His lip curled. “Don’t play games with—”
She pushed the needle into his arm and released the liquid filling the syringe. He twitched once, and she led him into an alley and left him there. The call took longer than she preferred. She pressed the phone to her ear until it hurt and darted across the road. Two blocks from where she’d left the dead operative, he picked up, and her breath became a flutter at the deep timbre of his voice. At my age.
“Hello, Ward.”
“Gail, it’s been a long time.”
She ducked her head and closed her eyes. Tears started again, but she brushed them away, not the crying sort. “Aw, darling, I’m so gratified to know you remember me.”
“And I’m sure this isn’t a social call.”
She sighed. How could he love her when she had been instrumental in making him the way he was? The fact that she’d shared a few amazing nights with him was enough, and she couldn’t ask for more. She scanned the area around her but didn’t spot anyone suspicious. That meant nothing. Spending time flirting with Ward might feel good, but it might also get Heath killed. “I am calling to tell you to come get your son.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She frowned. “His name is Heath Hunter, and he’s here in Nevada.”
“Here?” The word might have sounded casual on the surface, but she sensed him going on guard. Ward had a special place in his heart for Spiderweb. He lived to bring them down, and while she believed he never would, he left knowing she, for one, would never betray him. That’s why he eventually gave her a way to contact him if she needed to. He never understood her devotion to the company’s mission and her devotion to him when they were exact opposites. She hadn’t told him about the lab in Nevada because he would come and destroy it, just as he had one other, the one where his tiger side came into existence.
“Logan City,” she told him. “There is a lab in Logan City—beneath it. Your son is being held captive there. I suggest you come quickly before it’s too late.”
“So what you’re saying is your ambition drove you to have my child, and now your experiments on him have gotten out of hand and you want me to rescue him?”
She started, not imagining he would jump to such a conclusion. The bitterness in his tone hurt like a knife to her chest. Composing herself enough not to reveal her emotions took a moment. “Does the name Elizabeth mean anything to you?”
“Elizabeth!” Bitterness dissolved into raw pain, and she heard the love lost in his tone. If she didn’t know then, she knew now, no one could compete with Elizabeth. Gail couldn’t help being glad she was dead, even if it was selfish and she would never have him for herself.
“She was pregnant when you helped her to escape thirty-five years ago.”
“I know that,” he snapped, as if the memory tortured him, “but she died in the explosion that almost took my life as well.”
“She didn’t.”
This time he grew quiet, and she guessed he reviewed the facts in his mind and determined the possibility of Elizabeth surviving and him not knowing it. She guessed he evaluated whether someone was there with her, forcing her to convince him to come. He must know she would allow them to kill her before she led him into a trap. Even if he never acknowledged it, he knew she loved him. He would never return the feelings.
“Listen, Ward, we don’t have a lot of time. You know Spiderweb almost as well as I do, and you can imagine what I’m risking to call. Elizabeth is listed as dead in our database, but several days ago, a man wandered onto our property. He demanded answers about his dad, the man he called Tate Hunter. Tate Hunter was a Spiderweb operative, a brilliant scientist from the reports I came across. The young man held my assistant hostage until several of our people were able to subdue him, for his sheer ignorance of what he is.”
“What he is?” Ward repeated.
“A tiger shifter. He doesn’t have full control, and he has to be pushed to let go, but blood does not lie. Heath Hunter is your son, and his mother, by his own mouth, was Elizabeth—your Elizabeth. So you can come and rescue your son, or you can allow Spiderweb to do what it wills with the first man born as a tiger shifter.”
Gail ended the call when two men appeared at the end of the street. She strolled to the end of the block, turned right, and bent to pretend to adjust the strap on her shoe. The phone slipped from her hand and fell down the sewer hole at the curb. She straightened and continued on. How close they must have been watching, or Arlo informed them she had been acting strange. Then there were the searches she used on the database. “Of course, Tate’s name must have had a red flag attached to it, especially since Heath said he was murdered. Hurry, Ward, they may have already made the connection between you two.”
