Perfect Mate

by Mina Carter

  “No.” Jack’s voice was as sharp and scolding as if he were speaking to a misbehaving puppy. “Mine.”

  Jack watched with careful eyes as Darce fought for control on the floor. Flat on his back, with a large arm over his eyes, the big man’s broad chest heaved as he dragged air into his lungs.

  “Darce…you cool, man?”

  Jack couldn’t see his eyes, but they weren’t the only clues as to what Darce would do next. He moved a step closer to the man on the floor. Every muscle in his body was tense, adrenalin running through him. Any moment he expected the other man to explode into action and try to get to Lilly. Until the silver madness was out of his system, Darce would be unpredictable. He always was.

  The moon disappeared behind a cloud, and the glow streaming through the windows cut by half. Jack held his breath. He was an Alpha, the lead wolf in the section. He was faster, stronger and more powerful than the rest of them. Even a little moonlight had enabled him to burn through the drugs that held him prisoner. The others had to work more at it, a process that could rob them of human reason for a while.

  “Darce…?”

  Crap. He was going to have a fight on his hands if Darce couldn’t break through. He knew he could take the other man. He’d always been able to best any of his men in combat, both when they’d been human and now, when they weren’t. But it was the last thing he needed, with Walker setting off the alarm and a suppression team about to breathe down their necks.

  “Come on, man, fight it. I need you fit and thinking human. Walker set the alarm. Forget the shit hitting the fan, this place is gonna look like Armageddon soon.”

  Darce shuddered. His spine arched into a hard bow as his heels drummed the floor in a rapid tattoo. Even in the half-light that rendered everything in shades of gray, Jack could see the beads of silver as they poked out his pores.

  He moved, slid to his knees next to his second in command. Grabbing his hand, Jack held it tight. “That’s it, man. Push the bastard stuff out. You can do it.”

  The silver beads grew in size as Darce fought his own body, until it looked as if the soldier had a serious thing about piercings. The chemical scent hit Jack’s sensitive nose like a freight train. His wolf went wild, trying to get away from the stench. Gritting his teeth, he forced it into submission.

  He would to pay for it later, but he didn’t care. His relationship with the thing inside him was symbiotic, rather than parasitic as he’d believed at first. He got increased speed, strength and the ability to shrug off wounds that would kill a normal man. In return, all his wolf wanted was to run free.

  Darce nodded, grabbing Jack’s hand in his as he fought to expel the silver. The beads grew until they couldn’t maintain their shape. One by one they fell, the silver leaving a black trail in its wake as they rolled down his cheeks.

  “Can I help?” The soft voice behind Jack made them both jump. Holy shit. He’d forgotten Lilly was in the room. The last thing he needed was a woman added to the mix, not while Darce was so volatile.

  “Lilly, into the corridor,” he warned as he prepared to hold Darce down.

  A tiny noise from below him made him look down. Darce’s eyes were open. Silver pooled on the floor beneath the other man, and his face was streaked with black, but his eyes were human brown.

  “I got it, Cap’n. Thinking human.”

  Relief flooded through Jack, and he switched his grip to haul Darce to his feet.

  “Lilly, I’d like you to meet my right hand man. Lieutenant Darcy Foster. Apart from the fact he has a girls name, he’s not half bad as a soldier.”

  The woman was beautiful. For a moment Darce couldn’t speak, struck dumb in awe. He breathed in, careful not to draw attention to himself, and rolled her scent over his tongue. She even smelled fantastic. A floral, exotic fragrance clung to the surface of her skin, swaths of it releasing into the air every time she moved. He recognized it, or at least part of it…the low-level musk that every wolf yearned to smell.

  She was a wolf-mate.

  It was different for every one of them. Any Lycan could tell she was destined to bond with one of them, but her scent would only resonate on a soul-deep level with her destined mate. Under the influence of silver, he’d smelled the mate-scent and reacted instinctively, thinking she was to be his. Now himself again, he recognized the scent wasn’t quite right.

