Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  "Zachary Sorenson. I might have known."

  The rangy, ponytailed young man on the couch scrabbled up to a sitting position, just in time for Peri to punch him in the arm—rather like Cho had done to her earlier, but much harder and less friendly.

  "Ow," Zach muttered, rubbing his arm. "Moreland. Why doesn't it surprise me that you're here?"

  "That I'm here?! You got me mixed up in this, you Bigfoot-hunting freak!"

  "You know each other?" Noah asked from the kitchen doorway.

  "He's the one who called me about the bodies at the morgue in the first place."

  "Hey!" Zach protested, as the woman on the couch swiveled around to fix him with a stern look. "You're gonna get me fired!"

  "You're in WitSec, you dink," Peri said. "Your ass is probably fired anyway. Uh, I'm sorry, I don't think we've met." She held out a hand to the woman.

  "Dr. Veronica Bassi." The woman frowned at her. "Are you with the media? If Zach's been passing information to the media without going through our official PR channels—"

  "I'm not media ... exactly."

  "And this isn't Witness Protection," Noah said, lounging in the doorway. He seemed amused by the entire scene, especially Zach hunching down as if he expected either Peri or Dr. Bassi to start beating on him at any moment. "We're just going to hang out here for a few days to make sure all three of you are safe, and then you can return to your regular lives."

  "That doesn't explain why our phones were confiscated," Dr. Bassi said sharply.

  Peri had to struggle not to reach down and touch the reassuring, solid shape of her phone to make sure it was still there.

  "It's for your own protection, ma'am," Noah said.

  "We're being disappeared," Zach moaned. "I told you!" he appealed to Dr. Bassi. "These aren't even regular feds! They're the real deal! The men in black! Don't you read Peri's blog?"

  "No one is reading any blogs, because we're all on lockdown," Cho said from behind Noah, or rather, given their height difference, from under his arm. "And no one is being disappeared. We're going to have a nice little rural vacation for the next few days, that's all."

  "The issue is, you may be on the radar of some very nasty people right now," Noah told them. "As long as you stay out of the way until they're apprehended, everything will be fine."

  Zach whimpered.

  "Grow a pair," Peri told him, and marched off in search of a bathroom.

  Behind her, she heard Dr. Bassi ask, "You haven't said what your agency does, exactly."

  Peri stopped in the hallway, her ears pricking up, but the only response was Cho's cheery, "Okay, who wants salad?"

  Peri sighed. After using the bathroom, she located the only bedroom that didn't already have anyone's stuff in it and dropped her backpack on the bedspread of a twin-sized bed that took up most of the space in the room. Whenever she moved, the floor creaked under her. At least the window opened, and she cranked it wide to get some air in the room, until noticing there was no screen and cranking it hastily shut again before the room filled up with bugs.

  The nostalgia was wearing off. She'd begun to remember why she'd left the rural lifestyle behind in the first place.

  At least she had her phone.

  As she powered it up, another aspect of rural living occurred to her, and with a sinking heart but a lack of surprise, she watched the phone fail to produce any service bars or its comforting little 4G symbol.

  "Right," she muttered, plugging her charger into the wall. "No cell towers in rural hell."

  This was going to be a very long few days.

  Chapter Seven

  Noah wasn't able to talk to Cho alone until they got Bassi and Zach started on the task of preparing a quick dinner of fried chicken and rice. Leaving their protected witnesses working in the kitchen, the two agents walked out to the backyard.

  "So you're doing field work again?" Cho asked.

  "Why does everyone keep asking me that?"

  "I don't know why everyone else is asking, but I'd like to be confident you're going to be able to back me up if we get in trouble."

  Resentment stirred in him. "I'm a trained field agent, Cho. I just prefer to work a desk job."

