by Sylvia Frost
“Yep, lights and security are on the same circuit. Sorry. GPS on the guard’s phones say they’re on the floor below you, with another four heading to the basement to check what I’m sure they think is a blown fuse. I sent my team to deal with them. I’d say you’ve got ten minutes. Fifteen, if you want me to do some more hacking magic.”
“I think I’ve had more than my share of magic for one day.” Tapping her ear piece again to hang up, Ms. Briar’s heavy footfalls echoed through the hallway as she hurried to explain to me what I’d already overheard. One of the security team had given her work-boots after I patched her up.
I held up a hand and shook my head to silence her. It was bad enough that she was tromping around, a recap was the last thing I needed. If her fox-shifter hacker hadn’t been the only one able to open the service entrance back door, I would’ve never risked Ms. Briar’s safety by letting her come.
Ms. Briar surprised me by closing her mouth and shifting her grip on her pistol to keep it cocked into the shadows, guarding our flank.
Safe, for the moment, I focused on my matemark. The tingling was more intense. We were getting closer to Rose. I motioned us forward and Ms. Briar followed, a little quieter this time as we rounded the corner.
Past the laundry room stretched a line of identical doors. Faded multicolored plastic flags rested above the frames, not labeled with doctor’s names. My slitted, golden eyes caught no human forms in the shadows, either. I stopped at the first door, my fingers running down the grain of the wood.
I heard nothing on the other side.
Silently, I moved to the next door and then the door after that. The farther I got along the hallway, the faster the warmth spread down my neck. When I reached the last door, I felt Ms. Briar’s hand on my shoulder. She probably thought I couldn’t see the fear in her wide brown eyes or how her lips were corkscrewed into a grimace, but I could.
Careful not to scare her away, I grabbed her hand and squeezed. She started back, confused for a second, and then relaxed, offering me a grateful smile. I nodded to the door. Ms. Briar nodded back. Then we entered.
Right away I knew I’d made the correct choice. Rose’s scent of lilacs burst through the sterile numbness of the silver nitrate like roots breaking through concrete. A second after I registered her scent, I spotted her.
My mate was crouched in the center of the room like a little cub about to strike. Her hands were imprisoned in cuffs still linked to the plastic guard rails from the bed. The rails dragged behind her like carcasses from a kill. In her right hand she wielded her miniature magnesium sword, and with her left hand she held the scabbard perpendicular over her weapon. With her wild box-braids dancing around her face and brown eyes gleaming, it wasn’t clear to me whether she was going to start a fire with the scabbard or throw her tiny weapon at the first person to cross over the threshold.
We stared each other for a moment, my heart swelling. Her body may have been soft and lusciously curvy, but her eyes held fire. I had never loved her more.
Then her jaw dropped, eyes widened, and a smile broke over her features. “Daniel!” she cried.
“Rose.” Without thinking, I swooped her up in my arms, kissing the first bit of her I could reach, which was the top of her head.
She sighed against my chest, hands scrabbling at my shirt. “Oh, Daniel. God, am I glad to see you!” She noted her mother behind me and rose to her tiptoes to get a better look over my shoulder. “Mamma? How the hell are you here?”
“Language, Rose,” Ms. Briar said through a sucked-in breath of disapproval, but her eyes weighed my expression carefully. She was worried I’d tattle on her stalking.
I wouldn’t. That was her secret to tell. I busied myself cutting Rose free of her plastic handcuffs with my claws.
Rose didn’t seem to notice, she was too busy rolling her eyes at her mother. “Sweet Jesus, Mamma. I’ve been kidnapped by a crazy corporation, now is not the time to care about me swearing. We have to get out of here.”
“But,” her mother echoed, shocked at her daughter’s defiance, but with the tiniest hint of approval. “I guess you’re right.”
“I love you, Mamma,” she said, laughing, as her eyes met mine. “And I love you too, Daniel.” She sank to the ground, her hands sliding off my shoulders and down my arms, tender warmth softening her face for just a moment.
