Autumn Rising (11 page)

“What
are you doing?” he asked.

David didn’t answer the question.
“Move that dresser over there.”

Peter glanced around.
An old fashioned, dark wood dresser was pushed up against the wall. “What? That one?”

“Do you see any other?”

The banging from the front door increased in volume and speed.

“Some
one really wants to get in here,” Peter said, nerves beginning to jitter around his stomach again.

“Yeah, and they’re after us. Or at least you. They wouldn’t be interested in me if you hadn’t led them here.”

“Sorry.”

“Too late for sorry now.”

Peter crossed the room, put his shoulder against the dresser, and pushed. The heavy piece of furniture scraped against the concrete floor, the wood groaning. He stood back and blinked in surprise. A small door, not much higher than his chest, was cut into the brick behind.

“What is this?”
Peter asked.

“A way to save both our asses. Now get in there.”

The banging against the front door erupted in one final crash, and the sound of wood splintering followed. Heavy footsteps thumped above their heads, together with shouts of warning. Peter was thankful David had as many deadbolts on the door to the cellar, but it wouldn’t hold them off for long.

“Right, I’ve set these babies off. We have exactly three minutes.”

“For what?”

“For us to get far enough away.”

David turned and ran toward the small door, pulling it open to reveal a hidden tunnel beyond. He crouched and ran at a stoop into the enclosed space. Peter followed, turning to pull the door shut behind him.

“Don’t worry about that
,” David’s voice came, echoing down the tunnel. “Clock’s ticking.”

He’d already managed to pull the door
partially shut, so he left it as it was. He turned in the confined space, and followed David in the same running crouch.
I should shift,
he thought. This would be much easier to run down in the shape of a mountain lion.

Though he knew he needed to focus on what he was doing right now, he couldn’t help but send his spirit guide back into the room to find out what was happening, and who was af
ter them. The mountain lion padded up the stairs and passed through the door. As he’d expected, men in combat gear, holding weapons and a battering ram, were trying to break down the door of the cellar. So far, the door had held, but from the way the wood had already splintered, he doubted it would for much longer.

The door burst open, and soldiers stormed through
, weapons out held. They shouted warnings Peter couldn’t quite pick up.

Suddenly, a bright light burst through the room, followed in a split second by a huge explosion. His spirit guide instantly withdrew, and Peter found himself back in the present again.

A rush of heat came roaring up the tunnel.

“Move!” David yelled.

He realized what had happened. David had somehow set the canisters he’d seen in the basement on a timer to explode.

Peter got moving
, trying to outrun the explosion. A decent amount of distance had been put between them and the basement, the door and dresser partially protecting the entrance of the tunnel.

Despite this, the force of the explosion hit him like a hot wind, a burning fist slamming agains
t his back, throwing him forward. The air was sucked from his lungs in a scorching suction. He hit David just in front, knocking him to the ground, and landing on top of the other man. Peter froze, hoping his body would protect David from the force of the heat. He would heal faster than the human man from whatever injuries he might sustain.

The last pop and crashes of the explosion fi
nished, the smack of burning on the air. He didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out if any of the soldiers had survived the blast and were still coming after them, though he suspected part of the cellar roof may have collapsed. Peter hoped and prayed the tunnel roof would hold up long enough for them to make it out of there.

David started to cough.

“Are you okay?” Peter asked, scooting backward to climb off him. The tang of his own singed hair and clothes filled his nostrils.

David staggered back to his feet. “
I’m fine. We need to keep moving.”

Peter wasn’t going to disagree.

They got moving again. Every step hurt, the remains of his burned clothes rubbing against the raw flesh.

F
inally, fresh air began to filter toward them.

The tunnel op
ened out onto a small ravine, a muddy creek running along the bottom. They fell out of the exit, tumbling into the water with a splash. Peter lay there for a moment, taking comfort in the cool water on his scorching flesh. The back of his jacket was almost gone. He lifted a hand and gingerly touched the back of his head. The hair was singed down to stubble. The skin beneath tender and hot. The hair would take a while to grow back, but within a few hours his skin would have healed itself. He’d suffered worse injuries.

David sat up with a sigh, propping himself up out of the water, against a rock.
His glasses had gone askew, the lenses fogged with soot. He took them off and started to clean them on his shirt. “Now what?”

