by Alyssa Day
“We’re almost there,” Litton said. “It’s about twenty minutes outside the gate. We’re going to give you a special demonstration of our capabilities and experiments to date, and also present our plans for the future. With the help of your funding, we anticipate great strides in the very near future.” The man was all but preening. “Great strides,” he repeated.
“Well, you are the genius,” Tiernan said, a bland smile on her face.
Litton shot her a suspicious glare, but she kept the smile on her face, no matter that she believed the man to be a contemptuous rodent. Brennan was impressed.
“Yes,” Litton said, turning back around to face forward again. “I am.”
Tiernan rolled her eyes, and the driver made a choking noise that he turned into a cough. Brennan glanced up and met the man’s gaze in the rearview mirror. The shifter was fighting a grin, so he’d clearly seen Tiernan’s reaction. Brennan smiled, too, inviting the driver to share the joke.
Never hurt to enlist allies. The shifter might not actively help them, but it’s harder to shoot a man when you’ve shared a joke with him. Ven had taught them all that. Although Christophe was fond of telling Ven that it was his jokes that might get him shot. Brennan smiled at the memory, and at his ability to find joy in something so ordinary as the bantering between his fellow warriors.
They sat in silence for the rest of the trip, and Brennan memorized their directions and notable landmarks so he could find the place again. After the promised twenty minutes, the driver turned the car off onto a tree-lined road that narrowed for a few miles until it was no more than a single lane. If they met any cars coming the opposite way, someone would need to pull clear off the road into the grass and weeds.
They took a sharp turn a little too fast, and Tiernan fell against Brennan. He took advantage of the moment by putting his arm around her—any excuse to touch her. The look in her eyes when she glanced up at him made him want to touch her in many ways. Naked ways.
“We’re here,” Litton announced.
Brennan put thoughts of Tiernan, naked, to the side for more careful consideration later, and studied the enormous, blocky, white-painted building.
“It’s a warehouse?” Tiernan asked.
“We bought the warehouse and made major renovations to the inside,” Litton said. “We needed a large space that we could retrofit to our own precise specifications.”
“Of course,” Brennan said. “Easier when the basic structure is in place.” As if he really were a businessman and had done such things many times. He felt the warmth of Tiernan’s approval even before he saw it in her eyes.
The shifter pulled right up to the front door and parked the car, then jumped out to open the door for Tiernan. She had no polite way to refuse, so Brennan had to endure several seconds when she was in easy reach of the driver. If the shifter really had been experimented on and chose this moment to succumb to the madness, Brennan wouldn’t be able to reach her in time to save her. Brennan had far too much experience with the damage an enraged shifter could do with his claws and teeth to be anything but tense until she safely reached his side.
“Welcome to the Litton Neuro-Research Institute,” the scientist said with a flourish, opening the large metal door. “Prepare to be amazed.”
“Oh, I am, Dr. Litton,” Brennan told him as they entered the building. “I definitely am.”
Chapter 23
Tiernan had been nervous enough about the drive down the back road to Out-in-the-Boonies, but the metal detector at the doorway ratcheted her anxiety level to an eight or nine. Brennan surely had his daggers with him, and that was going to go over badly. Really badly.
The shifter had lied about being part of Lucas’s Pack, so he was definitely one of Litton’s thugs, but that was no surprise. Litton was too paranoid to have anybody but people he could control around him, she’d bet. She’d met the type before, and they hadn’t even been mad scientists.
Brennan never even paused. He sauntered through the metal detector like he was a celebrity on a red carpet. The machine didn’t make a peep.
After all her worry about Brennan, the machine buzzed loudly when she walked through, and she flinched. The very bored-looking attendant perked up, probably at the opportunity for trouble. He shot up out of his seat, his hand hovering near the pocket of his jacket. “Weapon?”
Tiernan smiled. “Cell phone.” She put the phone in the little tray and walked through again, this time with no buzzing. Litton, who had been practically dancing from foot to foot the whole time, led them down a short hallway and into a large conference room.
“We’ll be in here for the presentation, and then I’ll take you on a tour of the lab,” he told Brennan.
“I’d prefer a more casual approach,” Brennan said. “Why don’t we walk around the lab now and save the formal presentation for later or even tomorrow? I like to see my dollars at work, so to speak.”
Litton didn’t like that idea at all. His face turned an unhealthy purple color and he started spluttering. “Oh, no, no, that won’t do at all. You know scientists, Mr. Brennan, a bunch of people more set in their ways you’re unlikely to find soon. We have to let them follow the plan or they’ll get confused and unhappy. Unhappy scientists don’t do good work.”
“We’re so lucky you’re not like that, Dr. Litton,” Tiernan said sweetly, finding it hard not to laugh when he scuttled out of there, muttering something about coffee and back in fifteen minutes.
Brennan crossed the space separating them until he was standing so close to her that his breath ruffled her hair when he spoke. “You shouldn’t tease the evil scientist.”
She shivered a little from the sensation of his warm breath traveling down her neck. “I know, but he annoys me so much. Even if I didn’t hate him for everything he does and everything he stands for, I’d still want to kick him in the nuts just on general principles.”
