by Vivi Andrews
Rachel said nothing, not sure she was grateful.
“Brandt doesn’t blame you, you know. For the experiments,” Grace said conversationally, hitching herself up onto one of the empty beds and swinging her booted feet. “None of us do. We’re the first point of contact for most of the refugee shifters, treating them for everything from dehydration to…well, you know. Don’t you?” She tilted her head studying Rachel with disturbingly direct blue eyes. “They don’t all talk about what happened to them, but those that do, speak about you like you’re the patron saint of everything good and holy in the world. You had to do some shit you aren’t proud of—we’ve all been there. Nobody’s judging you. At least no one in this building. Got it?”
Rachel nodded. She was reluctant to like Grace, but the lioness didn’t seem bothered at all by her coolness.
“Nice shiner,” she said when Rachel still didn’t speak.
Rachel lifted a hand to her cheek, her fingers hovering over the mark. She hadn’t had any makeup to cover it up—Adrian hadn’t gone that far in his provisions. It didn’t hurt unless she touched it and the swelling and discoloration were minor, barely noticeable. She’d forgotten it was there, but she should have known the shifters would notice it.
“It was an accident.”
Grace snorted. “That’s almost as good as I fell.”
Rachel stiffened, irritated by Grace’s insinuation. “It wasn’t anything like that. Adrian would never,” she defended, though the hawk shifter hardly deserved her loyalty after his hot-and-cold routine. But through all their tempestuous history, he’d never laid a hand on her and she knew he never would. It would violate his honor in the most intrinsic way. “He was having a nightmare and I got in the way.”
“So you are sleeping together. Damn, I just lost twenty bucks. You positively reek of his scent, but I figured that could always be from staying at his place.”
Rachel’s face grew hot with the knowledge that her sex life had been the object of speculation and betting. She shouldn’t be surprised. The shifters didn’t seem to have much in the way of boundaries. It was a wonder her blush wasn’t permanent.
Last night was too personal to be public knowledge. She protested, “We aren’t—I mean, it isn’t like that. We don’t—”
Grace’s arched brow screamed that she wasn’t helping herself with her stammering.
She was a better liar than that. Rachel cleared her throat and tried again. “He guards me. From the floor. He won’t get near me.”
Except when he did. And the world caught on fire for a few minutes before they both remembered he hated her.
Grace nodded, unsurprised. “Either way, I’m glad he didn’t hit you. He seems like a good guy. I’d hate to have to kick his ass into next week.”
Rachel frowned. She didn’t know what to make of the woman. She and Adrian seemed so close, and then she went and implied that she would take Rachel’s side. It could be a ploy to get Rachel to trust her. But even if it was a trick, Rachel was inclined to let it work. She was so tired of being guarded all the time. If only the woman trying to befriend her wasn’t also the one she suspected of sleeping with Adrian. Though if Grace knew he was sleeping with Rachel… Grace didn’t seem the type to share.
She could make herself crazy speculating or she could ask. She’d been raised that it was rude to ask, but the last few weeks had worn away her need to be polite. “So you and he aren’t together?”
Grace snorted out a laugh, rocking back and forth on the bed with the force of it. “Oh honey. Me and Hawkeye? No, thank you. Not my type.”
Rachel was tempted to ask her what her type was. It seemed incomprehensible to her that Adrian’s brand of fierce, intense passion wouldn’t be every woman’s type, but before she could get the words out, voices reached them from the back hallway and Dr. Brandt emerged with a petite, curvy woman. Moira.
“You must be Rachel!” she exclaimed with undisguised enthusiasm lighting her pale brown eyes. “Adrian spoke of you so often I feel like I know you already. I’m Moira.”
Rachel took the hand Moira offered, unsure how to respond to the idea that Adrian’s version of her could have generated such a positive welcome. Luckily, Moira didn’t seem to require a reply. She pulled Rachel into a tour of the facility, gently but inexorably taking control and putting proof to Dr. Brandt’s comment that Moira only let him believe he was in charge. She was clearly the heart of the operation—though she ruled so subtly Rachel doubted most people even noticed she was there.
Her coloring was unusual, a few shades darker than most of the lions Rachel had met—shades of brown tinting her skin, eyes and hair so she looked for all the world like she’d been dipped in caramel. Moira was also much smaller than Dr. Brandt and Grace—who Rachel suspected were both lions. But what was Moira?
“What do you say, Dr. Russell?” Dr. Brandt asked as they completed the tour in the cluttered office he shared with Moira. He tossed himself into one rolling chair, waving Rachel to another as Grace perched on the desk and Moira took the other chair. “Will we do?”
“I’m very impressed with what you’ve done here,” she said sincerely. The infirmary was no back-country sawbones. They had much of the most up-to-date technology, though nowhere near the level of the Organization facilities. “I should be able to do almost everything I need to with what you already have, and if we do need more specialized equipment, we can cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“We try to do everything on site,” Dr. Brandt explained. “Too much risk in sending blood work to external clinics to be analyzed, but that does limit us. There’s only so much we can do with the resources we have—but it’s better medical care than most shifters get.”