Chapter Ten
Heath felt the darkness coming over him again, but he fought it to stay awake. He had to figure out a way to escape, but his mind refused to clear, and worse, Deja’s scent filled his nostrils. He heard her voice in his dreams, crying out for him. Her obvious pain ripped him apart, and for awhile, all he wanted was to go back to his ignorance, to down the pills and force his tiger into hibernation, or wherever it had been all those years.
The scrawny man he’d held captive stood at a computer, punching in data. He kept his back turned as he worked, but Heath smelled his fear.
“What did you give me?” he demanded of the man. He thought he remembered him being called Arlo when he was in and out.
Arlo turned. “Oh, you’re awake again. That’s good.” He came closer and checked Heath’s bonds. Heath drew in a deep breath and narrowed his eyes. He hadn’t imagined Deja’s scent, but then again, he couldn’t be sure if they tricked him. That lady scientist had hypnotized him and asked him all about his parents. She might have followed up with a drug to torment him with thoughts of Deja. No, he could at least relax in the knowledge that she remained safe at home, and with any luck, this organization would never learn about her since he cut ties. As much as it hurt knowing he would never see her again, it was what he had to do.
While Heath thought of the beautiful woman he left behind, something in his peripheral vision caught his attention, and he turned his head to get a clearer look. He hadn’t consciously thought to growl, but the noise rumbled up from his throat anyway.
“Where did you get that ring?” he demanded.
Arlo grinned and held up his long, slender hand with the bit of jewelry on the baby finger. “Isn’t it nice?”
“Where?”
Arlo frowned. “Don’t you worry about it. It’s mine. The doc said I could take it.”
Heath jerked at the bonds, and the assistant jumped back a full foot, crashing into the counter and almost knocking the laptop to the floor. Vials in trays rattled, and a glove box thunked on the floor.
“Tell me now,” Heath threatened, “or I will rip that hand off and feed it to you as soon as you’re close enough.”
“I―I―I am not scared of you,” Arlo insisted. “You’re strapped down. You can’t get to me, and even if you could get loose, I just have to snap my fingers and the guards will be in here to take you down like they did before.” Arlo raised his chin and put up a brave front. Heath had seen how the scientist treated him and how the guards scoffed at the little man as if he was nothing.
“Snap your fingers?” He sneered. “The one you call doc can replace you in a heartbeat. You’re an assistant, a dime a dozen. In fact…” Heath paused to give his next words more impact, “…I suspect with an organization like this, you wouldn’t find yourself fired if you screw up. You would find yourself dead!”
That got to him. While Arlo tried to work, his hands shook so much he couldn’t hold onto the papers he shuffled, and he kept backtracking on the keyboard because he entered incorrect information. Heath hadn’t gotten far, but he enjoyed knowing he rattled the piss ant even a little.
He closed his eyes, and Deja’s sweet face rose in his mind, along with the ring he had given her as a birthday pr
esent. A new suspicion entered his head, but he didn’t want to believe it. He kept his eyes closed and his voice calm as he asked the question one last time.
“Where did you get the ring?”
Arlo cursed. “If you must know, I got it from some whore.”
The beast stirred within, but Heath tamped him down. “A whore.”
“Yes, she has nothing to do with you. She’s just some dirty slut I found, a black slut.” Arlo’s tone turned from agitated and fearful to conversational, as if the words he chose were directed toward a friend and not to Heath who had every intention of ending him. Arlo went on. “I guess she’d be good to do, though—with protection. I mean, after all, she’s dying. No one would know. If I swung that way, of course. She’s pretty and has long legs.”
Heath had prided himself on being an honest man, a good man who would forge his way in this life within the bounds of the law. If someone crossed him, he sought to handle things legally. However, right now, something rose inside him that operated under its own law, and that rule stated that anything or anyone who threatened what belonged to him would be dealt with in violence until he destroyed it.