“I love you, Rose, too.” Bowing my head, our lips met, and I relished her sweet wet mouth. I counted my pulse, making sure I didn’t steal too many seconds of bliss before we had to run again.
The lights went on.
My eyes flew open and I pulled Rose against me instinctively, caging her in my embrace. Ms. Briar had raised her gun to point it at the door.
“Loxely,” she hissed into her Bluetooth receiver.
I heard footsteps on the other side of the door. More than one pair. Three at least. I glanced at the window. We were at least two stories up, but my strong lion’s bones could handle the fall if I shifted. Cat’s always landed on their feet. Rose and her mother were another matter, but maybe if they held on tightly…
The doorknob began to turn, we were out of time. Reaching deep inside of myself, I tried to pull out the change, but I was too slow. By the time I felt fur piercing my skin and the burning nausea of my organs rearranging themselves, the door had already opened, and through it walked a nurse, three armed guards and Lonan Brown.
Chapter 23
ROSE
Three guns wielded by men in body armor, a short blonde nurse holding a metal stand decked out with a full, cloudy IV bag, and Lonan Brown. The small army that stormed through the hospital door was enough to make any girl meekly sit back down on the bed, and say, “Oh well. Guess I’m done for.” But I wasn’t just any girl. Not anymore.
Lonan halted when he saw Daniel, Mamma and me, his hand flying to his own waist reflexively where there was now a standard military issue handgun.
I did not doubt it had silver bullets.
“Well, okay,” Lonan drawled, looking us over. “I can’t say this is unexpected, since I’ve currently got a squad engaged in a firefight downstairs with a mean-looking croc shifter with a hook for a hand, but you did find Rose faster than I would’ve thought.”
“Tell your men to put away their weapons,” Mamma said calmly, her gun pointed directly at Lonan, ignoring the soldiers with their scarier-looking rifles.
God, I loved Mamma.
She always knew who the people with real power were and how to take them down. After she lost the court case against the sheriff who killed Daddy, she found in her records of Amazon Glam that the sheriff had been buying lingerie for his mistress two towns over for years. All she had to do was post the receipts on the local bulletin board and the town busy-bodies did the rest. It wasn’t justice, but at least he suffered a little.
Unfortunately, it’d take a more than the rumor mill to stop Lonan.
Lonan nodded, and the three soldiers raised the muzzles of their automatic rifles. “Sorry. I can’t do that.”
I squeezed my hands into fists, concealing my mini sword and scabbard. Both were useless. Mamma was the only one with a weapon, and Daniel…
I glanced at him out of the side of my eye and my mouth went dry at what I saw. His nose, which I once thought wide and slightly African, had now expanded fully into a lion’s snout. Whiskers pierced his cheeks, fangs curled over his lip, and his hair had exploded into a full bright orange mane, although he still had human feet, hands, and eyes.
Lonan must’ve caught him halfway through the shift, and now he was afraid if he completed it, Lonan would shoot me or Mamma. I could see in Daniel’s eyes that he didn’t care if he died himself.
Mamma glanced between us, her eyes wide at Daniel’s transformation, but she didn’t lower her weapon. “I don’t take orders from people who break the law,” she spat at Lonan.
Lonan’s smile tightened. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my company is with the government. We are the law.”
Mamma squared her shoulders and stepped closer to the line of loaded assault rifles, her face twisted with decades of suppressed fury. “The last time the law messed with me I let them, and I regret it every day of my life. If you so much as harm a hair on my daughter or her freaky boyfriend’s head, I will blow a hole through your skull and I will smile. Got me?”
Lonan’s eyes narrowed. “I think we’d get a bullet through your daughter’s skull first, Alycia.”
I could almost feel the icy horror sliding between my Mamma’s lips at Lonan’s words. She flinched, her gun wavering just a centimeter. I couldn’t let him do this to her.
“You wouldn’t.” I pushed my Mamma back with one arm without thinking about it. “You kidnapped me to give me a treatment. You can’t do that if I’m dead.”
Lonan sighed and fidgeted with his expensive watch. “Your point is?”
