It was perfect.
“Did you finish the sweep of the lower level?” asked Garth as he began the process of taking down the case with the sword. He fully intended to take the weapon with him as a parting gift. After all, he’d been serious. He owned its sister sword and wanted to reunite the pair.
Hans paused in the doorway and ran a hand through his shoulder-length black hair before letting out a long breath. That wasn’t normal for the man. He was generally the poster boy for stoic expressions. “Captain, there is something you should see.”
“If it’s more stuffed bears, we’re gonna want to look away when Rurik has a word with the dick in cuffs in the van,” said Gram, rubbing Rurik’s shoulders as if he were prepping a boxer for another round. “I cannae be certain but from the sounds of it, some of Rurik’s extended family members now decorate a den here. This is goin’ to end with dead guy bits on everything. I’m sure of it.”
“That is not humorous,” said Rurik in a deadpan voice. “He has pictures of himself next to dead wolves. That should make you want to eat him too.”
Hans didn’t budge from the entranceway, nor had his body language changed. Something was wrong. “Captain.”
Garth stopped his attempts to get the sword case off the wall and focused on his teammate. “What is it?”
Moisture coated Hans’s eyes and his gaze darted to the floor. “I don’t have the words to describe it. Landros radioed for a team of medics and additional transportation. It is bad enough that he didn’t wait to talk to you first.”
Team Eight had been paired with another team for the mission. While both teams worked for PSI, one was full of shifters and the other was full of vampires. Philandros “Landros” Mires was one of the vampires. He was also high up within PSI. Garth had known him for centuries, though there had been a time when they’d stood on opposite sides of the battlefield. Those days were long over between them.
The same could not be said for Auberi Bouchard, another member of the Crimson Ops Division of PSI, or Fang Gang, as they’d been nicknamed by the shifters in the organization. The two sides made mocking one another an artform. It was mostly all in fun.
“Captain, this is bad,” said Hans.
Gram stopped smiling. If Hans was saying something was serious, that meant something huge had happened. Hans was famous for his understated responses. Germans were known for such things. Whatever was happening was big enough that it shook a man who generally didn’t show emotion.
Garth wasn’t sure he actually wanted to know what Hans and the others had evidently encountered while clearing the lower levels of the estate.
Chapter Two
Garth and the others followed behind Hans as he maneuvered through the aftermath of the fight they’d first encountered upon arriving. There had been a lot of gunfire, claws, teeth, and pure alphaness going on—and it showed.
Garth even had a few cuts and bruises. Nothing serious. And he liked a good fight, and wasn’t squeamish, so the aftermath didn’t bother him.
The dead bodies had been removed from the premises, but the cleanup teams had not yet arrived to handle the rest of the mess. That meant it looked like a horror movie had been filmed there. Hans had managed to walk around the pools of blood left behind without stepping in any, despite his obvious emotional state.
The artwork on the walls was gaudy and the dirtbag had more than likely overpaid for it all. Garth wasn’t exactly up on the arts, but even he knew the paintings were terrible and there wasn’t a huge market for them. A small laugh bubbled up from him as he spotted blood splatter on one of the atrocities masquerading as art. It was a painting of one of the guy’s fancy sports cars.
It screamed douchebag.
The entire house seemed to have been decorated by the same person. Whoever they were, they had no taste. Frankly, Garth was shocked he’d not, as of yet, come across any floor-to-ceiling velvet prints with naked ladies on them. He’d not been through the entire home, so anything was still possible.
They went down two flights of stairs, and then entered a small room that didn’t seem to hold much of anything of significance. In fact, the only thing in it was a serving table pressed against the far wall. Two gold vases sat on the table, one at each end. On the wall behind the vases was a portrait of the dirtbag in the van. His smile in the painting was as smug as the one he’d worn when Garth had put the cuffs on him.
Yep. Total douchebag. Just seeing the painting made Garth reconsider allowing Rurik free access to the man.
“Is it me or does this guy have shit taste?” asked Garth as he realized the gold vases had what looked to be phallic shapes etched on them. He’d never seen dicks arranged in a way that resembled flowers from afar, and he’d thought he’d seen just about everything.
Rurik grumbled. “It’s not you. He does have shit taste. He decorates with dead animals.”
Gram eased up behind Rurik and shot Garth a hard look. “You had to go there again.”
Hans said little on the matter. It was easy to tell his mind was on something else and not on jokes.
A second before Garth was about to ask what was so important that he’d needed to come at once, Hans reached up and pushed a small button on the wall. The button had been installed in a way that could have made it easy to overlook, as it blended perfectly with its surroundings.
The next thing Garth knew, a panel opened in the wall and he found himself staring into a stainless-steel elevator.
“Well, I wasnae expectin’ that,” said Gram from behind Garth. “I may put in a bid on the place too. I do nae have a secret elevator in any of my homes. I want one.”
“Where does it go?” questioned Rurik. The edge he’d had to his voice upstairs was gone. Evidently, he felt something big was coming as well.