“Why. Is. She. Dying?” His tone grew uneven and scarcely discernable as human, even to his own ears.
Arlo, who had turned away as he bragged, spun to face Heath. “Fuck!”
He took a step to dart toward the door, but Heath tore apart the strap holding one arm down and caught the little man. He raised Arlo off his feet and dangled him in the air by one hand as he brought him closer. When he’d retrieved the ring from his finger and stuffed it into his pants pocket, he shook the assistant and heard the impact of his head snapping back and forth on his neck.
“Why?” Heath ground out.
A wet spot slowly spread out over the front of Arlo’s pants, and red burned his face from neck to hairline. “Th-th-th-the women are all too weak. All of them die because they don’t survive the experiments. After they change the first time, they eventually die, but she…sh-sh-she didn’t change at all. She’ll go sooner.”
Experiments. The word echoed in his mind. The dreams he’d had of Deja crying out in intense pain were real. Heath ripped his other arm free and threw Arlo against the nearest wall. His body crumpled on the floor in a heap, unmoving. Heath didn’t give his staring blank eyes more than a glance as he freed his legs. Just as he stood on his feet, the room spun about him. He shook his head, and the familiar scent of the guards who had taken him down that first day reached him seconds before they opened the door.
One of the guards shot off probes from the stun gun in his hand. Heath sidestepped them, caught the wires extending from the probes, and tossed them on the floor. He leaped forward and closed the space between himself and the guards within the blink of an eye and sent them crashing into the passageway wall outside his room. More guards came running around the corner, and he caught the nearest one by his neck and drove him into a few others. He drove his fist into a face and his foot in the groin of another man. They kept coming, and he plowed through them. Nothing would keep him from getting to Deja.
In the distance, an alarm went off, and the sound of running feet reached him. How many of those bastards did they have working for them? He couldn’t rely on the hope that they all carried stun guns, and even if they did, a group shooting off the probes together meant at least one or two would reach their mark.
Heath stalked down the hall, sniffing the air. This way. He had no idea how he knew he could sniff her out, but he did. Then again, it wasn’t him. The beast within took charge, almost like a separate entity. He ran full tilt, and when someone in a lab coat rounded a corner, he didn’t pause to see if it was the doctor that worked on him so he could question her just as he’d done when he got there. He lowered a shoulder the way the football players he watched in high school did. The person, a man, cried out and jerked backward off his feet then slammed onto the floor. Heath stepped over him and kept moving.
At the end of the next corridor, he paused and crouched. Voices reached him from the end of the next hall. “He’s not going for the exit,” one guard said.
“Where’s he going then?” Another guard.
“Fools, it’s the girl. Go and wait for him there. Load this formula in your tranq gun to make him docile. Don’t make any mistakes or you will answer to me.” From the arrogance and hint of intelligence of this particular person, Heath assumed he was either a scientist, one of the lowlifes that experimented on human beings against their will, or he was a higher up, the ones that called the shots. Either way, he would not allow this one to escape him. Nor would he let any of the guards get near Deja.
He crept along the hall on his hands and feet, keeping low. They had removed his shirt, shoes, and socks. He noticed claws had formed from his fingernails and the same with his feet. Yet, he made no sound as he crawled along the tiled floor. Blood rushed in his ears, his pulse pounding. Restrained adrenaline coursed through his system, and the anticipation of the kill escalated until he couldn’t wait to drag his claws across the nearest flesh and hear their screams as they died.
Heath drew up within a foot of a guard, but no one saw. He crouched lower and then leaped high and hard, landing with both hands on the back of the man he faced. The guard’s head hit the floor with a sickening thud. Heath didn’t pause to see if he lived. He went after the next and the next. They scrambled to get their guns in position, but he bit hands and swiped using his claws in a powerful blow that sent them crashing into the wall. Before long, one remained standing, and he made sure it was the one in charge. The man backed away, stumbling over his own feet. He held up a hand in defense, and Heath snarled at it.
