Outside the cage where they’d been holding their captive, Miller stood tensely, eyes fixed on the shifters trapped in the hallway, gun drawn, though it wouldn’t do much good just at the moment. The barrier was bullet proof, and he took the time to wonder whether it was because the Noturatii wanted to protect its members, or to prevent them from shooting valuable specimens.
The man leading the new arrivals was huge, as big as the man they held captive, and Miller kept his focus on him. He’d be fearsome in a fight, though the woman looked just as capable and more pissed off. Hmm. Best not to underestimate her. Blood was splattered over them, and he wondered how many guards they’d taken down to reach this point. And where the hell this legendary Khuli was. After she’d been over the lab with a fine-tooth comb, their defences were supposed to be impenetrable.
The third man had only one eye, and he wondered why a fighter with such a liability had been brought along… until the man suddenly shifted into a huge grey wolf, who seemed to grow larger by the second as his hackles came up and his head went down, teeth bared in open threat. The wolf, surprisingly, had both eyes – eyes that fixed themselves on Miller with lethal intent.
Miller was awed by the sight. The wolf wore armour in a deep red colour, full body coverage, and yet the design was such that it wouldn’t impair his movement in the slightest. Their recent captive had refused to shift, no matter what ‘incentives’ – namely, torture – they’d offered him. But watching one shift of its own accord? It was beautiful. Graceful. Smooth and seamless in a way Miller had never imagined it could be.
“No deal,” Melissa said beside him, in response to the man’s suggestion that they just let each other walk away. “Besides, I think you’re at rather a disadvantage to be bargaining with us.”
The man smiled – smiled – a look filled with genuine humour and no small threat of death. “Don’t say I didn’t give you the choice.”
Footsteps sounded from further down the hallway… Oh fuck, there were more of them? The guards should have killed them all! Miller gripped his gun tighter, a dozen escape routes for the guards and Melissa mapped out in his head. They could always capture another shifter, but Melissa was a key component in these trials, her and Phil the brains behind an operation that seemed to get more complicated with every new discovery. Without them, they’d lose ten years of hard research and progress.
Three more shifters arrived at the end of the hallway, two humans and one wolf, and the huge man seemed not at all surprised by their arrival. No, that wasn’t a shifter, he realised. That was Phil! The head scientist, stripped of his lab coat and glasses, had a gun held to his back and looked utterly terrified.
But as he watched, the shifters took stock of the situation – the captive with the gun to his head, the bars…
“Control panel’s in the ceiling. Just above you,” the leader said to a tall man wearing a trench coat, the one with a gun to Phil’s back. How the fuck did they know where it was? Then Trench-Coat pulled out a crossbow, and before Miller could blink, the ceiling was on fire, smoke pouring out of the hatch, flames crawling along the ceiling. Trench-Coat went for the bars trapping the others in, shoving the metal back into the floor, while Warrior Woman went for the barrier. Gloved fingers couldn’t get a grip on the glass, but another explosion popped off inside the ceiling hatch, fresh smoke pouring through the gap, and the wall protecting them all from sudden death retracted, leaving three guards and a headstrong scientist facing off against five angry shifters.
Negotiate, Miller thought desperately, scrambling for a deal that would get all of them – or most of them, at least – out of here alive.
But Trench-Coat was way ahead of him. “How about we all stay calm. We’ve got something you want,” he said, shoving Phil in the back and making him stumble. “And you’ve got something we want. So how about we arrange a nice little trade, and we all get to walk away alive.”
Melissa glanced at their captive, who remained impassive, despite the showy entrance of his fellow shifters. “How do we know you won’t just shoot us once we let him go?”
Certainly a valid question. But just then, another man swung around the corner. He had dark hair and a cold, steely expression on his face, though he looked younger than the others. He pulled up short as his gaze landed on Melissa, and his hard face turned pale.
“Sarah?” The word came out jaggedly, a husky cry of disbelief, and Miller realised that Melissa looked as startled as the young man did.
What the hell? As Miller tried to catch up with whatever it was that was going on, he noticed that the other shifters seemed just as surprised as he was by the young man’s sudden question.
