“Sam!” Emerald screamed, running toward the sheriff, sending dread through Erin’s heart as she waited for a bullet to plow into Emerald.
The sheriff thought so too, because he threw himself at Emerald, knocking her to the ground beneath him.
Dr. Batista fell to her knees, her lab coat pulled over her face. Erin didn’t have a chance to see if the doctor was shot or reacting to the debilitating blue gas. Jared scooped Erin up, pulling her crushingly tight against him as he sprinted toward the line of trees to escape capture. But within five steps a net blasted over them, falling like thick lead ropes, blinding Erin with its gnarling mesh. Jared struggled against the weight of the net, dragging them forward with superhuman strength, groaning with the strain.
His movement only served to bind them tighter into the net. The ropes strained, cutting sharply into Erin’s shoulder, pressing painfully into her scalp and face. The blue smoke rose higher, enveloping them in a thick, choking cloud, as if another canister of it had been shot beneath them.
Jared roared with frustration, shoving harder and harder against the net, but gaining no ground.
“No!” he screamed, falling to his knees.
Tears poured from Erin’s eyes as the gas stole her ability to see or breathe.
She knew that whoever was behind this attack had known just how to capture Jared, and had been told how he could run. Only someone with a great amount of money and resources could put together such an elaborate setup, and Erin was very afraid that person was Cinatas. She might have been able to protect Jared from the law, but when it came to Cinatas’s evil, she was beginning to think she was powerless against his far-reaching hand.
She wrapped her arms around Jared and pulled him close, even as the world slipped painfully from her grasp.
Awareness came slowly in a muddled haze of confusion. Erin tried to move, but couldn’t seem to lift her hand or shift her legs. She thrashed her head, fighting against the bindings, remembering a heavy rope at the fringes of her mind.
Danger.
Jared.
She opened her eyes, blinking against the bright lights of a sterile-looking lab, a white one, one very similar to the Sno-Med lab in Manhattan where she’d found the bodies, only this one was much, much bigger. Cold, an icy, bone-chilling cold surrounded her as if she were lying on a slab of ice. With heart-stopping horror she realized she was strapped to a stretcher, arms, legs, chest, and hips bound tightly down. The IV dripping told her somebody had tapped into a vein in her arm. A monitor beeped the accelerated pace of her heart and flashed her other vital signs, her rapid respiration and elevated blood pressure.
And she wasn’t alone.
She shut her eyes, feigning sleep.
“My patience in waiting for you to rejoin us is wearing thin, Morgan.” Dr. Cinatas said. “I’ve been so looking forward to just a few games before departing the area. You wouldn’t want to disappointment me.”
Erin snapped her eyes open, catching sight of the dark doctor, who looked more satanic than ever before now that she knew what evil lurked behind his polished facade. The gleam in his eyes she had first seen as charismatic intensity revealed itself as feral insanity. The slight smile, a cruel twist rather than guarded affability. He had the perfect grooming, his designer suit was an expensive casket for a rotting corpse.
“Your disappointment isn’t very high on my list of priorities at the moment. Where is Jared?”
“Tisk, risk,” he said, holding up a syringe, tapping it, and ejecting a drop of fluid. “My disappointment needs to be your greatest concern, Erin. Your every breath should hinge on it. I owe you an injection, Morgan. Ever read about what a man goes through before being executed? What his last moments are like? What he feels? What he thinks about? Ever wonder what those last moments of a condemned’s life are like?”
Cinatas moved closer to the stretcher.
“Where’s Jared?” Erin asked again, trying to give Cinatas no reaction to his taunting, but the heart monitor sped to an alarming rate.
The doctor glanced at it and smiled. “Ever wondered what it would be like to die from a lethal injection? The helplessness of being strapped down as a needle of death came closer and closer? Ever wondered what the feel of poison would be like in your arteries and veins as it coursed its way through your body, leaving every cell screaming with pain?”