“You tell me
. You’re the one who just blew his house to pieces.”

“It was only the cellar. The rest of the house should be fine.”

“I think the ceiling came down.”

His mouth twisted.
“Or not.”

They sat, panting, trying to recover enough to get moving again.

“We need to come up with a plan,” Peter said. With his stomach dipping, he realized he wouldn’t be able to go back for his car. If the government hadn’t noticed it before, they certainly would have now. The vehicle would either be impounded, or they would let him take it and track him.

“I guess I’ll have to take you
to the place where I suspected they have taken your friend.”

Peter turned to him, frowning. “You’re willing to take me now? How come?”

“I think my options have just been slightly limited. What else can I do?”

“I don’t know. You could have turned me in, back there. You could have
opened your front door, invited the soldiers in, and let them take me.”

“Y
eah, well I guess I know something about loyalty.”

“Thank you, David.”

“They would never have believed me if I said I hadn’t told you anything. They’re a suspicious bunch.”

Peter thought back to the lock
s and alarms, the secret tunnel, the bombs. “So I see.”

Cautiously,
he got to his feet. He tested his limbs, rolling his shoulders. Nothing was broken, and already the burns were feeling better. The bottom of his pants was sopping from the creek water, but that was a mere irritation. Beside him, David also got to his feet.

In the distance came the sound of sirens. The explosions had obviously been noticed by others in the
neighborhood. How long would it be before the military realized he and David weren’t blown to pieces, or buried under the roof collapse? They had that on their side for the moment, but as soon as the tunnel was discovered, the military would be back on their tail.

They needed transport.

Peter briefly considered shifting. He was big enough as a mountain lion to carry David, even though David was a big man himself. But any sights of a giant mountain lion would no longer be put down to an escaped, ill-considered pet, or an animal from a zoo. Instead, people would know exactly what he was, and now that would get him hunted. Plus, Peter still remembered David’s reaction the last time he’d seen him shifting.

No, they needed a car. The question was, how would they find one?

Chapter Fourteen

AUTUMN HAD LOST
track of the length of time she’d been kept in this cold, sterile room by herself. She’d been left alone since Vivian Winters had slit her wrist, though the guards kept watch on her. She could see them standing with their backs to her through the glass panels on the door. Her wrist throbbed at the same pace as her pulse, a constant pain she struggled to ignore.

She sighed and shifted the position she’d been sitting in, her back propped against the wall. She had to do something.
Had she been here a day? Two? Three even? Her intense boredom, combined with the lack of blood circulating in her system, and the remaining effects of whatever they’d drugged her with to get her here, made her groggy. When she slept, she had no idea how long she’d been asleep for. There were no clocks in the room and no windows to the outside world. The effect was completely disorientating. In the hours when she was awake, she worried about Blake and Chogan. Were they even still alive? The thought of something happening to either of them caused her heart physical pain. She tortured herself by playing out scenarios in her head where she found out they’d been murdered. When she dragged herself out of her imaginary world, she found tears streaked down her face.

She had to do something to get
out of here, or she was going to go crazy. It had only been a matter of days, and she could already feel her mind starting to slip. She could bang on the door, try to get the attention of the two soldiers beyond, but she had a feeling the people who made the decisions were right behind the mirror.

Autumn got to her feet
and walked to the mirrored wall. Though she couldn’t see beyond, some kind of masking on the back preventing her from seeing through, she was sure someone, or even a couple of people, sat watching her the whole time.

She
lifted the hand with the undamaged wrist, and pounded on the glass with her fist. “Hey! Can someone come in here? I need to talk to you about something.”

Nothing changed, no sense of movement
beyond, so she banged again. “Come on. You can talk to me, you know?”

He
r soft fist against the glass wasn’t enough to get their attention.

S
he looked around. A metal kidney bowl they’d used to drop the plastic parts of the syringes into after they’d been used sat next to the sink. She picked up the bowl and returned to stand in front of the mirror, staring at her own face, pale, wild eyed, grazes and scrapes all over her skin, her hair sticking from her head in a crazy mass of knotted curls.

Autumn
raised her hand with the bowl and slammed the metal against the glass, over and over. The reverberations vibrated through her wrist. The clang, clang, clang, of metal against reinforced glass jarred through her, but there was something deeply satisfying about the noise. She kept going, a determination over all else not allowing her to stop. She had nothing else to do anyway.

