Mark of the Wolf; Hell's Breed

by Madelaine Montague

  When Laurie looked around, she saw the other three had pushed their bikes up into the parking lot. Lucien left her to retrieve his own while the men unloaded her trunk and carried her luggage to their bikes.

  “Uh … you’re taking me on a bike?” Laurie said uneasily.

  “They’re going and your car isn’t,” Lucien said pointedly as he straddled his bike. “Come on. Get on the back. I’ll take care of you.”

  “We aren’t going on the freeway, are we?”

  The four men looked at each other.

  Lucien set his kickstand and climbed off the bike. Striding toward her, he dropped a heavy arm across her shoulders, walked her to the bike, and lifted her onto the back. “What hotel are you staying at?” he asked as he slid a leg over the bike again and started it.

  It was a little reassuring that he asked the name of the hotel, but not much after he’d manhandled her and put her on the bike! She told him where she planned to stay.

  “You might want to hold on,” he said evenly as he gunned the engine.

  He hadn’t put his jacket back on and there was nothing between them but a thin t-shirt! She did not want to get that chummy with the scary man! She nearly went off the back when he accelerated, however, and grabbed frantically for a hold. By the time he hit the freeway ramp, she was plastered as tightly to his back as she could get and had locked her fingers around his waist. She would’ve wrapped her legs around him, as well, if she could’ve gotten them that high.

  She didn’t want to see the cars flying by them, but somehow she couldn’t seem to help herself, especially since the bike seemed to be swooping from side to side. She discovered why it seemed that way when she finally unclenched her eyelids and opened them a fraction. He was zipping back and forth between lanes. The rest of his team had closed in around them, but it didn’t especially feel like a ‘buffer’ between her and the cars. She closed her eyes again, trying to focus her mind on something else—anything else.

  Even the fact that she was plastered more tightly against the man than she’d ever embraced her former boyfriend and it felt like she was coiled around a block of stone couldn’t hold her mind away from the terror long. She was actually surprised that she managed to notice anything at all about the man considering the level of terror—but she did notice that she liked his smell, because she had burrowed her face between his shoulder blades—and she did notice that he had lovely muscles everywhere. Descending the off ramp was even more frightening since she could feel gravity pulling her forward, but she told herself that she only had to endure a few more minutes and she could get off the vehicle from hell and she was never, ever going to set foot on a motorcycle again as long as she lived!

  Chapter Three

  “She didn’t know us,” Kane said as soon as they’d trooped inside the cabin they used as a safe house near the city—‘near’ being a subjective way of describing it since it was two and a half hours from the city.

  Despite the fact that it had been hours since they’d dropped Laurie Stone at her hotel nobody asked ‘who?’. “Because it wasn’t Lindsey, you dumb fuck!” Damien growled, stalking into the kitchen and grabbing a beer from the fridge.

  Kane glared at his back. “How do you know that? She looked like Cpl. Merriweather. She was right behind us. She could’ve been sucked through, too.”

  Damien turned to look at him for a long moment and then exchanged a significant look with Lucien. “She didn’t know us,” Lucien responded succinctly.

  “Yeah, but we knew her and we pretended we didn’t. Couldn’t she have been pretending too?” Kane said pointedly.

  Lucien shook his head, caught the beer Damien tossed to him and sprawled on the couch. “Her file.”

  Kane glanced from Lucien to the other two men and stalked into the kitchen to get himself a beer since Damien hadn’t bothered to get anybody one but himself and Lucien, his twin brother. “We’ve got files, too. We’ve got the files on the men that we were and files we made up after we got here.”

  Basil spoke up for the first time. “We weren’t those men. Those poor bastards are probably on Xeno-12 right now, wondering what the fuck happened, just like we’re here, wondering the same.”

  Kane frowned, thought it over. “You know what I mean,” he growled irritably.

  “Alright, let me put it this way,” Lucien said when Kane reached the living area again. “One, I saw Cpl. Merriweather when we went through the vortex and I’m pretty damned sure she didn’t. And two, five minutes in Laurie’s company is enough to convince me that she is definitely NOT Merriweather.” He took a draught of his beer. “I’ll admit it gave me a nasty turn when the DA handed that file over and I got my first look at her. I wasn’t convinced it wasn’t her when we were doing surveillance. But now I’m convinced. She isn’t Meriwether.”

  Damien dropped into his favorite chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles. “Well, where the fuck does that leave us? Here I thought we might be getting closer to finding out what the hell happened or, more importantly, how to get the hell out of this place, and now we’re back at square one?”

  Lucien stared at his bottle broodingly, as if it was a crystal ball. “I think we can accept the theory that we’re in an alternate universe,” he finally said musingly.

  “Don’t start that again!” Kane snapped. “It gives me a fucking headache!”

  “Shut the fuck up and let him talk!” Damien and Basil snarled at the same time.

  Lucien, who’d already opened his mouth to blast him, closed it again and tried to pick up the thread of his thoughts. “We know we sure as hell ain’t in Kansas anymore, ToTo!” he snapped. “Nothing else fits—whether we know how we got here or not!”