As Cinatas came at her with the needle, Erin couldn’t stop herself from fighting, no matter how futile the effort would be. Beside her, the monitor beeped her skyrocketing pulse. Cinatas laughed as he slid the needle into the port on her arm. He pushed the plunger home, and the vein in her arm screamed with pain that rushed up to her chest, freezing her lungs. Her brain fuzzed, and the heart monitor went silent.
“Erin,” Jared whispered as thoughts wavered through his consciousness like fleeting clouds. His wild run through the woods, the campfire bloodbath, his return to Erin, her touch soothing the ragged horror of what he’d become, the indescribable pleasure of her body, the danger...
“Erin!” Jared yelled. His eyes sprang open, and he sucked in air, instantly alert to everything about him. The cold dampness, the dank dark oppressiveness of being closed in, bound. He’d split the tape covering his mouth, but chains at his wrists and ankles held him strapped down. He could smell death around him, and the lung-burning scent of acrid chemicals. He could also smell blood—fresh human blood, not Chosen blood, not Erin. He could smell the sheriff, Emerald, and Dr. Batista, but not Erin. He could hear their breathing, but not Erin’s. He had to find her.
He struggled against the chains for his freedom. He was encased in a metal box that hemmed him in on all sides. He jerked on the chains with bone-fracturing force, but barely felt the solid lengths loosen beneath the full power of his strength. He fell back, chest heaving, body shuddering from the pain of his efforts, the desolate horror that he couldn’t help Erin spreading over him. It was as devastating as the Tsara poison eating away at him.
He wouldn’t accept that he couldn’t get to Erin. He howled with rage, shaking the metal of the box with the shattering volume of his cry.
Cinatas turned from the pleasure of watching Erin’s convulsions. A little of this and a little of that had made for a very interesting IV cocktail. The howl coming from the morgue next door had made the glass in the lab vibrate from the force of it. It’d taken one announcement that the lab might have been contaminated with a deadly bio-agent to clear the building of employees and security guards—a problem that would be easily declared as a mistake by his “hazard” team by morning. Besides Manolo, only Shashur, his bodyguard, and his servant were in the building. On the roof he had a gunman and pilot.
Hopefully Shashur, who languished in the penthouse under the first throes of what would soon become a raging fever, hadn’t heard the cry. Shashur was sure to recognize that howl, as few sounds could match a werewolf s. Cinatas had heard only one wolf before. Pathos’s howl could freeze the heart as effectively as the drug he’d just shoved up Morgan’s vein.
Before Cinatas could leave the lab, Manolo rushed in, or ran in as fast as his diseased body would allow. The man was a brittle skeleton of what he’d been two days ago. His scarlet cheeks were sunken, his cracked lips oozed, and his dark eyes were dull with pain and raging fever.
“Did you fail to do as directed to secure the man? If Shashur hears him, it will kill my plans!”
“Sir, I did everything exactly as you ordered. I secured them all in the morgue and set the temperatures very low.”
“Good. I’d hate for you to make another mistake. Your service these last two days has been exemplary. It was a shame I had to do what I did, but you’re a better man because of it. Stay here. You’ll be of no use to me in the morgue.” Cinatas left, giving Manolo a wide berth. Even though he thought he’d developed a strain of the hemorrhagic virus that was non-communicable, medical science did have its failings.
Cinatas moved into the morgue where he accepted and transported medical research cad
avers in style to the Sno-Med facility. He had to struggle to slide the drawer open to see the beast-man. Cinatas had hoped to see the werewolf in its wereform rather than the body of a man fighting his binds.
“You are a big one,” Cinatas said, scrutinizing the man. “Even bigger than Pathos. If you can do all the things that Pathos can, then this is going to be so good. You, my friend, are going to help me gain control of the most powerful force for evil on earth. The Vladarian Order will bow to me.”
“Where is he? Where is Erin?”