“It’s just the three of you?”
“Up until recently there were less than a hundred shifters living here,” Grace said, swinging one leg at the knee. “There’s a lynx who comes by to run blood work for us as needed and some of our pride mates have basic first aid training to help in a pinch, but for the most part three was plenty. Especially since, as a group, we are notoriously pig-headed about seeking medical help.” Grace tipped her head in Moira’s direction. “Bears are the worst. You’d think doctors were going to declaw them all with the way they grouse about even getting a check-up.”
“Lions are no picnic,” Moira put in dryly.
Rachel’s eyes flicked to the petite woman. She seemed much too small to be a bear, but there was something very warm and maternal about her and bears were good parents. She wasn’t used to meeting shifters without seeing their files first, with their animal designation and medical history laid out before her.
“Is it rude to ask what kind of shifter a person is?”
Grace laughed and Brandt did as well, but Moira took pity on her. “It’s not rude, no. It’s just that few shifters would have to ask so they forget that not everyone can smell the differences on them. Grace and Brandt are both lions. I’m a Kodiak bear.” Rachel’s jaw dropped and Moira laughed, a soft, gentle sound completely at odds with Rachel’s image of bears. “Yes, I know, it surprises most people who can’t smell it on me. But someone has to remind the lions they aren’t the top of the food chain. And my strength comes in handy if we have a shifter mama with a difficult delivery.”
“That it does,” Brandt agreed. “But first we have to get to full-term. Which, with cross-breed pairings, has been quite the challenge. With pairings of the same breed, our shifters seem to be so fertile we’ve had to develop birth-control shots to keep our population from rising too rapidly, but cross-breeds are a different story.”
Moira nodded. “We have so many old wives tales about what happens with the offspring of cross-breed pairings, but we have no real data. And here at Lone Pine, with so many different breeds mixing, more and more cross-breed pairings seem to be popping up.”
“Which is where you come in.” Brandt turned to he
r. “So what can you tell us about your work, Dr. Russell?”
“Call me Rachel.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Dude. Are you really the Hawk? Like, the Hawk?”
Adrian eyed the young soldier looking up at him with what could only be described as glazed hero-worship. “Just call me Adrian.” He hadn’t been the Hawk in a while.
The kid’s jaw dropped. “Holy crap, you are. I thought you were a myth! One of the guys was telling a story the other night about you being like…what’s his name? The Greek dude who ferried souls? Only you did it for shifters. Ferrying them from hell back to the real world with new names and shit.”
“Charon.”
“Right! Only you’re, like, ex-Special Forces, right? Green Beret or something?”
“Army Ranger.”
“Dude. I can’t believe you’re real. I thought you were just something shifters had invented to make themselves feel better when everyone was disappearing without explanation.”
Adrian kept his gaze trained on the tree line from the crow’s nest guarding the perimeter wall, wondering if he just ignored Soldier Junior if he would take the hint and go away.
“Dude, if you’re the Hawk, what are you doing here?”
No such luck. “Perimeter watch.”
“Well, yeah. But why aren’t you out freeing more of us?”
“I’m not a superhero, kid. I can’t do anything without someone on the inside sneaking the shifters out to me.” If he had been the ferryman, Rachel had been Persephone, trapped in the Underworld.
“So you just stopped?”
“We didn’t just stop,” he snapped, wondering if he had ever been that young and obnoxious. “They caught us. First me. Then her.”
“But you got out.”
“Yeah.”
“And now what? They win?”
Adrian wondered if punching the kid was frowned on. “They don’t win,” he snarled. “We’re still fighting them.”
“But you’re here.”
He didn’t have anything to say to that. The fucking kid was right about that much. He could say he was still recovering, but that felt like a cop out. He could say he was looking after Rachel, but what was he really doing? Hiding out.
He’d lost more than his wings during his time at the Organization. He’d misplaced that piece of himself that made him the Hawk. The one this kid gawked at like he was some kind of miracle worker.
He wasn’t doing everything he could to bring down the Organization. He was doing everything he could to protect himself and protect Rachel.
The next Organization raid was scheduled to leave tomorrow morning. He should be on it. But would Rachel be safe without him? He couldn’t help remembering the tiger stalking through the woods. Or the feel of her hot and eager in his arms. And he didn’t know which one was more dangerous.
He didn’t know if he could be the Hawk, reclaim that part of himself, and still keep her safe.
He could speak to Grace. As soon as he had a shift break, he would go back to the infirmary. The Hawk had been dormant too long.
“When they first brought me in,” Rachel avoided saying the name of her former employers, even though it was just Brandt, Grace and Moira with her in the office, “none of the captured female shifters were catching and the human females they impregnated with shifter sperm kept miscarrying. For the human women, fertilization wasn’t the problem—there was something about their body chemistry that seemed to be incompatible with the fetus. By studying some of the other data on hand, it became apparent to me that the physical presence of other shifters could cause both humans and shifters to produce a unique hormone. I became convinced that the isolation of our subjects was limiting this hormone which made it impossible for the women to carry to term.
