Mate Claimed su-4

by Jennifer Ashley

  The thought formed and grew, delighting the half-Shifter beast and panther. Even Iona the human wasn’t alarmed. Killing these researchers for hurting Amanda sounded like a good idea.

  Iona picked her way forward as far as she could as a panther, then silently rose into her human form—effortlessly this time. She took a small acetylene torch from a holder on one of the lab benches and walked forward on bare feet.

  As she drew closer, she saw that the large computer screens nearly hid a small glass window behind them. The two researchers fixed their attention not on the window, but on the screens, which showed electronic scans of a baby. Amanda.

  Amanda lay beyond the glass in a room where she was being X-rayed or MRI’d or whatever, and she was crying.

  Iona turned on the acetylene torch, stepped forward, and aimed the stream of fire at one of the computer screens. It melted.

  The researchers, a man and a woman, swung around. The woman screamed. The man said in shock, “What the hell?”

  Neither looked like they were going to grab for her, so Iona melted the second computer monitor. Both were now nicely warped, useless hunks of plastic.

  “Open up that room and take her out of there,” Iona commanded.

  “How did you escape?” the man asked, still staring. “Where are your clothes?” His gaze swiveled to Iona’s breasts, his mouth dropping open. Some researcher he was.

  “Robbie,” the woman wailed.

  “Don’t worry,” Robbie said. “She’s not a Shifter. Call security.”

  Iona snarled. She morphed into her half-Shifter beast, swung the acetylene torch’s canister, and smacked Robbie on the side of the head with it. Robbie’s eyes rolled back, and he fell to the linoleum in a boneless heap.

  The woman screamed again and dove for the red fire alarm on the wall. Iona got there before she did, smacked the woman out of the way, and slammed her fist against the base of the woman’s skull. The woman slid silently downward, joining Robbie on the floor.

  Iona set down the torch and fumbled to open the door imprisoning Amanda, praying it wasn’t sealed by an electronic lock opened by the computers she’d just melted. But, no, the researchers were at least wise enough to have a door with an ordinary handle, which Iona nearly broke when she wrenched open the door.

  She rushed inside the little booth, which had scanners surrounding the tiny baby on the table. Amanda’s body was nearly covered with sticky nodes that attached multiple wires to her skin. She too was being fed an IV drip, the needle huge in the tiny arm into which it had been shoved.

  Amanda was crying fretfully, a child alone, scared, and unhappy. Iona peeled the disks from the baby’s skin and gently tugged the needle out of her arm. Amanda began to cry more strongly, and Iona swept her up.

  Iona was still her half beast, but Amanda quickly snuggled against her soft fur. Her little mouth sought Iona’s breasts, small in this between state, and Iona shook her head as she cuddled Amanda close.

  “Sorry, little one, I don’t have anything for you. But I’ll take you to your mommy, all right?”

  Amanda seemed to understand that things were looking up. She cried harder, but in irritation now, not in her too faint whimper of fear.

  Iona could move faster as a panther, but she had to worry about carrying Amanda. She needed to make it to Cassidy quickly though, in case these two woke up and sounded the alarm, or in case their unconscious bodies were found by more researchers.

  She glanced around for some kind of sash in which to sling Amanda. She found no handy towels or blankets—everything here was plastic or flimsy paper towels. She looked down at the woman in her clean suit and smiled in satisfaction.

  Iona tore the woman’s suit in half with her beast strength and pulled it away from her body. The woman wore shorts and a T-shirt beneath, the T-shirt with a glittering, sexy neckline, maybe to entice the breast-liking Robbie.

  “You can do better than him, sweetie,” Iona said, fashioning the pieces of the clean suit into a sling.

  She wound the sling around her body and used it to hold Amanda securely against her belly. Iona cradled Amanda as she made her way out of the room, but she stopped when she noticed a niche near a dark window that held a familiar-looking purse and cell phone.

