by Laura Taylor
“Easy,” Mark said as he saw her flinch. “The more equipment you’re carrying, the harder it gets to shift. It’ll be a little rougher than usual, but it’s worth the effort.”
Dee nodded, then helped Mark into his own suit. Aside from physical protection from bullets, the spikes would also make it much more difficult for anyone to grab the wolves; they formed rows of miniature daggers that would lacerate anyone’s hands. She made a mental note to keep her distance from her comrades when in wolf form, and made sure Faeydir understood that as well.
Finally they were both ready, and Mark shifted back. He gave her a hard, almost desperate stare. “I’ll be okay,” she said before he could say a word. He hugged her tightly, a quick, fierce embrace, and then it was time to go.
“May those who run, run fast and true,” Baron said, everyone suited up and armed to the teeth.
“And may those who fall find glory in the House of Sirius,” the Den replied in unison.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Baron said, with a humourless grin. “The dogs are about to go to war.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The rows of warehouses were ominous. Dee gritted her teeth, pushing the instinctive fear down. Terrible things had happened the last time she was here, and a strong sense of foreboding was not helping her focus.
Are you okay with this? she asked Faeydir. Her response took a moment to translate. She showed Dee an image of the picture on her bedroom wall, the pack of wolves running through the snow, accompanied by a sense of satisfaction so strong it made Dee stumble. So we’re part of the pack now, right? An image of dead scientists lying bleeding on the floor, accompanied by a spark of glee. Well, at least her wolf was on board with this crazy plan.
They weren’t bothering to be discreet. The Den’s four white vans had pulled up with all the subtlety of an action movie, tyres screeching, motors roaring.
They piled out of the vans, Baron and Caleb at the front of the column, then John, Silas, who was ignoring his not insignificant injuries, Caroline, who preferred knives to firearms, and Andre, who looked as calm as if he was taking a stroll along the beach. Dee, Mark, Skip, Raniesha and a handful of others trailed behind, while those not so talented at fighting – Alistair, George and Heron, to name a few – waited with the vans, ready to make a quick getaway. Assuming, of course, that any of them came out alive.
Baron quickly shot both security cameras mounted on the outside of the building. The sudden loss of feed would doubtlessly alert the Noturatii to their presence, but it could still buy them precious seconds as the security guards rallied to repel an attack that they were unable to assess, their electronic eyes blinded to the Den’s numbers and strategy.
They reached the door, and Baron paused only a moment before they started raising hell. “Weapons out. Shoot anything that moves. If Tank isn’t retrievable, put him down. It’s better that way, both for him, and us. Kwan?” he snapped, and the Korean man darted forward. “Do your thing.”
When they’d been planning this assault, Dee had assumed that Skip would be in charge of breaking through the security locks – surely she had a dozen devices that could fake fingerprints or iris scans. But the actual plan was both a lot simpler, and a lot more surprising. Caroline wasn’t the only shifter in the Den with unusual abilities, she’d learned. Kwan also had a mysterious talent – the ability to manipulate electrical currents. When he’d first joined the Den, he’d cause no shortage of mischief, unexpectedly turning off all the lights in the manor, or making the television change channels by itself. It had taken Baron months to figure out who was doing it, and how, but as well as just causing mischief, the talent had some far more serious uses.
Kwan stared at the security panel, one hand running lightly over the metal case that secured it to the wall. Skip had found out the type of device they were using, and after a quick look at the design, Kwan had assured them he could open the lock. He closed his eyes in concentration now, fingers moving slowly, like a musician coaxing notes from a violin, and then the red light on the panel flashed to green, and the lock on the door clicked open.
Wow. That was handy.
Inside there was another door, this one with a guard, and Caleb put a bullet in his skull before he’d even realised what was happening, his body hitting the floor with a thud.
Baron silently gestured for Skip and Silas to head off to the right – Skip’s task was to erase any and all video footage of their arrival or activities, and Silas was her bodyguard – a task he seemed to relish as he carried a gun in each hand, another one on each hip, and enough grenades to take down a small building.
The moment the pair was gone, Baron nodded to Mark, who took point down the long staircase towards the labs. They had all studied the layout of the building, of course, but Mark was the only one who had been inside before, who knew the layout in three dimensions, rather than via two dimensional lines on a screen.
Three guards tried to intercept them, the first too stunned to do anything but gasp before he was dead, the other two putting up token resistance which Andre quickly quashed. He was lowering the last guard to the floor, a knife in his lung, before Dee even registered that he’d moved, and she allowed herself a split second to be impressed by the Council’s training. No wonder they inspired unquestioning loyalty from the rest of Il Trosa.
But that was when their progress was suddenly halted.
Li Khuli was roaming the corridors when the alarm went off. She’d been expecting it ever since they’d brought the shifter in, and she felt a surge of glee now that the moment had finally arrived.
She lived for moments like this. Ever since she’d been abducted as a child, off the streets and away from the gang who alternately protected and abused her, she’d been in training to fight, to kill, to torture.