  "I'm not disputing that—"

  "Yeah? Because it sounds like it. Look," he said, as they slowly wandered the perimeter of the property, "I know what people say about me. That I'm unqualified. That I got this job because Dad bought it for me—"

  "I'm not saying any of those things, all right? Knock that chip off your shoulder." She made a flicking motion at the shoulder of her sweater. "What I heard is that you had a bad experience in the field and noped out for a desk job. I'm good with that, as long as you're going to be okay if we come under fire."

  "I am," Noah said, hoping it was true. "Okay, information-sharing time. Let's put our cards on the table. What do you know about why we're all out here?"

  "You first," Cho suggested. "I hear you were at the morgue when all of this went down."

  Feeling outmaneuvered, but unable to argue, Noah told her about the firefight, Trish's shooting, and the unknown enemy agents in the van. "You've probably heard all of this from the witnesses already."

  "I have, but it's different getting an eyewitness account from a fellow agent. Any news on Trish?" Cho added gently.

  Noah scrubbed his face with his hands. "They said she's gonna be okay. I didn't get a chance to see her in the hospital; she was still in recovery when we had to roll. God, things are happening so fast."

  They made a full circuit, wandering back around to the cars while Noah went on telling Cho about Peri's kidnappers and her apartment being searched. While he talked, he also took the opportunity to check the general layout of the property. There was a rear driveway, he noticed, a narrow and barely passable track that continued from the parking area behind the house and vanished between the trees.

  "Where does that go?"

  "It runs out to an old logging road," Cho said. "Which hooks up to the main road a mile or two down. Good to have a rear exit in case we need it."

  Or a way for enemies to sneak in from behind ...

  "There's something else I need to tell you about." He hesitated for only a moment. If Stiers was pissed at him, let her yell. Being the agency director's son might as well work to his advantage for a change. "Have you heard of the Valeria?"

  Cho's expression was contemplative. "Yes," she said at last.

  "Damn it!" He kicked at the ground. His inner tiger was close to the surface in this rural place, his instincts stirred by the forest scents; it made him want to fight. "How long have you known?"

  "I was actually the person who found out about them. Stiers has been keeping a lid on it."

  "So, what, the rest of us didn't deserve to know that we might all be in danger?"

  "Don't be a martyr," Cho retorted. "First of all, it wasn't my decision, but for what it's worth, I agree with Stiers that it was a good idea to keep the circle small until we were able to investigate further. If the whole agency knew, then their families and friends would find out, and soon all of Seattle would know. There was no point in causing a general panic if the Valeria turned out to consist of three bigots in a basement."

  "And does it?" Noah asked pointedly.

  Cho grimaced. "No. From what we've learned, they're based out of a small country called Allegarda in the southern Alps, between Italy and Switzerland. According to ... our contacts—" From the brief hesitation, Noah thought she might have stopped herself from saying a name. "—some of their members are highly placed in the Allegardan government, and they operate openly within the country. They have agents throughout Europe and now, apparently, on other continents too. Allegarda itself has been purged of shifters for a long time." She paused, taking a breath; Noah recognized that she was trying to decide how much to tell him.

  "Cards on the table," he said, his voice sounding harsh to his own ears.

  Cho jerked her head in a brief nod. "What makes them so dangerous is not ju
st that they know about us, but that we can't hide from them, because they can sense us the same way we can sense each other. But it works both ways. We can sense them too, or at least the ones among them who have the ability. Those who can do it are called Witchfinders, and I've got a theory that they actually have shifter ancestry and just don't know it. Some of them might be shifters themselves." She pointed at a wooden picnic table under a shaggy, overhanging pine at the edge of the yard. "Come on, let's get a little farther from the house. Don't want the humans to overhear any of this."

  As they crossed the scruffy lawn to the picnic table, Noah flexed his hands, feeling his inner tiger struggling for release as emotions churned in him. "You said they operate openly within Allegarda. Do you mean the entire country knows about shifters?"

  Cho sat on the edge of the table, her legs dangling. She was a gecko shifter, and there was always something a little gecko-like about her, a nervous energy and a tendency to perch on high things. "No, it's just that they aren't really secret, per se. I understand they're passing themselves off as some kind of exclusive club or not-so-secret secret society, you know, like the Masons or the Skull and Bones, but for anti-shifter bigots."

