Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  "Good explanation," Cho told him in a voice that could strip paint. "That totally doesn't raise more questions than it answers."

  "What do you mean? If it's not racial, then what is it you guys have a problem with? Government agents? Americans? Uh—gay people? Is Noah gay?" For the sake of her own fantasies involving those muscular shoulders and that graceful body, she really hoped not.

  "Er, no ..." Matteo hesitated again, then cursed softly in his own language, running his hand through his hair.

  "See?" Cho said. "This is why we don't just tell people things. Welcome to my world."

  He gave Cho a sharp look. "Is there any reason why we can't just tell her?"

  "Yes! She's a tabloid journalist! She runs a tell-all blog. She is literally the worst person you could tell anything to."

  "If that's the problem, I could be sworn to secrecy very easily," Peri said hopefully. "People tell me their secrets all the time."

  "Right," Cho said, "and you put them on the Internet. I've read your blog."

  "I actually do know how to keep a secret," Peri said, stung.

  "She saw us together," Matteo said. "We can't just let her go back and tell everyone. If we explain—"

  The rest of his words were lost in a tremendous whomph that shivered the air around them.

  Peri's first, baffled thought was, Fireworks? She looked up, expecting to see lights cascade in the sky above them. Instead she saw an orange glow above the trees, back in the direction they'd come from.

  Cho sucked in a breath. "The safehouse." She took a running step in that direction, but Matteo caught her arm.

  "My car. It'll be faster, and give us an exit strategy."

  Cho nodded and beckoned to Peri. "Come on."

  The glow was brighter now, visible through the trees. "The safehouse? Did someone blow up the safehouse?" Was Noah dead? And Zach and Dr. Bassi—but—Noah—

  "Peri, here," Cho said, and she pressed the confiscated recording equipment into Peri's hand. Hardly able to believe it, Peri quickly closed her fingers around it.

  "Why are you giving this back to me?"

  "Because you might need it." Cho propelled her forward with a hand in the small of her back. "Let's go!"

  Chapter Eight

  Maybe it was the tiger half of him, or maybe it was something in his emotional makeup, but Noah had always been good at waiting. Cats could sit for hours, alert and patient, guarding a mousehole or waiting by a bird feeder. He wasn't sure if it was quite the same, but he didn't find it difficult to sit up on guard duty, alert to any sound inside or outside the house.

  After Peri left, he lost interest in the movie, halfheartedly watching it with the sound turned so low the voices were only a faint murmur. He tensed on the infrequent occasions when a vehicle passed on the road, relaxing only as the sound faded in the distance. The rumble of something loud, probably motorcycles, made him rise and go to the window, but he was just in time to see the headlights flash through the trees and fade away. They weren't stopping here. He went back to his place on the couch.

  The movie ended; an infomercial came on. Noah turned his attention to his gun. He loosened it in the holster and practiced drawing it while sitting on the couch. He was out of practice; he'd been slacking badly at his obligatory sessions on the target range. He hadn't drawn a gun in an actual field situation since—

  He closed his eyes, trying to banish the memories, but instead the older trauma was replaced by images more recent but no more pleasant: quick flashes of Trish going down, the heat of her blood against his hands. One of the calls he'd made from the house this evening had been to the Evergreen Clinic, and Lafitte had said she was out of recovery, awake, and hungry—a very good sign for a shifter, since their accelerated healing needed extra calories and protein. She was going to be all right. But still, she was hardly more than a kid, and he'd taken her into danger ...

  Though, if what Cho told me is right, all of us are in danger.

  His thoughts kept circling back around to what Peri had said about small towns being hotbeds of gossip. They should be okay for the next day or two, but maybe it would be a good idea to move the three civilians somewhere farther from Seattle. Maybe even hand them off to a different office of the SCB, put them down in Arizona or out in D.C. That would free him to do more than just sit around staring at the walls.

  He felt a small tug at the thought of Peri going away. He hadn't realized spending time with her would be so much fun. She had always been a compelling adversary, and now he'd realized that she was smart, funny, and fun to be around. Under other circumstances ...