She’d become good at it, her first kill a simple kitten, then an adult cat, then dogs of various sizes, before her trainers had set her loose on one of the other trainees. It was meant to be a simple training exercise, a test to see who was the fastest and strongest, her instructions to break the girl’s arms and then let her go.
But she hadn’t. After breaking first one arm, and then the other, she’d seen the look of cold defeat in the girl’s eyes, had hated her for her weakness, and she’d felt more powerful than ever before in her short life. So she’d grabbed the girl’s head and twisted, feeling the raw pleasure of her neck cracking, and then watched in fascination as the girl collapsed, eyes blank, skin pale.
Her trainers, far from angry with her for disobeying their orders, had praised her, congratulated her, and led her off to be paraded in front of the other Khuli children, an example of the true nature and purpose of their training.
It had been almost as exhilarating as feeling those fragile bones crack beneath her hands.
She’d killed many people throughout her life. Business men, politicians, police officers and detractors from the Noturatii. But there was nothing she liked better than killing a shifter.
It wasn’t because she harboured any particular views about their inherent evil. It had been impressed upon her from an early age that they were abominations, dangerous, evil, terrorists and traitors to the human race. But in her own mind, none of that mattered. No, the reason she loved to kill shifters was that they were harder to kill. Injure one form, and they would take on the other, and the fight could begin again. Take away their weapons and they would fight with fists and boots and teeth. They were tough bastards, and the last one she had killed – an assassin like herself – had taken no less than three hours to die, limbs broken, chunks of flesh removed, one foot cut off completely; but still he’d fought her, employing throwing knives, bullets from a tiny, concealed pistol, even a grenade. But she’d survived, and the shifter hadn’t, dying finally with his body contorted in agony as she’d slowly removed his internal organs, wondering which one would be the one to make him bleed out.
And now she smiled as the building-wide alarm went off. A quick check via her earpiec
e and she knew the situation – the exterior cameras had gone off line, and security was rushing to meet the enemy in the upper levels.
She switched channels to the one used exclusively for her five assassins and gave them their instructions.
And then she headed for the basement, the lowest level where the experiments were carried out.
Jacob had given her orders. He thought he knew her plan of attack. He expected her to meet the shifters in the hallways and pick them off, cutting off their invasion before it had really begun.
But Li Khuli had other plans. She didn’t just want to kill them. She wanted to make them suffer. Let them see the progress the Noturatii had made towards their demise, and then feel their own life being choked slowly out of them.
So the labs were where she would make her stand – assuming any of the dogs managed to make it down that far.
A small, quiet, strangely peaceful part of her really hoped they did.
Baron was feeling strangely calm as he took cover in a doorway and popped off round after round from his semi-automatic. The guards were thick in the halls, surging out of every doorway like ants from a disturbed nest, but he felt no fear of them.
They were well trained, organised, but the narrow fighting space hampered their attempts to kill the shifters, and his own team were expert marksmen, every shot made to count. Head shots, mainly, as the guards wore bullet proof vests, just as the Den did.
“Cover!” Raniesha yelled at one point, tossing a grenade down the hall, and the explosion was deafening, a blast of heat surging back at them as every member of the team dived for cover. The lights went out as the ceiling was ripped apart, electricity in this section of the building disabled, and they waited for long, painstaking seconds as the smoke cleared. Sprinklers burst into action, drenching them and the fire that had broken out, but they ignored it. They had a mission to fulfil, a species to protect, a friend to liberate.
Baron twisted to the side, rolling and swearing as a heavy body dropped down on top of him. A knife missed his chest and lacerated his arm instead, but he had no time to assess the damage as his attacker regained his feet and launched a second assault.
A bullet to the head stopped him in his tracks, the body hitting the floor before Baron even registered that he’d pulled the trigger.
He didn’t have any time to gloat though, or even to check the cut on his arm, as he saw another four of the black-clad men filling the hallway, fighting in close quarters with his best warriors. Andre, Caroline and John were front and centre, and it took only a split second to assess the situation.
Assassins. The Council wasn’t the only faction in this war to employ specialised fighters, and from the way these men moved, they had been trained by experts. One of them had relieved Caroline of her gun, and they were now fighting hand-to-hand. Andre was being kept busy by a second, while John had shifted and was tearing chunks out of the other two. Damn, but he was good in a fight.
Baron raised his gun, but quickly lowered it again. Bullets were a no-go – there was a high risk that he’d end up shooting Caroline or Andre instead. The rest of the shifters had held their ground a short distance back along the corridor, no doubt recognising this fight as beyond their capabilities, and Baron found himself wishing he had either Tank or Silas at his side.
Caroline went down for a moment, and Baron moved to go to her aide, before realising that she had just kneecapped the assassin and finished him off with a knife to his neck. That left a gap in the fight, and Baron used the split second opportunity to shoot one more assassin in the head, leaving John to rip the throat out of the remaining man.
That left just Andre, who unfortunately found himself in a more open section of the hallway. That meant less cover and more space for the assassin to move.
Andre was holding his own though, seeming to almost play with the man as he sidestepped and ducked and wove. The assassin was too cocky, Baron thought, as he watched the fight. He was too confident in his own skills and probably hadn’t realised who he was up against.
