Dark Wolf (Shadow Pack Book 1) (14 page)

The little man’s eyes glowed at these words. “It
will
be judgment day for the Israelis, my friend. Name your price.”

A second man interrupted. “Wait. How long does it take to infect our soldiers with this virus? Is it permanent? What abilities do these creatures have? I have many questions before I will pay your asking price, and knowing you, my friend, it will be very high.”

Ambrose raised an eyebrow at his guest. “We are still in the research stage regarding the length of time the virus stays in the system. However, it does seem to be permanent. As for how long does it take for the virus to take effect? Dr. Williams?” He motioned for the scientist to approach with a large syringe filled with an odd viscous blue liquid. The smaller man obediently strapped his boss’s arm and injected him with the serum, obviously trying not to meet anyone’s eyes.

Kane watched, controlling his facial expressions, while his gut was screaming to run as far as his legs and money would take him. He would quietly walk out of here and never return. Hopefully the wild cards he had left in the deck—Katie’s Were boyfriend from the mountains and whatever had attacked Norm—would arrive in time to save her.

∙•∙

All stood back to watch as Ambrose’s fondest wish was fulfilled. He closed his eyes, feeling the burning liquid running through his veins like lightning, his blood pumping faster and faster as he asked the gods for the Change. His skin began to glow and change size and shape when the lights went out.

Ignoring the shouts of terror from his guests, who had realized that they were in a dark room filled with monsters, Ambrose’s eyes flew open and adjusted to the darkness immediately. “This is
not
from the storm. There’s something wrong, and I have a feeling I know what it is. Kane,” he snapped in command, and he looked to Kane, who nodded and opened the door to leave.

“I’m on my way, sir,” the lieutenant said into the dark of the room without an inflection of fear.

“Find out what’s going on, my friend. This might be a good time for our guests to see our powers at work.” The buyers had seated themselves again. Attendants lit candles, and in the flickering light, the guests still looked panicked but did not dare move a muscle when the rapidly changing Were-man snarled at them. None of the men at the table wore weapons, as that was a dreadful insult at the bargaining table, and their flunkies were stationed in the halls. But each of them was wishing for a gun or two as they watched Ambrose turn into a half man/half wolf before their eyes.

∙•∙

Ambrose felt powerful and reveled in the senses that had grown with the Change, the scents and tastes of the room taking on a powerful new meaning. He could smell the Turkish tobacco on the Moroccan weapons dealer and the cocaine and musk of a well-used prostitute on the Cuban mercenary. The different smells told him everything about the very essence of each terrified person in the room, except for his pack mates, who stood nearby, awaiting his orders. It was a shame Kane hadn’t stayed long enough for Ambrose to get a good whiff of him. His enigmatic assistant had been distant lately. It would have been interesting to smell the direction of his thoughts. The strange twinge in his nerves and the slight nausea in his stomach he dismissed as his own inexperience.

He mind-spoke to his men, a trick he had been told about by the were-men themselves. “
Someone’s here. Let us hunt!”

He paused to address the room in the horrid growl-speak of a were-man. “You might want to remain here until we clear up this little matter. And lock the door behind me.” As he stood outside with his were-men and the nervous scientist, he heard the buyers and their men scurrying to lock themselves in his conference room. Damned coward.

The guard by the door took one look at the monsters and brought his shaking gun up to bear on them.

»»•««

Norm Stewart had managed to convince himself that the bear-man he had seen in the mountains earlier was a hallucination brought on by exertion and his cholesterol medication. When the gigantic forms appeared through the door of the conference room, his heart nearly stopped, and then he took aim.

Dr. Williams raised a hand to stop the foolish man, but before any of them could move or speak, the guard’s head was no longer attached to his shoulders, and Ambrose stood over him, uttering a short, wolf bark-laugh, his claws dripping blood. He had moved so fast Norm had been too shocked to shoot him down.