  Darce’s gaze locked onto the woman again. He knew he was staring, but quite frankly, he didn’t care.

  Forget beautiful, she was gorgeous. Petite and with the sort of full curves any straight red-blooded male would kill to get his hands on. The wolf-mate scent clinging to her skin was just the icing on the “want now” cake.

  She wasn’t his. Her scent wasn’t right and besides, the way the captain hovered around her—managing to roll protective and possessive into one potentially violent package—her chosen mate had already found her.

  He smiled as she approached, careful to keep his grin human, even though his wolf was still too close to the surface for comfort. His fangs ached, lying in wait just behind his blunt human teeth.

  Jack was less than a step behind her. His gaze, more amber than blue, locked onto Darce’s outstretched hand as though it were a poisonous snake. He didn’t blame the guy.

  Darce wasn’t the pack alpha, but he was next in line, and he could change almost as quickly as Jack could. He’d even begun to master the partial shifts, changing just his hands and leaving everything else human, something only the most powerful of them could manage.

  He didn’t blame Jack for being protective, not when the hand he’d extended to Lillian could sprout claws at any moment. The merest scratch would infect a normal human, and the mating-scent would only make her more susceptible. He had no doubt that if he even looked at the cute brunette askance, Jack would take more than a pound of flesh as a punishment.

  “Hi. I think it’s a nice name. Unusual but nice.” She smiled shyly as she put her hand in his and shook gently. “I’m Lillian Rosewood. I’m…one of the staff here. I take it you already know Jack?”

  One of the staff? Darce’s grip on her hand tightened for a second. Like the rest of the pack, he had no reason to like and every reason to hate doctors.

  Her face whitened, and her lips compressed as she carefully tried to extricate her hand. Jack stepped forward, an unmistakable snarl of anger on his lips. Belatedly, Darce realized he was crushing her hand and dropped it.

  “Sorry. Don’t know my own strength at times. And thanks, I kinda like it.”

  He added a charming smile to ease the tension and backed off a step. The last thing he needed after pushing what felt like a boatload of silver through his pores was a fight with Jack. He might have almost mastered a part-shift, but Jack was pack alpha, and a master of the shift. He was so adept, the guy could shift just his fingernails into lethal, three-inch talons. Mad shifting skills the rest of them could only talk about in envy.

  “So…you’re a doctor here?” he asked carefully, shooting a quick look at Jack. The Project were real careful about outsiders knowing what they were up to, and even more careful about other medical staff getting a looksee at their “people”.

  If Lillian was a doctor, and she knew what they were…then Jack had just signed her death warrant. Hell, even if she wasn’t a doctor and knew, the Project wouldn’t allow her to live. His eyes unfocused as a wave of the mating scent hit him again and threatened to short-circuit his brain. If she was a wolf-mate, and Jack’s mate, then the pack would be obligated to keep her safe.

  She smiled. “Oh, no. No, I’m not. I’m the hospital manager.”

  “Fuck me sideways,” he breathed, understanding in his eyes as he looked at Jack. He wouldn’t want to be the guy’s shoes for all the money in the world now. He’d gone from having nothing to live for, to having everything to live for…and everything to protect against an enemy who would stop at nothing to achieve its aim.

  “I’d rather not. Why, what’s wrong…you got a thing against admin
staff?”

  “Huh? What?”

  Her swift retort surprised him, and the sly humor in her eyes made him smile again. Catching Jack’s warning glare, he made himself pay better attention, but not too much, to the lady he spoke with.

  “No, not at all, pretty lady. I was just thinking we should count our lucky stars. Help on tap with all the horrendous report forms they make us fill out. In blood,” he wailed dramatically, hand over his heart. He peeked out from under the heavy fall of his hair and winked at her.

  Jack’s lips compressed, and he all but shoved his petite mate behind him. “That’s quite enough of that, we need to find the others and formulate a plan. Walker triggered a remote alarm. We’re gonna get company and soon.”