The deep timbre of Brennan’s laughter sent another shiver down her spine and she moved a prudent distance away, pretending to be fascinated by the tray of coffee cups. Then she remembered what she’d wanted to ask him and returned so she could speak quietly and avoid any eaves-droppers or bugs.
It wasn’t paranoid if there was a good chance it might be true.
“How did you make it past that metal detector?” she murmured, scratching her nose to cover her mouth in case they were on video surveillance. Although maybe that was a bit over the top. What was the likelihood that they had lip readers on staff?
“The only—”
She cut him off by pulling his head down and kissing him, then pretending to nuzzle his ear. “The room might be bugged. Maybe whisper in my ear?”
He put his arms around her and pulled her very close to his hard body. “Finally, a mission I approve of one thousand percent,” he said. He returned her kiss, taking full advantage of the situation to thoroughly claim her mouth. She was dizzy by the time he stopped.
“The only weapons that can survive transforming into mist with us are those made of a native Atlantean ore, orichalcum. It has the added benefit of not triggering metal detection, even masking other metals that are combined with it,” he murmured near her ear. She was pleased that his voice was ragged; this insane attraction between them was definitely two-sided.
“Even the silver?”
“Silver?” His eyebrows drew together. “What silver?”
“You told those vampires your blades were tipped with silver.”
His face relaxed into a lazy grin. “Ah, Truth Teller, it surprises me that you ask me this.”
She blinked. “You lied?”
“Call it more of a bluff.”
It was her turn to laugh. She had been so worried about more important things, like not dying, that it had never occurred to her to listen for bluffs.
“You’re devious, Brennan.”
“You’re beautiful, Tiernan,” he whispered, and then he kissed her again, but only briefly, and she heard the voices heading down the hall to
ward them right after he raised his head.
“Here we go,” she said. “Showtime.”
Brennan let Tiernan turn to face the door but kept his arm wrapped around her waist, telling himself it was because she needed the comfort of his touch. She would have called him on that lie immediately. His fear for her safety was spiking adrenaline and pure, primal aggression through his body so powerfully that he had to work hard to control himself. It wouldn’t be good for either Tiernan or their mission if he were the one to commit the first overt act of hostility.
Litton burst through the door, reminding Brennan again of nothing as much as a hairless rodent, leading to an odd and utterly random curiosity about whether or not were-rodents existed. Seemed unlikely.
Several men and women in lab coats followed Litton through the room. Litton gestured toward the large conference table and everyone took a seat, except for one man who hurried over to the equipment on a desk near the front.
“Welcome to the place where the magic happens,” Litton said, sweeping his arms out.
“Bit grandiose, isn’t he?” Tiernan said under her breath.
Brennan’s rage calmed down several notches at the amusement in her voice. His mate was not afraid; that fact went a long way to dampen the fury threatening to swamp him.
“Please take a seat,” the man at the equipment said.
Brennan and Tiernan took the two open seats at the end of the conference table. They were farthest from the door. Brennan forced himself to draw in slow, deep breaths to fight the animal instinct of being cornered.
The predator in him didn’t like it one bit, no matter that none of the humans between Tiernan and the door seemed likely to put up a fight. Lab coats could conceal a great many things, weapons among them.
Even Brennan could not always outrace a bullet.
Litton nodded, and one of the scientists, a female, distributed dark blue folders to each person at the table. She hesitated when she got to Tiernan, biting her lip, and she shot Litton a look, but he just nodded again and she put the final blue folder in front of Tiernan and then rushed back to her own seat.
“You will find in front of you documents that detail a great many of our more important findings in the area of neurophysiological control,” Litton said.
As Brennan and Tiernan opened their folders, an image flashed on the screen at the front of the room. A group of large, obviously strong men were working on a skyscraper. They were all happy and smiling for the camera.
None of them was human.
“Those are all shifters,” Tiernan said. “You can tell from the way they’re hanging off the side of that building, or those two who are carrying huge steel beams with one hand. Only shifters would have that kind of strength and agility. But why—”
“Correct, Ms. Baum,” Litton said, as if rewarding a prize pupil. “They are all shifters. But not just any shifters. These are all men who, just one month before this picture was taken, were hopeless derelicts. Leeches upon society. They’d taken the worst of the shifter existence—violence, dominance, bloodlust—and warped it even further, until they were roaming as a gang in Chicago. Brutalizing innocents and terrifying even the police force.”
He stopped and grasped the lapels of his lab coat, looked around the room, and smiled his smug, self-satisfied smile. “We made them productive members of society in just three days.”
“I thought you said one month?” Brennan said.
Litton was clearly prepared for the question. “Well, it took them three-and-a-half weeks to learn construction.”
Everyone in the room, but for Brennan and Tiernan, laughed, but it had the tired sound of being well rehearsed. Brennan looked down at the papers in front of him and scanned the people in the room out of the corner of his eye. Most of them had telltale signs of exhaustion and anxiety. Pale and deeply drawn faces, nervous quirks such as tapping the arms of their chairs or the table, fidgeting, lip-biting. It didn’t take a shifter to read this body language. A select few, however, were leaning forward, all eagerness. They were the zealots, then.
