by Nara Malone
Seth’s response was instant, What’s up, bro?
The same thing that is always up.
Marcus stirring up trouble again?
I suspect he’s in it deeper than ever.
Jake raced through his apartment and ran down the stairs to the computer shop. He turned around at the bottom and ran back up, annoyed that humans insisted on everyone wearing clothing in public.
I just swapped thoughts with him a couple of hours ago. Where is he now? Seth wanted to know.
More important, where is Allie? Is she somewhere she’ll be safe without watching over for a little while?
I wish I could say yes, Jake. They had a birthday party for her tonight. Luckily I was invited. I heard her say to a fellow who offered her a ride that she was catching one with Lila. So I went over to her place to wait, just be sure she got in safe. She’s not here and it’s been a good forty-five minutes. Diner is a two-minute drive.
Jake grabbed a t-shirt and sweats, yanking the shirt on as he went, pausing at the door to hop on one leg then the other as he put on the pants.
Why do I get the bad feeling that a missing Allie and a missing Marcus are somehow connected? Getting his truck and I’m headed your way, Seth. ETA about five minutes.
Jake found Seth leaning against a tree across the street from Allie’s apartment. There wasn’t much moon. Jake would be grateful for that before the night was over.
“They were drinking,” Seth said as they ran through possible explanations for where Allie was. “It could be none of them was up to driving and they decided to walk.”
“I’ll bet they took the shortcut through the park. But they should be here by now.”
“Is there a zoo in the park?” Seth asked.
“No.”
“I think I’m getting something from Lila. She is drunk. She’s agitated. I may only be getting every tenth word. ‘Fucking…leopard…fucking…pig…fucking freezing my ass off because of an ass’?”
“Let’s go see what we can find out from Lila. Marcus has me locked out tight, but I’d be surprised if he wasn’t right there in the middle of it.”
They ran together, eating up the ground with their long-legged strides. They came to a footbridge and purses abandoned under a tree. Seth pointed the way down a trail into thicker woods.
Jake followed. In a spot where a creak spread out into a small pool, Seth plucked a wet bra from a branch. Jake found a pair of panties in the grass at the water’s edge. Three pairs of high heels were scattered across the clearing.
“Looks like the magus’ evening has been a whole lot more interesting than mine,” Jake grumbled.
Seth sniffed the air and pointed toward a trail leading deeper into the woods.
“Allie, get your ass back here now.” Lila’s voice, Jake noted. Her tone commanding rather than hysterical reassured him that things hadn’t gotten too far out of control.
They came upon Lila and Franny struggling back up the path with a pig between them.
Franny had opened her mouth to scream. Jake dove to cover her mouth. Seth had the forethought to dive low, catching Lila and the pig.
Franny was clawing at Jake’s arm. Lila opened her mouth as if she were going to scream. Again Seth came through, wrapping Lila in a one-armed hug and slapping a hand over her mouth all while never losing the pig. That annoyed Jake. Just once he’d like to see his cousin screw up.
“Let’s everyone calm down,” Seth murmured. “We’re here to help but if you scream now, you’ll bring a whole lot more trouble down on yourselves than you can imagine.”
Jake eased his hand from Franny’s mouth and she stopped flailing. She straightened her dress while shredding him with her stare. “What kind of trouble?”
“The owners of that stolen property you’re making off with for one.”
Seth uncovered Lila’s mouth.
Jake fired off a question while he still had a shot at getting a word in. “Where’s Allie?”
“I don’t know. Marcus is playing some creepy game.” Lila rubbed her arms as she talked. “Now you see him now you don’t. The guy does a wickedly believable illusion with a leopard. Allie ran off after him and hasn’t come back or answered us.”
“I’ll find Allie and Marcus,” Jake said, refusing to let Seth slip in and take control. “You get them out of here.”
“Allie said take the pig to her place.”
Seth cradled the pig in one arm and took Lila’s hand. “I’ll catch up with you as soon as I have them safely tucked away.”
