Web Master (#8 Shifter Squad)

by J. C. Diem

  Web Master

  Shifter Squad: Book Eight

  J.C. Diem

  Copyright © 2016 J.C. DIEM

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  ₪₪₪

  Chapter One

  Worry emanated from Mark, adding to our sense of urgency that was growing by the second. Already travelling well over the posted limit, Reece put his foot down. We surged forward and quickly bore down on a vehicle that was driving at a more sensible speed. Glancing into his rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes widened in alarm when he saw us looming up behind him. We flashed past him so fast that he wouldn’t have been able to see our faces through the heavily tinted glass.

  “Where are we going, exactly?” Kala asked, drawing Mark out of his reverie. He’d fallen into a brooding silence after his boss had called with some disturbing news. Apparently, someone had teleported inside some of the PIA’s most secure facilities. They’d stolen some dangerous artifacts, including the stone head of a golem that we’d delivered for safekeeping.

  Hearing that both of the golem heads were now gone had been a nasty shock to us all. Procuring them hadn’t been easy and now we’d have to hunt them down all over again. But that wasn’t the worst of the news. It seemed that Viktor D’Ath had gone missing as well. Both he and the artifacts had disappeared shortly after we’d left the facility. All of this had happened only minutes ago and we were still processing it.

  “Our headquarters is near Washington, D.C.,” Mark replied. “I’m surprised that the Board has ordered all of you to come along.” I’d never heard of the Board before, but they sounded important. I could hear the capital B in his tone.

  “Why?” Flynn asked. As usual, I was sandwiched in the backseat between him and Kala. Zeus would normally be sitting right behind me, but he hadn’t come with us this time. He was at our compound, waiting for us to return.

  “It is very rare for anyone below level eight clearance to be summoned to HQ,” Mark replied. Our organization was so secret that the location of our headquarters wasn’t disclosed to all PIA agents. I could now see why he’d fallen into a contemplative silence. He was trying to puzzle out why the Board wanted us all there. Surely it had to have something to do with whoever had broken into their facilities. We were the Track and Kill Squad and it was our job to hunt our quarry down.

  “Have you been there before?” I asked.

  “Many times.” He was the only one in our squad to actually have level eight clearance. The rest of us were a measly level five. We knew enough to perform our missions, but were kept in the dark about anything our superiors didn’t think we needed to know. I had a feeling this related to EERI. The Extraordinary Entities Research Institute was an evil rival agency to the PIA. We weren’t sure what their grand plan was. We only knew it wouldn’t be good for mankind.

  Reece guessed the reason why Mark had been called before the Board so many times. Due to our recently renewed bond, I read the thought from his mind before he voiced it. “Your superiors require periodic updates about us directly from you, I take it?”

  Mark nodded. “As you know, I joined the Paranormal Investigation Agency after my wife and daughter were killed. My main reason for doing so was to seek revenge against shifters.”

  We didn’t feel any shock at that admission. He’d been a young CIA agent who had been tracking a killer. He’d had no idea that the murderer was a werewolf. Garrison Carter had killed Mark’s family in an attempt to throw him off his scent when he’d begun closing in on him. Instead of falling to pieces like most people would have after losing their family, Mark had become even more determined to track the psycho down. His persistence had eventually paid off. He’d finally managed to take the shifter down and end his decade long murder spree.

  Unfortunately, Garrison’s wife had been almost as unstable as him. Nina had waited for the next full moon and had taken a few of her pack members and had gone after Mark. He was only human, but he was tough and skilled. He’d killed two of the lesser werewolves after their alpha had almost disemboweled him. Nina had fled with her surviving lackeys when she realized he wasn’t easy game. She wasn’t quite crazy enough to sacrifice all of her minions just for revenge.

  “I’d planned to track Garrison’s entire pack down and end them all,” Mark said, inadvertently picking up where my thoughts had just trailed off, “but Nina came after me first. She came very close to killing me.” His hand unconsciously went to his abdomen where he still bore the scars from her attack. “It took me three weeks to heal enough to hunt her down. I took a team and infiltrated the Carter property. She and her pack were long gone, but they’d left a child behind.” Kala sat up straighter and Flynn tensed beside me. They knew he was talking about Reece.

  “A human wouldn’t have been able to survive that long without food and water,” Mark said to Reece. “I knew you were a shifter and how dangerous you could become once you reached adulthood, but I couldn’t bring myself to murder a defenseless child.”

