Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  "I get to go home and pack an overnight bag, right? I mean, I need a toothbrush at the very least. And my laptop." Her eyes went wide. "You don't suppose they broke into my apartment, do you? Would they steal my stuff?"

  "I ... don't know." He wondered if Stiers already had a detail on her apartment. If they were after her, they'd probably come back. It would be nice if people would tell him things.

  "I need to pack." Peri crossed her arms. There was something both defiant and defensive about it, and Noah was able to glimpse, for a moment, the fear lurking behind her facade of bravery. She was badly shaken, as anyone would be; she was just doing a good job of hiding it. "I'm not going to any safehouse if I can't at least get a change of underwear."

  "If I take you to pick up some things from your apartment, will you let us put you in a safehouse?"

  "Sure," she said, a little too quickly.

  "Without arguing about it."

  "I already said sure, didn't I?"

  Noah gazed at her for a moment, then nodded. "Grab your jacket. Let's go."

  Chapter Six

  Peri couldn't suppress a shiver as she looked up at her familiar apartment building from the passenger seat of Noah's car. The top of the convertible was up, so she could only see a little of the building's facade. She ought to just get out and walk up to the door, but she hesitated, unable to forget the rough hands closing on her, the sting of the needle going into her skin.

  Just getting into the car had been difficult enough. Someone had cleaned it up, but it was still obvious that the seats had been recently stained with blood. There was a strong smell of cleaning chemicals. On the drive, she'd found herself sitting forward, trying to hold her body away from the slightly sticky leather. At a traffic light, she'd taken off her jacket and laid it over the seat behind her. That helped a little, but not much.

  Noah touched her arm: a quick press of warm fingers, there and gone. "Wait here. Stay in the car with the doors locked until I sweep the area."

  Peri nodded, subsiding in her seat.

  Noah opened his door, then turned around and tossed her something. Startled, Peri caught it reflexively. It was a key ring with a rubber Tony the Tiger toy on it, along with the car's keys. She looked at him in bafflement.

  "It's hardly secure if they can just get the keys off me and unlock the doors, right?" he said with a tiny smile. "I'll be back in a few minutes. If you see anything happen to me, start the car and get yourself to safety, then call for help."

  Peri nodded, gripping the keys.

  "In that order, got it? The important thing is to get yourself out of the dangerous situation first. Like in an airplane safety lecture, when they tell you to put on your own mask before helping other passengers."

  "I've got it, Tiger," she said impatiently, and saw a surprised look skate across Noah's face before calmness reasserted itself. She wasn't sure what that was all about. Guy obviously liked tigers, what with the key ring and the stripes on his jacket. If he didn't like her calling him that, then she'd just have to use it more often.

  He wasn't wearing the jacket now, just a black T-shirt that clung to the planes of his muscular body, framed by the shoulder holster. Peri couldn't help watching the flex of those muscles as he got out of the car, reaching behind him to pop down the door's manual lock before slamming it. She could still feel the light tingle where he'd touched her arm, so soft and quick it was like the kiss of a butterfly's feet, but the touch seemed to have burned itself into the skin of her bare arm. She brushed it lightly with her fingertips.

  From the relative safety of the car's interior, Peri watched him prowl the sidewalk like ... well, like a predator, she couldn't help thinking. There was a loose, rippling grace to the way he moved. People instinctively got out of his way, even before they noticed the gun he wore. He projected confident self-assurance and authority, and people responded to it automatically.

  Peri had never realized how astonishingly hot those qualities could be. Bossy guys had always been a turnoff for her. She'd grown up under the thumb of powerful, controlling adults, and after getting out of that situation, all she could think was, Never again. Her hatred of being pushed around had carried over into her dating life. The minute a guy started thinking he could give her orders, she was more than happy to show him the door. Maybe they thought she was a bitch or an ice queen, but Peri didn't give a damn; her life and health and happiness were more important than some dick ex's hurt feelings. She only wished her mom had been equally alert to the warning signs in her dad.