Jake didn’t argue. Marcus always took females in labor. Seth wasn’t going to get away as soon as he thought.
Jake crept back up the trail, noting an occasional human footprint, most males in shoes, some small, barefoot and female. Farther along tracks got more complex, many overlapping—a trampled area where shoe prints cut across tracks made by a big cat and tire tracks led away. The cat tracks, leopard, confused him. The mix of scents was impossible to untangle.
He was at the edge of the business park when Maya turned up, naked and dripping wet.
“Go home,” he growled.
“No. Besides, I brought your reinforcements.” She pointed to a black van waiting in the corner of the parking lot.
“Ean will have my head for this. How did you find us?”
“Feminine intuition.”
“The truth, Maya.”
“I heard Marie put in the call to Ben. I knew it must have something to do with Allie and once I got to Greyville it wasn’t hard to locate Ben. We don’t have time to argue. I scouted out a way in, but you have to go under water and come up through a drain cover. Marcus is in there. Do you know how to teleport through water to get to him?”
Jake couldn’t even swim. “No and you shouldn’t either. How do I know you are skilled enough not to get hurt?”
“I was skilled enough to escape Pantheria and find my way here to Ean. I can get to the magus. I did it before when Adam and Ean got in trouble. We don’t have time to waste.”
Ben had emerged from the shadows and joined them. “She’s right. The tracks lead away from the pool, get confused, and then all lead here with some missing, notably male and female barefoot. Once she gets in she can let us in. With all the activity in the building it’s about the only way we’re getting in.”
“Okay. Okay!” Jake grabbed Maya’s shoulders and gave her a hard shake, then bumped her forehead with his. “Be careful. And come straight to that side door once you’re in. You let us in as soon as you’re inside.”
When Jake let her go, Maya moved into the woods. Power stirred the air around him. It was an unsettling feeling, that kind of energy in a female. Feminine power should be channeled inward, toward creating and nurturing new life. Males were the ones who created and manipulated energies in the external world.
They hunkered in the brush and waited. Time crawled.
“Ben, how many of your guys are with you?”
“They’re all here, including Lobo. He bounces back fast.”
“Isn’t he a vet?”
“Yeah.”
“You better send him over to Allie’s apartment. Any moment now Seth is going to realize he’s got a major problem in his arms.”
“What kind of problem?”
“A sow in labor.”
Ben chuckled. “Of course. By the Mother of all, life is more interesting with the magus around.”
“Mmm. That’s not quite the way I’d describe it.” Jake leaned to one side and then the other, shifting his weight to ease cramping in his knees from squatting in the underbrush. “Where the fuck is Maya?”
* * * * *
Allie slipped down the corridor as soon as the elevator indicator showed the men had reached the third floor. She had been hoping for a simple lock on the room containing Marcus, something pickable, but she was thwarted by the keycard style used in motels.
Leaning against the door, she scanned the corridor. It all seemed rather hopeless. Through the window she could see
Marcus in a fenced pen nearly as high as the ceiling. If he were conscious he could probably knock it down with the swipe of a paw.
He was breathing, the motion of his rib cage expanding and contracting barely perceptible. She didn’t know a lot about leopards, but in her brief experience with cats the movement was more pronounced than that, even when they slept.
She turned back to the corridor. There had to be something she could use to get in. It had been three years since her days of street burglary. In the tech age six months was a long time.
Lacking a better idea, she went down the corridor trying doors. It could have been worse, they could use biometric locks. If they were using keycards there was a universal keycard somewhere and there were individual keys. What was the easiest way to manage key cards in a research facility this size?
Bingo. She found a door that hadn’t quite closed behind its owner. She slipped into the lab and closed her eyes, allowing her pupils to adjust to darkness and then reopened them. The lab was only semi-dark, a heat lamp over a terrarium housing two huge hairy spiders. Allie’s skin went cold with dread.