  Iona snatched up her phone and began punching numbers. Then she made a noise of irritation when the phone gave a desultory beep. No service.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” Iona glared at the phone. “I am so changing my service provider.”

  She dropped the phone into her purse and wedged the purse into the sling alongside Amanda. Iona checked the stairwell, heard nothing, and shifted back to her panther, Amanda hanging snugly beneath her.

  Iona hurried down the stairs on swift panther feet, changed to her beast to open the door on the floor where Cassidy waited, and ran on through without shifting again. She touched Amanda’s face, the half Shifter surprisingly gentle, but all was well. The little cub was still, her breathing deep and even.

  Iona quietly opened the door to the room where Cassidy lay, but the broken door handle clanked, the sound echoing in the deserted hall. Iona halted for a frozen moment, her heart pounding furiously, but she heard nothing, saw no one.

  She slipped inside and shut the door, changing back to human as she approached Cassidy on the bed. Cassidy’s hands were still strapped down with the metal cuffs, but Cass was wide awake.

  Cassidy gave a cry of joy to see Amanda, then started to cry because she couldn’t reach for her. Iona unwound the sling, set Amanda on Cassidy’s chest, and carefully retied the fabric around Cassidy, holding Amanda in place against Cassidy’s bare breasts.

  “There. Now she’ll be fine,” Iona said, trying to sound reassuring. “And that’s a clean suit, so she’s germ free.” She smiled, but Cassidy didn’t relax.

  “Iona, we have to get out of here. And then I’m going to kill everyone in this building.”

  “I already whacked a couple of them. It felt good. But I agree. We’ll go.”

  Iona checked Cassidy’s cuffs again, metal and tight, bolted down, no latch to break. Even Iona’s Shifter beast wasn’t strong enough to break them. A couple of Shifters together might, but Cassidy couldn’t help.

  However, there was a Shifter in this building who might be strong enough. Iona looked at Amanda, who’d happily found sustenance at her mother’s breast. Amanda and Cassidy would be sitting ducks for someone like the tiger Shifter in the basement.

  On the other hand, there were no other Shifters in sight, and Iona had no way of knowing how long it would be before Eric would find them, or if he even could. She had to use the resources she had on hand.

  Right now her resources consisted of one of the strongest females in Shiftertown secured to a bed, a half-crazed Shifter with no name in the basement, a building full of old equipment, and a baby.

  If Iona could handle the tiger until she freed Cassidy, then Cassidy would be able to help them all get out of there. Including the tiger. Iona had made a promise to him, and she’d keep it.

  “Cass, I’ll be right back,” she said.

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “Find a way to get you out of here. Don’t go running off now, all right?”

  Again, Cassidy didn’t smile. She’d relaxed from her insane worry about Amanda, but her attention was now entirely on her baby.

  Iona kissed Cassidy’s forehead, touched Amanda’s cheek, changed to her half-Shifter beast, and left the room again.

  Eric sensed something moving in the dark desert with him. Diego had driven him up the 95 toward Indian Springs, where they’d stopped at a roadside bar. Diego had headed on to the 375 to Area 51’s front gate, while Eric had walked quietly around the building, holding his breath against the noisome garbage in the back, and faded into the night.

  He’d stripped when he was well away from the bar, hiding his clothes in a plastic bag under some rocks. He’d fastened the pack that contained everything he needed tightly around his
torso, shifted to his wildcat under the moonlight and clear sky, then loped off east and north.

  Now someone else moved in the dark with him, and that someone wasn’t human. Eric sniffed the wind, then stopped to wait for the large black wolf to trot down from the shadow of the nearest ridge.

  Eric said in body language, What the fuck are you doing?

  The wolf answered in his own body language with plenty of expletives, basically conveying the message, You need me, asshole.

  Eric didn’t have time to shift and swear at him, so he growled again, moved off into the darkness, and let Graham follow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The tiger Shifter who called himself Twenty-three was surprised when Iona returned. She could tell the surprise only through his scent, however, because he glared in fury through the bars and didn’t change expression when he saw her.