  Well, under other circumstances he would probably never have had an actual conversation with her. This is temporary, he reminded himself. He needed to stay professional while she was in his custody, but afterward, maybe he'd see if she wanted to get dinner, and find out where that went.

  What am I doing? She's spent her entire adult life trying to uncover our secrets and plaster them all over the Internet. Dating her would be a disaster, for me and for the SCB.

  And yet he couldn't stop thinking about it. He wanted to run his hands through her curly, mermaid-colored hair and pet the soft fuzz on the close-cropped back of her scalp. Her full lips invited kissing; her hips seemed made to nestle into his lap—

  Right. He stood up quickly. Time for a brisk patrol around the property before he ended up slinking off to the bathroom for a cold shower and some quality time with his right hand. These are not appropriate thoughts to be having about a woman you're supposed to be protecting, AGENT Easton.

  Before going outside, he walked quietly through the house. Peri seemed to have meant it when she said she was going to bed. All the bedroom doors were closed, none showing the light that would indicate someone was awake inside. He heard soft snoring from Zach's room, silence from the others. The women were quiet sleepers. Either that, or they weren't asleep. Noah pictured Peri lying awake in bed, trying fruitlessly to connect her phone to the Internet, and smiled. That woman would probably be the first to sign up for Internet brain implants if they ever became available.

  Damn it, he just couldn't seem to stop thinking about her. This was bad. Somehow his attraction to her seemed to have mutated into a full-blown crush.

  Let's take a walk outside, shall we?

  He let himself out quietly into the night. The sky was clear and filled with stars, a half-full moon riding near the dark tops of the trees and drenching the yard in its stark silver light. The wind blowing down out of the Cascades promised good hunting tonight. At times like this, the urge to shift and give free rein to his inner tiger was a physical ache inside him.

  He walked quietly through the yard, alert and listening. Something was setting his nerves on edge: general tension, maybe, but he couldn't help thinking his subconscious was picking up on something he hadn't noticed yet. Once he thought he heard distant voices, and he stood still, straining his ears, but he could no longer distinguish it from the breeze rattling the tree branches. Besides, there were neighbors around; when the trees bent in the right way, he could glimpse their lights. It might've been nothing but a late conversation on someone's back porch.

  He paused at the back of the house where the cars were parked. He disliked having his car all the way around back. On the open highway, he was confident that he could outrun damn near anything he came up against. However, if he had to try to make it out on the logging road Cho had pointed out to him, the low-slung Camaro was going to struggle.

  May as well check out the escape route since he was here. See if he thought he could make it or needed to plan for a getaway on the highway.

  It didn't look too bad. Wild grasses had overgrown the old driveway, but the road surface underneath was solid. However, the long grass had a different secret to reveal. Noah was no tracker, but even he could tell that someone had been walking through it.

  Cho, doing a patrol? Hikers?

  Or someone else?

  Now this was something a tiger's sharp sense
of smell could help with.

  He glanced back toward the house, where all remained dark and silent, and succumbed to the wild temptation of the night. He opened the door of the Camaro and shed his clothing, folding it neatly in the passenger's seat. The gun went last, placed on top along with his car keys. Noah crouched so the car would give him cover as he shifted.

  The night came suddenly alive around him. His senses as a human were only slightly more keen than a normal person's. As a tiger, however, he could sense a rich and multi-dimensional world around him. The inky shadows under the trees were full of detail now—somewhat blurry, as tiger vision was sharper at close range than far away, but easy to see; light that seemed poor to him as a human was bright as day to a cat.

  His whiskers quivered as he tasted the wind. Human habitation always brought powerful smells, even a place as rural as this; he scented the dull reek of propane, the petroleum stink of his car's exhaust, cooking smells lingering from dinner preparation, rubber and steel and leather, even faint traces of Trish's blood.

  But nature was there too, the clean scent of the pines and the warm, living smell of tiny creatures in the forest—squirrels, birds, mice. His tail twitched involuntarily. He forced his human mind to stay in control of his instincts, sifting through the hodgepodge of smells, trying to pick out human scent.