  "Bigots doing what, exactly? How much are you covering up?"

  "Well, we didn't used to think—" Cho began, but Noah interrupted her as more pieces of the puzzle dropped ominously into place.

  "The morgue! Jesus. Did they kill those people whose bodies they stole?"

  "Maybe. We aren't sure. There's a possibility that ..." She trailed off, drumming her fingers on the planks of the table.

  "Spit it out, Cho."

  "We have intel that they're planning a major strike against shifterkind," Cho said reluctantly. "We don't know what or when, but what happened at the morgue could be connected to that. There's some speculation that they might be trying to create a disease that targets shifters, and the bodies could be intended for experimentation, or ..." She drew a shuddering breath. "Plague victims."

  "For God's sake, Jen!"

  She didn't flinch at his outburst. "I know. Believe it or not, Noah, I really do understand the way you're feeling. I think you're taking this much better than I would be. Better than I did, really, when I first started finding out about this stuff."

  "But—this is—we can't just ..." He clenched his teeth, pacing around the table as restless energy flooded him. More than anything, he wanted to shift, to sink into his tiger body and run through the woods, putting all of this behind him. "How can you justify keeping this secret? We have to tell the Seattle shifter community."

  "And cause a panic?" she shot back. "Noah, I hate this, I hate it, but keep in mind this is still pure speculation. What are we going to tell them to do about it? Leave? If there really is a plague, we can't let them—they'll spread it everywhere. So we'll have to contain them somehow. We can't lock up every shifter in Seattle; we don't have the manpower for it. And hardly any justification, since we don't even know if there really is a threat."

  Noah clenched his fists until the nails bit into the palms. He hated to admit it, but he was starting to see what Stiers and his father must have been struggling with, all these months. How did you deal with a threat this vague without making things worse?

  "So what are we doing?" he asked, leaning a hip against the table as his tigerish urge to move about began to fade. "The answer better not be 'nothing.'"

  Cho drew her legs up onto the table and rested her elbows on her knees. "The big priority right now is recovering those bodies. If the lab can examine them, we'll have a better idea of what we're dealing with. Most of the other agents are out looking for them."

  "And while they're doing that, we're stuck on babysitting duty."

  She shrugged. "Someone's got to." With a sudden laugh, she added, "And if Trish is in the hospital, then you've left Mayhew in charge of your office, haven't you? I hope it's still there when you get back."

  ***

  For Peri, the evening dragged past with agonizing slowness. She kept turning on her phone to check for reception, even though she knew the house hadn't magically grown a cell tower in the last half hour. Noah refused to let her go into town to see if she could get reception there. She was starting to entertain dark suspicions that he'd only let her keep her phone because he knew she wouldn't be able to use it. So much for trusting a fed.

  The house had a land line, which both agents used off and on throughout the evening to check in with the agency. The safehouse residents were allowed to make brief phone calls to reassure their loved ones that they were all right—Bassi called her boyfriend, Zach his mom—though there was always an agent hovering discreetly nearby. Peri wondered what Noah and Cho would do if they said anything they weren't supposed to. Tackle them and take them down? That certainly wouldn't raise any suspicions on the other end of the line.

  She tried not to think about the fact that, unlike Bassi and Zach, she had no one to call. No one who would notice if she went missing, except the people following her Twitter feed.

  "You know, using a phone physically located in a safehouse isn't very secure," she couldn't help pointing out.

  "More secure than a cell phone," was Noah's unsympathetic answer, which she couldn't really argue with.

  The TV didn't even have cable. They could pick up three channels: PBS, one of the network ones, and some sort of local-access channel that was showing a school board meeting. When the evening threatened to devolve into nonstop arguing, Cho went hunting through the house and managed to dig up a stack of board games in a closet. All of them looked like they'd been picked up cheap at thrift shops.

