by Nara Malone
He sighed and moved behind Marie at the window, put steadying hands on her shoulders. “Knew what, Marie? What did Marcus say that has you so upset?”
“He asked me if I could recognize faces. I thought I could, but when I sat down to take that stupid test he showed me, I realized I can’t. Not with the usual cues gone, like voices, or their body shape. Hell, they don’t even let you see their hair. And I can’t do it. I can’t recognize famous faces I have seen hundreds of times in my life.”
“So?”
“So? It’s an ability that sets humans apart. I’m not even that human. I’m not human enough to recognize Oprah.”
He squeezed her shoulders. “Sweetie.” He rolled his eyes when that word slipped off his tongue. He’d been in the South too long. “I know it’s been rough adjusting to being a little more than you thought you were, but that doesn’t make you less. You see what I’m saying? You aren’t less than human. You’re more than human.”
Her bottom lip trembled. “Did he have you take the test?”
Jake shook his head.
“Doesn’t that tell you anything? I’m different from the rest of you. I’m not good at being a tiger or a human.”
“You need to be more patient with yourself.”
“Would you take the test, Jake? And do it honestly. Don’t flub it for my sake.”
“I don’t know your famous people.”
“There are other versions that don’t rely on recognizing celebrities.”
He didn’t have time for this. With a sinking feeling he knew he’d make time. He let her drag him back to the computer and was about to shoo Oliver from his perch at the keyboard when the image on the screen froze him—the lab where Marcus had stolen Hella. Jake looked from screen to rabbit, watched stunned when Oliver nudged the mouse with his nose then paused and gave a click with his paw to bring up a view from a different camera. Oliver had hacked into the research facility’s online files for their IP security cameras and was clicking through the most recent images stored. This was a view of the loading dock and Jake recognized a naked Marcus fleeing toward the woods with a wrapped bundle in his arms.
Marie gasped, “Where is he? Are those shots from Marcus’ last raid?”
“According to the time stamp, that’s from fifteen minutes ago. I know where he is though. I’ll get him.”
“I’ll tell Adam.”
“No, call Ben. I need backup. We don’t want any of this to lead researchers to you and the girls. If Adam and Ean get involved it could bring cops right to your door and when they start digging into who we all are and where we came from…” Marie was fair skinned already, but her skin turned a new shade of colorless. He squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. Just call Ben. I have to go.”
He scribbled some instructions on a pad beside the keyboard. “They use IP cameras to store still images in an internet account. Stay logged in and remove any pictures of Marcus. Make copies of some from before he got there and rename the files with the proper timestamps. Here’s the username and password that worked for me last time I did it, just in case you get disconnected.”
“I’ve got it. You go.”
“Give that lab name to Ben. And keep Oliver away from the computer.”
She’d already scooped the bunny up and held him cuddled in her lap while she typed. “Go, Jake. As much as you might like to think you’re the only digital wizard around here, I could code circles around you.”
He turned back. “Is that right?”
“Will you go? I have this.”
He went.
* * * * *
Allie’s brain was crunching facts triple time. The alcohol daze receded and a strong sense of déjà vu took hold. Winter, early morning, imagining the blend of white and shadow had shaped itself into a cat that disappeared when she’d reached to touch it.
And then she’d heard a cat, a soft but tortured cry and that led her to a bush, to finding the poor mother cat, sides heaving, ready to give birth. Marcus. Marcus must have been behind that. Something drove him, something more than just the need to save them. What had he said before? That he had a sense of kinship with them? That he understood what it was to be too different to ever be acceptable.
She’d been too mad at the time to hear what he was saying. But now a suspicion took hold. She’d probably laugh at the idea when she was completely sober, but right now she couldn’t shake the growing belief that Marcus was like them. That he had a secret difference, that it was something he couldn’t make peace with. If it were something to do with test tube fertilization or cloning, it could explain his fixation on the hybrid experiments. If they could put human neurons in animal brains, maybe someone had put animal parts in his.
Allie didn’t see any tracks, but she found a trail that followed the stream and her need to follow it was a compulsion she couldn’t ignore. She was only a little surprised when she saw Marcus running toward her, carrying something bundled in a ragged army blanket. The fact that he was dripping wet and naked seemed less important than the squirming blanket.
“What are you doing, Marcus? What have you done?”
He peeled back a corner of the blanket and Allie could just make out the head of a small pig. It oinked, more a moany oink punctuated by heavy panting.
“She doesn’t look so good,” Allie said.
“She’s in labor,” Marcus said, his breath as labored as the pig’s.
“She doesn’t look any bigger than a baby herself.”
“Potbellies don’t get very big. She’s probably too big for you to carry though.”
“Why would I want to carry her?” Suspicion crept in. “Where are you going?”
“To draw them away from you. Here, the brush is dense here.” He ducked under a branch and stepped over a log, put the pig down in a heap of leaves. “If they get too close, cover her with leaves and get away.”
“Marcus, I am not helping you steal that pig.”
“She’s human, Allie. Or her brain is. We can’t abandon her.”