∙•∙

Ambrose took a deep whiff of the air in the hall. She had gotten out, of course. He could smell the path of her escape. Was someone here for Katie…a lover perhaps…waiting for her on the beach somewhere like the last one? He smiled inwardly. Whoever it was, he would kill them and her. He could search the world and kidnap himself another mate and force her to bear him an heir.

The fussy hands of the scientist began to flutter. “Sir! You need to bring your men and yourself back to the lab for me to observe! There still could be some side effects, sir! Let Kane deal with whatever is going on!”

“Nonsense! I feel incredible and so do my men!” The other three wolves growled their agreement and narrowed their eyes in the direction of the smaller man. Ambrose ignored odd twinges of his muscles that had plagued him since the Change. Those effects and the blazing headache he had would pass, surely. He was just so angry and so…hungry. The doctor backed up in fear and started to make his way down the hall. “Well, if that is all you need me for, sir, I will get back to the lab,” he said, and then turned and fled, his white lab coat flapping behind him as the gruff coughing sound of the animal men’s laughter followed him down the unlit hall.

The duty of running the patrol boat in the waters off Seven Devils Island was a tough one that night, given the boiling waters of the channel. The pilot was restless, and his companion, against company regulations, had gone for a nap on the berth in the back cabin. The idiot could sleep in a hurricane, the pilot thought to himself as he scanned the water again, heading toward the shore before the brunt of the storm hit. The water was full of groans, growls, and other noises tonight in addition to the howl of the wind, a symphony of sounds in which a slow scrape was audible. The pilot looked back to where the other man had been snoring loudly in defiance of the rough motion of the water.

“Ron? Ron…where the hell did you go? You lazy bastard.” The sleeping man was missing, the cabin as clean as that of a navy destroyer about to be boarded by an admiral. The pilot started flipping switches and turning on the floodlights to look for the stupid prick. Probably went outside and fell overboard when the boat hit the large wave that had rocked them so hard a few minutes ago.

A soft growl made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an impossibly large, clawed, part hand/part paw reach around his body and flip off the light switches he had turned on, bringing darkness down on the small boat. Before he could muster a scream, the pilot was thrown to the floor, and he stared up at the wolf-man in black fatigues standing before him. Before he passed out, his last thought was of darkness, except for the glow of the wolf’s red eyes. Then total darkness.

∙•∙

At the dock, the boat quietly put in without replying to radio contact. The two guards in the boathouse were arguing about who would have to go out and help tie up the silent boat. When the giant form of a grizzly bear ambled out of the deepest shadows of the rain to stand before them on its two hind legs, drawing itself up to all twelve feet of its height, they stood frozen with their mouths agape, watching it shuffle closer to the thin glass windows of their shack. They raised their guns to fire on the beast, but it was too late as a blunt blow hit them both from behind. They dropped to the damp boards of the deck, unconscious.

“Tie them and stuff them in the closet.” The growl came from the dark, and as several forms swarmed up onto the deck from the Zodiacs that had floated in behind the patrol boat, the bear sat back on its haunches to observe the work being done. A compact rocket launcher was being set up nearby, aimed directly at the electric plant. The objective was not to blow up the plant but to cause an electromagnetic surge by means of the specifically designed silent missile held in the arms of one of the were-men. The island would be a darkened battleground, to the werewolves’ advantage.

The rocket shot into the air, and with a small metallic
thunk
, embedded itself deeply into the cabinet shielding the generators. With a negligible amount of noise and sparks, the entire island went dark in the face of the beginning storm.

»»•««

When the missile effectively knocked out the electricity on the island, Katie, still wearing her wolf-woman form and half frozen, was perched on the branch of a moss-covered water oak, looking down at the roof of the biggest lab. If the security here was like the house’s system—with only motion detectors on the ground and window alarms—she should be able to land on the roof and rip out a hole to enter the lab. The pens were empty and the doors leading to the building closed. Whoever was being held had already gotten their yard privileges for the day.