  Shifters were skilled at passing as human. Usually, they were only dangerous during the three nights of the full moon when they turned into their alter egos. Some didn’t have the control to stay away from humans when they shifted. Weak and slow compared to us, people made an easy meal. One taste of human flesh was enough to damn our species. Doing so set shifters on a murderous path that always ended with them being hunted down by the PIA.

  Both Reece’s father and younger brother had turned rogue. Between them, they’d killed over twenty people before they’d finally been stopped. Nina hadn’t eaten any humans, but she was definitely unbalanced. Out of the four members of the Carter family, Reece was the only one who didn’t have a mental defect.

  His eyes met mine in the mirror. They crinkled at the corners in an amused smile at my assessment. I was going to have to get used to him knowing everything I was thinking now that we were bonded again. It would take conscious effort to keep him out of my thoughts. I wasn’t sure it was even possible anymore.

  “Despite your distr
ust of shifters, you asked your superiors for permission to raise Reece?” Flynn said. His tone held more than a hint of admiration for Mark’s courage.

  “Only after I rescued you and Kala,” Mark replied.

  I frowned at his answer. “Didn’t they question you about why you saved Reece?”

  “They didn’t know that I’d rescued him,” he shrugged. “No one did.” He sighed and his gaze went distant as he replayed the scene in his mind. “While the rest of my team were searching the property, I bundled Reece into a blanket and hid him in my car. It was obvious that Nina hadn’t been taking care of him even before she’d abandoned him. He was just a bundle of bones and weighed almost nothing. He was so malnourished and dehydrated that he didn’t have the energy to cry and give himself away.”

  Kala made a small sound of grief at Reece’s plight and I put my hand on her knee. The three agents had grown up together and were as close as true siblings. This was the first time they’d heard the whole story of what had happened to him. It was painful for both her and Flynn to hear that their adoptive brother had been so badly neglected. I’d witnessed the abuse that he’d suffered at the hands of his mother from his memories. I would never forget his torment, but at least they’d been spared that sight.

  “When it became clear that Nina and her pack were gone,” Mark went on, “I dismissed the team and headed to our closest compound. It took almost a month for me to nurse Reece back from the brink of death. Then we were given a tip from a concerned EERI employee. He told us that two children were being experimented on. I was chosen to investigate claims of genetic engineering using shifter viruses. I left Reece with someone I trusted who didn’t work for the PIA and took a team to the EERI base. We found Kala and Flynn in one of the labs on the first basement level.”

  They’d been too young to remember it, but the memory was still fresh in Mark’s mind. Reece’s hands tightened on the wheel. He clenched his jaw in anticipation of what we were about to hear.

  “How bad was it?” Flynn asked. He was striving for a calm tone, but his tension seeped through to me.

  “Bad,” Mark confirmed. “We entered at night, using a stealth approach rather than going in with our guns blazing. EERI’s security wasn’t as tight back then. The informant who tipped us off about the experiments gave us the access codes. We were able to infiltrate the place without setting off the alarms.” He went silent as he contemplated how much to tell us.

  Rubbing a hand over his face, he decided on telling us the entire truth and turned around to face Kala and Flynn. “You two weren’t the only children that had been experimented on. I found records of dozens of others that had been injected with various shifter strains. You two were the only ones who survived the process, but they don’t know why. There didn’t seem to be anything different about you compared to their other subjects.”

  Kala’s arms were tightly crossed and her golden eyes had gone flat with suppressed rage. “Did they have records of what happened to our families?”

  Mark dropped his eyes and nodded. “I should have told you before now, but I couldn’t bring myself to break the news to you.”

  “Tell us what happened to them,” Flynn said. It sounded more like an order than a request. They needed to know the truth and he could no longer keep it from them.

  “You had a little sister,” Mark told him. “She was injected with the werewolf virus.” He switched his attention to Kala. “You had two older brothers. They were injected with werelion and weretiger viruses.” He shook his head and forced himself to continue. “None of them survived the injections.”

  “Our parents?” Kala asked in a strangled tone. She already knew the answer, but needed to hear him say it.

  “They were killed when you were all taken.” His gaze was full of sorrow. “I’m sorry, kiddo.”

  Fighting for control, she angrily wiped away the few tears that managed to escape. Neither she nor Flynn remembered being stolen from their families. To find out that they’d had true siblings had been a kick to the gut.

