. There was a point in time the man was a loose cannon. That had simmered some with his mating.
James put his weight on his better leg. “What’s up?”
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