  “I need your help,” Iona said to him. “You help me free my friend, and I’ll take you out of here.”

  “You said you’d take me out if I told you where the cub was.”

  “And I will. But I have to take my friend too, and the cub. And you have to promise not to touch them.”

  The noise that came back to her was a feral snarl, and she worried again.

  “Hold it together,” Iona said. “Tell me about yourself. What did you mean when you said you’ve always been here? Were you brought here as a baby? A cub, I mean?”

  “No. I have always been here.”

  “Born here?” The tiger looked full-grown, about the same age as Jace perhaps. “Your mother was captured?”

  “I don’t know. I never knew the female they made me from.”

  “Made you? You mean like artificial insemination?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Holy crap on a crutch,” Iona muttered.

  Humans breeding Shifters? Iona thought about what she’d seen up in the laboratory—dozens of test tubes in the glass cabinets, Amanda, a half-human Shifter baby, being scanned every which way, the data flowing across the computer screens.

  Humans had stolen Graham’s wolves from a bus and taken them to the facility in the desert to harvest blood and skin samples. Iona bet the Shifters had been scanned and studied there too, while they’d been tranqed.

  She looked at the cages again, all empty except this one. Tiger Shifter was number twenty-three. Numbers one through twenty-two were all dead.

  “Why?” she asked in horror.

  “To fight for them.”

  “But Shifters aren’t allowed to…”

  Collared Shifters, Shifters acknowledged by humans, weren’t allowed to be in the military or law enforcement, the human government reasoning that dangerous Shifters couldn’t be trusted with weapons. Shifters might turn the guns on their human masters.

  But Shifters bred in secret, in this building in the middle of who knew where, un-Collared and allowed to go feral…Were humans trying to create Shifters they could control to fight for them, the same reason the Fae had bred them long, long ago?

  Shifters they could control without Collars…Iona thought about what Eric had told her about the experiments done on him twenty years ago, and the pain he was experiencing now. Liam and Eric had surmised that Eric’s adrenaline spikes were causing the pain, as though the Collar was doing its job without actually going off.

  Iona went cold. Had the experiments on Eric been a precursor to this? If the humans had been trying to develop Shifters to fight, they’d have to be un-Collared so they could battle without restriction. But the humans would need another way to control the Shifters when they wanted to—had they been trying to find a way with Eric? And now, twenty years later, whatever they’d done to him was biting him in the ass.

  And how long had the humans been doing this? Experiments had been forbidden on Shifters, but if Tiger Man was Jace’s age, apparently they’d gone on all these years in secret.

  The experiments couldn’t be going well though. Not with the first twenty-two Shifters dead. Was that why they’d wanted the wolves’ blood and DNA? To try again? What if it hadn’t been just blood and skin that the researchers had taken, but eggs and sperm?

  “Oh, Goddess.” Iona had never thought about the pagan deities much, but right now, the Goddess, with her moon shining high above them, was the only thing available to give her comfort and strength. “I’m taking you out of here.”

  The lock on the tiger’s cage was thick and electronic, and opened with a magnetic key card. Of course. They’d need to make sure Twenty-three was securely confined. If Iona broke the lock without swiping the electronic key through it, the cage door still might not open.

  Iona heaved a sigh. “I’ll be right back.”

  She shifted to her panther again as Tiger growled, not believing her. She sprinted to the stairwell, then through the door and up all the damn stairs again.

  Iona peeked into the lab at the top before she went in, to find the two researchers sprawled on the floor where she’d left them. She wondered, as she went to the niche where she’d found her purse, whether she’d hit them hard enough to keep them out awhile, or so hard they’d never wake up again.

  She broke the lock of the cabinet next to the niche and found the researchers’ personal belongings. They had phones, which she took, and keys, which she also took, and felt grim satisfaction when one of the key rings had an electronic key card attached to it.

  She stayed human this time to run back down the stairs carrying all the goodies. Iona set everything out of harm’s reach and approached the cage with the key card.