N
o reaction came, and for a moment she worried that the room they’d placed her in was soundproofed, but then she remembered hearing Vivian Winters’ approaching heels clicking and knew that it wasn’t. Bet they wished they’d considered that oversight now.

A soldi
er, the young, Hispanic man Thorne had pointed out to her, turned to face her through the door. “Hey, quit that will you?”

“Not until you get Vivian Winters in here to talk to me.”

The soldier—his name was Romero, she thought—just shook his head and turned away. She continued the banging, a rhythmic motion worse than a dripping tap. If they wanted to drive her crazy, then she’d do her best to get to them first. Her arm was aching, her upper body tired, but still she continued.

Romero turned back to her
. His open palm slammed against the glass on his side of the door. “Stop that, you crazy bitch!”

She kept banging, yelling back at him as she did so. “Not until you get Vivian Winters.”

He glared at her, and then turned on his tail and marched down the hall.

Five more minutes passed, and Vivia
n’s stern face appeared on the other side of the glass door. She pressed a buzzer and used her fingerprint to get inside. Autumn stopped the banging, lowering her aching arm. Her fingernails were split on one hand.

“I hear you’ve
been causing some ruckus, Doctor Anderson,” she said. “And that you’ve been asking to see me.”

“I’m going to go crazy if you keep me in here. I’m a scientist, not a lab rat. I need to work.”

She shook her head. “That’s not going to happen.”

“You can keep me guarded. Where am I going to go?”

“It’s not about you escaping. I can’t let you near our experiments. What if you sabotage them?”

“Why would I do that? I’ve already told you that I’m not your enemy. I
was taken by Blake from the Chicago facility without me even knowing what was happening. No one explained anything to me. Have you thought about this from my perspective at all? I was working for you guys—I was always on your side—and the next minute I’m being kidnapped and then discover that the men who had taken me can turn into God-damned wolves. They proved to me pretty quickly that they were prepared to kill. I was scared, and overwhelmed, and they told me all this stuff about how the government would want me dead—that possibly my mother’s death had something to do with you guys.” She studied the other woman’s expression for a reaction to these words, but her face was like stone. “I didn’t know which way to turn.”

Vivian pursed her lips, twisting them as she considered what
Autumn had said.

“I’ve always been on the side of my country, Ms. Winters. Perhaps I made some bad decisions along the wa
y, but that has never changed. What I can’t change is who or what I am. Everyone wants a piece of me, and I’ve accepted that. The shifters want to use me, the same as you and Thorne do. At least if it’s you, and I’m working here, I feel like I’m involved, and helping my country, not just being used.”

“Okay,” she said eventually. “If you really are on our side, you need to give me something.”

Autumn’s stomach twisted with nerves, but she tried not to let her feeling show on her face. “Name it.”

She sidled up to her, to stand close, invading
Autumn’s personal space. “Give me something on the shifters, something you learned during your time with them that we won’t know.”

“And then you’ll let me out of this room? Show me the projects?”

“I’ll keep two guards on you the whole time, and if you so much as breathe in the wrong direction you’ll find yourself drugged and straight back in here.”

Autumn nodded, wracking her brain for something she’d learned
that Vivian might not be aware of. Something occurred to her, but she kept her mouth shut for the moment. If she told them that, how would they use it? Was her freedom from this room, and a possible chance at escape worth divulging information about the shifters? But if she didn’t get out of here, or somehow find a way to stop this project, Vivian and her team could find a way to create their own army of shifters and use them against the others. For all she knew, they could be planning on wiping out all the natural shifters so they were the only ones in control.

This would have to do.
She had no other options.

Autumn took a deep breath and jumped in with both feet.
“The shifters run at a higher temperature compared to regular humans. Even when they’re in human form, they still feel hotter.”

Vivian’s blue eyes lit up. “Really? How interesting.”

“So do I get out of here now?”

Vivian smiled, smug and
superior. Autumn held her hands at her sides to prevent herself from punching the other woman. “Yes, I suppose you do. But like I said, one wrong move and you’ll be back here before you can blink.”

“I understand.”

Vivian clapped her hands together. “Right, well let’s give you the grand tour.”

