Guard Wolf (Shifter Agents Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  The level of effort and attention to detail that had gone into making this place horrified her. Someone had put a lot of work into it, and some of the details, like the low door and cage clamps, made her think the cage's designers were working to minimize dangers they'd faced in the past. They had been doing this for a while. She counted eight cages in a row, a whole cell block facing the sinks and cameras. Her cage and Avery's were the only ones with floor pads, which suggested they were the only prisoners at the moment.

  Another detail she couldn't help noticing was a large hose coiled up on the wall behind the sinks. For cleaning cages? Turning a cold-water bath on the prisoners?

  Her skin twitched involuntarily at the memory of Evans dumping a pitcher of water over her.

  How would you like a spitting-mad koala in the face, lady? She hadn't been exaggerating when she'd told Avery that angry koalas were nothing to mess around with. Not up to wolf standards, of course, but she was pretty sure she could do some damage.

  Just the thought of getting her teeth and claws into Evans was startlingly satisfying. The rage that rose up in her wanted an outlet; instead, she leaned her forehead against the bars and tried to let it wash through her. As she did so, she became aware that she felt unwell in other ways: shaky, weak, ill. Her head hurt. She hadn't noticed at first because of the after-effects of the drugs, but shouldn't that have worn off by now?

  Withdrawal, she thought, startled as the realization hit her. She knew she wasn't supposed to quit her meds cold turkey, and now it appeared that she'd been off them long enough to start feeling the effects.

  Great. The one time in her life she needed her wits about her, more than ever before, and she was going to have to do it while feeling awful and trying not to collapse into a weeping, suicidal mess.

  Nicole clenched her fists until her nails bit into her palms. You can do this, she told herself grimly. For Avery's sake, you can do this.

  As much as she wanted to rip into Evans with her koala claws, she knew rationally that she'd accomplish nothing more than squandering her only ace in the hole, and for nothing more than a temper tantrum. To get out, she wasn't going to be able to rely on strength, speed, or escape-artist skills, because she had none of the latter and her captors had her outclassed at the others. She was going to have to be patient and smart and canny.

  How does one get out of a locked cell?

  She tried to think of all the movies and books she'd seen, since those were her only exposure to the kind of situation she found herself in now. Setting something on fire seemed to be the standard technique, or pretending to be ill and calling in a guard. She had no way to make a fire, though, and absolutely no desire to set anything on fire while she was locked in with it. What an amazingly stupid idea. The next time anyone does that in a book, I'm throwing it across the room.

  Some sort of trickery involving the guards was her best bet. She wondered if she was a good enough actress to convince them she was seriously ill. Then, glancing at the camera, she wondered if they'd care enough to come check it out.

  A wave of shivering passed through her, like the chills that went along with the flu. It might not all be play-acting, she thought, and wished she'd paid a little more attention to the information pamphlets that came along with her meds. Stopping them wasn't supposed to be terribly dangerous, just uncomfortable, with the possibility of the depression symptoms recurring—okay, new thoughts. New thoughts.

  Should she reveal herself as a shifter? Avery seemed to think they'd be better off hiding it, but Nicole wasn't so sure. If Evans found out the new captive was a brand-new kind of shifter, Nicole expected they would fall all over themselves wanting to study her, and therefore wouldn't want to hurt her. As an ordinary human, she was expendable. The only reason why they had kept her, she thought, was because she knew too much to let go, and having her here gave them some leverage over Avery.

  If they decide they don't need me, I doubt they plan to drop me off on the nearest streetcorner.

  The soft click of the door opening jolted her out of her thoughts. Nicole scrambled to her feet, struggling once again with the irrational urge to cover her naked body with her arms. Instead she stood defiantly, arms crossed under her breasts.

  The person who came in was the skinny girl from earlier. She was still armed with an incongruously lethal-looking assault rifle, slung over her shoulder with the muzzle pointing up. Aside from that, she could easily be a university student. In fact, she reminded Nicole of the kind of student she'd been. From the girl's haunted eyes, sunk in dark shadows, to her pallor and severely bitten nails, everything added up to a package that would've had Nicole running to make an appointment with the nearest counselor if that had been her sister or daughter.