They cannot hurt me. But it felt as if they were looking at her, watching her with beady little spider eyes. The cheesecloth covering the terrarium had gaping holes. Why didn’t they at least have a screen over the box? What if they were like Marcus, some sort of super spider that could launch itself from the glass box and make itself as big as a human? Her heart hammered triple time and despite her shivers, sweat trickled from her armpits down her rib cage.
She tried calming herself, taking one shaky breath and then another. There was no time for phobias. She had to find a way to get to Marcus. The handy thing about labs was that they always had gloves handy. The sight of a boxful reminded her she should have a care about fingerprints. She grabbed a pair, cringing at the powdery rubber feel of them encasing her skin. The sensation set her teeth on edge. Between glances at the spiders, she searched the desktop with its jumble of papers and objects. Then the drawers, offering up a silent prayer that all spiders were in that terrarium and they didn’t have a friend that had decided to go strolling about the lab before she arrived.
A mouse in the bottom drawer sent her jumping back with a squeak. It leapt to the edge of the drawer, twitched its tail and disappeared into the murky shadows under the desk. A chewed package of crackers proved to be the sole contents of the drawer.
One of the spiders had scrambled up onto a branch propped inside the cage, sort of a spider version of a jungle gym, something to entertain them Allie guessed, but it could also be a bridge to the outside.
“Don’t look at them. Don’t think about them,” she whispered to herself.
She turned to a coat rack with an assortment of lab coats, jackets and sweaters draped over hooks. Hopeful, Allie worked through the pile as quickly as she could. Attached to a lab coat hidden under a sweater she found an ID badge with a magnetic strip on the backside. Yes!
Now, if it opened the door to Marcus, she could get him out of here.
Keeping an eye on the spiders, she grabbed a rag from the desk, shook to be sure nothing alive was attached and backed out the door.
Allie held her breath when she inserted the card. The LED indicator flashed green and the door opened. She glanced around for some sign of a camera but didn’t see one. The dog pen must not be something that required constant monitoring.
Marcus. He looked so vulnerable, smaller, a less substantial rumpled heap of fur tossed onto the concrete floor. Allie squatted beside the cage and worked her hand between the gate rails, running gloved fingers through Marcus’ fur.
The gate had a lock and chain, a basic garden-variety padlock. She’d dropped a couple of paperclips in her pocket when she was searching the desk and she went to work with those. She was so out of practice, cursing under her breath. At last she felt the soft ting inside the steel casing and the hasp spring releasing.
Inside the cage she tried to lift Marcus’ head into her lap. “Marcus, you have to wake up, my heart. I can’t carry you out of here.” His nostrils flared. His tongue gave her wrist a weak lick and he went limp again. She looked around for something to use to haul him out. A cart with a couple of sacks of dog food on it rested against one wall. It wouldn’t hold a full-grown leopard, but she wondered if she could drape him over it somehow. She might be able to drag him to the warehouse area, maybe hide him there until he woke up.
Chapter Thirteen
“Patience, brother. She has to steer clear of the humans,” Ben said. “Rushing could get her in trouble.”
“Nothing like the kind of trouble we’ll be in if something happens to her. We have to get in there now. It’s been too long.” Jake stripped out of his clothes, tossed them to Ben and shifted.
The side door opened and Maya’s blonde head appeared. Jake dashed across the parking lot and pushed Maya out the door, “Go home.”
“No chance, big guy. You still need me. Allie is here somewhere. What if they’re both drugged or held in different areas? We need to stick together until we figure out what’s going on.”
Maya sent him a flirty little look, which made him snort. He was Yeti and she was Tiger. She couldn’t even talk in shifted form but had to rely on telepathy. But while Yeti might be the superior subspecies, Tigers didn’t view it that way. She was about as attracted to him as a turtle might be to an eagle. Nothing would ever happen in that department, which freed them to joke about it. But deep inside a longing for a mate twisted like glass. The last Yeti female had been killed by a hunter’s stray bullet. Wasting had so devastated the Yeti tribe that no female child had survived to adulthood in more than a century.