Hans shivered. “To hell.”
With that, he stepped into the elevator and the rest of the men followed. The fact they all fit with room to spare said something about the size and capacity of the thing. They weren’t small men.
What did the dirtbag need with a secret elevator at all, let alone one that could fit four alpha males with ease?
Garth wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
The farther down they descended, the more dread began to fill him. People didn’t bury things this deep in the earth unless they didn’t want others knowing about them. From the looks of it, this was something no one was meant to see.
Hans put a hand to the cold metal of the elevator wall and lowered his head. A pained cry came from him. As quickly as it had started, it ended, and he righted himself.
No one commented.
There were some things you just let a man have and didn’t talk about. Emotional outbursts were one of those.
The elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open. As Garth exited, confusion came over him.
To his right were five exam tables like one would find in a gynecologist’s office. The kind of tables that had stirrups to put one’s feet in. Although, he’d never seen stirrups come equipped with manacles. These did. His gut clenched. The exam tables were made to hold someone against their will.
“No,” he said in a hushed tone.
“Fuck,” returned Gram, his voice a whisper as well. “I do nae think any of us want to own this place now.”
Rurik stepped past them, staring around the room, his attention going to a wall lined with glass-front cabinets. In the cabinets appeared to be everything from medical tools and devices, to medicines of some sort or another. It was a one-stop shop for the weird, the wacky, and the medically creepy.
There was no mistaking the equipment in the giant room. It was for testing of some kind, and with the exam tables, Garth’s gut told him the testing had something to do with women and babies.
The entire thing was like something out of a horror movie and any minute now, Dr. Frankenstein might walk out with his assistant, ready and willing to commit acts that should not be spoken of, let alone committed.
Hans came to
a stop next to Garth. Their shoulders touched. Garth knew Hans had demons in his past that shaped the man he was today. He knew that more than once when a fellow operative had referenced the word Nazi around Hans because he was German, and had indeed lived in Germany during the Nazi occupation, Hans had lost control of his typically even temper.
Garth also knew why.
Hans and his brother, like many others, had been subjected to horrific testing at the hands of Nazi doctors and scientists during World War II—prior to that, even. During a time when most people knew very little in regard to what was really going on in the name of science.
Most assumed eugenics and attempts to change men and women into something else started with the Nazis. That Hitler and his teams of twisted scientists were the first to commit heinous acts under the guise of science. They weren’t. In reality, it went back much further and had many more players than just the Nazis.
America had its own ugly history with it all, but it had done a far better job of burying that information and hiding it away from most textbooks.
The quest for superhumans and super soldiers was hardly new. There were people in the world who would stop at nothing to achieve them. The Nazis were some of the worst offenders by far. Garth had fought in both World Wars, and there were things from the second one that he would never be able to shake from his memory.
As he looked around at the large lab, he was instantly reminded of some of the testing facilities the Nazi’s had during World War II. History sugarcoated the full truth behind the breeding programs, reproduction experiments, and the torture in the name of research. The numbers of dead and the atrocities associated with the Nazi’s quest for racial hygiene had been far beyond what the history books spoke of. It was beyond what many historians even knew or thought they knew.
Garth had been part of a unit of men who had happened upon a number of Nazi testing locations. What he’d seen still haunted him, and those facilities greatly reminded him of the lab he was in now.
Humans who studied the time period in history were under the illusion that there were a set, known number of locations where programs and testing took place. That wasn’t the case. There were hundreds of secret locations, and they weren’t limited to Germany. While some were used for humans, the lion’s share of them were for supernatural creation and reproduction—for trying to interbreed various species.
And while history whispered of Ilya Ivanov’s attempts to create ape-army super soldiers through crossbreeding humans and apes, it didn’t speak of the actual success—or the fact that apes were not the only animals used in the testing. It also didn’t mention the success the Nazi’s achieved in manipulating the makeup of supernaturals and actually creating some from scratch. There was a whole lot of fucked up that the history books didn’t touch on.
Garth’s gut told him that the lab they were currently standing in had ties to it all. That it had something to do with breeding.
Monsters. Fucking monsters.
Garth knew men who had been subjected to the testing against their wills—some inflicted by the Nazis, and some done by governments no one would ever believe took part in it all. He knew men who had been forced to attempt to breed the natural way, no matter that neither participant was willing. He knew some who had been taken, held, experimented on, while also having their seed taken from them to be used later.
To this day, no one could account for where all the samples and test results from World War II had gone. The disbanding of the Nazi labs and testing sites should have closed all the doors, ended all the worry, but it hadn’t. It had opened Pandora’s box—freeing so many villains to go to ground, taking with them the majority of their research and results. In their wake, so many were left dead or damaged.