  On the other hand, no one noticed anything was wrong with me.

  And what on earth is a girl young enough to be a uni student doing as a security guard in a place like this, anyway?

  The girl said something softly to an unseen person outside the door—Nicole could only glimpse his or her shadow on the wall—then eased it shut behind her. She glanced around as if she expected someone to jump on her out of nowhere in the empty room, and crossed the floor quickly to stand on the other side of Nicole's cage bars. She leaned close, wrapping her thin fingers around the bars.

  Nicole wondered if it would be possible to grab her and wrestle the gun away from her.

  Wide-eyed, the girl whispered, "Did you see my father? Have you talked to him?"

  "Your father?" For a mad instant Nicole thought she meant Avery. But this girl was hardly more than a decade Avery's junior, if even that much. Besides, he clearly hadn't recognized her.

  The girl nodded, her chopped-off hair swishing around the sharp points of her jaw.

  Are you quite sure you haven't mistaken me for someone else? "You know we're being recorded, right?" Nicole said, nodding to the camera.

  "No, we aren't," the girl said, though she kept her voice soft. "The video and audio are both looping right now. As long as I don't do it for too long, they'll never know."

  Nicole blinked. It seemed an opportunity had fallen into her lap, and she dropped her half-formed plans to seize the gun—for now, anyway. "I'm Nicole. What's your name?"

  "Ashley," the girl whispered.

  "I don't suppose you'd be willing to open this cage, Ashley?"

  A quick headshake. "They don't trust me with keys anymore."

  And yet they trust you with a gun? "Why? Have you helped people escape before?"

  Ashley chewed a lip already bitten bloody. "I came here to talk about Dad. When you mentioned him—your friend, I mean—" Her dark eyes were large and pleading. "Have you seen him? Is he okay?"

  The penny dropped. "Your dad must be—" What was the name they'd used? "—Alan, right?"

  "Alan Lopez," Ashley agreed.

  As in EGL Labs? "Lopez is a werewolf?" Which led to the other inescapable conclusion— "Wait, you're a werewolf?"

  "Me?" Ashley said, astonishment written all over her face. "No, of course not, why would I be?"

  "But you said—" Now Nicole was thoroughly confused. "Your dad is—Okay, listen, the ... whatever Avery and I saw, the person you're referring to, was a werewolf." Or something like it. "That means you're one, too, even if you don't shift. Or are you adopted?"

  "Oh!" The penny clearly dropped for Ashley as well. "No, no. He wasn't born like that. He's human. They made him into one."

  Nicole just stared at her. Being a shifter was not communicable, by biting or any other method. After living with Tim and Erin for nearly a decade, she felt pretty clear on that point. On the other hand, she was in some sort of mad-science lab ... "How?" she asked, and wrapped a hand around the bars near the girl's, to stabilize her suddenly wobbly knees.

  "By giving him werewolf blood transfusions," Ashley said. At Nicole's look of horror, she added quickly, "Oh, nobody forced him. He volunteered! Actually, he was the one who started doing it himself, in the beginning, without telling Mo
m. Then, later ..." She swallowed.

  Nicole had seen what happened later. Cautiously she started to put her hand over Ashley's cold fingers. The girl flinched violently away, skipping several steps back from the cage, and unslung the gun from her shoulder in one smooth motion, bringing the muzzle to bear on Nicole.

  Nicole held up her hands, her diaphragm freezing the breath in her lungs. This was now the second time in two days that she'd had a gun pointed at her, not to speak of being shot with tranquilizer darts. The shock, she found, was less profound the second time around, and she managed to say in almost a normal voice, "I'm not going to hurt you."

  "You better not," Ashley said. "I hope you know Jeremy's right outside, and he's ready to come if I scream."

  "Who is Jeremy?"

  "My boyfriend," Ashley said, with a fragile defiance. "And he's mean. You don't want to get on his bad side."

  And how well do you know his bad side, Ashley?