After helping Dee and Raniesha get Gabrielle up the stairs, Mark checked in with Kwan and Aaron who were guarding the door, and learned that there had yet to be any sign of Baron and his team. And despite his orders to do his job and get out, Mark grabbed Dee and kissed her hard on the mouth, then bolted back inside the building. He had led them all here, after all, and as his life was likely forfeit at the end of this parade, he’d just as soon go down fighting. If Baron had got into trouble – which was more than likely, given the defences of this place – then an extra pair of hands – and teeth – wouldn’t go astray. He ran back down the stairs, navigating the place like he’d lived here for years. He followed the hallway along to the cages, expecting to find them all locked in a fight, perhaps wounded, maybe pinned down and unable to escape, or worst case, possibly already dead. He braced himself for all manner of horrors and chaos when he turned the final corner, seeing smoke filling the hallway, flames licking along the ceiling.
But then he caught sight of…
Nothing could have prepared him for this. Sarah! His sister! The one he’d been looking for when he came to the lab in the first place, the one he’d given up for dead. She’d been captured after all! She was surrounded by guards, their guns drawn, Tank standing patiently as they threatened to shoot him, and his gut lurched to think that perhaps she’d been kept here all these months, ready to be the next test subject in the Noturatii’s sick experiments.
“That’s not my name,” Sarah snapped at him, and Mark’s heart sank at his mistake. Perhaps she’d given them a false name, tried to protect her identity? Not that it would matter now. They were going to kill them all and free her, so there would be no one left to threaten her.
“We can help you,” he tried again, taking a step forward, dimly aware of the stares of disbelief from Baron and the other shifters. “We can get you out of here-”
“What the fuck do you think I am?” The cold, hard statement was delivered with all the hate she could muster, and it was then that Mark finally felt himself pulled up hard, feeling reality snap back into place.
And saw the gun in Sarah’s hand.
“You’ve joined the Noturatii.” Even as he said it, he didn’t really believe it.
“Well, bravo,” she said coldly. “Of course I joined the fucking Noturatii. After I found out what they’d done to you. What you’d become.” She looked him up and down, an expression of pure disgust on her face. “And the fact that you chose this? God, how could you do that? How can you not see what you are?”
“Not to break up the party or anything,” Baron suddenly snapped, still holding his gun steadily aimed at the guards, “but what the fuck is going on?”
“This is my sister,” Mark said, not bothering to disguise the truth as anything other than what it was. “The one I came here looking for when I found Dee.”
“That is your sister? One of the eggheads behind the Noturatii? Oh, good work.” He muttered something under his breath, and Mark decided he was better off not knowing what it was. To think, he’d come here to rescue her, and all the while she was…
“Why did you join?” It was a tiny detail in the big picture, an irrelevant side track to a life or death situation. But he had to know, and this was likely the only chance he would get to ask.
“I saw a photo of you. On the internet. When you were supposed to be dead.”
“How did you find it?”
“Why does it matter?” she asked impatiently, then cursed. “Oh, what the hell. It was attached to an article I was studying about leukaemia when I was in my final year at university. Only in the photo, you were in your mid-twenties, when you’d supposedly died when you were seventeen. So I did a little digging, and that led me here.”
Mark let out a sardonic laugh. “You ‘found’ a photograph? Believe me, Sarah, no one finds out about the shifters or the Noturatii without one side or the other telling them. You didn’t ‘find’ the Noturatii. They planted that photo for you to see. They assessed your reaction to the news, and then they recruited you. Nice to see where your morals led you. To kidnapping innocent people and torturing women-”
“Melissa!” one of the guards snapped suddenly, a tall, black man with a military air about him. And Mark realised that Tank was getting impatient with all the chit chat and had started casing the hallway for cover, had started taking covert glances at his captors to assess their weaknesses, and Military Guy had noticed the change in his mood. He was good. Still their enemy, but well trained and alert, and Mark almost regretted having to kill him. He’d be a worthy ally if he was on their side.
“No deal,” Sarah – no, Melissa snapped, no doubt reverting to a previous conversation with Baron and his team. “We’re not giving up the captive.”
Now what? Mark thought blackly. They could have a shootout, but more than one of them was going to end up dead, and having come so far to find Tank alive, only to lose him now…
Andre made a small, contemplative sound, and fitted another arrow into his crossbow. Without any warning, he fired it at the wall beside Melissa’s head.
The arrow embedded itself in the plaster, a small, flashing light on the head, as the guards snapped back to attention, guns trained on them, their own guns pointed at the guards. “Well, let’s think about this,” Andre said calmly. “I detonate that charge, and you’re all dead anyway. And don’t think I won’t take out one of our own to see you out of the picture. I would rather he walk the next world than spend his life as your sorry prisoner, and I’m fairly sure he’d agree with me.”