  “We got here through the damned vortex! Don’t tell me you forgot that!”

  Lucien glared at Kane.

  Basil, who’d just returned from the kitchen to get a beer for himself, punched his shoulder. “How about you just shut the fuck up and listen for a change? How about that?”

  Jostled, Kane, who’d been about to take a sip of his beer, poured it down the front of his shirt instead. Uttering a snarl of rage, he bounded out of his seat. Damien had been prepared for it. He punched Kane in the chest, sending him sprawling in his seat again.

  “Cut it out!” Lucien roared. “I can’t fucking think when y’all start that shit!”

  Everyone froze for a moment, exchanged glares, and then settled in their seats.

  Silence reigned for several minutes. Finally, Lucien resumed his speculation. “Nobody’s forgotten the damned vortex,” he growled. “All I’m saying is, whether it was natural or not, it wasn’t a damned tornado—because if it had been we’d still be on Xeno-12—probably dead, but still there. And I, for one, don’t think it was natural at all. Not saying it couldn’t be, but we were at war. It seems to me that we have to consider that the chances are high that it was some kind of weapon.

  “We know positively that we aren’t in our universe! A lot of things seem to be the same, but everything’s backwards and twisted. We dropped onto a battlefield in our time and place—war games, I’m pretty sure, here. We keep seeing people we recognize as people we knew in our own time and place, but they aren’t the same. They just look like the people we knew—well, except for the people that got sucked through that thing with us. And I’m thinking it had to be an exchange—we switched places—because I don’t think I could be in the same time and place as another version of me—any of us.”

  Damien shook his head. “We’ve gone over this, Lucien, over and over in the past eighteen months. I don’t see that going over it is helping. I don’t see that we’re any closer to figuring this shit out just by rehashing it.”

  Lucien glared at him. “Bear with me. I’m just trying to get this straight in my head, alright?”

  Damien shrugged and focused on his beer.

  “What I was getting around to is that even though this is a different place there are connection
s and parallels. Laurie isn’t Lindsey. I’m almost one hundred percent positive of that. But one thing I have noticed since we got here is that …. Well, it’s like the two places are connected in a way. They run parallel to each other and a lot of the same things are true of both. What I’m saying is Laurie isn’t our Lindsey, but she’s the person our Lindsey would be in this universe—is. So there must be a connection even if she isn’t the same person.”

  Damien blinked at him, glanced at Basil and Kane and then looked at Lucien again, and then his beer. “How many of these have I had?”

  Lucien glared at him. “Ok, let me put it this way—I still think we might be on to something and I still think we need to stay close to Lindsey/Laurie. There’s a connection somehow someway. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure we met up with her because it was inevitable/fate/ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

  “It’s like DA Peeples all over again. He barely glanced at the identities we’d made up for ourselves. Why? He isn’t Donald. He doesn’t know us—isn’t our brother in this world--but he still felt the connection. There’s no other explanation for him hiring us without a thorough background check.”

  Kane frowned, obviously turning that over in his mind and examining the logic for flaws. “It didn’t look to me like Lindsey/Laurie felt any connection. She didn’t trust us at all.”

  Damien gave him a look. “And Cpl. Merriweather was our bud, right?”

  Kane stared at him a moment. His brow cleared. “True. She hated our guts so that’s not really different.”

  Lucien and Damien both glared at him, but it was Lucien who spoke. “Speak for yourself. She didn’t hate me, and I didn’t get that vibe from Laurie either.”

  Basil and Kane exchanged a look. Basil knew when to keep his mouth shut, though. Unfortunately, that wasn’t something Kane had ever learned. “She threatened to have us terminated … twice! … for insubordination. She said we were defective. You’re saying she actually liked us?”

  “She was against the genetic engineering project,” Lucien said pointedly. “She didn’t hate us. She just didn’t trust genetic engineering, and, as much as I hate to admit it, she was right. We damned sure aren’t normal.”

  “Somehow I don’t think the shape-shifting was part of that project,” Damien said dryly. “That was something that happened to us when we went through the vortex.”

  “I don’t think it was a planned part of the project,” Lucien agreed, “but we don’t know that it wasn’t a side effect.”

  “That never happened before we went through the vortex,” Basil pointed out. “And they had years to study us before they put us in the field.”

  Lucien frowned. “In which case it might be reversed if we can ever figure out a way to go back through. But since we don’t know, yet, if the vortex was created naturally or if it’s some kind of weapon …. It could even be this place for all we know. Maybe the guys that were us in this place could do that and we can now that we’ve taken their place?”

  Kane gaped at him. “So why did they try to kill us when we shifted if they were used to it?” he demanded, harping back to their arrival. “I wasn’t exactly thinking normally, but it seemed to me that the ‘friendly fire’ we were getting was because they didn’t know what the hell we were!”