Male voices, shouting to each other and moving in their direction, brought his head up. His nostrils flared and he wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad.
The pig huffed and panted.
“There’s not much time. I can’t let them take her, Allie. Do you know what that will do to her, to have come so close to the freedom she longs for, to safety for her babies, and then lose? Help me.”
“Allie? Where the hell did you get to?” It was Franny and she wasn’t far away.
Allie knew she should turn around and walk away. The pig licked Allie’s fingers and oinked softly. Allie sighed. “Go,” she said. “I’ll try to find a way to get her to my apartment. But you come get her as soon as you can.”
He nodded and the men’s shouts approached at a faster clip as if they were running.
“I have tracks,” one called.
“Sorry, Allie,” Marcus said. “I didn’t want you to discover what I am this way, but it’s the only way to keep them from you.”
The air around her vibrated. A rising tension as Marcus went transparent and vanished. Then the vibration changed, went back down the scale and a leopard reappeared in his place, a familiar leopard. Allie’s heart did a somersault in her chest. She dropped to her knees, struggling to draw breath through a panic-sealed throat.
Marcus the leopard leapt through the bushes, headed in the direction of the searchers.
Allie wanted to believe it was a trick, an illusion, but whatever it was, she still had a laboring animal beside her. With the vivid memory of a leopard appearing in the snow only to vanish, and her subsequent discovery of a laboring cat, there were too many coincidences piling up for Allie to believe it was all illusions any longer.
She gathered the blanket around the pig. “You don’t know me very well,” Allie told her, “but I’m just trying to help.” She patted the animal’s head before she covered her face. She tried maneuvering the plump bundle so that she could
lift the animal in her arms. She only succeeded in making her squeal in pain.
“Allie?” Franny shouted no more than two feet away. “Girl, you better answer me right now.”
Chapter Twelve
“Here, over here,” Allie called as loudly as she dared, “and keep your voices down.”
Her warning was followed by what sounded like a woman’s scream.
Allie hoped that was Marcus. Didn’t leopards sound like women screaming?
Franny and Lila dove into the bushes beside her.
“What the fuck is going on out here?” Lila whispered through chattering teeth. Lila was back in her dress, but still minus hose and heels. Allie didn’t want to think about the damage to her own stockings and dress.
“Most of this has something to do with Marcus. I could use your help but I have to warn you I’m helping him break the law.” The pig squirmed and made another moany sound.
Franny lifted a corner of the blanket from the pig’s face, and pressed the palm of her left hand over her chest. “Oh thank god. I was afraid you had a child here for a minute.”
Allie said, “I can’t lift her. I need to get her to my apartment.”
“Sugar, if they wouldn’t let you keep that cat you found out here, I doubt the no-pets policy will be waived for a pig.”
“I’m just keeping her a few hours but she doesn’t look so good. We really need to move fast.”
“Why are you helping him steal a pig?”
“He insists she’s some sort of genetic experiment, that they put a human brain in her.”
“Oh poor thing,” Lila said. “If we each grab a corner of the blanket and work together we can carry her.” She scratched behind the pig’s right ear and was thanked with a string of oinking. “Yes, sweetheart,” Lila cooed. “Tell me all about it.”
“What if he’s lying?” Franny asked.
“What if he’s not?” Lila countered.
Another loud pop, like a gun going off, and a reciprocal scream broke the impasse. “Grab an end of this blanket, Lila,” Franny said. “Where is Marcus now?” she asked Allie.
“He’s trying to lead the guys who want her back away from us.”
“Figures Marcus would be in the middle of a mess like this.”
“Let’s get this pig someplace warm and dry,” Lila said, “and then we can grill Allie. If Marcus is alive, I’ll take my wrath out on him later.”
Franny got on one end of the blanket and Lila had the other. “Baby, you get my flashlight and lead the way,” Franny said.
“I just need to check Marcus is okay and I’ll catch up with you. Don’t let anyone take her away from you. She’s been horribly tortured and Marcus was trying to rescue her from that. Details later.”
Allie ran before they could argue and she hoped they would listen, but her priority was Marcus. She had the sickest feeling that she was too late.
A flurry of activity and the bright beams of flashlights crossing and moving through a wooded patch near the business park confirmed her intuition. The shouting had stopped.
Cautiously, she moved toward the light and the low-pitched exchange of male conversation. This was simply a problem to be solved. She couldn’t let emotions creep into it right now. But she couldn’t block the electric jolt slicing through her middle when she recognized the spotted fur coat of the animal they gathered around.
She moved softly, aware of each twig and stone under bare feet—slowly testing the surface and easing her weight soundlessly into each step, as if she were an animal stalking prey. But the behaviors were instinctual, a second nature she’d only vaguely been aware of until Marcus’ lessons brought them to awareness. She felt, almost tasted the air on her skin, her senses so aroused and tuned to trouble. Her ears picked up the conversation even though the voices were soft and several yards away.
“I think the tranq has a good hold now.”
“How long will it hold on a cat this size?”
“I gave him a dose big enough to drop a buffalo. I never used this on a leopard but we should get at least an hour.”
