Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  "You two, stop right there."

  Bassi stepped toward them, holding Julius's rifle.

  "Oh, come on!" Peri cried.

  Caine smiled thinly. He still had his service weapon in one hand, though to Peri it looked pathetically tiny compared to the rifle. "Let us go, woman."

  "I'm not going back. I want a guarantee of safe passage out of Arizona, or no one's going anywhere."

  The ceiling groaned again. A thick crossbeam over their heads cracked down the middle.

  "If this collapses on us, we're all gonna die anyway!" Peri protested.

  "Better a clean death than whatever you have in store for me." Bassi's voice shook. She was as much on the edge as Julius, though in a different way.

  The feline and ursine combatants slammed into the wall again. This time the groan in the rocks around them had a different tone, a deep rumble that chilled Peri to her core.

  "Well, that's done it," Caine murmured. He clamped his hand on her arm—his fingers were icy—and took a step to the side.

  Peri had no idea what happened next.

  The ceiling was coming down on them. She saw it happening in frozen snapshots of horror: the supporting timbers snapping one by one, the ceiling bowing outward as great cracks ran through it. Choking dust filled the air; rocks struck her upturned face, and all she knew was that she was about to die and had a perfect front-row seat to watch it happen.

  —and then Caine gave a hard wrench on her arm, and there was an instant of startling cold before she stumbled into a wall and tripped over something vaguely bucket-sized that bounced away with a series of clangs.

  Beside her there was a crash and a low curse from Caine.

  "... what?" Peri gasped. It was almost pitch dark, though not completely; dim, ruddy light gleamed through horizontal cracks in the ... whatever they were in. No dust, no falling rocks, though a sticky film was clinging to her face and hands. Something tickled her ear and she realized she was tangled up in a spiderweb and began tearing at it frantically, trying to get it off her.

  There were some more clangs, a sudden crash, and light spilled in. Caine was framed against a rectangular block of blazing sunset light—a doorway.

  Peri stumbled after him. Where—but then she knew where. They were stepping out of one of the old wood-and-tin huts in the complex of mine buildings at the bottom of the hill. Above them, dust billowed out of the cave opening, and a low rumble was just dying away. The canyon was full of blue evening shadows.

  Peri gaped up at the hill, absently brushing at the spiderweb still clinging to her hair. One minute they'd been in the cave—the next they were at the bottom of the hill—but how?

  "What?" she said again, blankly, but Caine was already off, scrambling up the trail to the cave with his gun raised.

  As Peri started to scrape together her scattered wits, the horrifying thought came to her that Noah was in that cave! She ran after Caine, not even caring that she had no weapons. She couldn't stand here and do nothing.

  Caine recoiled so abruptly that she nearly banged into him, and in an attempt to avoid that, almost fell off the steep, narrow path. Something was moving up there in the dust cloud. There was a tremendous clatter as more rocks and timbers fell in the mine, and hollow booming sounds echoed far down in the earth; they must have set off a chain reaction of cave-ins. But there was also more purposeful movement, something lurching out of the dust to collapse at the top of the path—

  "Noah!"

  She pushed past Caine, forgetting to be afraid, and fell to her knees beside Noah. His fur was covered in dust and blood, but Peri didn't care. She gathered his massive feline head into her lap. His tongue lolled out of his mouth.

  "Noah, please say something. Please." She was babbling nonsense—he couldn't talk, he was a tiger—but she just wanted some indication that he knew she was there.

  His eyes opened to yellow half-moons. He blinked slowly and pushed a little closer to her. "You're still in there," she murmured, digging her hands deep into his matted fur.

  Another crash from inside the cave had Caine raising his weapon, pointing it over Peri and Noah. In the drifting dust and the deepening shadows, she couldn't see anything. That was just the sound of more falling rocks and timbers, surely it had to be ...

  A tremendous shape reared out of the dust cloud, and Peri froze like a mouse confronted by a hawk.

  Julius's ursine bulk heaved again, throwing more debris off his back. She kept forgetting how big he was. As he stood up, he just kept coming.