  “What did EERI call us?” Flynn asked. He was better at controlling his emotions, but I felt his anguish.

  Mark hesitated before responding. “They didn’t use names. You were just numbers to them. There were no records of your real names or your families’ names. They just recorded your relationships to each other.”

  “Who gave us our names then?” Kala asked as she hunched her shoulders, internalizing her pain.

  “I did,” Mark said. “Kala was my daughter’s middle name.” His scent turned uncertain. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Her smile was tremulous. “Of course not. I feel honored.”

  “What about me?” Flynn asked.

  “Flynn was my father’s name.”

  That hit Flynn deeply and he reached out and gripped Mark’s shoulder for a moment.

  “You named them all after your family,” I said. Reece was the name he and his wife were going to give their unborn son.

  “I always intended to tell you all the truth one day. I chose your names so you’d know that I care about you as much as I did for my wife and daughter.”

  “We know,” Reece said. “We’ve always known that you love us. You’re our father, Mark, even if we aren’t your biological children.”

  Now it was Mark’s turn to grow emotional. He cleared his throat and nodded, rendered momentarily speechless.

  Beside me, Kala had turned grim. “We were less than nothing to EERI. They couldn’t even be bothered to give us an identity, other than a number.”

  Flynn leaned forward to speak to her. “We’ll make them pay, sis.”

  She forced out a grin for his benefit. “I know. We’ll hunt them all down and kick their butts!”

  ₪₪₪

  Chapter Two

  A question was niggling me and I had to know the answer to it. “Why didn’t you give them all your surname?” I asked Mark.

  “I legally adopted all three kids, but it seemed prudent to give them all separate surnames,” he replied with a shrug. “I didn’t want them to become targets of rogue monsters if I was ever hunted again.”

  I could understand why he felt that way after Garrison had torn his first family apart. He’d wanted to protect the kids and had done his best to make it seem like they were just his agents rather than his family. “That isn’t the whole truth,” I said. I could tell by his scent that he was hiding something.

  Huffing out a disgruntled sigh, he muttered something about my enhanced senses. “My hope was that they’d want to become PIA agents when they were old enough.”

  “That isn’t exactly a surprise,” Flynn said with a faint smile. “It was pretty obvious what your plan was. You started grooming us when we were five.”

  Mark shifted guiltily at my slightly accusing look. “What else were they going to do for work? They didn’t have families to look after them and to help them hide their true natures from humans. Their bosses and coworkers would have become suspicious when they had to take three days off with every full moon. Being part of a specialized team with me in charge was the only way I could keep them safe.”

  “You did the right thing, Mark,” Reece said. “I’d like to know how you convinced your superiors to allow you to raise us, though.”

  Mark was uncomfortable at the question and searched for a reply.

  “If you tell us it’s classified, I’ll make you regret it,” Kala warned him. She would never hurt him physically, but she could make his life a living hell by annoying him constantly. She knew what buttons to push to get under his skin.

  “It is classified,” he said then held up a hand before she could descend into a tirade. “I’ll tell you anyway, because you’re all mature enough to hear it.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “After I rescued you two, I received a call from my direct superior, summoning me to HQ. I couldn’t refuse, so I left you all with another person that I trusted.”

  “It was Fran, wasn’t it?” Kala said. She was a
year older than the two boys and recalled being looked after by her.

  “Yes. She and her husband had been trying for kids for a couple of years. I knew she’d look after you all as if you were hers. She agreed not to mention you to anyone and she upheld her promise.”

  “I remember her smoking almost constantly, but apart from that she was nice enough.”

  “What happened when you went to HQ?” Flynn queried.

  “I was brought before the entire Board,” Mark said. “They are the nine men and women who run the agency,” he explained before we could ask. “I don’t know how they knew, but they were aware that I’d rescued you three. They wanted to know why I hadn’t informed them personally of my actions.

  “I reminded them that I’d lost my wife, daughter and unborn son a few months previously. I asked for their permission to raise you three as my own. I told them my plan was to train you to become agents. I convinced them that you could become a great asset to the PIA. Who better to hunt monsters than highly trained shifters?”

  Kala was taken aback by that. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you only saved us because you wanted to raise us to be assassins?”

  “No,” I said on behalf of Mark. “That’s just the excuse he gave them. It was the only thing that could have saved you from being kept under constant guard or killed outright. He loved you guys from the moment he found you and he wanted to protect you himself.”