  Someone had definitely been back here recently.

  Noah stalked out from behind the car, his tiger muscles rippling under his striped pelt. Under the trees he felt secure, the dark shadows cloaking him and the stripes in his fur blending with the grass. He sniffed at the trail he'd found earlier, breathing deeply with his mouth slightly open to pick up more scent.

  Cho. He had worked with her enough to know her smell. And the other one was Peri. It surprised him to realize he already could pick out her smell, since he'd never even had a chance to sniff her as a tiger. But there was no mistaking it.

  He couldn't tell if they had been together or if they had passed down the back driveway separately. His sense of smell was keen, but not quite that keen. However, they had been outside sometime in the last hour or so.

  Noah coughed under his breath, a predator's grunting cough of displeasure. What were they doing? He knew neither of them had gone past him in the living room to either the front door or the kitchen exit, which meant they had to have snuck out of their bedrooms. Cho was impulsive, but surely she had enough sense not to risk the safehouse and the people they were protecting. Peri, on the other hand ... He could easily see Peri deciding to creep out and do some investigating at night. In fact, he should have expected it.

  Except they were in the middle of nowhere. What did she think she was going to find?

  For the love of ...! Maybe they were collaborating. Neither one of them was especially gifted with impulse control. It was possible Peri had somehow talked Cho into escorting her for a snoop around the neighborhood.

  Now that he'd thought of it, the idea was all too plausible.

  Well, if they were together, they were probably safe enough. He didn't smell anyone else's scent in the back driveway. He would definitely have a few things to say to Cho in the morning about proper safehouse procedure and communicating with one's partner, though. And she thought he was the unreliable one.

  Speaking of proper safehouse procedure, unauthorized shifting in the field was not the sort of responsible guard behavior that Chief Stiers would approve of. Still, he was unable to resist the temptation to stand in the shadows for a moment longer, ears pricked forward, listening to the night. With a tiger's sharper hearing, he definitely heard distant voices now. He still couldn't make out the words, but at least one of them had a female cadence. Cho and Peri, probably. A car passed on the road—

  One of the bedroom windows jolted in its frame and began to creep upward.

  Noah flattened himself in the grass. From the shadows, predator-still, he watched as the window opened. Dr. Bassi leaned out and looked around. Her head vanished inside but reappeared almost immediately. This time she was pushing a small travel suitcase in front of her, which she leaned out the window to deposit carefully beneath it. Turning around, she began to climb out of the window backward. She was fully dressed, and Noah would lay odds that the little suitcase contained everything she'd brought with her to the safehouse.

  Curiouser and curiouser. This was quite a night for stealthy errands, it seemed. Noah wondered if she planned to steal one of the cars, but instead she legged it along the back of the house, as far as the propane tank.

  The tank was a long cylinder with rounded ends, raised off the ground on a metal frame to keep it from rusting on the earth. Bassi took something out of her pocket and leaned close to the tank. There was a hissing sound, a sharp chemical smell, and a faint whiff of propane.

  Noah didn't dare take the time to retrieve his clothes from the car and get dressed. Instead he trotted up behind her on stealthy tiger paws and shifted.

  "Dr. Bassi, what are you doing?"

  "Fucking hell!" she burst out, jumping. She spun around, an aerosol can dropping from her fingers. "What are you doing out here? I thought you were watching TV—" She broke off and stared at him. "Are you ... naked?"

  "Long story. Where are you going, exactly?"

  Bassi was frozen, looking at him, and then she bent her knees and plunged her hand into a side pocket of her suitcase. Noah knew that move. He wasn't sure what she meant to pull out, but he knew it was bad news and lunged forward with shifter speed to stop her. He caught her wrist just as her hand emerged with a small automatic pistol in it.

  "What the hell, Doc?" He twisted it out of her hand easily, not bothering to contain his tiger strength.