  But he was hurt, and hurt badly. He had to try several times to get his back legs to work, and his fur was plastered with blood and dirt. When he swung his huge head toward them, one of his eyes was screwed shut, the face on that side a mask of blood.

  Caine took careful aim and squeezed the trigger, emptying his pistol into Julius's bulk. At this range he could hardly miss, but Julius barely flinched. It was as if bullets bounced off him, or maybe just that he was so huge that a gun the size of Caine's couldn't do much to hurt him.

  Julius took a stumbling step toward them. He was hurt, but not too hurt to tear through them. A low growl rumbled from his massive chest.

  Caine tensed. Though she had no shifter senses to work with, Peri got the impression that he was getting ready to shift into whatever it was that he shifted into. The very air around her seemed to grow colder.

  Noah stirred in her lap. With a struggle, he lurched to his feet, swaying where he stood.

  "Do the thing," Peri gasped. "Caine, do the thing you did before, get us out of here."

  "I can only do the thing, as you so eloquently put it, in the dark," Caine retorted. He flicked a quick glance at the purpling sky. "In an hour, maybe. Right now, no."

  He also didn't look so good, she realized. He was paler than usual, and the gun kept wavering. Either he was starting to come down with the disease, or doing whatever he'd done had taken a lot out of him.

  Julius's massive jaws parted, and he gave voice to a roar that echoed off the canyon walls and broke loose another small, noisy cascade in the collapsed mine.

  Noah snarled and charged at him, stumbling but determined.

  Under the onslaught of the furious tiger in his face, Julius backed up—over the edge.

  Twisting with feline agility, Noah managed to avoid following him. It was about fifty feet down to the canyon floor. The great bear tumbled, paws flailing, rebounding off rocky outcrops until he struck with a horrific crunching sound.

  Noah wobbled and collapsed.

  Peri got up shakily and stumbled to Noah. As she knelt beside him, she risked a peek over the edge. In the blue shadows at the bottom of the canyon, Julius sprawled like a massive heap of dirty laundry. Even as she watched, the furry mass twitched and he began struggling to get up.

  "You've got to be kidding me! What does it take to kill that guy?"

  Julius's head went up suddenly, his ragged ears pricking forward, looking toward the mouth of the canyon. At first Peri didn't hear what had alerted him, but then she caught the sound of engines, just as headlights stabbed through the gathering dusk in the canyon.

  "SCB's here," Caine murmured. "Finally."

  Peri was still looking down as Julius wobbled to his feet and began to shamble away into the gathering darkness among the old mine buildings.

  "He's getting away!"

  Caine made a hissing sound that didn't seem to come from a human throat. "He won't make it far."

  That sounded ... disturbing, but down below, the canyon was starting to fill up with emergency vehicles. Headlights and flashing red and blue lights danced in the growing dusk.

  "You owe me," Caine said, and Peri jumped violently to find him standing over her. How did he move like that? "You and your boyfriend both do."

  She was tempted to say something like Yeah, thanks for not being a douche and leaving us to die, but the thing was, they did owe him. "Spoken in the tone of a man who's about to ask for a favor," she said warily, looking up at him. "Whad
dya want?"

  "Your silence."

  "You mean about the ... the thing?" Her brain was already trying to tell her that it hadn't happened, they hadn't traveled from the cave to the bottom of the cliff in the blink of an eye.

  Except they had, and it was also how he'd gotten out of the quarantine unit, and how he and Noah had managed to get to the cave ahead of the entire SCB.

  "Eloquently stated as usual," Caine said dryly.

  "So what are you going to tell everyone?"

  "That's my problem." He nodded to Noah. "He promised me he'd say nothing before I brought him here. A promise made on behalf of the both of you, I regret to say. In the darkness and confusion, you never saw exactly what happened, and that is all anyone needs to know. All anyone ever needs to know."

  Peri hesitated. Caine crouched down to bring himself to her level.

  "Trust me, do you?" she asked.