“Easy, you don’t want to do this,” the man said.
Heath straightened, but the change he’d taken on didn’t recede. He peered at one dead guard and another, then back at his last prey. How can you think I don’t want to do this? I want to do it. I want you dead, right now.
Heath didn’t speak the words out loud. Somehow, when he allowed more of the beast to take over, speaking human words became harder. Forming sentences in his mind was easier, but in a way not natural.
He took another step toward the man. The scent of blood filled his nostrils, having clotted on his fingers and pooled beneath his feet. Droplets stained his chest, and the raw, metallic odor spurred him to draw more.
“S-s-subject…ah, damn it,” the man stuttered. “Listen to me!”
“Heath.” Deja’s voice reached him from down the hall, beyond the man in front of him. He knew she’d called out too low for the human to hear because the man didn’t react. His attention fully on Heath, he seemed to think Heath couldn’t see him sliding a tranq gun closer with his foot. Heath sprang on him and ended it fast.
Here. He stood outside the door where she was held and tried the handle. The code box above it meant no one got in without authorization, but Deja’s scent made him ache to be near her and to be sure she was safe. He tried the added strength the tiger gave him, but it wasn’t enough. Of course it wouldn’t be. These people were used to dealing with his kind. Only his intense rage and determination to protect Deja had driven him to break the bonds that kept him strapped to the table. Nothing he did now helped.
He stood immobile and pressed his hands to the door panel. Sensing movement behind the barrier, he looked down and caught her shadow. “Deja,” he almost cried out in anguish.
“Heath, help me, please. It hurts.”
“I’m coming, honey. I promise.”
Heath tore off down the hall in search of a warm body. He broke locks where he could and invaded room after room. No one seemed to be in the area, but he didn’t stop searching, even as his throat dried and his limbs ached. At last there was one, a human hiding in a closet. Heath approached him, growling low in his throat. The man cowered. He pushed farther back into his hiding space, although there was nowhere else to go. Against his chest, he held a stack of disordered papers as if they were important to protect. Heath swi
ped them from his hand, and they scattered over the floor. The man yelped.
“Where is everyone? Why aren’t they coming after us?”
The man frowned, and Heath realized he wasn’t speaking clearly enough. He willed himself to calm down and glanced at his claws. Even without the tiger, he could take down this small nerd. Heath tried again to ask his question. When the man didn’t answer, he jerked him by the collar and dragged him from the closet.
“Answer me now, if you want to live.”
In his thin, long neck, the man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His limbs shook, but at least he didn’t wet himself like that first guy. “They’re watching you. They want to study—”
Down the hall, a door opened. Heath gritted his teeth. “And they don’t want you telling me their secrets. I don’t care about anything except getting Deja from that room. Now you will undo the lock with your arm attached or ripped off.”
“I―I―I will help you.”
“Good choice.” Heath held on to the back of his neck and guided him toward the door. He stopped just short of the opening, peeked into the hall, and drew back in time to miss the dart. He could put the human out there, but that would mean he’d either be killed or fall asleep before he entered the code. For the time being, Heath had to protect him.
Heath pushed the man down until he knelt and put a finger to his mouth, a signal for silence. He closed his eyes and listened as hard as he could. Having no idea how to call on his enhancements, he waited too long for the tiger’s abilities to kick in. Movement sounded in the hall, too close. He had to roll and barrel into the human in order to avoid the next dart. Now they had no other choice. They had to go all out or risk capture.
Heath directed the man to stay where he was and ran blind into the hall. Five men crouched in dark clothing. He grabbed the one closest to him and jerked him in front of himself to take the shot. The guard sighed, and his chin dropped like a stone to his chest. Heath shoved him at the other four, but his body didn’t go far. The tiger’s strength was absent. He cursed and ran at them. Throwing punches as hard as he could, he fought without strategy or instinct. A dart lodged in his arm. He mis-stepped and fell to his knee. Fog clouded his mind, and he tried shaking it off to no avail.
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