  So what was so different about Noah? Maybe it was that he didn't wield his authority in a way that was unnecessary or unearned. He was pretty unassuming most of the time. When Noah told her to do things, like staying in the car, there was a good reason for it. She couldn't really argue with Noah's orders, because they were smart orders, things she probably would have done anyway if she'd thought of it.

  And perhaps more importantly, he listened to her objections. Communication was a two-way street, something that a lot of guys in Peri's experience seemed to have forgotten (starting with her dad), but Noah didn't seem to mind if she pushed back, as long as she had good reasons for doing so. He could have forced her into the car and driven her to the safehouse against her will, but he hadn't. Even if going back to the apartment was dangerous, he understood that she couldn't just go into hiding with no change of clothes or toiletries or emergency tampons.

  And he hadn't taken her phone away, even after being ordered to do it. He'd told her the truth instead. Peri touched her jeans pocket, where the phone—her lifeline to the world—was safely tucked away. Gotta pick up the charger, too. Don't forget.

  Noah's swift tap on the driver-side window made her jump. She leaned over to pop up the door lock.

  "The outside of the building is clear. Here's what we're going to do. It's a secure building, right?" Peri nodded. "After you open the door for me, follow me inside. Let me clear each stairwell and room before you enter it. Stay behind me so you're out of my line of fire, okay?"

  Line of fire. Another small shiver ran through her, made up of equal parts fear and excitement. "What if someone comes up on me from behind?"

  "With a locked door at our back, we're a lot more likely to encounter someone in front of us. But if you see or hear anything suspicious, yell at me and hit the floor. That way, you'll be out of my line of fire when I turn around."

  Noah shadowed her across the sidewalk, blocking her from the street. He was very close, so close she could smell the light, spicy musk of his cologne.

  "If someone tries to grab you, go limp. A human-sized deadweight is hard to handle. They might drop you. At the very least they'll have trouble moving you like that."

  "But shouldn't I struggle?"

  "If you're alone, yeah. Scream and fight for all you're worth. But you're with me. If you go limp and stay still, I only have to worry about one target, rather than having both of you thrashing around." He smiled briefly. "You have to trust me to protect you."

  Weirdly, she did, although she wasn't sure why. Peri hadn't trusted anyone to protect her for as long as she could remember. Both her parents were useless at it. If they hadn't been, she'd still have two intact legs.

  Noah stood between her and the street at the door of the building while Peri fumbled for her keys, realizing as she did so that the tiger key ring was still in her hand. "Oh, here," she said, thrusting the keys at him.

  Noah caught her hand in his big, warm one, and pushed it back. "No, keep them. If things do go south, you can use the car to get away."

  "You take this bodyguard thing very seriously," she said, turning back to the door to hide the flush heating her cheeks. If only he weren't quite so close.

  "It's my job," he said, his voice perfectly serious. "You're my job now. Keeping you safe, I mean." Was that a hint of fluster at the end? Peri had to hide a smile.

  She unlocked the door, and they stepped into the building's tiny lobby. "My apartment is on the third floor," Per
i said. "It's 307."

  Noah nodded. "We'll take the stairs. Stay a couple steps behind me, so you're not in my way, but don't fall too far behind. Door keys?"

  She passed him her key ring. Noah pocketed it and drew his gun. Heart beating fast, Peri followed him into the stairwell.

  It was incredibly tense; she kept looking over her shoulder and all around. When a door slammed somewhere else in the building, she flinched violently, and heard a small huff of breath from Noah that made her think he wasn't as calm as he seemed.

  But no one interrupted their climb. Noah nudged open the stairwell door with his foot, the gun held low at his side, and slipped through with Peri in his wake. As soon as they were in the hall, she could see that he wasn't going to need her keys. Her door was standing slightly ajar.

  "Shit," Noah murmured. "Stay outside. I'm going to clear the place before you come in."