Stunned,
Autumn followed Vivian as she opened the door, allowing them both out into the corridor beyond. As soon as Autumn stepped through the doors and into the corridor, two large men in uniform fell in behind her. One of them was Romero, the same man who’d called her a crazy bitch for banging on the glass.

“These will be your guards,” Vivian said, speaking over her shoulder as she walked with long strides, her heels clacking against the floor. “They will be at your side every moment you spend out of that room.”

“Great,” she muttered. At least she was out of that God-forsaken prison.

She hurried after Vivian, trying to listen to what she was saying, while taking in everything around her. She walked past other glass door
s, exactly the same as her own, and was shocked to discover people sitting behind them, some with their heads in their hands, others pacing furiously—men and women alike.

“Who are they?” she asked.

“Just people who are of interest to us,” the other woman said. “They are none of your concern.”

Autumn couldn’t help but be concerned.
“Are they shifters?”

“One or two, but others are here because they are suspected of having other paranormal abilities that we might be able to harness—telepathy,
telekinesis, precognition, astral projection ...”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“I assure you, Doctor Anderson, I most definitely am not. I would have thought after everything else you’ve learned recently, that the existence of such things wouldn’t come as much of a surprise.”

“
How long have they been here?”

Vivian shrugged. “Depends. Some of them,
only a few months. Others have been here since they were children.”

“What?” she said, aghast. “You kept children here?”

“It was important for us to study their abilities. They might not be aware of what they could do and harm themselves or others. Or another country might become aware of their talents and take them for themselves. We were only doing what was necessary.” She paused, then said, “Besides, the ones who were children when they came here no longer have any memories of their previous lives. This is all they’ve known. This is home.”

How can you possibly know that?
She thought, but didn’t say. How could they get away with taking children, and nobody asking questions? But then she remembered Mia’s job, how children went missing all the time, and realized it was more common than she’d ever given thought to.

“Anyway, they’re none of your business
,” said Vivian, her tone curt, indicating the matter was closed. “I’m going to show you the next couple of floors.”

Autumn noted there were no windows anywhere, nothing that indicated the outside world even e
xisted.
Of course,
she reminded herself, Vivian had already told her they were in a bunker deep underground. Why would there be windows? All of the doors she’d passed led to other rooms, and she hadn’t even seen a sign for a fire exit—a potential escape route. If the whole building was like this, it was no wonder Vivian had let her out in exchange for information. It wasn’t as though she could go anywhere.

They reached an elevator, and Vivian used her thumb print to call the car. “There are five floors,” she said while they waited. “I’m going to take you to the hub of the operation, and then I’ll show you the labs.”

“What are on the other two floors?”

“One floor is made up of
living quarters.”

“You live here?”

“Most of us have our own studio apartments here, though of course my quarters are larger. We couldn’t have a team of people entering and leaving the building every day. It would soon cause attention, something we try to steer clear of.”

“Until now,” remarked
Autumn. “Rounding up shifters is going to get the public’s attention. Especially when you start picking off their mothers, or sisters, or children.”

She shrugged. “Anyone who causes us trouble will be swiftly dealt with.”

Autumn thought she knew what that meant. In her current position, she didn’t need to hear the details.

“And what about the final floor?”

“That floor ...” she hesitated. “That floor is for storage.”

Autumn didn’t
believe her.

The elevator doors slid open with the whisper of well-oiled mechanics. They stepped inside, the guards following, and Vivian on
ce again used her thumb print to select which floor she wanted. The doors closed in front of them, and within seconds opened onto another floor. They stepped out, Autumn’s shadows staying close.

Autumn looked around in wonder. Where the
upper floor had seemed almost deserted, if she didn’t include the poor souls, who, like her had been kept captive for the Paranormal Defense Department’s experiments, this floor was teaming with people. They rushed around, passing sheaves of paper to one another, sitting at huge control panels covered in numerous buttons, lights, knobs, and levers. On the walls, surrounding the government officials and workers, were huge screens, ten feet high and fourteen feet across. The space was massive, big enough to fit at least twenty of the screens, so they circled the people below. Autumn stared. They appeared to be showing parts of the city. On one screen, a small crowd of people were running, though Autumn couldn’t see what from. On another, men in helmets and army gear pushed and shoved a young couple into the back of a van. On the next, a huge black cat—a panther from what she could see—snapped and snarled as people surrounding it poked at it with what looked to be garden forks and other implements.