Beside me Daniel was growing more and more agitated. His hands were paws now. If given only a few more moments he would pounce.
“Tell the werebeast to stand down,” one of the soldiers grunted to Lonan, his body armor clanked as he shifted the grip on his gun to brace it on his body.
“Dr. Ward, you’ll stop shifting, if you want your mate to come out of this alive,” Lonan commanded.
“When did you know?” Daniel’s voice was garbled, half-animal, half-human and all pure feline fury. “About me. About her.”
“I just follow orders and collect a paycheck. But my understanding is we’ve known about you for a while,” Lonan said. “Going to med school doesn’t exactly qualify as living off the grid. Even if you did change your last name.”
“Then why didn’t you come after me again if you knew where I was?”
Lonan’s fingers ran up and down the holster for his side-arm thoughtfully. “I’d bet recapturing you had a price-tag the board of directors didn’t feel comfortable paying. They’d gotten everything they needed from you scientifically, and you were too busy hiding to hook up with even your family, let alone more dangerous werebeast elements and pose a real threat. In summary, revenge isn’t a solid business strategy.”
“Then. Why. Take. Her?” Daniel’s shoulders hunched and his eyes flashed into a cat’s narrow pupil in his anger.
“I’d keep on explaining, but time is money, and I’m not going to waste more of either on you.” Lonan rolled his shoulders as if getting rid of a muscle cramp and then motioned to the soldiers. They pressed forward in a single lock-stepping stomp.
His gaze zeroed in on Mamma. “Now, Ms. Briar, we have two options. One, we shoot you and Daniel here ‘in the skull’—” he put quotations around the last word and did a horrible southern parody of Mamma’s accent, even though she’d lost her twang years ago, “—and then perform the therapy on your daughter. Two, you stand down, let me do my job, and I promise that I won’t hurt your daughter or her mate.”
Lonan’s beady green eyes bore into mine to see if I’d contradict him. He knew that I knew that not only would the treatment in the IV bag cause me significant brain damage, but that breaking the bond couldn’t be good for Daniel. But if I confessed what I knew, Daniel and Mamma would charge the soldiers and end up dead.
I needed another plan. I clenched my jaw. My palms were doused with sweat by this point, which was reacting with the magnesium of the sword in a bubbling fizzle. Naomi’s meteorite sword would’ve never done that, it would’ve glowed and been the size of a real weapon. If I had that, I could’ve sliced Lonan’s head off.
“Well?” Lonan asked the three of us, his voice cold as a credit debt collector. “What am I working with here?”
Daniel’s back arched, his Werehawk’s T-Shirt was beginning to bust open as his muscles grew. All my life I’d dreamed about seeing a werebeast transform in person. I thought it would be beautiful. And it was. But it was also sickening, because I knew if he finished transforming, in the end all there would be was a corpse of a lion on the ground. I’d never see Daniel’s human face again.
“Wait!” I called. “I’ll do it.”
Everyone in the room looked at me. The last glimmer of humanity in Daniel’s eye flashed like the color a setting sun.
“You’ll do what, Rose?” Mamma said, voice rough. “What are you going to do?”
I swallowed, my throat aching from pain and tears. I loved this world so much. I loved my mamma, I loved my stupid Brooklyn apartment that I’d worked my butt off to call my own, I loved all the books and all the stories about brave women doing brave things. Maybe that’s what stories were for, so that even when you did something brave and you couldn’t remember it, other people could, and you’d live on that way.
And I loved Daniel. I loved him most of all.
I smiled at him, wishing I could bring his lips against mine one last time and whisper that I hoped what I was about to do wouldn’t hurt him and that I needed him to help take care of my Mamma if I didn’t wake up, or if, after I woke up, I wasn’t myself anymore.
One of the soldier’s chins rose as he evaluated me. I recognized him. He was the same man with the weak coffee eyes and the squished jaw, the one who had broken into my house. He was not a man who would stop from pulling the trigger just to let me have a goodbye kiss.
So I squared my shoulders, ignoring the pain in Daniel’s face. I’d rather hurt him now, than have him dead.