  She looked past him anyway when he pushed the door the rest of the way open. "Those bastards!" she burst out, ignoring Noah's hissed "Shhhh!" Her place usually existed in a benign state of disarray, but nothing like this. Her belongings were scattered across the floor, the couch cushions flung around with their stuffing pulled out, posters torn off the walls. The apartment was a small studio, so there was already too much stuff in a small space. Now it looked like a garbage dump.

  As soon as Noah was inside, cautiously checking the closet and bathroom with his gun at the ready, Peri started digging into the mess in search of her laptop.

  "I told you to wait," Noah said as he came out of the bathroom, holstering his gun.

  "Why, because an intruder might have been hiding under the couch cushions?" She picked up one of the destroyed cushions and flung it angrily across the room. Nothing in her apartment was valuable; the couch had been picked up at a garage sale. But it was the principle of the thing. This had been hers. She turned a tipped-over plant pot upright and scooped the dirt back into it with her hands. The plant, like most of them, was dead, but that didn't mean they had the right to just go throwing things around.

  Noah inspected the splintered wood around the lock plate on the door. "Looks like they didn't bother trying to pick the lock; they just kicked it in. Don't waste time tidying up. Get what you need and let's get back in the car, fast."

  "It's my fucking apartment and I'll straighten it up if I want to." But he was, as usual, right. Her hands were shaking. She didn't want to stay here anymore anyway. She carefully straightened a bent leaf on the plant, because she didn't want him to think that all he had to do was give an order and she'd hop to it, before she went looking for her backpack.

  After some searching, she found it under a slit-open pillow. Her clothes were all over the floor, flung out of the set of cheap Target hampers where she normally stored them. She stuffed handfuls into the backpack. It wasn't worth trying to find specific items in the mess. As long as she had some underwear and spare T-shirts, she'd be okay.

  "See if you can find my laptop," she said over her shoulder.

  "What's it look like?"

  "What do you think? It's a laptop! There's a Megadeth sticker on it."

  "We really have to talk about your taste in music."

  "Fuck off, Easton." In the bathroom, she grabbed shampoo, toothpaste, and the boxes of disinfectant wipes and baby powder that she used to keep her prosthetic leg's liner clean and dry. Her toothbrush was down on the floor behind the toilet. She shuddered and left it there. While she was at it, she used the toilet; they'd told her that the drug would process through her kidneys, and they hadn't been kidding about that.

  Spare liner for the prosthetic. Hairbrush. Tampons. Her makeup case had been torn open, the contents scattered across the floor. Nothing appeared to be damaged, so she scooped a few lipsticks and a mascara into her bag, looked at the rest of it and decided not to bother. She got her second leg out of the closet, the carbon-fiber blade for running. It was much too expensive to leave behind.

  "See any sign of a camera?" she asked Noah, with a sinking feeling in her stomach. If she were covering up evidence, a camera would be one of the logical things to take, and it was a big, nice one that she usually left sitting on a shelf right in plain sight. They wouldn't even have to look hard to find it.

  "No. Sorry." He looked up and did a double take. "What's that?"

  "Oh. My running leg," she explained absently, using the running blade to poke through the mess in search of anything else salvageable.

  "Your what, now?"

  "Running leg. For running."

  "I understood the words. I'm just not getting how it helps you run." Noah set an unbroken cup by the sink. She was surprised and slightly touched to see that he'd been cleaning as he searched. The cushions were back on the couch, and all the plant pots had been turned upright and put on the windowsill.

  "It's designed to absorb the impact of running and give me some spring. My regular leg isn't as resilient and might be damaged by the—" Peri stopped. If she hadn't been so rattled, she'd probably have caught on to the disconnect in the conversation already. "Oh, you don't know about my leg, do you?"

  Noah looked politely baffled.

  Peri pulled up her jeans leg and thwacked her thigh with her fingernail. "Plastic."

  The light dawned. His eyebrows went up and a look of fascination spread across his face. And damn it, he wasn't fucking cute when he got interested in something. Definitely not.