  “Let’s hope,” she said, and swiped the card through the reader.

  The lock’s light went green, and the cage door clicked open. At the same time, Tiger Man slammed himself against the bars, his eyes red and enraged. He barreled out of the cage, straight for Iona.

  In their trek through the desert, Eric and Graham had passed several guard posts containing men in SUVs with high-powered rifles, and signs posted everywhere warning people to stay out or expect to be shot for their pains. Eric and Graham had moved like ghosts in the night, flowing against the black desert, never spotted.

  They now looked down from the top of the knifelike hill they’d crested to the heart of Area 51 spread out before them.

  A long runway stretched north toward the huge dry bed of Groom Lake, the lake bed stark white in the moonlight. A few planes were on the airstrip running in the night, lights blinking. Hangers clustered in tight formation near the end of the runway, illuminated, work going on even now. Other buildings filled the spaces to the west of the runway, but Eric was fixed on one a little way away from them.

  The humans hadn’t bothered to put fences around the building to which Xavier’s directions had brought Eric. He studied it—a military rectangular block a few stories high with antennas on top, one narrow door, which was guarded, and few windows. The windows Eric could see were narrow and set high in the walls, all too small for a man or large leopard to squeeze through.

  Eric shifted to human in the darkness, and Graham rose into his man shape next to him.

  Without speaking, Eric moved on down the hill toward where he knew Iona to be, Graham right behind him. Never mind Xavier’s GPS coordinates, Eric knew Iona was there. He felt the pull of the mate bond leading him straight to her.

  The mate bond told him now that she was in deep trouble.

  Eric halted again to crouch in the darkness a few yards from the building. “You sure?” Graham whispered to him.

  “Yes.” Eric took the camera phone he’d worn on a pack around his waist and snapped a few pictures.

  “Brilliant ideas on how we get in?” Graham said, lips nearly touching Eric’s ear.

  Eric scanned the building, which didn’t seem to be as heavily guarded as the hangers and the airstrip, though it did have one guard, standing upright and alert, at the front door. No cars were parked around it, though the other buildings had plenty of vehicles in their parking lots. This building looked deserted, ignored
by the humans, which meant something pretty bad must be going on in there.

  “Roof,” Eric said. He looked at Graham. Eric knew he could scale the wall—he was a cat after all—but could a big wolf?

  “I’m right behind you,” Graham said.

  “Don’t get caught.”

  Eric put away the camera, morphed back into his leopard, slunk forward, and moved stealthily to the building. He hoped no humans had come up with the idea to put land mines around it, but too late to worry about that now.

  He made it to the building, found a dark corner, crouched down as far as he could, and sprang upward. He caught bricks and window ledges with his paws, and when he got high enough, a fire escape. At one point he found a CCTV camera, which he smashed.

  Eric reached the top and pulled himself up, hearing Graham panting and climbing behind him. Graham made it over the lip of the roof, and Eric saw that he’d chosen to climb in his wolf-beast form.

  In silence they searched the rooftop for a door that would take them inside. Then they’d scour the entire building for Iona, Cassidy, and the cub, and pray they found them alive.

  Tiger Man’s half-Shifter beast grabbed Iona by the throat, madness in his eyes. Iona gasped for breath and found none. His fingers bit into her windpipe, starting to crush, points of pain. He was strong, enraged, crazed.

  Iona fought him in watery terror; then that terror snapped something inside her. Iona’s control dissolved as blackness filled her vision.

  She shifted to her half beast without realizing she’d done it, her neck muscles hardening under the Tiger’s hands, until his fingers could no longer crush her. Iona brought her hands up between his and snapped apart his hold on her.

  Tiger let her go, but he took one step back, flowed into his pure tiger form, and attacked. The tiger’s eyes were bloodshot and feral, and the feral inside Iona responded.

  Never mind Eric’s lessons in control, or Iona’s worry that she’d succumb to the wild thing inside her. She no longer cared. This animal was attacking her and needed to be subdued.