Hans and his brother Jannick were just one example of the broken left behind. The twins had been playthings for some of the worst scientists in the Reich. Dr. Mengele who was a scientist back then, often referred to as the Angel of Death, had a well-known hard-on for twins. They were the perfect subjects for his fucked-up tests. He could do as he pleased testing wise with one twin and use the other for a baseline of comparison. He could follow the test subjects through every stage of the testing from start to finish—making sure they died at the same time, so the autopsies could be done together.
Bastard.
There had been others like Mengele. Sick fucks who hid behind the label of science, doing as they pleased. Some were brought to justice. Many weren’t. And others were supernaturals who had managed to go below the radar. Garth could only hope time had ended them and that they weren’t still conducting their tests.
One look around the lab told him his hope was pointless. There were simply too many similarities to the past to ignore. And if Garth noticed it all, Hans and Jannick had to as well.
Jannick was also part of Team Eight. Garth had specifically requested the brothers be on his team when they’d come on with PSI after being freed from Nazi labs. Garth knew that even though neither man would ever admit it, they needed to be around one another. That they were each other’s pillars of support.
It was a twin thing.
Garth wasn’t sure where Jannick was at the moment. He’d splintered off earlier with Hans and the rest of the operatives to finish clearing the lower levels, so odds were, he was close. And he no doubt was having as many issues with what they’d discovered as Hans.
Garth knew that during their tragic past, Hans and Jannick, had been held captive in facilities built to hold supernaturals, and the testing they’d been forced to endure would have killed a human within seconds. Yet the twins had been forced to live with the torture and experiments for years. Their hate of Nazis knew no limits. They held no shame for being German, but they held much hate for Hitler and those who had done the man’s bidding willingly.
Garth put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze, in an attempt to show support for the man, as he could see the inner turmoil the scene before them had caused.
“There is more,” said Hans, his words clipped. “Jannick and the Fang Gang are in the labs beyond this one. Brace yourselves.”
“It gets worse?” asked Rurik, disbelief in his voice.
Hans nodded but said nothing more as he went through the lab and to a large metal door. It was the kind of door one expected to find on a commercial freezer in a restaurant. Not in the basement of a mansion. Of course, there was a whole lot of shit in the mansion no one would have guessed would be there. Hans opened the door and stepped back.
It was Garth who went through the door first. He stood in stunned silence for half a second, taking in the sight before him.
There were rows of metal cribs that resembled cages, like one would see in a hospital, lining one side of the large stark white room. The majority were empty but not all of them. Some held children of varying ages.
Garth fought to keep from being sick at the sight of it all. In that moment, he knew his heart wasn’t totally hardened from life. That it wasn’t frozen as his father’s had been. It could still feel, and it was shattering for the children. In all his life he’d never harmed a child. The very idea of doing so sickened both him and the wolf he carried within him.
Children were to be protected, no matter the cost. They were gifts from the gods.
The Fang Gang operatives were busy listening to orders that Auberi barked at them. Many of the operatives had children in their arms. Auberi had trained as a doctor more than once throughout his long life and was more than capable of taking charge of the dire situation, despite the fact the guy was an asshole.
If memory served, the vampire had also fallen behind enemy lines during World War II. Garth didn’t know the details, but he knew enough to understand Auberi hadn’t been spared torture and testing either. Neither had a number of the men in the Fang Gang.
Landros, who had been shot in the leg during the taking of the estate, held a little girl who looked to be around the age of three or four. Her huge blue eyes were h
aunted and hollow. Her long black hair was matted in spots and Garth wasn’t sure if it was curly or snarled from lack of care. What he did know was that she was grossly underweight, as were all the children from the looks of it. The neglect was palpable, and made him want to kill every person who’d had anything to do with it.
Rurik wouldn’t need to bother with the dirtbag outside. Garth planned to puree the fucker himself.
The need to step closer to the little girl in Landros’s arm came over him, as did an immense drive to protect the child, no matter the cost.
Landros apparently felt the same way, because his eyes flashed to black and back to brown again quickly. It was a warning from his vampire to Garth.
Come closer to the child and risk its wrath.
Garth wasn’t sure exactly how old Landros was, but he knew the man came from Ancient Greece. He also knew he had a history as a warrior, as did most of the men in PSI, and Landros had personal demons. Ones that didn’t have fangs.
They’d sparred a number of times over the centuries, and they’d even fought on opposing sides during wars in the past. Garth knew what the Greek was made of; a fight between them would be epic.
Still, for the little girl, he was willing to do whatever it took to be sure she was safe.
She twisted slightly in Landros’s arms and buried her tiny face into his chest. She peeked out at Garth and offered the smallest of smiles, instantly calming his stirring beast. “Is she okay?”
Landros shook his head. “I don’t know. My gut says she’s not, and I smell something strange upon her. Do you? It’s sickeningly sweet.”
Taking a deep breath, Garth caught the faint undertones of something else. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was there. His beast began to beat at him slowly from within. It didn’t like the scent…or what it meant.
Danger.
Act of Brotherhood: Paranormal Security and Intelligence (PSI-Ops) an Immortal Ops World Novel Page 3