Extinction loomed. The few dozen remaining males had resigned themselves to watching their species die. He tamped down the emotions and moved into the dark warehouse. Maybe the Magus had the right of it. They had to accept change, adjust to a future that didn’t include them. If they couldn’t save the Pantherian tribes, maybe they could save the hybrids humans were manufacturing.
When he peeked through a door that led out on a corridor, another mind brushed his.
Magus?
Get Allie out. Get out.
Then the telepathic connection broke. “Did you hear?” Maya asked.
Jake nodded. He looked up and down the hall then turned to Maya. “Okay, now we go.”
“Oh sure, a seven-foot-tall Yeti isn’t going to look conspicuous at all on the security tapes.”
“It’s better than being identified. You keep your head down and stay close to me.”
To his relief she listened, but her stifled giggle told him she still looked at this as more an adventure game. She’d grown up in the sheltered world of Pantheria, far from the cruelties of nature’s worst and in particular humankind’s worst. He wanted to protect her, maintain that innocence. But for her own well-being, she had to know the reality he knew. Unfortunately, that lesson would start with whatever had been done to the magus.
* * * * *
Allie didn’t want to leave Marcus, but she couldn’t wake him and couldn’t lift him. She put her arms around his neck, pressed her face into the thick rough there. “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll find a way to get you out of here.”
If she used the cart and possibly the broom handle for a lever she might be able to work enough of him onto the cart to drag him out of here. She struggled just to drag the fifty-pound feed bags off the cart and rolled the cart through the cage door as close to Marcus’ back as she could. Next she grabbed the broom and clambered over cart and leopard. When she paused to think about it, she was in a cage with a full-grown, supersized hybrid predator. She had no idea how he would take to the idea of being prodded with a broomstick when he woke up.
From the new angle it was obvious that to lever him onto the cart would mean having to flip him over entirely like a pancake in a skillet. She crawled back over him, sweating, acutely aware that time was slipping away. She needed to raise his body six inches, something possible
if she threw all her weight into it. And then try to somehow nudge a corner of the cart under with her foot or something.
She worked the broomstick under, prying gently at first and then apologizing as she threw all her might onto it. Once she had what she hoped was enough underneath, she blocked the wheel locks on the cart and braced an end of the stick on a corner of the cart. Then pried. She threw her weight into it. Just as she’d inched the cart close enough to get his hip under the stick snapped, dropping him back onto the concrete floor. She collapsed, panting beside him, tears burned the backs of her eyes and swelled her throat. There was no time for tears. There had to be a way. There just had to. She could not leave him.
Allie was leaning over Marcus, palm pressed in the vicinity of where she thought his heart should be. She couldn’t feel the beat. She tried her hand over his nostrils, holding her breath, while she waited for that kiss of moisture that would signal breath.
The door creaking open behind her nearly sent her own heart shooting out of her mouth. Her brain categorized details—blonde, female, no clothes. A flicker of recognition stirred, not in her mind, but a light flutter in her stomach. The name fell off her tongue before Allie thought about it. “Maya?”
“Um, yeah, sweetie. I saw Franny and Lila in the park. They were worried so I came looking for you. It’s probably a really bad idea for you to be messing with that leopard. Why don’t you come out here with me?”
“I know this won’t make sense right now, but I know the leopard. He’s completely safe. We just have to get him out of here and fast. The guys here stole him and they said something about sacrificing him tonight.”
“Honey, I’d love to help, but stealing will only get you in more trouble. Didn’t you just get out of jail? And I know Marcus is here somewhere. We need to get you both out before this place is overrun with researchers, which by Jake’s best guess will be any minute now. Have you seen Marcus?”
Allie looked down at the leopard and back up at Maya. “Yes.”