  Bassi tried to wrench her hand out of his grasp, but Noah held on. Her face had changed: not shock now, but pure, startling hatred. As a black man, he wasn't completely unaccustomed to getting looks like that. But she'd been totally fine earlier; she'd talked to him easily at the morgue, and if there had been any reticence during the evening, it was easily attributed to the trauma she'd suffered today.

  But now she was staring at him like he was something that had crawled out from under her shoe.

  "You're one of them," she spat.

  Noah was so taken aback by the venom in her tone and her face that he let go of her. Bassi turned and ran, not around the side of the house but in a beeline for the woods, abandoning her suitcase and gun.

  He could catch up to her easily as a tiger, but for now he focused on the more pressing problem: the propane tank. The smell of gas was even stronger now. Noah had never dealt with this kind of thing before—he was used to the city, where gas was delivered to the house through a gas main—but he assumed there should be some kind of shutoff valve to stop the gas from flowing through the pipe to the house.

  There was. He found it easily, and also discovered it was jammed open. What she'd been doing was spraying quick-setting foam around the screw-type handle that would normally rotate to shut off the tank. It would have to be chipped off in order to stop the flow of gas.

  This close, he could hear the gas hissing softly as it flowed through the pipe into the house. But it wasn't spraying out of the tank.

  So why could he smell it so strongly?

  But the answer came to him an instant later.

  She'd turned on the gas inside the house. She must have cranked all the burners on the stove and the furnace open.

  Noah took one flying, panicked leap toward the kitchen door when a great fist seemed to punch him in the chest.

  He was thrown through the air and tumbled as he landed, shifting automatically, digging in his tiger claws. The world still seemed to be moving, the ground lurching under him. He lay flat and stared at the house, his ears ringing.

  The damage from the blast was astonishing. Huge sections of wall had been blown out, and flames were climbing the parts that were left. The propane tank itself hadn't blown up; instead, propane was jetting from it like a huge blowtorch, incinerating everything in its vici
nity. The first explosion had been the gas inside the house, but there was even more gas in the tank, and it was under pressure. Once the tank got hot enough to blow, it was going to vaporize everything around it.

  The house was already engulfed in flames.

  It was likely there was no one left alive, but he couldn't take that chance. Zach was almost certainly dead. Peri and Cho might or might not be inside—Damn it, Cho, why couldn't you tell me if you were leaving?

  With predatory grace, he leaped to his feet and sprinted for the corner of the house, the heat of the flames singing his fur. If Cho wasn't still outside, she'd be in the master bedroom, which was far enough from the worst of the gas explosion that it might be intact. And Peri—but he couldn't think about Peri right now. Peri's bedroom was right in the hottest part of the fire, where the propane tank was torching off. If she was still in the house, she was already dead.

  He rounded the side of the house, heading for the front door, when a bullet punched him off his feet.

  Noah didn't even know what had happened at first. The roar of the flames drowned out everything, and his ears were still ringing from the explosion. He didn't hear a gunshot. All he knew was that one of his legs went out from under him and he crashed hard to the ground. Raising his head, through the smoke and shimmering heat he saw a big, dark SUV in the driveway.

  He'd heard a vehicle on the road earlier—but had been distracted by Dr. Bassi. He'd never heard it drive on by.

  A big man in a black duster was standing by the SUV with a long hunting rifle. As a tiger, Noah's distance vision wasn't the best, but in the flickering light of the flames he glimpsed a dark slash across the man's face. And he couldn't miss the distinct tingle of shifter recognition, similar yet strange—just like the Valeria agent at the morgue.

  This is Peri's scar-faced man.

  Bassi was working with them. She had been all along. She hadn't been calling her boyfriend earlier; she'd been alerting the Valeria to the location of the safehouse.

  The man took aim with the rifle. Noah sprang away—or tried to. His right foreleg buckled under him, and as he fell again, he realized that the gunshot wound wasn't his only injury. He'd been hurt earlier when the explosion threw him down. He was only now becoming aware of it. He couldn't get a deep breath, couldn't get his legs to work right.