Tank met Andre’s eyes and gave a small nod. A ghost of a smile crossed his lips, and Mark had to wonder what the hell they’d done to him in the past twenty-four hours to make him ready to pass into the Hall of Sirius without so much as a word of protest. Tank was a fighter… but Andre wasn’t done yet.
“So here’s the deal. You give us your captive, and we give you your scientist, who, I’m led to believe, is the brains of this operation.”
The scientist in front of Andre whimpered. But the look on Melissa’s face was far more interesting. She glanced at the other man and a look of near-glee crossed her face, quickly quashed and replaced with a neutral contemplation that didn’t fool Mark for a second. A little professional rivalry, then? She was willing to sacrifice a member of her own team, not for a strategic advantage, but for a personal one.
God, he really knew nothing about his sister at all.
“Deal,” Military Guy said before Melissa could reply, and she gaped at him, aghast that he would dare commit to such a horrendous offer.
“At least one of you has some sense,” Baron muttered to Mark’s right, but Melissa wasn’t done being difficult. Perhaps she thought herself heroic. Or maybe she was just too stubborn for her own good. He remembered that about her – even as a young girl, she’d had the backbone to stand up for what she wanted, the persistence to see her schemes through. And Mark felt a wave of longing for the girl she had been. And a swell of sorrow for the woman she had become.
“Same question I asked you before,” Melissa demanded, shooting a glare at the guard. “How do we know you won’t just shoot us once we release him?”
Andre fingered the detonator for the arrow. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “What choice have you got?”
Miller fought for calm as he watched Melissa argue with the shifters. She was a scientist, not a soldier, armed with a single small pistol against wolves, semi-automatics and explosives, and she wanted to play hardball? She was going to get them all killed if she wasn’t careful. Miller stole another glance at the arrow in the wall. He’d already seen the destruction one of those charges could wield, and he didn’t like their chances if Trench-Coat decided to press the button.
“Enough!” he snapped at the woman, then shoved her behind himself when she glared at him again. The chit could get as mad as she liked later, but for now, he was taking charge. “You bring Phil out to the front,” he instructed, stepping in to take their prisoner from the guard watching him. He pressed his gun to the back of the man’s neck and twisted his arm behind his back to keep a hold on him. If he tried anything funny, the other guards would take him out.
The leader of the shifters brought Phil forward, holding him in a similar manner, gun to his head, and they met in the middle of the hallway. “Both of us step back,” the leader instructed. Miller obediently took two steps back, keeping his gun up, half his attention on Warrior Woman down the hall, who was looking a little too trigger happy for his liking.
At the leader’s command, Phil stepped forward, skirting around the captive shifter, who watched him go past like a fox watching a hen. Then the captive stepped over to his leader, who never took his eyes off Miller.
These guys were good, Miller had to admit. Not prone to distractions, no weaknesses in their defence, advanced weapons. It reinforced his idea that there were two groups of shifters in England, and that they were dealing here with the more modern, more tech-savvy of the two. It was an odd feeling to respect his sworn enemy so much, but it was impossible not to feel a certain admiration for a small group that had managed to infiltrate this lab – and blow half of it up, if the earlier explosions had been anything to go by.
When Phil reached him, Miller retreated with the man back the way he’d come, while the shifters did the same.
“So now you walk away?” Miller asked, once they’d retreated to the corner. The explosive arrow was still flashing away in the wall, and he had to wonder just how good their word was going to be.
“Give me your gun,” the former captive said, and the leader did so without hesitation. Miller honestly had no idea what the man was going to do. Would he honour the deal struck by his comrades, or-?
Melissa screamed, an ear-piercing shriek as the captive raised the gun and shot Phil in the head. He hit the ground with a thud, blood spraying over the guards behind him, and Miller took up a defensive position in front of Melissa. If they wanted to take out their other scientist, they’d have to get through him.
“He had it coming,” the captive said. And Miller remembered that cold threat uttered in the cell – the captive had promised that Phil was going to die, and he wondered for a moment just who else was on the man’s hit list.
The shifter locked eyes with Miller, and for just a moment, he felt his world tilt. Was he about to die? If so, he had a thousand sudden regrets… and the odd thought that he was grateful that his death should come at the hands of such a worthy foe.
“One day, you and I are going to settle our differences,” the captive said, eyes never wavering from Miller’s. “But it’s going to be in a fair fight. No guns. No wolves. No backup. Just you and me, and then we find out what you’re really made of. Let’s go,” he said, turning to the other shifters. They began a coordinated withdrawal, backing away, weapons drawn, until the last one had rounded the corner. And Melissa watched them go, her face stricken, as if someone had just kidnapped her only child.