  "Hungry Hungry Hippos!" Cho enthused, brushing dust off the stained and peeling box. "I loved this when I was a kid. I didn't know it was still around."

  "From the look of things, that game is probably at least as old as you are," Noah muttered.

  The group settled on Monopoly, since it could be played with any number of players. Peri watched them setting up the board and wished the entire situation didn't remind her quite so much of her childhood. She'd had more than enough of being trapped with people she couldn't get away from. If it had been just her and Noah, she might have enjoyed getting to know him better—he was pretty nice when he wasn't being all Mister Agent Man at her. And he was also hot. Very hot. But it wasn't like they could have a private conversation with this many other people in the house.

  "I think I'm going to bed," she said. "I'm really tired."

  "It's only eight p.m.," Zach said.

  "Yeah, but I've had a hell of a day." She noticed Noah looking at her with concern, which was more irritating than flattering, considering that he was entirely responsible for her being stuck in rural hell without even Twitter to entertain herself. "And my schedule is pretty weird anyway. I'm gonna crash."

  She wasn't planning on sleeping, just getting away from the others. But when she'd shut herself into the tiny bedroom, she realized she was actually exhausted.

  Just for a few minutes, she thought, flopping down on the bed. I'll close my eyes and ... sleep ...

  She wasn't aware of falling asleep, but she opened her eyes to darkness, and lay for a moment in weary disorientation. She must have slept for a couple of hours, if not longer. Night had fallen outside the window, and the house was quiet. She was thirsty and needed to pee, and her prosthesis felt like it was biting her leg.

  She sat up and pulled up her jeans leg to rub the top of the prosthesis sock on her truncated shin. The whole leg ached dully in a way she was all too familiar with. Usually walking didn't hurt at all, but when she overdid it or left the prosthesis on too long, nerves could be uncomfortably compressed. She'd been lucky not to have much trouble with phantom pain, but what she did have was a recurring sense of her leg's presence, as if her brain still hadn't adjusted to its absence over a decade after the accident. Right now it felt as if she needed to stretch her toes to relieve the pressure on her leg. Peri sighed and rubbed her aching leg, trying to fix in her mind that her l
eg stopped just below her knee, and the toes she could feel pressing against the inside of a ghostly shoe weren't real.

  She got up quietly and slipped down the hall to the bathroom. The water-spotted mirror showed her a pale, haggard reflection under a mop of sleep-scruffed hair. Peri splashed some water on her face and drank from her cupped hands.

  When she left the bathroom, she peeked into the adjacent living room. Noah was on the couch in front of the TV, where a movie was playing quietly. He looked relaxed, but he was wearing his shoulder holster over the black T-shirt. His back was to her.

  "Can't sleep?" Noah asked quietly, and Peri jumped.

  "How'd you know I was here?"

  He glanced over his shoulder at her and smiled. "Sharp ears."

  "What are you watching?" she asked, venturing over to rest her hands on the back of the couch. She was on the opposite end from Noah, but she was still very aware of his nearness.

  "No clue. I missed the credits. Some made-for-cable thing from the nineties with a bunch of actors I've never heard of."

  Peri looked at the screen, where a multiethnic group of people in a life raft were trying to beat off a shark with a paddle. "They seem to be having a good day."

  "One of them's also a murderer. Want to watch it with me and find out which one?"

  Oh, temptation. No one else was up. She sat down on the end of the couch, feeling suddenly, desperately shy.

  This is ridiculous. I've been chased by junkyard dogs and interviewed people who tried to run me off at gunpoint. There is absolutely no reason why watching a movie with a ...

  Cute boy was where her mind was going with that, but just then Noah gave her another of those quick smiles, and her train of thought derailed. Noah was very definitely a man.

  A very good-looking man.

  She was aware of him in every part of her body. With her eyes closed, she could have mapped the distance between them. All she had to do was scoot a little closer on the couch ...

  "What did you say was happening in the movie?" she asked in the hopes of getting her mind out of the gutter it was rapidly descending into.