“It made sense to me that the hormone would be required for reproduction—a sort of biological failsafe to prevent shifter children from being born in an environment where there were no other shifters to care for them. The presence of a shifter father—or other shifter support system—would cause the mother to produce the hormone and enable her to carry the child to term.
“I was unable to convince my employers to lessen the isolation of my subjects, but I was able to isolate and reproduce the hormone, which I injected into our subjects as a supplement. The human women continued to miscarry—though much later in their pregnancies—but the real breakthrough was when I applied the hormone to shifter females. Their fertility instantly skyrocketed.”
“But we’re surrounded by shifters,” Grace interrupted. “That shouldn’t be a problem with us.”
“With cross-breeds it might be,” Rachel explained. “The hormone is very breed-specific. If you are, let’s say, a lynx mated to a bobcat, your body might not produce the hormone at all without another lynx in the vicinity. Though they’re both felid species, the hormone appears to be extremely picky.”
Moira nodded. “Lion shifters living in prides would be more fertile, flooded with that hormone. As would wolves in packs. That would also help explain why even our more independent shifters tend to feel the need to bond into family units far more frequently than their animal counterparts.”
“We called it the community hormone. Several of our shifter subjects associated the injections with a feeling of comfort or home—some even reporting hallucinating familiar scents as a side effect. The humans were less affected, but the feelings generated seemed to be positive there as well, just to a lesser degree—it would be logical for shifters to seek out that sensation in the wild. The comfort of the community.”
“I understand this shifter community hormone makes the mother’s body a fertile environment for the fetus, but what about the babies themselves?” Moira asked. “What would they shift into?”
“Even after I began having some success, I was never allowed to see the mothers through to the end of their pregnancies, so while I believe there were a handful of successful births, I never actually saw the children or learned if they could shift. In the wild, certain animal species can create hybrids—lions and tigers can have offspring together—but based on genetic testing of the fertilized ova, it appeared the breed of a shifter child was determined almost entirely by the breed of the mother—the only exception to this being the very rare cases of humans carrying latent shifter DNA being impregnated by shifter males.”
All three of her listeners straightened sharply. “Humans with latent shifter DNA?” Brandt pressed. “We’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“It’s rare.”
“Do you have it?” Grace asked, which shouldn’t have surprised Rachel.
Of course they would think she would be more sympathetic to them if they shared some genetic marker, no matter how buried. Rachel had wondered herself, when she first saw that certain humans carried the shifter gene. She was an orphan, after all. Her parents could have been anyone or anything. But then she’d performed the test on herself.
“I’m just human.”
She imagined she saw disappointment on their faces—she wasn’t one of them after all—or perhaps that was just her projecting.
“So this hormone, that’s the magic bullet?” Brandt asked.
“It does a lot, but some pairings are simply incompatible. The fetuses aren’t viable in any environment. Ursine-feline, for example.” Or avian-human, like her and Adrian. Not that she should be thinking along those lines. Lately, he didn’t even seem to like her, even five minutes after loving her senseless.
“And you have data on which breeds can successfully cross?”
“At the fertilization level, yes. I had reams of it which should be in the computers taken from the raid of the lab where I was found. We had hundreds and hundreds of samples—every mature shifter brought through Organization labs was harvested for reproductive material.”
“Jesus.”
Rachel
whipped around at the raw curse from the doorway behind her.
Adrian stood in the hall just outside the office’s open door, horror and disgust warring for dominance on his face as he stared at her. He turned on his heel, stalking away without a word.
“Adrian!” Rachel scrambled out of her seat and after him, replaying what he must have heard in her head.
She’d been talking to colleagues, people who were as fascinated by the science as she was, but to a shifter who had been experimented on, she didn’t know how it would have sounded. How much had he heard?
The way he’d looked at her…
She caught him near one of the patient rooms, catching his arm between both of her hands in an attempt to slow his rapid stride. He spun, startling her with the quick about-face and caught her by her arm, half-dragging her into the patient room and kicking the door shut behind them before dropping her arm like the touch of her skin burned him.
“Harvesting for reproductive material?” he snarled, stalking to the far window before spinning to face her with the breadth of the room between them. “Did you do the job yourself or did you have assistants for the hands-on portions? Did you get bonuses if you got us off quickly or were you paid by the hour?”
“Don’t be insulting.” She tucked her arms against her chest, defensive.
“What am I supposed to be, Doc? How many little hawks were you trying to breed from me?”
“None. They never drew sperm from you. I rescheduled the procedures whenever they tried to do those things to you. I couldn’t do much, but I swear I tried to protect you from whatever I could.”
“So of all the tests you were perfectly happy to watch them perform, you drew the line at that one. Lovely. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”