  Most disturbing of all to Nicole was that despite the girl's agitation, her hands weren't shaking; the muzzle was rock steady. Dealing with agitated people, calming them down, was part of her job, and she didn't think Ashley was a completely unprepared 20-year-old who'd had a gun shoved into her hands and was sent out to do a grown-up's job. No, this girl had been helping her father—

  —or both her parents, perhaps.

  "Ashley," Nicole said, anticipating the answer even as she asked the question, "who's your mother?"

  "Don't you know?" Ashley asked, sounding baffled. "You met her earlier."

  Evans-Lopez. Sharing not just a lab, it seemed, but a marriage and a child. She would have seen the resemblance sooner, if not for Ashley's thinness shaving off the baby fat and bringing out the sharp edges of her face in a way that accentuated the differences rather than the similarities between Ashley and her mother's bone structure.

  "I'm in a cage, Ashley." She kept her hands where the girl could see them. "I can't hurt you. Go ahead and put the gun away, and I'll tell you about your dad."

  Ashley did, hesitantly, slinging it over her shoulder again, but keeping a hand on it. "I know what you people are capable of," she said. "Except, no—you told Mom you're not a werewolf, didn't you?"

  "I'm not," Nicole said, repeating the half-lie for what felt like the billionth time.

  Ashley took a cautious step closer to the cage. "You said you'd tell me about my dad. You saw him, right? Did you talk to him?"

  Now that she understood his situation better, Nicole wondered if there was anything left of Alan Lopez to talk to. "I only saw him briefly. We didn't talk. But he was—" All right seemed a lie of such massive proportions that she couldn't manage to say it to the girl's hopeful face. "... not hurt, I don't think. Avery had more contact with him. That's the other person who came in with me, the werewolf. The one you tranquilized and dragged away," she couldn't help adding, not quite managing to keep the condemnation out of her voice. "Now, Ashley, I've told you all I know about your dad. Please tell me about my ... my friend. Where did you take him?"

  "He's in Lab 1 with Mom," Ashley said. "That's why I'm down here, because she's busy and won't notice."

  Nicole became aware that her fingers were cramping from her grip on the bars, and peeled her hands off. "Is he okay?"

  "They're not going to kill him, if that's what you're worried about. He's too important."

  "For studying."

  Ashley nodded. "Those creatures ... their blood is a treasure trove of important compounds we can't even isolate yet, let alone understand." Her voice took on a reciting-from-memory quality; she was clearly repeating something her parents had told her.

  "They're not creatures, they're people," Nicole said. "People like your dad."

  Ashley's face twisted. She closed on the cage, forgetting to be afraid. "My dad? Do you know what happened to my dad? I watched it. That thing's blood twisted and warped him, not just his body but his mind, too. He went from being a normal person to some kind of ... of beast. Monstrous, dangerous—he didn't even recognize me or Mom half the time!"

  "Because your dad was an experiment," Nicole protested. "Avery isn't like that, not at all. He's the gentlest person I ever met." She decided not to add that he could also be fierce, when protecting people he cared about. So can I. And if he's hurt, you'll all find out just how fierce I can be.

  Ashley still looked disbelieving, so Nicole shifted gears. "What on earth were your parents trying to do, anyway? If that's how you feel about wolf shi—werewolves, why would you want to become one?"

  "He didn't!" Ashley snapped, her family's honor apparently at stake. "My parents are trying to isolate the werewolf healing factor. That's the main way humanity can benefit from their kind. They can heal anything, you know?"

  Not anything, Nicole thought, recalling Avery's scars. Still, it was certainly true that shifters healed faster than normal humans.

  "So they used blood transfusions to try to get the healing factor into your dad?"

  Ashley shifted her weight from foot to foot, twisting the gun's strap around her fingers. "It was ... someone he knew was ill. Congenital heart failure. He thought ... the werewolf thing could help them, and he didn't want to ..." She trailed off.

  Nicole was leaning forward, straining against the bars. She felt as if the whole thing was on the verge of making sense. "Ashley, the person who's ill ... is it you?"

  Ashley dropped her gaze to the floor, her body language answering more fluently than words.