  “Nobody really knows a damned thing!” Basil snapped. “Give us a break, Kane. We’re just kicking possibilities around, trying to figure it out. Not but what I don’t agree with you on this one—I think we all do even though it’s hard to swallow. The only explanation for what we landed in, though, was exercises and, if that’s what it was, then they had no business lobbing live rounds at us and trying to hit us. And I don’t think they would have except that they weren’t expecting us to change.”

  Lucien gave him a sour look. “I’m off to bed,” he said, finishing his beer in one long draught and getting to his feet.

  In retrospect, he didn’t suppose he could blame the bastards for trying to kill them. It had happened to him and it had scared the hell out of him. It had scared him worse, though, to think he might be stuck like that—a monster half human and half wolf. Thankfully, they’d changed back before they’d had time to worry about it too much. Any hope they’d had that it was just a onetime thing was dashed fairly quickly, however—as soon as the military tracked them down and engaged them again they’d changed. It was definitely a permanent part of their new personas, even though they’d discovered since their arrival that they could not only change from human to half man half wolf. They could transition completely from man to wolf and they could control the shift change—mostly.

  A side benefit to that seemed to be almost instantaneous healing from the holes the government/military seemed determined to put in them any time they managed to get close enough, but he couldn’t say he was exactly thrilled that they weren’t just half man and half wolf on the genetic level anymore. And he didn’t think he’d regret having to give that up if and when they managed to make it back to their own world.

  It was bad enough to feel like a monster because that was the way the scientists who’d developed them looked at them—and anybody else that discovered they were genetically engineered—like the handlers they’d been given when they were sent in to be trained as soldiers.

  Looking like a monster, even though he’d discovered he could change back to a human form—in appearance anyway—had destroyed his attempts to convince himself he really wasn’t, that he was as human as the ones that considered themselves humans. He was just more than human.

  His last thoughts just before he dropped over the edge of the cliff into oblivion, though, weren’t speculation over how they might reverse the situation and get home. His thoughts were about how good it had felt to have Laurie pressed so tightly against him, how good she’d smelled, and if there was any way in hell she might be convinced he wasn’t a monster when he felt like he was one.

  He’d never been able to reconcile his lust for Lindsey with the personality she had. Laurie was nothing like Lindsey, though, beyond the physical appearance. And he thought he was going to find it impossible to focus on the job rather than getting into Laurie’s pants as fast as he could figure out how to do it.

  What sort of ramifications might that have, though? They hadn’t actually interacted with the people on this side at that level. They’d been careful not to. And as long as they were stuck on this side, the lives they’d created for themselves, and the job, were important to their survival. He was pretty sure the government/military still wanted to get their hands on them and it wouldn’t be a good thing for them when and if they did—or anyone that happened to be with them at the time.

  No. It would be best all the way around to keep ignoring the blue balls and focus on surviving long enough to get themselves out of the mess they were in. And if it turned out that it was hopeless and they were never going home, then the lives they’d made for themselves on this side were all the more important.

  * * * *

  Laurie didn’t sleep well. There were a lot of very good reasons for that--starting with the car that probably wasn’t going to be there by the time the tow truck went to pick the damned thing up to tow it to a garage. She’d put in a call for a pickup as soon as she’d gotten to her room the night before. Although the phonebook stated that the company offered 24 hours service, however, the man she’d spoken to hadn’t sounded very convincing when he said he’d get his next driver on it.

  She doubted there was a driver other than the one she talked to.

  Of course the car might be a total loss anyway if what Lucien had said was true and she didn’t actually doubt his word.

  She didn’t know what the hell she was going to do about a car if it was toast!

  Her scheduled meeting with the DA wasn’t exactly conducive to restful sleep, either.

  In point of fact, she hadn’t been resting well since she’d witnessed the murder.

  She could recall some vague pieces of dreams, though, that told
her that her woes certainly weren’t totally responsible for her restless night.

  The scary ride she’d had on the back of the motorcycle and the scary men she’d met were mostly responsible, but not in the way they should have been.

  She was pretty sure she’d had some erotic dreams mixed in with the nightmares about stalking killers, courtroom drama, and being chased down dark streets by drug addicts.

  And she didn’t have to think about it long to realize who’d starred in the erotic dreams.

  It was the twins! Well, brothers. The other two had been featured, but she couldn’t really remember much past being sandwiched between the matching bookends. If anyone had ever asked her if she fantasized about doing a three way, she would’ve told them they were out of their minds. Setting aside the fact that she had a hard enough time finding one man that appealed to her enough to consider intimacy, there were all sorts of problems with the concept—starting with logistics and finishing with the territoriality of men. Maybe it was fun toying with the idea of climbing into the sack with both—she would admit that much—but she didn’t sleep with men unless she considered them in the light of permanent. And a woman couldn’t consider sleeping with two men and permanence in the same breath. They might, or might not, enjoy a three way as much as she did, but that was going to be the first and last of the ‘relationship’.

  And she didn’t sleep with any man she wasn’t considering as a permanent part of her life.

  “Just keep telling yourself that, you liar!” she muttered as she showered. “You aren’t fooling me! You know damned good and well you’d leap at the chance to experience any one of those beautiful men—just for scrapbook memories!”