The massive gusts from the storm nearly knocked Katie off her perch. Leaping, she twisted in the air with an agility she hadn’t known she possessed and landed like a cat on the wet roof. There was no hesitation and no going back. She oriented herself to make sure she was over the outer perimeter of the building where the labs and offices had windows looking out on the lawn. She raised a fist and punched into the roof with every bit of her strength. Over and over, her knuckles cut and bleeding again, she finally opened a hole and slipped in to crash through the ceiling tiles into the darkened office below.

The intense pain in her hands broke her concentration, and she found herself Changing back to her human form. She lay in the pool of her hair for a moment, her bare skin in contact with the cold concrete of the office floor, listening for the footsteps of guards. “Push. I can push up at least,” she whispered into the darkness and pushed, hoisting herself with her bloody hands. “Just because I can heal fast doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, damn it.” Freezing, naked, and drenched, she spotted a white lab coat hanging on a hook on the back of the door. She slipped it around her shoulders and peeked into the dark hall. The storm must have taken out the electrical system, but her eyes were still part wolf. She made her way carefully down the hall, trying to remember where the outside pens were in relation to her position. A mournful howl made Katie’s head snap back.

She ran toward the sound, through the building that smelled like hospital beds. Her bare feet smacked against the cold floor. “This was my choice,” she murmured to herself low in the dark, trying to reason with her more sensible side. “I’ll let them loose and then kill Ambrose. No one will get hurt, except maybe me.” She was at a large set of steel doors. She tried to gather her spirit to her. No, it wouldn’t come yet. She took huge gasps of air and tried to calm herself. “Soul mates are a myth. He’ll never speak to me again anyway. I barely know him. Why am I thinking about him when I’m supposed to be trying to execute someone?”

“You know that in the Boy Scout Handbook under the heading ‘Sneaking Around in Enemy Territory,’ I’m certain that it states clearly not to talk to yourself when you don’t want to be seen.” The sarcasm in the deep familiar voice was stinging as it came out of the dark right beside her ear.

Katie came the closest she had ever come to fainting in that moment. Then she wanted to punch him but couldn’t because his huge arms were around her waist, holding her arms to her sides. She tried kicking him instead, but he had her tight.

“You know,” David continued conversationally in the gravelly voice of his were-man form, “if you had trusted me with all of this, we could have taken more time…planned this together, had fun with it, kind of like a date.” Two other large shadows detached themselves from the walls behind him and started working on the doors.

“You brought an army of werewolves?” she gasped, watching the fatigue-clad were-men as they wedged open the door. “And what do you mean, a date?”

David tightened his grip on her, turning her to face him. “Did it ever occur to you that I’m as uncomfortable as you are with the fact that I woke up one day and became the spiritual property of the girl next door, with whom I’ve only spent a few hours? I feel as trapped as you do.”

Katie gazed up at him. It was the first time she had seen him in his were-man form, and it was startling but not frightening. The Anubis-like head that had taken the place of his face still had David’s whiskey brown eyes, darkly angry but still loving as they looked at her now. “I want to court you, Katie. I want to do everything with you. It’s probably going to take enough wine and dining to run a cruise ship to get you to trust me. Why would you put yourself at risk like this? And dear God, what did you do to your hands, your beautiful painter’s hands?” She wanted to cringe at the sight of her bloody hands. He pulled some gauze from a pocket and tenderly started binding them up, showing amazing dexterity with the clawed hands of his wolf-man form.

“How many times do I have to remind you that I did get by for several years on the run without your help,” Katie hissed. Her hands ached, and she wanted to jerk them out of his grasp, but she also wanted him to hold her closer. Her voice grew smaller. “I didn’t want anyone else to die because of me.”

She said no more when the steel doors swung wide. The smell that had been sealed inside made their eyes water. The ammonia of old urine, feces, and death lingered in the air. The smell of decaying caged animals mixed with the other scents. Something was about to die, dying from lack of sunlight, fresh air, and the feel of freedom. Several loud thumps made the entire group turn, guns ready, in the direction from which they came. Several more uniformed were-men stood silent watch, accompanied by the largest grizzly in North America. Katie fought the urge to run to the huge bear and throw her arms around his neck.