  Darce nodded, and snapped back to the seasoned and experienced soldier he was. “On it boss-man. You keep the little lady safe, and I’ll round up the lads.”

  Chapter Eight

  Less than an hour later, Lilly was surrounded by grim-faced men and one woman in the staff break room of the military wing. She should have been comforted by the presence of a woman among them, but somehow the strange ice-blue stare of Private Nicole Smith disconcerted her. Especially after she and another of the team had been dispatched to deal with the rest of the guards. The terror in the screams that had echoed through the corridors was something she never wanted to hear again.

  “Right, these are the plans of the hospital. Lilly tells me non-military patients are minimal at the moment. Apart from us, St. Mary’s is an open facility. Most patients are allowed home visits, so they’re offsite for the weekend.”

  Nic snorted in bitter amusement. “Christ, the madmen really do run the asylum. But that means less for us to worry about. Think they’ll use blood-suckers or re-animates?”

  Lilly edged closer to Jack, her single source of comfort and security in a world gone mad. He’d lost the hospital gown, as had all the people clustered around the table someone had dragged into the center of the room.

  They were dressed in a combination of combat pants and jeans, and most were barefoot. One blond guy—Lilly couldn’t remember his name—had a pair of pink sneakers on. All were naked to the waist, except Nic, who was wearing a tank top with a smiley face on it. Apart from the single, slender female among them, the amount of ripped male flesh on display made Lillian feel a little lightheaded.

  “Re-animates for sure. They can’t risk us turning the Bloods. They haven’t figured out the inoculations to stop cross infection yet. And we still have some patients and staff to worry about. They’re holed up in the other wing at the moment.”

  The conversation made her head whirl. Most of it she couldn’t follow. Military-sounding words she’d never heard before and had no idea what they meant. Other words made her shiver, a part of her brain not wanting to know what they meant.

  They didn’t look like soldiers, not the way they dressed, anyway. They looked more like models. Although she’d thought him too young to have signed up, Jack was older than the rest. His hair was close-cropped. The rest had more hair than the average surfer, flowing down to their shoulders in a shaggy mess. It didn’t look like a conscious decision kind of style as much as a “let it do its own thing” kind.

  They were soldiers, though; that much was evident in the way they crowded around the table in an impromptu war council. And the small tattoo each had on their rib cage said far more than any talk of tactics.

  She shivered. She’d seen them before. Meat tags. Which meant they were from a unit that went into extreme action, into combat so violent that bodies were rarely found whole.

  “Ugh…” The groan started by Nic echoed around the table. “I freaking hate RAs! They taste bad.”

  Lillian frowned. Tasted bad? She opened her mouth, but shut it again with a click. She didn’t want to know. She really didn’t want to know.

  Thump…thump…thump.

  The sudden noise outside made her jump. Before she could react, light stabbed through the windows, constantly moving and searching, as though a giant shone a torch inside to look for something.

  Nic pushed the office chair she sat astride back and rolled toward the window. Leaning against the windowsill she looked up, craning her neck. “Two choppers with spots. Two more behind them, look like gunships.”

  Jack nodded. “Clean-up. We have about ten before the transports arrive.”

  Tension spiked sharply, as though it had barged through the door and filled up all the available space to watch proceedings. Jack looked around the grim-faced group.

  “Okay, the terrain’s too open to make a break for it yet, not with those gunships out there. All we can do is lock down tight and sit through the first wave. Once the re-animates are in position, the ships should peel off.”

  Darce nodded, leaning forward eagerly. “Then we spilt? The RAs aren’t fast enough to keep up with us. Not when we’re shifted and hot-footing it.”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Nope, we can’t leave this place undefended. RAs are dumb, but they’ll easily get into the other wing. You want innocent blood on our hands? Even if they are crazy, no one deserves that.”

  He spread out the floor plan of the hospital Lillian had given him earlier. The paper crackled as he flattened it down. When the new extension for the therapy pool had been built, the architects had done a full work up on the whole building. She’d no idea why she’d kept it, but now she was glad she had. Jack’s eyes had lit up when she’d pulled it from the cupboard in her office.