Something was very, very wrong here.
“I made a fascinating discovery about the brain,” Litton continued, clearly in his element being the center of attention. “The activity in the caudate nucleus can not only predict people’s preferences, but it can and does reinforce decisions already made.”
“The caudate nucleus is part of the striatum, isn’t it?” Tiernan asked, clearly surprising Litton.
“So lovely to see you’re not just a pretty face,” he said, beaming.
Brennan noticed the female scientists in the room—and some of the men—wince at the comment. Potential allies? But they all looked too defeated to strike out against Litton, and certainly they wouldn’t be able to stand up to vampires.
Tiernan, however, ignored the remark entirely, focusing intently on Litton.
“Yes, the caudate nucleus is part of the striatum, which is involved in generating movement.” Litton made a motion, and the image on the screen changed to a diagram of the brain. The caudate nucleus looked rather like an Atlantean sugar bean and was situated on the right side of the image.
Tiernan whistled. “That’s a pretty major discovery. Can you activate the caudate nucleus?”
Litton smiled. It was a singularly unpleasant smile. “Not only can we activate it, Ms. Baum, but we can control it and, by so doing, control the desires and resultant actions of the person whose brain has been activated.”
Tiernan slumped back in her seat, shaking her head. She turned to Brennan. “That’s not only major, that’s control-the-world major,” she said in an undertone. “And if he’s telling us this, he has no intention of letting us out of here, ever. He would not only be shut down so fast by the scientific community that your head would spin, but this is criminal prosecution time.”
“Anything you’d like to share with the group?” Litton said, sneering at them.
“Very impressive,” Brennan said, clenching his hands into fists on his thighs but presenting a calm face to the room. “Looks like you’re putting my money to very good use, Doctor. How long does this control last?”
Litton’s smug smile faltered, and he broke eye contact. “As long as we want it to last, of course.”
Brennan didn’t need to see Tiernan’s tiny head shake to know that Litton had just lied, but the confirmation convinced him that he needed to get Tiernan out of there, and fast.
“Is your head still aching?” he asked Tiernan, who glanced up, surprised.
He took her hand in his. “We should get you some medicine and have you lie down for a while before we continue this.”
“Oh, no, I’m fine,” she said firmly, pulling her hand from his, the light of battle in her eyes. “This is fascinating, Dr. Litton, please continue.”
“We have a bit of video you’ll be very interested in, Mr. Brennan. This will show you what we’ve done so far, what we’re planning to do next, and where we hope to ultimately arrive with our research and practical trials.”
From the first image of video footage, Brennan knew it was going to be bad, but even he, hardened by millennia of battle, had not anticipated the sheer depth of evil—all committed in the name of scientific research.
Litton’s voice, sounding somewhat tinny, narrated the footage, describing the testing and failures that led to eventual success in the human trials. The video focused on two subjects, one male and one female, and the results were fairly innocuous at first. The subjects were shown submitting to a procedure whereby they were fastened into a chair and various electrodes were attached to their body. A metal helmet bristling with knobs and antennae, looking like something out of the science fiction movies Ven and Riley enjoyed so much, was fastened over their heads, and the scientists administered what looked like a series of electric shocks.
Tiernan, beside him, was clutching the arms of her chair so tightly that her knuckles were as white as her face. “Is that—is that the procedure to activate?”
>
Litton nodded, his attention fixed avidly on the screen. “Yes. Depending on the level of natural resistance, which varies from subject to subject, we may have to repeat the procedure multiple times.”
The test subject on-screen, the female, screamed and arched her body and then fell back against the chair. Brennan saw the tears trickling down from the corners of her eyes, and he wanted to smash something.
Smash someone.
And his prime candidate had the nerve to chuckle.
“Sometimes they feel a little discomfort,” Litton said, still chuckling. “But they forget it when we’re through.”
“You can affect memory, too?” Brennan said, instantly imagining the worst.
“Not exactly. Something about the procedure does cause a bit of an amnesia effect, but that only seems to relate to events around the actual procedure itself. It’s the trauma of the procedure, we believe.”
“Gee, you think?” Tiernan snapped.
Litton frowned. “All great scientific achievement and progress must come with some sacrifice, Ms. Baum.”
“What did you sacrifice, Dr. Litton?” she shot back.
“I gave up a high-ranking faculty position at a very well-respected university to found this institute,” he snapped. Then he gathered his dignity. “I’m sorry, Mr. Brennan. Usually it’s hard for laypeople to understand the hard work and dedication that goes into this sort of scientific endeavor. Since you’ve been so heavily involved in research before, I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course,” Brennan replied. He took Tiernan’s hand in his own, under the table, and squeezed it in warning. So far they didn’t have any real proof of what was going on. Her rapid breathing rate was signaling Brennan that they didn’t have much time before she exploded, though.
“Please continue,” he told Litton.
The video continued to mild scenes of the humans accomplishing simple tasks and performing feats with physical dexterity that they hadn’t had before the procedures. They watched the subjects juggle, walk on a thin balance beam, and climb a rock wall.