  "You don't seem ..." Now it was her turn to trail off. She wasn't entirely sure what the symptoms of heart failure were, but Ashley didn't seem to have any of the ones Nicole would consider likely. Her thinness could be from illness, but she wasn't breathing hard, or blue in the lips, and she'd seemed entirely up to the task of wrestling around an unconscious adult male.

  "I had a heart transplant." The words seemed to be wrenched out of her, and she addressed them to the floor. "There was another girl, about my age, who was hit by a car, and I got her heart. Except, it didn't quite ... it made me ..." She swallowed hard. "Different."

  Chester's daughter had been hit by a car. Suddenly the last piece dropped into place. "Ashley, the donor you got your heart from—was her name Edith?"

  "I don't know her name." Ashley was shaking her head now, slowly, as if in denial not just of the question but of the entire conversation.

  "But she had a brother and cousins, didn't she?" Nicole pressed. "Were their names Helena and Gordie and Jimmy? Were they here, Ashley?"

  Because she could see it all now, clear as day. The little girl receiving the donor heart, and coming out different, whatever she meant by that—her parents, unscrupulous scientists that they were, but loving parents nonetheless, trying to track down the cause of the difference—

  "What was different about you, Ashley?"

  "A lot of things," Ashley whispered, staring at the floor. "I got better after surgery a lot faster than I should have. Cuts would just heal, like, I could watch it happen. I could smell things, it was so weird, like I could tell when Mom had been in a room because I could smell her, and not her perfume, but just her."

  "You're using the past tense. Is it still happening?"

  Ashley glanced up, a quick peek at Nicole from her bruised-looking eyes. "No. It went away slowly, as I healed up, and that's when I started having trouble with rejection. It hasn't damaged my heart too badly, not yet, but the doctors think it might. I'm on a lot of drugs to try to suppress it. Some people, that just happens, but Dad and Mom thought ... it wasn't natural. Because, you know, the donor wasn't ... Anyway, Dad thought, if they could just figure out what the healing factor was, and give me some of it along with my regular drugs, it would keep my body from rejecting my heart. But they couldn't isolate it, and they kept ... losing the test subjects. Dad decided to try transfusions, on himself first."

  Losing, Nicole thought. Nice euphemism, that. She doubted Ashley meant escaping. "And what about you?" she asked the girl—her jailer, who, she now th
ought, was as much a prisoner as Nicole herself. "Is that how you want to live your life—dependent on blood transfusions from captives?"

  "No!" Ashley burst out. Tears glimmered in her eyes. "I hate it!" Even as she said it, she glanced toward the camera, an automatic reflex. How long had the girl lived under constant surveillance, with her parents watching her every move, one part worry for a sick daughter, one part curiosity about a science experiment ...? "I don't want anybody to die to make me better, even if—even if they are these creatures, these wolf monsters. And especially not the babies. I know they're monsters, but they were just babies."

  Nicole's breath caught. "Was it you who let the puppies out? Is that why they won't give you keys anymore?"

  "I know it was stupid," the girl mumbled, twisting the rifle strap so tightly that her fingers had gone bloodless. "I know they'll probably turn violent in the end. But I never saw them do anything, and they never even transformed. I thought maybe Mom and Dad had got it wrong somehow, and they were just normal puppies. And even if they weren't, I hated the idea of having them spend their whole life in a cage, being used as ... as blood banks, or something."

  "So you put them in a box and took them to Pike Place Market?"

  "I put them in a box and gave it to Dad," Ashley corrected. "That's the last time I saw him. I don't know where he went afterwards. He'd been getting weirder and weirder, more and more like them, and less like us. He hardly even seemed to know us anymore. And he didn't like having the puppies in the cage. He would ... bite at the bars, like an animal. But he didn't know how to open locks anymore."

  Poor Ashley. Despite herself, Nicole's heart went out to the girl. "If you could get the key—" she began, but broke off at the sound of an altercation outside the door. The noises were too muffled for Nicole to be able to tell much except that someone, a woman from the sound of it, was yelling.