A loud crack signalled the end of the fight. Andre broke the man’s elbow, flipped him around and slit his throat.
A quick check of the hallway – all clear – and he turned to Baron and straightened his trench coat.
“Shall we?” he asked, as if inviting the alpha to join him for dinner. And Baron grinned.
“We shall.”
Huddled against the wall in terror, Dee fought to keep herself from shaking. Baron had done his best to prepare her for this, and there had been another pep-talk from Mark in the van on the way here, but in her naivety, she’d expected something more like a scene from an action movie – lots of cover, their enemy being lousy shots, nice gaps in the battle to gather her wits.
This was a blood bath. The shifters were expert marksmen, but so were the guards. Nate had already been shot, withdrawing to join Kwan and Aaron at the entrance – their job was to secure the exit and make sure there were no obstructions to a hasty getaway. There were dozens of guards dead, their bodies coating the hallways red, and the mess that the grenade had left… Movies never showed you the full extent of body parts littered about, nor conveyed the smell of burnt flesh and running blood.
So far, Dee hadn’t managed to get off a single shot herself, easing along the hallway in the middle of the column of shifters. Baron had explained the tactics – until they were on the laboratory level, he and his best fighters would stay at the front, carving a path through the mayhem. Mark was near the front as well, guiding them all down into the bowels of the building, while Dee hung back, waiting for her own opportunity to act, and dreading it at the same time.
Finally, though, the five assassins who had unexpectedly rained down on them were dead and they were off again, the quick, shuffling run-then-duck as they made slow progress towards their goal.
Down stairs, along hallways, through doors and down more stairs. Dee didn’t remember it being this far down from her panicked flight all those months ago, but Faeydir kept nodding, anticipating the next turn, the next doorway, even before Mark had given the direction.
Once past the initial surge of guards, the hallways were surprisingly empty. Administration staff seemed to have fled further into the building, while the major security presence here was already dead.
And then they came to a flight of stairs, narrow, white, a biohazard sign on the door above the landing, and Mark came to a halt.
Faeydir’s emotions were a mess of contradictions, fear, anticipation, and glee at being able to end so many lives committed to evil, as well as a strange sense of sorrow. We’re going to make it out alive, Dee reassured her hastily. You will see the snow and the sky again. I promise.
Any trace of distraction vanished, and Faeydir focused on the stairs ahead. Another flash of those wolves, running through the snow…
“When we get to the bottom of the stairs, the cages are to the left,” Mark said, letting Baron take the lead, and easing backwards to join Dee and take on his next assignment. “Directly ahead is a science lab where they keep all their records and chemicals, and the experimentation rooms are to the right. Security will be tight. And if they’ve just captured a new test subject, I’d expect every scientist in the building to be somewhere on this floor.”
“You all know what you have to do,” Baron said grimly.
And then there was no more time for thinking, as Baron led the charge down the stairs, and the Noturatii’s laboratories swarmed to life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Phil sat in the lab, trying to concentrate on his computer as the sirens continued to blare outside the room. More than half an hour had passed since the first alarm had gone off, sending security guards scattering and Li Khuli’s terrifying assassins heading for the upper levels, and somehow Phil had expected it to all be over by now. They’d hired the most fearsome weapon the Noturatii had to offer, and Li Khuli should have been up there, in the thick of it, wiping out this branch of the shifters once and for all.
Why were the sirens still sounding?
Phil took a deep breath and returned his attention to the screen, which was displaying the results of their experiments to create a new shifter. Blood pressure charts, neural activity, read outs of static electricity, heart rate, pupil dilation – nothing had gone unattended in their latest test subjects, and he was determined to crack the mystery.
“O’Brian,” Jacob snapped, marching into the room suddenly. “What have you got?”
Phil all but jumped out of his seat. Jacob scared the pants off him at the best of times. “Sir! I wasn’t expecting you back so soon.”
“So you’ve been sitting around doing nothing?”
“No sir! Of course not, sir.”
“So? What have you got?”
Phil fumbled for his glasses, then for his notes. “Well, sir,” he said, hands shaking as he tried to read the figures. “Unfortunately, the first test subject was not successful. She died almost immediately after we infused the shifter blood into her. We followed the instructions precisely,” he rushed on, seeing Jacob’s glare. “The initial experiments suggested that the convert had to be of the opposite gender to the shifter, so the capture squad picked up three women. We followed the notes, the strength of the electric fields, the ratios of human to shifter blood, the temperatures and pressures. Everything that was recorded by Andrews.”
“And it failed.”
“But then we experimented on the second girl,” Phil said, trying to sound enthusiastic, and probably failing.
“And?”
“She’s still alive, but she seems to be having some adverse reactions to the infusion. Her heart rate is elevated, her electrolytes are out of balance. Linda’s with her now, keeping her stable.” The resident doctor had insisted on the best medical equipment money could buy, and Phil was grateful for it now. If the girl died, at least Jacob couldn’t blame them for not being diligent enough.