  Peri turned away, reaching for anger to harden the part of her that wanted to melt when he looked at her like that. Like she was fascinating, interesting, charming: a mystery to solve.

  "So that's how come it hurt so much when you kicked me in the shin," Noah remarked.

  "No, that's because you're a wuss. If you want to get out of here before those assholes come back, see if you can find an EMF meter around here."

  She found most of her ghost-hunting gear and stuffed it into her bag, not because she needed it, but because she didn't want to have to pay to replace it. Phone charger, check. What else? She looked around the room, and the thought came to her that there really wasn't anything else from the apartment that she cared about losing. She had plenty of stuff, but it was all cheap and used. Somewhere in the mess, there was a box with old family photos in it, but the idea of losing them didn't break her heart.

  "No sign of a laptop or camera," Noah reported. "I don't think they're here. We gotta go, Peri."

  "Those total fuckers. My laptop has my whole life on it. Photos, drafts of my articles—God, it has all my saved passwords!" Peri pulled out her phone. "My blog, my Twitter—I have to change everything—"

  "Not now," Noah said. When she kept stubbornly typing on her phone, he caught her hand. "Peri, not now. You can do that in the car. Do you have everything you need?"

  She took a quick look around at the mess, at the apartment that no longer felt like hers. Something caught her eye in a pile of dirt tipped out of one of the plant pots: a plastic toy horse that she'd played with as a small child. She had been using it as a decoration in the pot, and she wasn't sure what flicker of nostalgia made her pick it up and brush off the dirt before tucking it into her backpack.

  "Yeah," she said. "I'm done here."

  ***

  They drove through the city. Peri stayed busy for a little while changing all her passwords. As far as she could tell, nothing had been tampered with. Her Twitter had no strange activity, her blog was unmodified, her bank account untouched.

  Someone who didn't spend as much time online as Peri did might not have realized that they had her entire life in their hands. Or maybe they just didn't care. That was the worst thought of all, that she was so irrelevant there was no need to destroy her. She was only a mouth to be silenced. They'd probably already thrown the laptop in the ocean.

  When she looked up from her phone, she realized they were passing buildings she'd seen before ... recently. "Are we going in circles? Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

  "I'm making sure we aren't followed," Noah said, s
ounding amused rather than upset. "My car is kinda conspicuous."

  "You can say that again," she muttered, hunching down in the seat. A new, terrible thought occurred to her. "Can they track me using my phone?"

  "No," Noah said, and then hesitated. "Well, only if they have government contacts. A federal agency could. But that doesn't seem to be what we're up against. Just to be on the safe side, turn it off when you're done."

  He stopped at a gas station to fill up the car and get Peri two large bottles of water—"You're supposed to be drinking, doctor's orders."

  "You realize this means I'll have to stop and use the bathroom at every exit between here and wherever we're going."

  "Hazards of the road." He shoved a bottle into her hands. "Drink."

  It was easier to drink than to argue. The cold water helped ease her headache. Meanwhile, Noah rummaged in the trunk of the car and then walked around it, doing something with a handheld thing about the size of a walkie-talkie with a pair of stubby antennae sticking off it. Curiosity roused Peri from her apathetic slump, and she opened her door enough to peer out of the car as he knelt and swept the walkie-talkie-ish thing around the Camaro's underside.

  "Checking for bugs?"

  "Yep," he said, sounding pleased. "I'm not detecting any signals."

  "Do you think someone might have bugged us?"

  "Better safe than sorry." He straightened up, turning it off. "Are you good to go?"

  "Like I have a choice," Peri muttered, but her heart wasn't in it. After seeing her apartment, she was starting to think having someone to protect her sounded like a good idea.

  Not that she was quite ready to admit it to Noah just yet.

  She checked the messages on her Twitter again, answered a couple of the urgent ones, and then, having run out of things to do, powered down the phone. All she could do was watch the roadside scenery as Noah merged with the traffic on I-5, driving north out of the city.

  Would she even be able to come back? Was this the last time she'd see any of these buildings? Her entire life had just gone up in flames.