  Caine smiled grimly. "I chose to save your life."

  "I saved yours first," she couldn't help pointing out. "Back at the lumberyard."

  For the first time since she'd known him, his smile gained a little warmth. "That's right. You did. So what now, with that mutual debt between us?"

  Below them, car doors slammed and voices shouted. Peri sank her fingers into Noah's fur, feeling the rapid rise and fall of his breathing. "Why don't you want the SCB to know what you can do? It's amazing. If you can do that, there's almost nothing you couldn't do."

  "And now you know why I don't want the SCB to know. And why I work best alone." The brief moment of camaraderie faded. His hand shot out with snakelike speed, cold fingers curling around Peri's arm. "Do not speak of this."

  For an instant, even though he'd just saved her life, she had a stomach-chilling surge of fear that he was about to push her off the cliff. Or do something else—something worse. In the dusk, the tattoos on his wrists, just visible under the sleeves of his shirt, seemed to writhe.

  She wanted to know what would happen if she said no.

  But not enough to actually do it. Not here, with him, in the dark.

  And she did owe him.

  "I ... I promise."

  Caine released her, rubbed his forehead as if it hurt him, and went to meet the SCB team without another word.

  With her fingers dug deep in Noah's fur, Peri watched him go. At this point, with all the other secrets she was keeping, it hardly mattered if she had to add another one to the list.

  "We made it," she murmured, caressing the long fur around Noah's face. Twilight and a dense layer of dust had bled the color out of his fur, obscured the vivid stripes, but he would be beautiful to her in any light. "We made it. We're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was a couple of weeks before they were allowed out of the SCB facility into Tucson, but not an unpleasant time. Noah was convalescing and Peri was content, for the most part, to hang around with him, playing board games or watching TV. When she got too restless, she was allowed to hike in the hills behind the facility, as long as she paid attention to signs marking off-limits areas. An SCB guard shadowed her at a distance.

  Caine had come back from the mountains a couple of days after Julius disappeared. Peri didn't get a chance to talk to him; she only glimpsed him at a distance, scruffy and covered in dust. Delgado found her a little later to tell her that Julius was dead.

  "Caine got him?"

  Delgado hesitated before shaking her head. "Caine found his remains. He was in the end stages of the disease, but the body had been ... burned, Caine said. It was up a little arroyo in the mountains. There were tracks. Caine said it looked like the tracks of a woman, alone, no one he knew. He followed the tracks back to the road and lost her there."

  "Valeria?" The word tripped off her tongue easily now. She was almost getting used to this, secret societies and assassins and always having to look over her shoulder. Nightmares still jolted her awake a dozen times a night. Maybe that part would get easier; maybe it never would, and she'd just have to learn to live with it.

  "Can't really think who else. It definitely wasn't any of us. We found their lab in Flagstaff without too much trouble, by the way, just had to follow the arson reports. A fire took it out the night we left." She flicked her finger to indicate Peri and herself.

  Peri still didn't want to think about that night. That day. All these days. Learning that Julius wasn't going to be coming after her anymore—it felt like leaning into a strong wind and having it suddenly stop. She didn't know how to stand up straight anymore.

  "Are the Valeria going to come here, do you think?"

  "To the SCB? Let them try." Delgado hesitated; the knowledge that a Valeria agent had managed to get through their security once already hung in the air between them. "Look, I know what you're worried about, but I really don't think you're a target anymore. We won this round. From all I've heard, they're pulling back, nursing their bruises, and rethinking their strategy."

  "But they'll be back."

  "Of course they will. And we'll be ready." Delgado blinked, flicking a pale eyelid across her lizard eye. "This is above my pay grade, so all I know are rumors, but word around the office is that the SCB is planning some sort of counter-intelligence operation. We're taking the fight to them. You didn't hear it from me, though."