  “We’ve all fought RAs before, so this should be a walk in the park. Yeah, they’re strong as fuck and go down fighting, but they’re as thick as shit. If we lock down all these corridors here and here, and open these and the front door, we can create a killing field here with cross fire.”

  He tapped the middle of the map, over an area that displayed where four corridors intersected in a staggered cross. The secondary branches were off to the secure wards, which meant they had a dual steel gate system not unlike an airlock. But instead of air, this one was designed to stop patients getting out. Or anything else getting in.

  “Any that get through that will face Darce, Sanders and Nic. Any questions?” He looked up and around the group but no one replied. “Thom and Nic, you get down and unlock the front doors. Darce, go with them for cover fire, then get your ass back here. Everyone else, positions.”

  The group around the table scattered, all going their own ways. Once they were alone Jack rounded the table and approached her where she was curled up on the single couch.

  “Hey sweetheart, how you hanging in there?”

  He crouched down in front of her, the heavy muscles of his chest and torso doing an intricate two-step as he reached out and took both her hands in his.

  “Other than I have no clue what’s going on and feel like I’ve been plunged into an episode of The Twilight Zone, then yeah, I’m peachy. Thanks for asking.”

  She knew she was being snarky, but she didn’t much care. She’d been pulled from pillar to post, seen men die hideously and she was supposed to believe that Jack and his men were some kind of military-created Lycanthropes.

  Werewolves in St. Mary’s? It sounded like the title of a cheesy B-movie and was so ludicrous she wanted to laugh. She suspected if she started now, though, she’d never stop. If she hadn’t seen those wicked claws herself…she shook her head. Perhaps she was seeing things, a trick of the light. Yeah, that must be it. Otherwise she was going nuts. In a mental institution. How fitting.

  “Okay, time out. I get the werewolves, but what the fuck are RAs? And Bloods?”

  Jack suppressed his sigh. He didn’t have time for this right now, but the suspicious shine in Lillian’s eyes, and the barely restrained hysteria within, told him that he’d better make time. Cursing, he marshaled his thoughts to put everything in an order she could understand. Maybe. At least he hoped so.

  Normally, the project took its time prepping new recruits and staff. From the barrage of tests, through to th
e numerous friendly “chats” with the facility counselor, by the time the truth was laid on out there on the line, each newbie had been well prepared. Less likely to have an unstable moment.

  The whole initiation process should take weeks, but he had to accomplish it in minutes. With a woman who was already half terrified.

  “Okay, here goes. The Project is a secret organization operating within the Army. They’re government backed but I don’t know how far up the chain of command they go.”

  Her eyebrow winged up, but he forged on anyway.

  “They take people like me, pump them full of something…something that changes us. All I know is that I went in human and I came out like this…with this thing inside me. They control us, with more drugs and threats. If we rebel, we end up places like this, or worse. Silver bullet to the back of the head and an unmarked grave somewhere.”

  He dropped his gaze, watching his thumb as he ran it over the back of her hand. She was tiny, her bones delicate under her skin. Beside her he felt huge, like a brute. He…the creature inside him…could hurt her so easily. His wolf wouldn’t hurt her, though. The damn thing was more likely to roll over and let her rub his tummy.

  “We’re only one branch of research. There’re Bloods and the re-animates as well…”

  “Whoa, whoa. In English, please.”

  She turned her hands and laced her slender fingers through his larger callused ones. He wrapped his fingers around hers, desperate for the touch of her skin.

  “You mentioned those earlier. If you tell me Bloods mean vampires, I will decide you’re crazy and walk out.”

  “Okay,” he agreed amiably.

  Silence stretched between them for a long moment. The penny dropped and her jaw went suddenly slack.

  “Shit. You’re not kidding, are you? So if the Bloods are vampires, then what are the re-animates? No, don’t tell me…they’re zombies!”

  She was being facetious, but Jack couldn’t help smiling. Quickly he smothered the expression and looked at her seriously.