“I’ll take the treatment,” I said.
“And the rest of you?” Lonan asked.
Mamma looked at me hopelessly and Daniel couldn’t meet my eyes at all, Just saying it once wasn’t enough. I had to tell them that this was my choice, even though it was anything but. I had to affirm what Lonan always thought, that causing pain was the only way cure me.
I glared at the IV bag dangling from the metal stand, as if I could set it on fire with my eyes. The liquid inside wasn’t completely clear, and I swore I could see the silver poison swirling around the water, waiting to take everything away from me. In my palm, the magnesium sword had stopped fizzling against my hot, sweaty hands.
Wait.
Magnesium plus water equaled a sizzle, because magnesium is crazy reactive. That was why I always wore the sword in sheath. Magnesium was dangerous. It might not have been able to slice anyone’s head off, but it wasn’t powerless. If I were able to put the magnesium into the silver mixed with the water, I could cause an explosion. I could take the very thing they wanted to use to hurt me and turn it against them.
Chapter 24
DANIEL
The nurse guided my mate onto the bed with a clinical kindness I knew well. Her eyes were the same dull blue as her scrubs. She didn’t care what happened to my mate.
How could Rose do this? I knew the coloration of the IV bag that swung from the metal pole. I knew what was inside. Silver. Poison. They were trying to cure her, and in the process would very likely kill her. But I still couldn’t move.
Rose hadn’t stopped looking at me the entire time as the nurse prepped the IV. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something I was missing, something she wanted to tell me. The soldier’s had relaxed their hold on their guns, but I didn’t have any illusions that after Rose finished cooperating they’d kill me and her mother both.
“Sweetie, I’ll need your arm,” the nurse asked Rose softly.
Rose bit her torturously soft lip that enticed me even here, even now. “There’s silver in this isn’t there?” She pushed at the bag with her right finger, making it swing back and forth. Her left, the arm the nurse was going to use for the IV, was still in a fist.
Why was she looking me? Did she think I didn’t know what inside the IV? And if that was the case, why would she want me to know? Knowing that they were going to hurt her wasn’t exactly an incentive to keep me from charging the soldiers.
“That and other things, sweetheart,” the nurse answered blandly.
Lonan’s gaze flickered over my paws, cat-like eyes, and sharp fangs, searching for any hints of rebellion. I was very tempted to rip open his throa
t, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from Rose.
“You’re going to need to unclench your fist, honey,” the nurse reprimanded.
Rose nodded, still looking over the woman’s shoulder, right at me.
Her fist. Her necklace. Magnesium.
What was in the medicine?
Silver.
Magnesium. Silver. Water.
Oh, Rose, you beautiful insane little human. Rose must’ve seen the recognition in my eyes, because she swiveled away from me back to the nurse. Then, before I could come up with a plan she was standing.
“Honey,” the nurse barked.
“Rose?” Lonan asked.
She ignored him. She ignored all of us, all of our eyes, all of our judgements. Then she took out her magnesium sword, plunged it directly into the plastic bag full of water and silver and threw it right in Lonan’s face. It spiraled through the air like a water balloon. The soldiers were too confused to fire.
Lonan tried to ward it off with open palms, just like he had my accusations a week ago, his gun dropping from his hand in shock. His fancy watch and over-priced clothes wouldn’t save him now.
Because one second later everything exploded.
Chapter 25
DANIEL
A flash of light so sudden I thought an atomic bomb had gone off blasted through the room. I couldn’t see anyone. Not Rose. Not her mother. Not the soldiers or the nurse. In the chaos, it would’ve been so tempting to run straight into danger and rip Lonan’s head off. But we didn’t have enough time. The soldier’s were blocking the front door, and if we charged through someone would die. I couldn’t risk that being Rose or her mother.
Black smoke began to plume from the bag, and the bed was on fire. That was a small comfort, if the bed was on fire, Lonan’s face probably hadn’t fared to well either.
If we stayed in here we’d die. “I’m going to finish shifting,” I roared. “Then get on top of me. We’re jumping out of the window.”