“Pathos is coming, but you won’t be seeing him for a while, not until you’re ready. Three weeks won’t be enough time to assure your takeover of the Vladarian Order. Next year’s Gathering should be just right. And Erin. Well, how she is and where she is will be totally up to you. I get your cooperation, she lives. I don’t, she’ll live in excruciating pain every second that you thwart my authority and plan. And just so you believe I mean what I say, I’m going to give you a little example of what it will be like. Let me tell you just exactly what I’ll be doing to Erin when you hear her scream...”
Erin heard Jared’s howl, thinking that he was calling her back from the dead again. Only she saw no light, heard no angels, nor was she hovering on the ceiling watching herself on the stretcher. She was on the stretcher; her heart was now beating, her lungs were now breathing, and her mind was working, even if it was a bit fuzzy. What had Cinatas done to her?
She could only assume Cinatas had injected her with a drug used in the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias, one that stopped the heart for a short interval and then let it beat again. His sheer evil had her palms sweating and her body shuddering with fear. Cinatas didn’t seek to eliminate her. His goal was to torture her.
She’d heard what Cinatas had said to the man in the room with her. Didn’t the man realize what was happening to him? To her?
“He’s done something to you,” she whispered. She didn’t know how close Cinatas was. “Didn’t you hear him?”
Erin heard a shuffling of footsteps, and a man who looked like walking death came into view, his dark eyes so bloodshot that they nearly glowed red, so ill that she feared he wasn’t capable of understanding her. His body trembled badly.
“Help me,” she said. “I’m a nurse, and I can help you.”
He shook his head, his fear of Cinatas too great.
Erin sighed, her heart sinking. “You have to. I was his employee too, but I disappointed him, and now he’s going to torture me and the man that I love. Do you have family? Someone you love? He’s going to hurt them. He’s—”
“Manolo!” Cinatas’s sharp command cut through the lab as he approached.
The man turned, his body shuddering horribly, and Erin’s dread grew exponentially with the thudding beats of her heart. That she hadn’t heard Jared cry out again made her insides wrench with pain.
“Have the pilot on the roof ready to go, should I decide it necessary. Then rest a bit. Once I leave here, you can escort Shashur to the airport and then take your family on a vacation for a week or two while you recuperate. Maybe go down to the island and visit your parents and brothers for a few days. I’ll order the private jet to return and take you. You’ve earned it.”
“Yes, sir,” Manolo said and stumbled from the room. Erin wondered if the man would live that long.
“”What did you do to him?” Erin forced herself to keep her breathing even and calm. She didn’t know how, but she was going to do her very best to disappoint Cinatas every way she could. She had to throw him from his calm, force him to make a mistake.
“A little virus in the blood can turn a person into a saint,” Cinatas said.
Erin searched her mind. “Are you playing God with Ebola?”
“Play God?” He shook his head. “I am a god. Ebola is passé, Morgan. There’s newer, more potent strains. But I can’t have you playing my staff against me. I can’t have you casting doubt into their feeble minds. That could be very painful for them, and for you.”
Cinatas moved to her side, and the monitor betrayed the increased beating of her heart. He smiled again. “Have you ever studied acupuncture? All of the little places on the body all mapped out, telling you that if you stick a needle here, then this will happen there?” He brushed his finger up her neck and over her temple. She forced herself not to react, even though her skin crawled.
He slipped an alcohol packet from his pocket, opened it, and rubbed the finger he’d touched her with clean. Then he rubbed the skin between her thumb and forefinger with the pad, despite her efforts to twist her hand away from him. Pulling another syringe from his breast pocket, he popped the cap.
Erin steeled herself for what sort of drug he would try next. He stabbed the needle into the muscle of her hand he’d prepped, and the excruciating pain tore a scream from her. Her eyes teared. Her body shuddered and broke into a cold sweat.
“That was perfect, Morgan. Not at all disappointing.” He held up a little electronic device, pushed a button, and her scream filled the room. “An hour or two of this, and your big friend will be my little lap-dog.” He laughed as if he’d said the funniest thing in the world.