“If he wakes up at all, you mean. Do you know how much an animal like this costs? It’s like finding gold.”
“Only gold if the owner doesn’t show up to stake a claim before we’ve got him stashed.”
“Next question, where are we going put him?”
“We have some empty canine pens in the basement.”
“That’s hardly room for him to turn around. And will it hold an animal this strong?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t planning to work with any big cats. We’ll keep him sedated until we can make other arrangements.”
“And what of the pig?”
“I called in some extra help to go look in the park. Some of those animal rights fanatics must have broken in and taken her. This fella is a bigger prize than a potbelly. We can pick pigs up from pet stores. Not that it doesn’t hurt knowing we’ll have to start that pig research at the beginning. We still have some frozen embryos we can implant in another host female.”
“But she wouldn’t be a hybrid.”
“Like I said, we’ll do what we can about her later. It doesn’t matter if the host isn’t a hybrid. The hybrid’s genes are in the extra frozen embryos.”
At the rumble of a motor approaching, Allie crouched. Headlights illuminated the woods and Allie dropped to her belly. Peering through a break in the brush, she watched a forklift approach. They hauled Marcus onto a pallet. Each bump and scrape registering like the slice of a knife, splitting her skin, gouging her stomach. One of them planted a boot against Marcus’ belly and shoved him farther back on the skid. It was as if the wind had been knocked out of her. If they were so careless over his suffering here, what would happen when he was in the lab? She could imagine the cutting, sawing, electric probes that might make up experiments.
It was easy enough to follow the group. If it weren’t near midnight on a Friday night there might be some cops around to notice the activity and ask questions. But they would have their hands full monitoring bars and drunk drivers over by the college. Hopefully Lila and Franny would make it safely through the park to her apartment.
The journey proved short. The building sat in an isolated spot at the back of the business park that bordered the town park. Allie watched the forklift disappear into the dark cavern on the other side of a garage-type door.
It had been a few years since she’d survived on stealing and she’d sworn off ever breaking another law as soon as she landed that first job with Franny. Marcus was like a cyclone ripping through the carefully planned, proper life she was trying to build. The trouble was that while Marcus was on the wrong side of the law, every inch of her being agreed with what he was doing. Maybe if she had grown up some other way, hadn’t grown up with people who crossed every line drawn, she might have done something different. But Allie was starting to understand that one man’s broken law was another man’s attempt to survive and in this particular instance Marcus was more important to her than laws.
She crept soundlessly along a wall, through the shadows. The door had started down and Allie couldn’t see anyone lingering to watch it close, so she dove, rolling under just before it connected to the concrete, sealing her into this foreign world with a bang and the echo rattling up through its steel frame. She put her palm to the concrete, her fingers met with a greasy patch as she pushed herself up. Lila’s dress was going to be beyond salvageable.
She lay still a moment longer, willing her breath to slow, drawing silence into her mind and letting it spread like a shield around her. Eddie used to tell her, “I swear sometimes you get so still it’s like you’re invisible.” And it was true that Allie played an invisibility game with herself as a child, imagining that she could make herself slowly fade away by staying still as a shadow, blending into her surroundings like so much furniture, unnoticed by the deadly men who came to visit.
Around her the warehouse was like a silent cave, but voices in an area beyond th
e walls clued her in to where she’d find Marcus. She crawled across the floor and behind a stack of boxes and waited, listening to the bang and clatter of gates. Images of chain and wire cage forming in her mind, a foggy view, a sense of bafflement before it all faded in a blaze of pain. Marcus. He was immobile but somewhat aware. She pressed fingers to the spot on her temple, the source, realizing these sporadic bouts of drilling pain must always have come from him, his thoughts trying to burrow into hers.
Go. Get out. The command from him came sharp and bold, but the effort sent him under into blackness. The force of his thoughts folded her, she bent, locking her head between her knees until the pain receded.
Down the corridor men conversed.
“That dog pen won’t hold him long.” A rattle of keys. “I’ll keep the door locked as well, and of course we’ll keep him sedated. If he proves too much trouble we’ll sacrifice him. I’d like to keep him alive and observe him, but if he’s too unruly we’ll harvest semen and organs.”
“We should decide what we’re going to do tonight. Someone will be looking for him. Probably an illegal pet, but surely they’ll report that he escaped so the local citizens can protect themselves.”
“Would you report an escape like that?”
The other man didn’t answer.
“The team is trickling in now. The first order of business is to assess the situation and make a practical plan.”
“But—”
“I’m still the team leader and I say plan first and act second. I’m inclined to agree sacrificing is the best thing and if we decide to take that route sooner, as in tonight, it’s probably better.”
A new voice joined the conversation. “Excuse me, Dr. Rogers, do you want a guard down here?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. Even if he managed to get out of the pen, the room will contain him. We have time yet before he’ll be a problem. We may just decide to put him down before he wakes up. Let’s get to the meeting.”
* * * * *
Jake tuned in telepathically to Seth as soon as he stepped through the portal into his apartment above the computer shop.