  So there was that. And there was also Dawn Mendez, the paint counter clerk, who spent another couple of days as an involuntary guest of the SCB before being allowed to go home. Since Noah, for the most part, slept through the first few days after the fight, Peri ended up hanging out with the other human quite a bit, chatting about their lives and families. Dawn video-chatted with her teenage daughter several times a day in the xericulture garden behind the SCB building complex. Peri sat in on one of the chats—she liked Dawn's daughter, a perky, horse-crazy fifteen-year-old—but, in the end, it stirred up too many old emotions, watching the mother and daughter banter playfully in a way she'd never been able to do with her own mother. She didn't begrudge Dawn and her daughter their bond. She only wished she'd been able to have the same thing.

  And she'd probably lost any chance of ever having a relationship with Ramona. Still, she hoped Wendy and Ramona were doing okay.

  ***

  As the patients recovered, Lafitte encouraged them to have light exercise and get outside as much as possible. Once he was able to, Noah joined Peri on her excursions in the hills behind the facility—which helped a lot with her lingering paranoia; she felt safer in his presence, even if he was still weak and tired easily. She wasn't interested in long, strenuous hikes anyway. Her leg had chafed and blistered when Julius was forced-marching her around in the desert, and while light hiking was okay, it started to hurt when she stayed on it for too long. When neither of them felt like hiking, they hung around in the garden, reading or napping in the shade.

  Peri couldn't remember the last time she'd taken a real vacation. The thing about being self-employed, especially in a creative field, was that she never stopped working. She was always writing a blog post or article in her head, always scoping out headlines in search of a new angle to mine for her site. Now her head felt oddly empty without that constant running news ticker in the back of her brain.

  She hadn't replaced her phone yet. The SCB had offered her one, but her mind instantly went to "government spyware" and she politely declined. She did use a borrowed laptop to check her Twitter and blog, which were deluged in a sea of comments and messages which she had yet to figure out how to respond to. Maybe Noah was right, maybe she could leverage the readership and social cachet she already had to do some good in the world. She would have to think about it some more. In the meantime, her readers probably thought she was lost in the hollow Earth or had been disappeared by the government (not entirely wrong about that last one, she thought) and she somehow just ... didn't care. The Internet could get along fine without her for a little while.

  She picked up fragments of gossip around the SCB offices about their ongoing cleanup
efforts elsewhere. There had been sporadic cases of the disease in the affected cities, but the vaccine and antivirals seemed to be working fine; there had been no further fatalities.

  Cho showed up after a few days, looking wan and convalescent, to debrief with Costa, the Arizona SCB having become the central contact point for coordination of agency efforts related to the disease. With Cho came a dark-haired, sharp-faced young man who Peri got the impression was her boyfriend. Peri didn't know what he did exactly, but she could tell at a glance that he wasn't an agent; he seemed even more uncomfortable as a guest of the SCB than Peri was. Peri would have liked to get a chance to talk to him, but he always seemed to be busy with something—mostly, from what she could tell, organizing informal poker games or betting pools in the lounge which (based on the grumbling) he always seemed to win.

  And there were other visitors too.

  Peri and Noah were relaxing in one of the outdoor garden areas when a couple appeared on the crushed gravel path winding between cactus and jojoba. Peri saw the woman first. It was, in fact, hard not to see the woman, who was one of the tallest women Peri had ever seen—her male companion was not at all short, and she topped him by a couple of inches. She was wearing a stylish pantsuit in a vivid periwinkle blue, with a matching hat pinned on her hair and tilted at a rakish angle. She was probably in her early sixties and had a sort of Jackie Onassis/Michele Obama vibe, giving off the impression of a woman who was stylish, put together, and capable: in other words, the sort of person who intimidated Peri merely by existing.

  But her smile was warm and welcoming, and just as Peri realized that both of the couple were looking right at the two of them with identical expressions of delight, Noah pushed back his chair and scrambled to his feet with a gasped-out, "Mom! Dad!"

  Peri shyly stood up, trying to resist the childish urge to move behind Noah to escape notice. These stylish people were Noah's parents? How in the world could they ever accept a ratty punk kid from the Left Coast dating their son?