“Jared?” Erin gasped, dying to pull the needle from her hand and shove it into Cinatas’s face. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”
“He’s on ice, learning how to cool his heels to my command. You’re proving extremely useful. Now to get you out of here so if he does break free, he won’t be able to find you. You’re the only thing he will bow to right now. His soul hasn’t quite crossed over yet, but it will soon. Together, we’ll be an unstoppable force.”
Snapping the brake on the stretcher, Cinatas wheeled her from the room. Erin’s mind scrambled, fighting against the pain every jarring move of her hand sent up her arm. She had to do something, say something that would stop Cinatas’s mad reign. “They are going to come for you,” she said. “The other Blood Hunters, Jared’s brethren from the spirit world. There is no place that you can hide when they do, is there?”
“Shut up. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Erin only smiled. “But I do,” she said softly. “I also know the secret to Jared’s power. If anything happens to me or Jared, there are a lot of people who are going to find out all about your cancer-treating scam and what you are really doing with Chosen blood.”
Something she said had struck a nerve. Cinatas paused before a set of elevators and stared hard at her. Then he smiled. “I look forward to extracting all of that information from you at my leisure. Don’t try and out-psyche me, Morgan. You’ll lose every time.”
The elevator doors opened, and Cinatas shifted to slide the stretcher in. At the last second Erin screamed at the top of her lungs, “It’s a trick, Jared! Don’t believe anything.”
Cinatas shoved the stretcher so hard that it bounced against the elevator wall, jarring her hand painfully. She fought for breath as the elevator doors closed.
Cinatas backhanded her hard, splitting her lip. The acrid taste of blood filled her mouth. He stared down at her as if fascinated, then he swiped her lip with his finger, bringing a drop of her blood to his mouth.
He acted as if he were sampling a sweet treat. “Your blood doesn’t taste any different than other Chosen blood. It will be interesting to find out why you are so special. Why are you under the protection of the Vladarian Order, Morgan? Why did they request that only you administer their transfusions? Why does only Pathos determine your fate?”
The elevator ascended, and Erin shut her eyes. Jared. Somehow they were both connected to the same circle of evil, one that was going to destroy them both.
With the scent of the doctor’s corrupted Chosen blood gnawing at his senses, Jared waited a few minutes after the man left before making his move. Jared’s captor hadn’t been able to shut him back into the metal box completely, and that crack proved to be Jared’s edge. Twisting his foot, Jared eased his toes into the opening and shoved against the side so hard that the steel draw
er he was in slid out, bringing him into the garish light.
He hung out from a row of drawers. Now that he was freed from the tight space, he could sit up, which gave him more leverage against the chains on his wrist. Flinging himself forward, he focused all of his weight and strength on his right wrist and strained to break himself free.
That was when Erin’s scream rent the air, cutting through him like a knife. Anger and fear coursed through him, rising with a feral need to destroy Cinatas. The chain broke loose, and Jared set to work on his other arm and his legs, visions of tearing the doctor apart with claws and fangs spurring his anger. He heard Erin’s second scream and realized that the quality of the vibrations was different from the first, as if this one had come from the television. Then Erin yelled that it was all a trick. The desperation in her voice had Jared s heart pumping with bloodlust. Once free, he started to run for Erin, but with his heightened senses, he realized that the sheriff, Emerald, and Dr. Batista’s breathing had slowed.
Jared jerked open the drawers he smelled them in, pulled off the tape covering their mouths, and broke the plastic binding their wrists before he dragged them off the cold metal slabs to the warmer tile of the floor. The sheriff was starting to stir when Jared ran from the room.
Jared entered the lab next door and followed Erin’s scent to two metal doors that he had to pry apart. The scent of her Chosen blood lingered more heavily in the air than before. A creaking sound from above gave him the direction he needed to go.
He ran back down the corridor for the stairs, but had to deflect a blow coming from the doorway of the room he’d escaped from.
“Son of a bitch,” the sheriff said, shaking his good arm as the metal pole he’d held clattered down the hall. “Why didn’t you say something to let me know it was you? Where’s Erin?”
Touch a Dark Wolf (The Shadowmen Book 1) Page 17